Who Was Baal?, Transcript

(00:04) our topic tonight is who was Bale and so um I think this is going to be a really fun one I'm going start off by talking a bit about theophoric names so um you know a great favorite book of mine anyway is the name of the Rose and they made a really pretty amazing U movie in the 80s that I saw when I was when it you know fairly soon after it came out and here Christian Slater is playing the Christian novice Ado of milk in the movie the name of the Rose um the original meaning of the name Christian is believer in Christ in the

(00:48) same way that if you're named Christopher you may not realize it but that means Christ Bearer and so since Christ I mean it's a title but it's more or less used as a name of God in Christianity these are what is known as theophoric names or theophoric names and that means to in literally means in Greek a name that bears a God and so uh there are plenty of other examples for example that are pagan uh derived names that we still use so Marcus and Martin are both theophoric names that mean something means related to Mars somebody

(01:32) who is of Mars the God of War the Roman God of War the planet Mars um and that could mean that the person is warlike that they're Marshall so the Bible has plenty of theophoric names and so for example uh just a handful of the dozens and dozens that come from the name L which is the name of a God but it becomes uh a word that means god in a generic sense in ancient Hebrew and other Western Semitic languages and so we can see the word L at the end of names and um this is means it's a theophoric name but it's also sometimes

(02:17) at the beginning of name so for example Daniel so that means L is my judge or L Elizabeth my L is an oath Emmanuel L is with us that's one of the Christmas songs Emmanuel God is with us God With Us Israel struggles with L Michel Michael who is like L Nathaniel gift of L Samuel L herd so we also have theophoric names for Yahweh which is the uh name of God in the Hebrew Bible and so again there are dozens and dozens of these I just picked out a couple haaiah Yahweh has grasp Isaiah Yahweh is salvation Jeremiah Yahweh will

(03:14) raise Jonathan Yahweh has given so you can see like in these some of these it's at the end you know Isaiah yah so that's Yahweh and so forth and sometimes it's at the beginning like yahosh Yesa or Jonathan you know is where those are so it's at the beginning um so Yahweh has given Joseph Yahweh shall increase Matthew is mat yahu gift of God and Jesus which is Joshua or yahoshua yah will save we also though in the Bible have plenty of uh theophoric names from B and so one of these is Ish sometimes been changed and um the

(04:02) name has been altered to ishbosheth so that they're not using the word Baal but the original is Bale Drew Bale Jezebel Jezebel and uh methel meth so these are uh meaning man of Baal Baal contends where is Baal from the mouth of Baal and so although Jezebel is pretty famous as a a villainous uh and it's kind of portrayed as a foreign enemy a foreign Queen who has come and married the king of Israel and is an enemy of Yahweh uh and therefore very appropriately has a theophoric name for Baal since she is a devotee of worshipper of

(04:49) Bale ishbel nevertheless is King Saul's son and successor methel is the son of Jonathan the son of Saul so grandson of Saul um David actually also has a son with a bale uh um theophoric name jeruel is actually another name for the very heroic judge from the Book of Judges Gideon um and so at some point or other they say that essentially they rename or they give it this as an alternate name um possibly because again the uh deuteronomic historians are aware that these ba names are um contrary to their narrative that they want to be

(05:41) telling because it implies that this hero of Israel is in fact um he or his parents at least were our our worshippers of this great enemy of Yahweh of Baal so as a preface for this whole Le lecture just want to point out that the Hebrew Bible includes a whole variety of words that we get translated into English as God or as the Lord and these include Yahweh elsh for God Almighty sometimes translated but God Elan Elan God the most high Elohim which is a plural but is translated as God so normally when I'm Mak doing these

(06:27) lectures I will quote uh the Bible using the new revise standard version uh but and and I almost always get that digitally from biblegateway.com so this is my advertisement for them since I use their service for free all the time um but the nice thing about that is that Bible Gateway also has this names of God uh Bible translation and so uh you can go to that and that will actually highlight the underlying uh Hebrew word that is being used for God uh very clearly so if you do want to find out what the English is covering up which is

(07:07) important to this particular lecture um that's an easy way to get your notes for that and uh I'm using that translation in some of the TR quotes here in some cases I'm just using the revised Standard Version but uh changing where it says the Lord back to the original Yahweh so one of the most famous stories I think in the Hebrew Bible is Elijah's contests with the prophets of Baal um it's so popular that it's uh that's a dozen uh children's stories that I found that illustrate it so it's a very memorable story uh it's

(07:51) found in the first book of Kings chapter 18 we read so Ahab who is the king of Israel sent to the the people of Israel and gathered the prophets together at Mount Carmel Elijah came near to all the people and said how long will you go limping between two different opinions if Yahweh is God follow him but if Baal then follow him and the people did not answer him a word so they didn't want to uh they didn't want to say what which side they're on at this point it's too dangerous then Elijah said to the people I even I alone am uh left a prophet of

(08:34) Yahweh but baal's prophets over there are 450 men let two bulls be given to us and let them choose one bull for themselves and cut it in pieces and lay it on the wood and put no fire to it and then I will prepare the other Bull and lay it on wood and put no fire to it and then you priest of baale call upon the name of your God and I will call upon the name of Yahweh and The God Who Answers by fire he is God and the people all answered oh it's well spoken okay yeah I'm up for this this is going to be a good contest this is going to prove

(09:15) this whole thing once and for all so uh Bulls here are um and in terms of totem animals they're sacred to both Baal and also to Yahweh it's a symbol of both Gods especially Baal though the prophets of Baal took the bowl that was given him given them and they prepared it and they called upon the name of Baal from morning till noon saying oh ba answer us but there was no voice and no one answered and they limped around the altar that they had made and at noon Elijah mocked them saying cry aloud for he is a God either

(09:54) he is musing or he is relieving himself or he's on a journey or perhaps he's asleep and must be awakened so some cruel jibes here and they cried aloud and they cut themselves after their custom with swords and lances until blood gushed out upon them and as midday passed they raved on until the time of the offering of the oblation but there was no voice no one answered no one paid attention then Elijah said to all the people come near to me and all the people came near to him and he repaired the altar of Yahweh that had been thrown

(10:32) down Elijah took 12 Stones according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob to whom the word of the Lord I'm sorry the word of Yahweh came saying Israel shall be your name and with the stones he built an altar in the name of Yahweh and he made a trench about the altar as great as would contain two Seas about 15 lers of seed and he put the wood in order ordered to cut the bull in pieces and he laid it on the wood and then he said fill four jars with water and pour it out on the burnt offering and on the wood so he's just like he's

(11:11) going to show way more and this is not just going to start with dry stuff and wait for the fire to happen he's going to show this is going to be totally soggy wood and and and cut up uh offering cattle here Bull and then he said do it a second time and they did it a second time and he said do it a third time and they did it a third time and the water uh ran All Around The Altar and filled the trench also with water so you know this is a badass prophet and at the time of the offering of the oblation Elijah the prophet came

(11:46) near and said oh Yahweh God of Abraham Isaac and Israel let it be known this day that you are God in Israel that I'm your servant and that I have done all these things at your word answer me Yahweh answer me that this people may know that you Yahweh are God and that you have turned their hearts back then the fire of Yahweh fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust and licked up the water that was in the trench and when the people saw it they fell on their faces and said Yahweh he is God Yahweh

(12:20) he is God and Elijah said to them seize the prophets of Baal let not one of them escape and They seized them and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there so and there's the Thunderbolt for the light I'm sorry the Firebolt uh from heaven in the kids story although not pictured as the slaughter of all the priests of Baal at least I didn't find that in any of the kids books um Elijah's name Will point out here um is a double theophany so he has both an L name and a Yahweh name and so

(12:59) l l Li yah that means my L my God is Yahweh and so he keeps on this is the part of the whole story it keeps on saying Yahweh he is God Yahweh he is God so that means Yahweh he is L so and it's essentially um Elijah's name is almost the slogan here for um yahwist henotheism which is to say we are only going to worship one God there's only our God our L is going to be Yahweh alone okay so this story is clearly a pmic against ba so through a Mythic Supernatural intervention yahweh's power is contrasted with baal's impotence and

(13:45) this kind of story uh becomes precedent for Christians uh after their in ascendence so after Christianity becomes the state religion of the Roman Empire and its successors Christians in late Antiquity in the Middle Ages would go and topple statues of the old gods and shrines or cut down sacred trees in order to show um the local what are now called Pagan peoples the people who are still revering the old gods hey if you uh if uh Mars or if dianus had some kind of um actual power if that was a real God dianus wouldn't let us just uh smash his

(14:29) statue like that and now we' smashed his statue and we've destroyed the shrine we've cut down uh you know deer's holy tree whoever's got a tree the druid's tree that must show that your Gods aren't real and our gods are the true our God is the true God and so this is the same kind of um story although it actually happens in history as opposed to the Elijah uh story from this kind of Mythic time period in the Bible um what is the story telling us as we look at it though when you're telling this story what are the authors actually

