Who Was Baal?, Transcript

Who Was Baal?

Transcript

(00:04) Our topic tonight is "Who was Baal?" I think this is going to be a really fun one. I'm going to start off by talking a bit about theophoric names. A great favorite book of mine is "The Name of the Rose," and they made a really amazing movie in the '80s that I saw fairly soon after it came out. In it, Christian Slater plays the Christian novice Adso of Melk in the movie "The Name of the Rose." The original meaning of the name Christian is "believer in Christ," in the same way that if you're named

(00:50) Christopher, you may not realize it, but that means "Christ Bearer." Since Christ is a title but is more or less used as a name of God in Christianity, these are known as theophoric names. Theophoric means, literally in Greek, a name that bears a god. There are plenty of other examples, for instance, pagan-derived names that we still use. Marcus and Martin are both theophoric names that mean something related to Mars, someone who is of Mars, the God of War, the Roman God of War, the planet Mars.

(01:38) It could mean that the person is warlike, that they're martial. The Bible has plenty of theophoric names. For example, just a