(15:03) U giving us as Clues as the background of their context so the story is also telling us that there is a longstanding question about which God should be considered the god of Israel Yahweh or Baal I mean Elijah says this is you guys have been of this opinion for a long time two opinions and this is getting us nowhere we've got to decid it out runford for all who's the god of Israel is it going to be ba or Yahweh also the story is showing us that baale has Royal patronage at least some of the time in um the history of Israel so the king

(15:38) here a Ahab who is the son of omry he's great villain of the Bible or he's portrayed as a villain in the biblical account anyway um he's called together all these prophets and while there are 450 prophets of Baal Elijah says he's the only um prophet of Yahweh left implying that there had been a whole bunch more in the past and now um because of presumably it has to be royal patronage in order for uh these prophets to be able to be making enough money to have this be their business um 450 is a lot so baale has Royal

(16:19) patronage the story um admits that there's an open question as to which God should be regarded as the god of Israel but and that baale is in descendence but it also presents the claim uh that Yahweh has priority so it says Elijah is the only Prophet left and he's doesn't just building a brand new altar it's suggesting that he is repairing an ancient abandoned Altar and so um this is a claim that uh the people of Israel have abandoned worshiping Yahweh in order to start to worshiping Baal and elsewhere in this story the

(16:58) text um makes another claim that ahab's wife uh who is the daughter she's a princess from siden which is one of the main Phoenician cities so the Phoenicians are a completely related people to the Israelites and they speak a very similar language and at this point are using uh almost the same alphabet as each other or abjad the same Continental uh writing scheme uh and they have um ba as one of they Gods um uh and essentially the text uh often blames um women as scapegoats uh for uh bringing foreign princesses as bringing

(17:42) um other gods into Israel and that's certainly an argument that's made here in the text so in other lectures we have uh pointed out that the biblical edifice as related in the Bible is is that at its core prophets and and later the um judges and good kings are attempting to hold on to a monotheism that was supposedly occurring from the beginnings of the foundation of time so the Adam and the anti- deluvian era of Patriarchs but that the people increasingly are polytheistic and they are therefore turning away from uh God

(18:27) from Yahweh and um in fact then it's saying it's suggesting that polytheist rebellions increase over time and that It ultimately has that as the explanation for why uh the northern kingdom why Israel and later the southern Kingdom Judah and Jerusalem and the Temple of Jerusalem are ultimately destroyed um however they uh that has not proved to be the case and so through centuries of uh study of the biblical text of understanding the history behind the Bible of doing textual criticism literary criticism of the biblical

(19:10) sources uh studying the archaeology and also the surrounding historical record of the peoples outside of the Bible um what we actually find out is that throughout the entire period up until the destruction of Israel nearly all of the Israelites were polytheist in the sense that they worship more than one God and that in fact henotheism is an introduction it's the new thing first Yahweh comes in as a new God and then the idea of pairing down the pantheon and ultimately um merging everything together so that you worship

(19:48) only one of the Gods Yahweh that's a reform that is associated with uh Kings and high priests who are centralizing worship within the Kingdom at temples that are patronized by the Kings of Israel and Judah and so despite the um the biblical uh story and an origin story of the Israelites as um not being from this land um and that they came from you know as slaves from Egypt and and or uh from Abraham as a Founder uh out of Mesopotamia in fact um the people emerged out of the same people largely as their neighbors and so the Canaanites

(20:42) the syrians the Phoenicians uh are largely all and the Israelites are largely all the same people of which they uh develop their own localized identities which they consider separate from each other so so read literally then the Bible presents a pyramid that is upside down to actual Israelite history and it's hard for those of us who have uh come to Israelite history uh through the lens of the Bible to see it that way so we have to adjust our um lenses to understand and get at the the history and then so that we can actually

(21:20) understand the Bible in its context so this is because the texts um are late and they're written or edited did by henthe ists and then later much later by monotheist reformers who are seeking to portray their own ideas as ancient and the TR and as the truly ancient practices and I'm sorry and that the truly ancient practices of the polytheists are sought to be portrayed as recent Innovations and like I said introduced by foreigners especially women um so when I'm saying H atheist here this is the idea that's an

(21:59) understanding that while there are many gods we are to worship just the one God and then later monotheism is a saying that there are no other gods there is only the one God so archaeology backs up this newer understanding of the history of the Bible uh and but the this newer understanding of the history and the Bible itself contains plenty of footprints of the actual history within its polemic narratives so we talked about um the presence right at the beginning of um biblical characters heroes with um Bale uh

(22:39) theophoric names and so uh and so same thing here there are plenty of mentions of Baal in the Hebrew Bible and these come alongside other traces of his Worship in Israel and those especially help us reconstruct the development of yahwism in first temple period Judaism so this whole time period when Israelite and then later judahite religion is emerging as distinct from its previously similar or identical Canaanites neighboring practices so we make the case a lot of times here that make the point that if we are going to understand the

(23:25) historical context of any ancient text the the real context is not when the characters um are supposedly living and when they are set so if you are writing if you're an ancient writer and you're writing about something 200 years in your past uh you may want to write about that all you want but you are going to introduce amazing number of anachronisms you're going to write about things and how things are in your own time period U because history hasn't been invented yet and you aren't able to you aren't aware

(23:58) of all of the of the things that have changed and so you're going to write about um the past as if it was exactly like things are now because you are not aware of those things you might have a couple Echoes of memory that you're going to include but you're really giving context for the history of the author not for the characters which the authors don't know much about and so when we're looking at things like the book of Kings here these are parts of what Scholars call the uter animistic histories which were likely first

(24:33) composed in the Kingdom of Judah after the fall of Israel to the Assyrians and frankly probably as close to the end of that time period as possible shortly before the fall of Judah to the Babylonians okay that's the earliest that probably could be composed there are plenty of Scholars who want to argue that for them at least to be edited together anything like their present format that happens in the Exile or after the return from the Exile the earliest possible is really at the end of the kingdom of Judah these texts were

(25:08) all later edited after Jerusalem's Fall by the Exiles and also maybe by the scribes who returned with Ezra so in any event the version that we have now um may include things that the Exiles and the people who are returning find the most important to have kept in so just by way of that context so that time period we're really so focused on Judah when Judah is um uh in its flowering when those biblical texts are being written this is actually at kind of the height and then the later decline of the Assyrian Empire

(25:49) so this is after the Northern Kingdom Israel had been incorporated into Assyria in 721 bce. and and the leaders and Nobles and uh uh anyway upper classes of that Kingdom had all been taken off to Assyria as the so-called lost 10 tribes where they ass assimilated and became regular Mesopotamians up there and so you can kind of see anyway that this is all within this taking place within the shadow of this um kind of first really vast Middle Eastern EMP Empire and so although the maps tend to emphasize the independence of the

(26:34) kingdom of Judah um from the destruction of Israel by Assyria Judah became effectively a client Kingdom of Assyria there were time periods when Judah was um actually at war with the Assyrians and was asserting a kind of Independence but generally speaking they were under siege when that was happening uh when that wasn't happening they were within the ass Syrian economic sphere which actually caused lots and lots of prosperity and so Judah prospered in the 7th Century BCE and Jerusalem which during the uh time period when the

(27:10) Kingdom of Israel was around uh it was a pretty small little Hill town of no significance it now finally develops as an urban center as it's you know quasi independent its autonomous davidic Kings uh especially welcome Exiles from the destroyed northern kingdom uh and create this court that is able to produce um a bunch of literature that includes the origins of the Bible so although it's written in a time when Judah is important the story of Elijah that I read the beginning here is set at a time when Jerusalem was still a Hilltown and

(27:52) Judah was a minor neighbor of Israel maybe just a a tributary of is Israel excuse me so to connect with their davidic patrons the kings of Jerusalem the authors who included priests and other Exiles from the north who brought with them uh Northern traditions and including uh the northern tradition of yahwism um they're the ones that created the myth of the United Kingdom of Israel the myth that um that in fact Jerusalem had been the center of a grand United Kingdom is Israel before the northern kingdom broke away uh from Judah so this

(28:41) idea of the Kingdom Under David and Solomon which is really important biblically but does not seem to have existed um historically because uh it doesn't backed up in the archaeology so we'll look at this just by way of a general context so that we can see kind of this timeline for Israel Judah and the Bible creation as we're going here from 1200 BC BCE till we get to 400 and this this whole big range of um composition for the Hebrew Bible the beginning of that is this period that we've talked about as as so important of the Bronze

(29:24) Age collapse when the hittite empire Falls this is the time period for the Trojan War the means the manans uh collapse the Philistines as the sea peoples invade the Egyptians and later are settled in Canaan in philistia and what it gives its name becomes Palestine um like I say there's a general collapse we have in the biblical um idea in this kind of Dark Age um set in that kind of shadowed time is this idea of Saul and David and Solomon a United monarchy uh literarily at least then what really happens is a strong State emerges in the north under

(30:13) King omry the father of Ahab that King in the story uh with Elijah and the priests of Baal that's when Elijah is active but that is not when the Elijah story is written the Elijah story is written uh at the earliest down we have here down here when Jeremiah is active two centuries later uh between these periods of time we're writing dtr1 and dtr2 those are potentially writing time periods possibly for when the book of Deuteronomy its first draft or the deuteronomic history its first draft in a second later updated draft is written

(30:52) uh not book of Deuteronomy the deuteronomic history um and so you can see see then the uh Kingdom of Judah existing on after um Israel is uh destroyed and that's where its flowering occurs under Hezekiah manasse Josiah and then the destruction of Judah the Babylonian captivity the end then of the Babylonian Empire the Persian Empire the Persians sending the Exiles back and then under Ezra uh we have the reading of the Torah Maybe in its present Edition for the very first time the five books of Moses so that's possibly when

(31:34) everything was finally all put together there at the end 400s and so you can see um why are the Saul David and Solomon period is so far removed so many centuries removed from When anybody was writing anything down um this is why it is lacking a in a lot of historicity so David um is known as the name of the uh the house that rules the C the royal family that rules in Jerusalem and so it's assumed that he was a person and so stories about him are written Solomon might have been a name associated with the Temple and so that's maybe stories

(32:14) are written about him about that um but these are composed um very much later so while Scholars agreed there was likely historic Elijah that is active in the 9th century BCE Israel the stories like I say are composed two centuries later and so they're generally Mythic and um this is why they are literary and they're able to contain so many wonderful Supernatural interventions um by contrast when we get to two centuries later to Jeremiah he's actually active when Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians and so he's a historic

(32:54) figure whose writings survive um within a nucleus of the book bearing his name so we have a book of Jeremiah it's been expanded it's not what he himself wrote every part of that but he's a historic person and we probably have some of his writings within that and his um writings align very much with the deuteronomist the deuteron deuteronomistic histories and so it's thought because of the themes are so similar that he is part of a school that is responsible for those for bringing together at least the the things that

(33:29) become the books of Joshua Judges Samuel Samuel Kings Kings so and say all of that so that we can think of the context right so the context really is Jeremiah's day as opposed to um uh as opposed to Elijah's day and so um let's look at what Jeremiah has to say about Baal Worship in his day so according to Jeremiah baale worship remains completely widespread in Judah in his own time period that is to say long after the fall of Israel um Yahweh spoke his word to Jeremiah Jeremiah says Yahweh said stand at the Gate of

(34:13) yahweh's house the temple and announc there this message listen to the word of Yahweh all you people of Judah who go through these gates To Worship Yahweh this is what Yahweh Saba which is say the Lord of hosts the Elohim the god of Israel says change the way you live and act and I will let you live in this place do not uh trust the words of the saying this is yahweh's temple yahweh's temple yahweh's temple it's a lie suppose you really change the way you live and act and you treat each other fairly suppose you do not oppress

(34:54) foreigners and orphans and widows or kill anyone in this place place and suppose you do not follow other gods that lead you to your destruction so keep the Commandments but especially here don't worship other gods then I will let you live in this place in the land that I gave permanently to your ancestors long ago you are trusting in the words of a saying it's a lie that cannot help you so um Yahweh here through Jeremiah is saying this is a uh this is not an unconditional Covenant that you guys have made you have to obey

(35:27) these Commandments otherwise otherwise you going you know the Covenant that you get to stay here is not going to um be kept you steal murder commit adultery lie when you take Oaths burn incense as an offering to bail and run after other gods that you do not know then you stand in my presence in the house that is called by my name you think that you're safe to do all these disgusting things the house that is called by my name has become a Gathering Place for thieves I have seen what you are doing declares Yahweh so the Judes are worshiping Baal

(36:06) just as the Israelites in Samaria had done and Yahweh warns Jeremiah that Judah will be destroyed the same way Israel was if Baal worship does not cease so he says I will force you out of my sight as I forced out all of your relatives all of ephraim's descendants so ephra am here is the leading tribe of the northern kingdom the leading tribe of Israel and so that's a is more less saying I destroyed Israel because of this I'm going to destroy Judah as well so heno henthe IST reformers including the deuteronomist so

(36:45) the people who are writing Kings and also Jeremiah here who has the same themes as theonomous they see Yahweh only worship as a covenant and a covenant that is in fact um uh not unconditional it's a very conditional Covenant so when Judah is breaking it by continuing to be polytheist uh Jeremiah explains Yahweh said to me conspiracy exists among the people of Judah and among those who live in Jerusalem they've gone back to the evil ways of their ancestors and refused to obey my words they are following other gods and worshiping them the

(37:24) nation of Israel and Judah have rejected the promise I made to their ancestors so there's a result that's going to happen with this so as with Elijah's Mythic contest Jeremiah predicts that Baal will not rescue Judah from the Babylonians this is what Yahweh says Jeremiah says I'm going to bring a disaster on them that they can't escape although they will cry out to me I won't listen to them then the cities of Judah and all those who live in Jerusalem will cry to the Gods to whom they've been sacrificing but these Gods will never

(38:01) rescue them when they're in trouble Judah you have set up many go as many gods as you have cities you have set up many altars in Jerusalem to sacrifice to Baal you have as many altars there as there are streets in Jerusalem so so you've been praying to all those guys so pray to them for help just like the priests of Baal did when they wanted their altar to be licked with the fire um but here's the difference between uh what the present day uh Jeremiah that is seeing and the story that the deuteronomist are writing

(38:36) about in this case Yahweh also isn't going to save the people from the Babylonians so he says Jeremiah Don't Pray for these people don't cry or pray for them I won't listen when they call to me for help in times of trouble what right do these people I love have to be in my house when they do so many devious things Yahweh say SEO had has pronounced disaster on you this is because of evil things that Israel and Judah have done they have made him Furious by burning incense as an offering to Baal so um so the context really is this

(39:15) baale worship is still um U very Central to Judah this as it had been in Israel um because again this is Jeremiah complaining about it in his present day and again the story of Elijah is being written contemporaneously to Jeremiah so this is a problem that they're seeing as a contemporary issue so a couple Generations before Jeremiah there was a king Hezekiah of Judah and he's really the guy who brought about kind of the early yahwist reforms in Judah so Hezekiah is a king who successfully resisted the Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem in 7 1 BC

(39:58) and he's an early patron of yahwist reforms and has the goal of centralizing worship by destroying What's called the high places all around his kingdom and so previously in all the past um the Levites the Priestly class in Judah had had uh local shrines up in the hilltops where they would offer sacrifices to Yahweh but also to the other gods in the Israelite uh Pantheon and uh and now Hezekiah is uh going around and smashing all of those no longer anybody allowed to sacrifice anywhere else we're now only going to

(40:39) offer sacrifices at the central Temple that is directly controlled by the king and his uh high priest partner so among things that he destroyed Hezekiah went so far as to uh destroy the nushan and so this is a bronze serpent which had become kind of a um Pagan cult statue thing it's a rival cult object but this object was believed by the people at the time Hezekiah in killing in destroying it believed that Moses had actually created it and so this is an actual relic of Moses uh and it does take there's a story about it in

(41:22) the um Torah in the pentat um that may may not have existed yet but anyway is that is still remembered from this time uh and yet he's so um concerned about centralizing reforms and eliminating worship of other gods that um an important uh religious item Mosaic religious item like this is also caught up in the Smashing um it's also because they are trying to create a religion that is um uh iconoclastic it doesn't have pictures you know so God isn't to be pictured anymore and so having these uh these symbols and animal symbols like

(42:03) this like a snake um are uh also something that they're probably trying to get rid of um this uh nushan is a symbol of a snake wrapped around a pole and so this is um a symbol of healing and it's used in a healing story and it is similar to the staff of Theus in Greek myology um it is not the same as the caducus which is two snakes with wings um the two snakes with wings is actually the um caducus is actually a thing that mercury runs around with and it's about Commerce but because it looks the similar and it looks a little cooler

(42:47) because it's got two snakes and wings um that became uh adopted um it that became adopted by medical stuff so you'll see like a lot of that used as a medical symbol even though really they should be using this one not the caducus which is a symbol of Commerce this just a mistake that people made so Manasseh uh who is uh Hezekiah son so hezekiah's reforms were reversed when his son came to power so manasse restored the the previous Israelite Pantheon back to the temple so King manasse rebuilt all of those illegal places of worship the high

(43:29) places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed he set up altars dedicated to Baal and he made a pole dedicated to the goddess Ashera as king Ahab of Israel had done manasse like Ahab worshiped and uh the entire sorry and served the entire Army Of Heaven so the whole Pantheon he built altars in yahweh's Temple where yah yeh had said I will put my name in Jerusalem in the two Courtyards of yahweh's Temple he built altars for the entire Army Of Heaven so now all the gods of the pantheon are now um being worshiped in the temple in

(44:12) Jerusalem he burned his son as a sacrifice so he also restored it says here in the Bible manasse restored the uh ancient uh practice West Semitic Pagan religious practice of child sacrifice which is something um that continued in certain circumstances uh in the um the Romans we talk no you know used as a plumming against the carthaginians the carthaginians who were also um uh Phoenicians or Punic colonists so from this same uh Canaanite Punic West Semitic culture um that they would sacrific their children uh and

(44:58) that was you know firstborn and that was a um you know the Romans considered that to be very uh barbaric practice and the Romans had their own barbaric practices but this was the one that they uh singled out as being uh that their enemies were uh were doing and we also know that for example this great leader of um of Carthage hannable you can just see right there the the aeric name right so Hannah Bale right right so that's and so that's where um that continues this baale worship so he burned his son as a sacrifice um you know we've talked about

(45:36) before how actually um the Isaac story The Abraham Isaac myth is a a substitution story where they're saying yes in the past we have sacrificed the firstborn of every womb but now we don't need to do that stop everybody the religious reform here is stop doing that we can instead have a a substitute we can use a a young Ram to do that and indeed the the Passover story itself is also uh referencing this so the firstborn is being killed by the destroying Angel everybody who hasn't sacrificed their firstborn but if you

(46:12) take Ram's blood and you put it over your door that shows that you've done a substitute and so then your firstborn is not going to be uh killed by ba or Yahweh or the destroying Angel by m or whoever whoever the sacrifices being to so he's restored that though Manasseh he consulted fortune tellers he cast evil spells he appointed Royal mediums and psychics he did many things that made Yahweh Furious Manasseh had an idol of Ashera made then he set it up in his Temple where Yahweh had said to David and his son Solomon I have chosen this

(46:49) Temple and Jerusalem from all the tribes of Israel so Manasseh overturns his father's reforms he restores the traditional Pantheon to the temple and the various polytheist PR polytheistic practices which the reformers saw as abrogating the Covenant with Yahweh the deuteronomist believed that Yahweh would punish Judah for reverting to polytheism and thus if they were correct if that was a true thesis or um theodicy then we King Manassa really ought to have been chastened somehow by God or frankly even killed by foreign enemies

(47:31) that's certainly what always happens in the literary component of the deistic history so uh Israel forgets God and they start worshiping uh some other God and then God brings the moabites in and the moabites conquer them for a while or the Philistines come in and conquer them um there's a big Empire right here Assyria that could easily conquer manasse to prove to remind everybody that actually you should should go back to worshiping Yahweh that does not happen though in fact instead because of the general context of Israel I'm sorry

(48:03) of a Syria's decline so one of the things that happens is um Canaan Syria Palestine this area um because it is wedged between two larger Powers it's when those powers are in Decline that it can see it's flowering and so um this is a time period when really Judah is able to start flourishing affording manasse a really long relatively peaceful and Incredibly prosperous Reign so he reigns 55 years according to the Bible um completely doing what should not have happened according to the deuteronomistic um theology so manasseh's son and successor

(48:47) King Ammon is assassinated very early in his Reign and that presented an opportunity for another reversal of policy when ammon's son Josiah assumed the throne as a minor according to the Bible an 8-year-old uh and during his Reign during Josiah's Reign uh we'll see hezekiah's reforms are reinstated and redoubled and it is this time Josiah's Reign that's when the Prophet Jeremiah began to be active and so he continues on after Josiah and he actually continues to be an active Prophet after the destruction of Jerusalem but this is

(49:24) Jeremiah's immediate cont text so this is why we come back to um Josiah so often and indeed the deuteronomistic history Praises Josiah above all other kings uh and it's a good reason for that is maybe because the very first draft of this thing is written during his Reign so according to 2 Kings 22 in the 18th year of Josiah's reign in other words after he has achieved his majority the chief priest of the temple hilaya sent him news and so we read there the chief priest Hoka told the Scribe Cham uh Cham it's hard to say that shaam

(50:05) fan I have found uh the book of Moses teachings in yahweh's Temple so this previously lost we'll say in quotes book here is then read to the King which causes him to have an immediate shift in policy so when the king heard what the book of teachings has said he tore his clothes in distress so uh many scholars have proposed that the book that hilaya found here uh is Deuteronomy and Deuteronomy may have been composed in its earliest form around this time it probably does not predate this at all and so um probably here the idea is that it

(50:48) Hoka and his school are composing um this book uh regardless of when it arose the book hadn't been read before or seen before uh by the Kings and it is used to justify Josiah's yahwist reforms so in 2 Kings chapter 23 we read then the king ordered the chief priest hilaya the priest who served under helaya and the doorkeepers to take out of yahweh's Temple all of the utensils that had been made for Baal Asher and the entire Army Of Heaven so now we're getting out rid of the pantheon again Josiah Bur burned the utensils outside Jerusalem in an

(51:28) open field near the Kidron Brook then he carried their Ashes to bethl Josiah got rid of the Pagan priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed to sacrifice at the illegal places of worship in the cities of Judah and all around Jerusalem they had been sacrificing to Baal to the sun god to the Moon God to the Zodiac and the entire Army Of Heaven he took the pole dedicated to the Goddess ashra from from the temple to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem he burned it in the Kidron Valley ground it to dust and he threw its ashes on the tombs of the

(52:04) common people he tore down the houses of the male Temple prostitutes who were in yahweh's Temple where the women did weaving for Asher so there is a lot of um that's a lot of paganism going on in the temple Precinct Precinct all the way up until um Josiah and as we can kind of see in the biblical period Josiah is very close to the end of the first temple period and we are still you know in the middle of you know pretty unreformed um uh Israelite Canaanite religion that is taking place at the very heart in the temple

(52:44) itself um so then one of the ironies of the deistic history that has so far looked forward to Josiah and has always promised again that if you obey the Lord and stop worshiping other gods you're going to prosper and if you forget and if you forget the Lord and you start worshiping other Gods uh you will be uh chastised um you know manasse had that great long Reign despite uh doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord whereas Josiah um just completely unexpectedly uh when a resurge in Egypt start to come out and the Pharaoh brings

(53:28) an army to uh meidu Josiah goes to see him maybe to be offer himself as a uh client King uh and very unexpectedly in 609 the Pharaoh Neco II just kills Josiah uh and that um is later interpreted as a battle uh which later becomes the the precursor to the idea of a battle there Armageddon uh but it's probably nothing any so Grand but it is a very um unexpected for the present day reformers who really believed that believed their theology that if you were to just not be polytheist if we're going to just be henthe ists like Josiah was

(54:12) being he should be being prospered he the Lord should be backing him and that's not what happens in actual history okay so from this really partial survey we can see that baale worship was very widespread in Israel and Judah often enjoying Royal patronage really up until the end of the first temple period of Judaism and we've also caught glimpses of a broader Pantheon of gods so the entire Army Of Heaven as it's being referred to here and that included Gods with names like Ashera the goddess Ashera uh the Sun the moon and so

(54:53) forth so that kind of brings us to the topic we've been dancing around a little bit and we want to do a more Deep dive into who was this great rival of Yahweh who is Baal who um uh Jeremiah and the deuteronomist are are complaining um many people think should be the god of Israel so first off there is more than one BA so in ancient Northwest Semitic languages so all of these Syria um Syrio Palestine Canaan Israel area here Phoenicia area Baal is a title that means Lord means owner so it's like the later ancient

(55:41) Semitic word Adon which also means Lord and that word is pluralized as adoni my Lord um my lords that uh word is used also as an honorific for a number of gods and in some cases it becomes the Theon or the name of a God in particular so for example Adonis so the Greek god Adonis who the Greeks really did understand um had come from um this Canaan area from Syria uh this name itself um is a lone word from this word Adon which means uh uh Lord Adonai so um we'll bring it we got to find out more about bael because we have um come

(56:36) upon another source of a lot of literature from Western Semitic uh the western citic region so ugarit was a wealthy Northwest citic Kingdom with close ties to the hittite Empire before this Bronze Age collapse that we talk about all the time so it was destroyed in 1185 most likely as part you know during the general Bronze Age collapse um very likely uh collapsing when the sea peoples overran it and other places so on this little map here of the Levant and Egypt the um the little places that have Castle symbols those are the cities

(57:21) like Ty and Tannis and Haron um those don't fall whereas cities like ashcon and cadesh and ugarit those Tarsus those all are conquered and those are destroyed during the collapse and the hittite state collapses although the Egyptians are weakened they they survive um so it's a fortuitous collapse um not for the people of ugarit at the time but for history because um all of their texts which were written on clay tablets some 15 00 texts uh survive and because um nobody ever rebuilt ugarit after it was destroyed it

(58:04) just stayed there buried and uh it was only in 1928 when it was dug up that all of these uh texts these tablets clay tablets were um discovered and that gives us a very rare glimpse into uh ancient Northwest Semitic religion as important as you know the Phoenicians are with the um very early alphabet we just don't have like a cache of you know all of the writings from TI or something like that so that we can know all of Phoenician mythology the way that we know uh Greek and Roman mythology and so how getting this survival texts in uh

(58:43) ugaritic is really really crucial so what do we learn from the ugaritic texts so Baal is among their Chief gods that are worshiped there we also have figurines and um relief sculptures and so forth of Bale from ugarit um the texts make it clear that Bale that the that the baale I said there's other ones more than one possible baale because it means Lord the baale that's venerated in ugarit is Hadad so Hadad is a storm God whose name likely means roar rumble effectively is evoking Thunder so this God originates in the

(59:26) Levant so in this area and so B Hadad the Lord Hadad was introduced uh into Eastern uh Semitic areas Mesopotamia by the amorites the kind of bwin attacking people who uh barbarians who overran uh at different times uh the Mesopotamia and so there in Mesopotamia Hadad became known as adad for the aad the Assyrians the Babylonians Etc so among the most famous myths require recovered from ugarit those 1500 texts is called the Bale cycle of stories so in the pantheon while L is their supreme god who's essentially

(1:00:16) representing kind of the heavens um the uh he is sort of like the if we if you think think of if you're more familiar with uh Greek and Roman mythology um you know this there's a succession of Sky Gods where the sky Gods begin uh with oros and then Kronos and then Zeus and each one you know oros is just the uh Heavens alone and Kronos is more uh each one is like more present among people until you get to finally get to Zeus a young active um uh storm God who is much more active in people's lives than just the distant heavens and

(1:00:58) so in that same way L is is more distant and removed and Bale is going to be a much closer at hand storm God and so there sort of a um equivalence there between uh when Bale is overthrowing L it's sort of like Zeus overthrowing cron Kronos if you know those stories so then at the beginning of this Bale cycle um the god yam seeks to gain dominion and effectively be he's going to be the one that is going to be the new leader of the Gods since El is sort of removed in his lofty Heavens so yam is the god of the sea and

(1:01:36) his claim for Dominion is initially it has the support of L so L likes yam uh and yam is beloved of L and he summons uh the Divine Craftsman figure in the story who's called kther wus which is skilled and wise is what his name means so so it's the wise kind of Craftsman of the Gods the architect of the Gods to build a grand palace for Yam but when he goes and talks to yam K wakas tells him that yam has really risen presumptuously that he's he's not glorious enough to um take over as the king of the Gods and you know Baal is

(1:02:17) going to resist him he predicts and indeed that's what happens and so Bale has a big long fight against y Y and yam again is the sea and it has sea creatures uh there and who are initially very scary and are fighting Bale a lot but ultimately Bale wins and slays yam and so we have a missing part of the the tablets so we don't have all the tablets um because this fight of baale against um yam this kind of uh primordial sea chaos kind of thing um that's very similar to other Middle Eastern other Semitic Mythic stories like for example

(1:03:02) Marduk um who slays Tiamat the B Babylonian personification of the sea as part of the Babylonian creation story and so a lot of Scholars speculate here that what we would have here now is baale having a creation story for this Earth out of U kind of the carcass of yam out of the chaotic the Waters of chaos um so uh now that uh ba has uh defeated the person who was The God Who was going to take Dominion uh anat his very close Ally maybe his sister the exact relationship isn't clear anat the goddess of hunting uh and aat as it's called in the

(1:03:54) ug eritic but is also in other um West Semitic uh iterations is Asher who we've already heard of so Ashera who is the wife of L they together persuade L to allow the Divine Craftsman to build a palace for Baal which he does and he uses the aid of fire kind of like Prometheus uh this is a important uh Power in Civilization and it takes a uh a 7-Day kind of cosmic period to build this Palace for Bale Bale then has the Divine architect ker wakasa install a window in his palace's roof and that window allows him to open and close the heavens giving

(1:04:41) Bale control over the rain and thus fertility of the land you might remember we just talked about the um uh the biblical um background cosmy ology of the world is that the uh World is Flat that is um resting upon Cosmic Waters and there is a kind of a hemispheric like firmament that is the sky that is over top of the earth and then there is a a window in the heavens that God that Yahweh can open up and he does open up when to cause the flood and this is a window that Bal has made in his own Palace that gives him control over

(1:05:21) fertility and it's very important in this arid land ly to be able to uh bring rain so in the next cycle because Bale has um struck the seven uh the seven-headed serpent monster lotan um in other words he's Express and he's also done things to express um his dominion over everything including death u m death the god of death is very offended so M um you know threatens to baale in the Underworld and says all the gods will know you're dead uh when that happens and after some fighting proceeds to kill baale a el and anat then have a big long

(1:06:08) uh mourning of baal's death uh L and Asher decide well Bale's gone now who can be now who should have dominion um it was going to be you know the god of the sea and then it was the god of the storm God who is going to be so they decide they're going to replace him with AAR which is the Morning Star Venus the lightbringer um but AAR proves unsuitable he's not able to be a strong enough uh God to be ruling uh you know ruling as king of the Gods um the story continues we saw that anat um the hunt goddess of hunting is either Ball's

(1:06:48) sister or some other close relative of baale he she goes and kills Mot um L then has a dream that Bale is still alive an not goes into to seek him um baale is still alive because rain is still coming and and then they're able to find him an not restores him to his Palace M even though you know I guess he's god of death you don't can't kill him forever he returns too um he fights he you know doesn't like the baal's back in charge he fights baale they fight on and on and on to a standstill But ultimately M has to concede the fact

(1:07:29) that a has um Bale's back and is bestowing his favor that means he's going to Baal has to be considered the King of the Gods and so this very quick simplification of the the baale cycle here so um so what can we say then about this baale so Bale Hadad the main is also likely to be the main biblical baale so although baale Lord began as an epithet for Hadad the word also then evolved into the God's name and then Hadad became the epithet so most Scholars agree that the Baal here in the ugaritic Baal cycle is essentially the

(1:08:08) same as the primary god named Baal in the Hebrew Bible although there are other gods in the text there's so many mentions of ba in the Old Testament that sometimes it simply is the the word Lord is met and so one of the examples of that is when we have things like um uh ishbel you know the the son of of of of Saul that uh theic uh theophoric word name so it's saying that he is a man of Baal but what's not clear there is is Saul's son here a worshipper of Baal the Rival of Yahweh or is he representing um a different

(1:08:55) a different yahwist understanding where they were trying to say Yahweh is Baal so so there there might have been there there were a couple different paths that could have been taken one is to to insist that Baal simply is Yahweh in the same way that they have later as well see insist that L simply is Yahweh uh and so the Bales in those names could mean Lord but also be referring to Yahweh as opposed to a distinct a God who is Baal who is distinct from Yahweh so we'll see how that goes so essentially um as we kind of have looked

(1:09:34) at all of those we have just an abbreviated from the story I just summarized West Semitic Pantheon so we had L who is the Supreme Heavenly deity El has a wife Asher the mother goddess at different times El then was favoring yam who was the god of the sea and then later um when yam and ba were dead he wanted to have maybe AAR the god of the Morning Star Venus to be the um uh the chief of the Gods we had baale and anat um B Hadad and anat who are related maybe they are the children of Deon the god of crops it's not entirely

(1:10:17) clear from the text uh they baale in turn fights yam and lotan the monster of chaos and also M the god of death um so those are just some of the Gods in the pantheon and there are more because we've already talked about how um even in the Bible are saying there were were uh uh shrines or or altars to also the sun god the moon God and and the whole zodiac so so one of the things that happens oh did I miss one I missed one slide there okay so one of the things that happens is as we abbreviate this um uh I'm missing one slide so I'll explain

(1:11:00) what happens so where does yah where does Yahweh come from so um this is kind of an important slide that I skipped so in the charts so essentially as we have an abbreviated um more abbreviated Pantheon what we're going to continue to have be important here especially is L and Asher and then we're going to have that include L and Ashera have sons of L among whom one of the sons of L is Yahweh and then there are other unnamed in the Bible other sons of L then we also continue to have um ba and ba continues to have for example his um the

(1:11:41) things that he's doing as a rival to Yahweh and it's understood in the biblical text okay that's like phase one then phase two is Yahweh absorbs l so um ashra who had been L's consort now becomes uh and maybe yahweh's mother now becomes yahweh's consort and so there's a bunch of phrases in the Bible where it talks about Yahweh and his Ashera um and then there are sons of L that are still REM remembered here and mentioned here and so Yahweh who is now L is the leader of a Heavenly Court lesser Gods who were the sons of el and

(1:12:27) now in this stage um Baal is largely seen as a rival and so it shouldn't be the god of Israel for at least the yist as far as the yist are concerned the people who are bais would maybe are saying no we can have both side by side or maybe you know Baal should be the god of Israel um and so yahwist anyway paint baale as a rival to yahweh's dominion and so then then uh in the next phase then Yahweh also um absorbs Asher as Yahweh becomes now the more removed Cosmic God uh in whose image uh whose Divine image both male and female

(1:13:12) are created um Yahweh at this time also takes on all of baal's roles so even though Baal is not uh Yahweh and indeed Bales are not Gods at all in this final um understanding of the yahs they're just merely Idols now everything that Baal did like fight the Leviathan that's something that Yahweh did and meanwhile the sons of Al which had been Gods they're no longer Gods now they are understood to be angels of Yahweh and so that's sort of the stage of um the progression of yahwism from kind of polytheism henotheism and ultimately

(1:13:54) monotheism in the first temple period all right and so that is um My overall uh you know Glimpse on who was Bale um the whole development of Yahweh and who was Yahweh where did Yahweh come from that's a future lecture you know that's a really also complicated thing and we'll talk about that but I thought we'd start with this but give you a window into that sequel at the end okay let me get a glass of water while landro is giving me the questions um boy I want to thank uh everybody for their donations puges uh writes waking up Wednesday

(1:14:46) morning and seeing the new stream going is the highlight of my whole week well thank you so much PES for your support and uh your donation thanks also to Dave Anderson to Michael Rogers thanks Philip doodo for a couple donations lots of donations I appreciate that uh and Jared um says I should have dressed up as Bale for the lecture it is Halloween happy Halloween I I didn't have a bale costume so I I should have your right I apologize for not doing that um land let's Advance the getting there sorry very active chat

(1:15:22) it's a very active chat okay Ron Wagner uh comments or in question uh one of The Commandments says something like I am God Thou shalt not have any other gods before me doesn't that imply that the Israelites worship multiple gods at the same time so so they're not supposed to because it says I am God and you're not have any other gods before me what it's saying is that they believe in multiple gods and so this is not a um you know this is from the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy I am the Lord thy God that shall not have

(1:15:57) any Gods before me that means um that we're not to um we are not to a monotheist understanding of God yet so when that is written um by the deuteronomist uh or whatever that could even be an older formulation when that commandment exists um um it's representing a hthe in other words there are multiple gods but we're supposed to worship one of them and so like you say that's an example of um the reality that we really have kind of demonstrated that the Bible demonstrates a lot um forever seeking wisdom says how

(1:16:34) does the bail cycle compare to Jesus as dying and Rising Gods does it fit any mythological themes so so the dying and Rising God theme is like this very popular thing from the 19th century that um that 19th century Scholars have kind of uh um kind of imposed on stuff and so and so mostly this dying and Rising god um framework has been largely abandoned U what is the in the Bale cycle um it isn't entirely clear what bal's dying and Rising which he does do here what this in in in fact represents so sometimes for example when in the Greek

(1:17:23) mythology when prapan is taken by you know the daughter of uh of series of Deiter uh who is the this fertility God that is creating all of this when uh creating the the flourishing of the earth um when her daughter is taken to the underworld by Hades by um Zeus's brother and brought into the the world of death then um Deiter in her grief causes all the plants to die and then that's why um plants uh die in winter this is an ideological myth to explain that and then because of a deal that Hades made with with Zeus and Demeter uh

(1:18:04) when the spring comes pran gets to come back with her mother and makes her mother happy and so the plants all come again so for the baale cycle um some Scholars have suggested that the baale going into the underworld with M and then get his sister bringing him back um uh in the form of a rain that maybe that would be seasonal like that others have said that no maybe um in this case it's um because it's from this more Aid area as opposed to a um as opposed to a seasonal annual thing an annual cycle like we experience uh where we are that

(1:18:42) it's talking about catastrophic droughts and so um Bale is in the Underworld during a time of catastrophic droughts and then L sees him come again and because the rains have come again um that that maybe is a not an annual um seasonal explanation of an ideological myth but it is that it is not entirely clear because we don't have you we have so little unfortunately in all of these uh West Semitic um mythology in contrast to what we have for the Greeks um Donnie Lee Gringo writing from Brazil says uh what connection

(1:19:24) if any are there between Eden snake and the Mosaic snake on a pole well it doesn't there's not any uh direct there's not any direct links in the text so they don't suggest that there is or that and there and and specifically the the Mosaic snake on a pole that existed an actual historical artifact at the time of um of Hezekiah that's a artifact of a snake on a pole that was attributed to Moses who was not a historical figure so Moses so so it is something that they understood one of their ancestral Heroes Moses

(1:20:04) would have had as his own thing and so it's seen as an artifact of that um but it's more likely you know but it is simply an ancient um religious cult item that Hezekiah destroyed so later when they have the uh when people wrote down stories about what their understanding of of where of Moses and where Moses would have made it it's it's in it's in relationship to healing and so it has no relationship with the the Eden snake uh that I know of so because the Eden snake has nothing to do with um uh with healing and so it's more related to this

(1:20:41) idea um even of the esus is U you know the staff of Aaron the and the staff of uh uh esus as opposed to the Eden the snake from Eden um you know the the idea of snakes is that they um you know in terms of healing so they shed their skins and then they that's as and it looked like a way to heal to people I mean it's a how they grow they can't they can't grow uh The Way We Grow skin so the way the the scales work is they shed their skin and then they seem like they've healed and so there was an idea that uh snakes had

(1:21:20) the ability of healing and so that's why um that's why it's associated with that it's not why it's Associated necessarily with Eden uh Sandra burn asks I'm assuming that uh the sacrifice of children is historically accurate uh why was it done to keep control or to hurt um I would say it's done because U yeah it's it is it is historically accurate yes there isn't done um it's not like I don't think that we have an example that it was it is insanely WI widespread but it was certainly done especially among the elite um it is not

(1:21:59) done uh well I mean it was done because uh I would say ancient religion is especially superstitious and so um there is your world is fairly chaotic the gods are uh fairly chaotic you do not know what will offend them and there is there was an idea that emerged here in um we call um Syrio Canaanite religion that um sort of a dedicatory offering had to be made so the first born of every womb is mine sayith the Lord uh and so that is that's actually made its way into the Bible even that that statement um and so there was an

(1:22:48) understanding if you didn't do that you would be um punished so so paganism you know polytheism is largely about uh all kinds of ritual things that you have to do to make sure that you can not be um uh not have Gods be angry with you and curse you and do horrible things to you or if they have been doing horrible things uh that you can propitiate them and get them to stop or at least um you know make make some kind of amends to make sure that would be and so it's just an understanding of ancient religion and

(1:23:20) so one of the this is one of the things that um you know people uh often think just think that religion is always bad actually the the um the Israelite religion that is having a reform that is saying no you don't have to kill children anymore now we can substitute do a sacrifice of a ram or something like that an animal sacrifice okay that's you may not want to do animal sacrifices you think that you today you might think that's a terrible thing it was a big Improvement you know and then later um eliminating animal sacrifices

(1:23:54) which is another religious reform that comes later is also uh a big Improvement and the and uh so reform continuously happens um and some some Modern reforms uh reformers would like to say well let's just get rid of um religion and many people have but the problem with that is is that they are only really getting rid of organized religion people immediately uh are just as religious as before in the sense of the things that they believe and when they don't have a forum for exploring it then they they fall into all kinds of other things like

(1:24:32) um they read books about manifesting or and they start to believe in manifesting or they you know they you know there's all kinds of different things that uh you know you go to different gurus for and you believe your energy is blocked and all this kind of thing and so religion doesn't um just because you get rid of organized religion that doesn't get rid of religion religion um and instead actually what I think we need or this is my personal belief is that we need um uh rational organized religions so that we can help people uh as a or we

(1:25:05) can as a people um try to understand things that are are healthy and that make sense and that are and that are workable and that and that are true as opposed to um things that aren't and so when we have Traditions that are horrific like this those should be uh Abol like they did in this historic time period um uh and indeed that's certainly part of what the yahwist reform was about getting rid of so um Jason kulo oh thank you so much for your support um so he asks you also ask was baale a man a king later uh deified so that is

(1:25:50) also some things that happen so a lot of time times um there there are examples where there might have been a historical person who was a hero who is eventually revered as a God or their their name in kind of an ancestor worship eventually um they have a shrine uh it becomes mythicized over time and so when it's a name like so Bale which just means Lord um anybody who was an Earthly person who was a lord who use the title baale um you know yes in theory sometimes um as they're remembered or as their remains or their

(1:26:31) Shrine or their statue gets remembered it could be also be understood as a as a God one of the many uh manifestations of baale or a different baale okay so landra says there's several examples in the tablets of that um uh Ry the king too asks is there any evidence of a henotheism towards baale in any of the northern Levant so so I don't know that that is happening so there is henotheism outside of Israel there's evidence for that for example in Moab so which is just a neighbor of uh of Judah and the moabites seem to be having you

(1:27:23) know henotheism towards a national God for them kamos um I don't I'm not aware of a bale henotheism uh elsewhere in the northern Levant but it might be a thing that is happening among Israel's nearer Neighbors anyway and it's certainly true that let's say if you have a city state um a city state like Ty could maybe have a I'm not just saying that out of a hand any one of them um might have a very particular Patron that they get really focused on um that wouldn't necessarily be henotheism but it might be kind of moving towards that um but

(1:28:02) I'm not I don't aware of any of the examples of that Bale in the northern Levant as far as I know continues to be worshiped as part of a regular large Pantheon where he gets equated um uh syncretic with with Zeus when During the helenistic period um Hector Herrera says can you talk about how Elohim technically the plural of L yet is used as a singular in uh post first temple Judaism so so yeah the um the name that we see almost all the time that gets translated as God in the Bible is technically you know would be

(1:28:42) pronounced gods and there is also a plural and so there's another bunch of different ways that this can can be described so uh it can be described essentially as how God as God is getting more Cosmic um is effectively having a Divine we you know like we talk about the Royal we you know that is our pleasure that you uh come to us and so forth that this is uh that God as God is absorbing these lesser Gods like Yahweh into being one the one God um that maybe um the whole Council of the Gods is is being kind of referred to even though it's now

(1:29:26) understood as one and so I guess I would say it is a sign of uh it's a tradition that develops it's potentially like a a sign of respect and reverence uh it isn't U it isn't a sign that um that the Israelites are believing uh the second temple Jews are believing that a whole bunch of gods plural they're using it to mean one God even though the word um is plural rain Weber says uh when in Genesis God kicked out Edam and Adam and Eve he put a cherubim to guard um to guard the Gard lest they eat also of the tree of life and become like us

(1:30:11) would ba have been considered one of us at that time so who um uh Yahweh here uh in that story which is uh from the the from the yahwist source of the Book of Genesis when Yahweh is talking about that the other gods are these Sons other sons of L that are part of the Court who are going unnamed and so he's talking to the other gods that are getting reduced of ultimately going to get to reduce to Angels um and so so baale could have been but it but probably isn't anymore it could have been one of the sons of God one of the

(1:30:54) sons of L uh like Yahweh but um so it's hard to decide because there's I think a couple different roads that could have been taken so one road is that Bale is collapsing into Yahweh and so um you know and Yahweh is saying he'll become like they'll become like us um Yahweh is baale and so baale wouldn't be one of the other people but or if um if Baal is a rival then um then maybe he's not being referred to as that but he's a different God so I guess I wouldn't necessarily it's hard to say since it's it's a we're more or less speculating

(1:31:33) because it's not it's not mentioned in the text directly what is meant there but I would say the sons of L are meant there the Heavenly Host um Eric Taylor says was worshiping Bale sort of like praying to St Peter for modern Christians no um it's not because Baal is a God and you could have been your you know he's vying in the Baal cycle to be the supreme god So ba like praying to Baal is like praying to Yahweh or it's like praying to uh to Zeus praying to St Peter is like um praying to uh any one of the uh the

(1:32:14) you know what the sons of l l essentially it's like praying to an angel so if you you can pray to um Michael who is is not a uh human Michael is an angel uh and so it's a different creation we're going to have a whole lecture on what angels are and so you can pray to to Michael and that's fairly similar to praying to St Peter you're essentially asking somebody that's up there in the Heavenly Court to uh put in a good word for you with God uh Michelangelo says why is Michael phrased as a question oh is it meant as an attack to

(1:32:54) non-believers or doubt since Michael is an uh Archangel why isn't the name sort of equivalent as nobody is like L um so so I was just repeating like this out of an eological dictionary and so it may be these are every time I've seen these um these eological meanings for these names there are a reconstruction and so the scholar is making an argument of of of what it's posing so usually um often they will look at the biblical atmology that's sometimes given in the Bible so a lot of times uh when the name is mentioned uh

(1:33:34) the person will say something that's kind of like a pun to explain the atmology of the name and so a lot of times people give preference to that but I don't think I don't actually think that that's necessarily a great practice it it it makes at least that what that is is it understands what the uh the compiler of the text how they understand the name at the time it's written and so maybe that's where that is coming from in that form but it may well mean something like you're saying is it does it mean nobody is like L I think it um

(1:34:04) it could it could mean that and so you could probably um look up the atmology for Michael and I think it'll probably be uh phrased in multiple different ways as Scholars kind of reconstruct what it's supposed to mean uh Andre Andre be more says can John make a connection between ancient and modern paganism SL Superstition uh why does that confusion of stories and explanations work even to this day um so so modern paganism is a is a a Revival it's a new um uh new religion that was kind of born out of post Protestants who are upset with um

(1:34:54) usually I think it came from is uh people who are upset with directions that uh especially 19th and 20th Century Christianity took uh post Victorian era as Christianity confu got really confused in with uh uh trying to police social norms and uh being very anti-sex and having a bunch of uh sex negative attitudes stuff that is just um should all be jet from Christianity but was seemed was made to be pretty Central to it and so um I think people saw um believed that ancient paganism was free of a lot of that because um you know

(1:35:38) some of the early expressions of ancient paganism is much more body focused and bodily and and um and has a lot of nudity in the pictures and and sex and so I think that that was a a way to legitimize a a Liberation from some of this uh Christian puritanism and prism of modern Christianity um and so it's a it's a a reasonable reaction to that um but you know it isn't it isn't particularly um I don't think it's particularly born out in what ancient paganism was like which is extremely um uh ritualistic it is kind of like

(1:36:21) this fear-based worldview it is yeah there's um not as you know they may not have been as upset about nudity and sex in different variants of it U but they're upset about lots of other things that uh that if you were to revive it really uh you would we would be appalled by and um and you don't even have to get to the the child sacrifice that we s saw here listed um and that the carthaginian and pagans were still doing um to even get there it's all kinds of stuff that the that the Romans were even doing if we read

(1:36:57) about we've done lectures on on how paganism is actually lived um in terms of superstition Superstition has been uh with us the entire time so um so animists pagans uh Christians and Jews and Muslims uh and post um Christian uh agnostics and atheists can all be superstitious so superstitious is something that exists inside and outside of of all of the religions and so I Define um Superstition as uh effectively like U things like believing that different kinds of ritual magic or or magic is going physical magic is going

(1:37:41) to happen in the world so um you know believing that you can do Jedi Mind Tricks with the force and that kind of a thing um there are uh believing in in luck uh believing in crossing your fingers believing in in sympathetic magic all those kind of things are I would plump into Superstition and and unfortunately that it exists uh inside Christianity a lot in the present day lots of superstitious Christians there's lots of superstitious post-religious people uh in the modern world so um yes why does that confusion

(1:38:19) of stories and explanations work even to this day I'm not so I'm not sure entirely what you mean so I would just say that the reason why we have um a bunch of Supernatural um stuff happening in ancient literary stories like when Elija calls down the the fire of God um it's because again those are literary Creations written after the fact the people in an in in the ancient world didn't have a um a a understanding of the difference of causation and they they didn't um didn't really have any difference between natural causes and

(1:38:59) and things that are that we would Define as as Supernatural because causation wasn't understood largely by them um let's see I really don't know uh uh um thank you for your donation and also you ask um can you suggest any books videos lectures Etc that go into historical detail of the other gods mentioned in the bible um so actually landro we had a big U bibliography for this can you give me can you look up some of those so that we can just put them into the links I I I had a I got a stack of books for this and I don't remember what

(1:39:41) they're all called they they've got long titles um so there are a bunch of books I don't have uh I don't have other videos and lectures but I but we definitely have a stack of books lecture before God was God yeah we have another lecture before God was God in our own que polytheism in the Bible and we have a lecture called polytheism in the Bible and we're going to come back to this topic in the new year and get some updated lectures on it uh Leon asks is there a lexicological collection connection between the L name

(1:40:19) in the Bible and the B name maybe that it's b l and no I think that that's not the case so um so it's a different it's a different um Source uh miguelangelo says did any biblical Prophet make a correct real prediction not a retroactive prediction like Daniel's statue or did all predictions fail like Josiah's Reign so so the real real prophecy is actually not about um making true predictions so I'm I'm going to tell you they they literarily they want to have that be the case you know so when when people are writing um about literary

(1:41:06) prophets who make you know who lived 200 years ago who make correct predictions of your time and they do it correct because you know what happened in your own past um they are they are making a kind of prophet prophecy that is um that is assur you of our place in the world in this day but obviously that is not a prediction of the future so a real contemporary Prophet who is speaking to his own time period or her own time period they really shouldn't be saying you know um I know for a fact that this will happen in the future uh because the

(1:41:41) future is not written so the the correct thing that I think prophets should be doing and and good prophets are doing is saying if we for example don't um if we don't address uh all of the issues that are causing the human main climate crisis um if we do not get carbon emissions under control if we do not deal with uh you know the population crisis all those kind of things that the degradation of um of of agricultural lands the extinction of species the world is going to be significantly um worse in future Generations than it is right now and

(1:42:22) there's a lot of suffering right now and so that would be a um you know a conditional um a conditional prophecy and so I think that some of them you know there are some conditional prophecies that end up being correct so I think that some of Jeremiah's um conditional prophecies that he was making there about uh you know or some of the other prophets that they're saying you know Jerusalem also is going to be destroyed if uh you know if if we don't change our ways and and one of his things is monotheism but actually if you if you remember that

(1:42:56) quote that I read he's also talking about um we have to be more ethical we have to be uh better to widows and orphans and and refugees um this kind of a thing so he's you have to stop lying and under and spreading false uh o OES and things like that we have to you know be interested in truth and reality um so he so he's making those kind of predictions and in that case um you know Jerusalem was destroyed after that and and the reason why he might have you know that might have not been a totally um you know crazy call to make is that

(1:43:36) obviously the northern kingdom had been destroyed um the kingdoms were pretty precarious at that point and so making the prediction that it's going to get destroyed is something that um you know you can make different political prog prognos notications that this is if we go on this path this kind of thing is going to happen and so I think that that some of those are going to happen um most of the so most of the the really problematic uh predictions are are when we get to apocalyptic um and apocalyptic ists like

(1:44:11) the author of Daniel that you're mentioning they really even though even though people misinterpret them so people um very wrongly read the book of Revelation and thinks that uh that the Book of Revelation is referring to the 21st century The Book of Revelation is referring to the first century when it was written that guy is writing to those guys and those things didn't happen in the sense of a literal end of the world um so that's a failed prophecy it is not a prophecy where he's writing about now so now we have to

(1:44:39) interpret it um uh spiritually and not as if it going to happen in history for it dab meaning um Kevin five Kevin the fth uh says since the Israel region was an Egyptian asset in the Bronze Age would their baale be different from the U ugaritic one which was under hittite control um it could be so baale actually um so it was the same God but he would have developed different uh different stories and attributes um Baal actually spreads at that time to Egypt so it is one of the Gods that's known um it's not one of it's obviously not a

(1:45:23) um uh one of the main Egyptian gods who are their native Gods but so so there is a you know um cultural exchange that's happening as also we were mentioning that Hadad is also taken to um Mesopotamia where he becomes adad so so um these ideas are kind of spread as they spread they change in all the different areas and that is based on like you say the fact that they're having different cultural uh um interchanges and they're exposed to slightly different ideas and customs and so it'll be a little different how it's

(1:45:57) understood in those areas um so pugy says is there any relation to carthage's uh baale Haman other than the linguistic Lord title that uh John mentioned earlier that's true so the so we don't know in um carthage's case so Bale again is a um is a sky God there uh and is an important Sky God but instead of for example uh Haman which is who's which is etymologically we don't know exactly where that comes from there's a bunch of different theories of where hamon is coming from as opposed to Hadad which is like rumbling um and also uh carthage's

(1:46:41) veil has as his as his sacred animal the ram as opposed to a um as opposed to a bull and so it's could be totally different Lord like you're saying it's a so so when I'm mentioning this the custom being the same um the the child sacrifice thing the the the sacrifice of the firstborn is a general um West Semitic you know Canaanite Phoenician thing um that is not necessarily BH hadad's thing it's actually even um in the Bible it's attributed to a different God it's I think it's to to Mo anyway so it's like the is it or Milam or something like

(1:47:25) that it's to a different God and so so it's not necessarily um I don't want to blame Bale for that uh it is simply part of the um uh that that Pagan religion and so in this case like you're suggesting actually because there's a lot of differences between you know B Haman and B Hadad uh even including the you know the the sacred animal it may be a totally different God uh darl Scott thank you for your uh support and he asks uh did worship of Baal or any other members of his Pantheon survive anywhere so yes um uh

(1:48:04) so the Israelites by the second temple period successfully you know wipe out all of the other people in the Israelite Pantheon and so it becomes true monotheism but all of their neighbors now then are very separated from um from religiously so um the people in Damascus their their Kingdom Aram you know becomes um kind of a cultural Aramaic the Aramaic language becomes the you know widespread even the in alphabet 2 um which even it gets adopted by the Israelites as a spoken language and so they uh continue to have uh temples to

(1:48:46) Baal there's temples to Baal across Syria and Palmyra and everything like that um he continues to be um as the uh uh as the area is conquered by the Greeks and becomes parts of helenistic Kingdoms um Greek Greek uh syncretism kicks in and so um people in those areas continue to worship Baal but they associate him with Zeus and so now he's Zeus and Jupiter and Baal but he continues to be known as baale in the uh in the cities of the East and so that continues on until um uh until the Romans uh become converted to

(1:49:26) Christianity it becomes the state religion and the um monks in the Eastern Roman Empire at a certain point start knocking over all the shrines like I was saying they do like that Elijah battle uh and they say well why isn't baale uh stopping us from kicking over the statue I guess he's not God I guess God the god of of the Christians the god of the bz the East Roman Empire here the Roman Empire is uh is God Christ and so that's when when it finally goes extinct uh under the Christians pugy says oh no Pug's already

(1:50:01) talked uh you have to what was I just finished Daryl Scott they okay here sorry there oh there's a lot of questions okay uh Jonathan McFarland thank you for your support um you ask are there any Bible passages that may originate from Semitic Gods other than Yahweh um like where where we saying thus saith the Lord and they speak um think of that so there are you like in a first person I think that's an interesting question I would have to look up any case where that might be I feel like um that there's might be some cases

(1:50:47) where like El shade is speaking directly to one of the Patriarchs um and so the idea then is that might be you know the actual God L before he's absorbed into Yahweh uh or they absorbed together so something like that might be the case um there are definitely things where Yahweh is doing stuff that other Semitic Gods actually did so like we had in the in the creation story that exists in the Psalms where um uh where Yahweh U you know destroys Leviathan uh and in order to begin creation that's something that

(1:51:28) um Bale actually did um but yeah that's an interesting question and something I would have to look up to see if I can find examples of that uh Jason uh kulo thank you for your support um asks a bunch of questions here let me look at go through these a little bit um in this chat uh notice that Bale looks like a sea people attacker a pelit Invader that became a lord in uh in Canaan possibly no um no Bale is there before the sea peoples so U Bale is definitely present in ugarit before the sea peoples get there so all of those things in the bail

(1:52:11) cycle those are all present um in texts that have been around in ugarit and then the sea peoples come and destroy ugarit they don't make all the texts after they get destroyed so he's definitely there first and it's not um uh the The peleset Invader um those guys probably brought their own Gods but um ultimately they uh become you know the Philistines and they lose their language and they really start adopting the customs of the locals so even though they're a warrior cast what probably happened is then they

(1:52:44) conquer the plane um the region between you know uh between the Judah Highlands and the and the Sea there philistia when they conquer that and give it its name um there's probably a lot of people that are still there which is why they adopt the local language and customs and probably Al mostly their religion as well um you also ask why was Cyrus conquest of Babylon prophesied um I think that there is prophecies that the Babylonians are also going to I'd have to look at that I I haven't looked that up that that's a good place to look

(1:53:23) for a prophecy that maybe uh succeeded um you said is Mosaic uh code plagiarized from hittite lock codes um so definitely there's a bunch of studies of where them what with Hittites there's definitely parallels from from the Mesopotamian law codes um so hittite lack codes I haven't looked at Parallels for that it's an interesting place to look for other parallels there are I would say the problem for um you know direct influence from the Hittites is that they have a completely different kind of language and it's harder to get at uh whereas um

(1:54:05) the Mesopotamians and their law codes they're speaking the same language and there's some really direct um U spreading of ideas between the two but it would be an interesting place to look for parallels uh Fabiano gitty says no just supported so thank you gave uh thank you for your support Fabi Fabiano um Joseph cania um asks was there ever a Jewish backlash against the worship of angels i' think that once the gods were transformed into Angels some people would have realized that angel worship is polytheistic so so yeah this is a

(1:54:45) um I think this is a very legitimate complaint that um for examp example uh the world religion of Hinduism can have with uh Muslims and Christians and Jews you know other words that Muslims and Christians and Jews have made this big big um uh case we're monotheists we believe in only one God and things like that but then there's all these other levels of of angels and demons and Jin and and you know dead people that are with God and and so forth and so there are all of these Divine beings especially Angels which

(1:55:20) are not even related to um Mortal beings but are Divine Creations um and so like you say any any existence of any of those ideals is a dimition of monotheism technically um I think in a kind of monotheism and so um and so the argument that that there's any big deal about the difference between monotheism and polytheism I I think it's a an abrahamic poic that doesn't really have a lot of a lot of meaning and you as you kind of point out um but I don't know that um I don't know how much um Jewish backlash against it it is because the

(1:56:02) text the transformation of the sons of God into Angels is at the first layer of uh Jewish holy text so at Torah level right and so um and so even the more conservative uh the most conservative sect of the second temple period the Sadducees um took the Torah as scripture and the Torah talks about you know angels and so I don't think that they were opposed to Angels um so ton of YouTube asks is the battle between Bale and M just another example of the fight between good and evil well you know it it can be but I

(1:56:42) don't think so I think that the um so I think that these earlier ones are as less representing the fight between Good and Evil and it is more between Order and Chaos um and that's the same kind of thing that's happening in the um you know in the Greek Miss right so there's um the the Olympians fight against the Titans that are essentially monstrous that are representing chaos and so um and so I think that that's the precursor be between uh the more ethical thing that occurs later in the um in the axial age when we start to get the world

(1:57:16) religions when people are worried about um more worried about good and evil uh as opposed to the polytheist concerns about Order and Chaos um so I just want to remind everybody uh we have our upcoming lecture is actually happening on Sunday so this Sunday as opposed to Tuesday and this is a special lecture and I hope you'll um you'll listen to it it's a um it's called the past present and future of the prophetic monarchy in the Latter-Day Saint tradition and so it is me as a historian talking about present day in um my own immediate context and

(1:57:54) also me as a historian actually making predictions but also uh being an activist historian trying to change history and so we we'll see it should be uh interesting and then we'll continue with our regular Tuesday lectures not next week but the next on November 14th with the problem of universals thanks so much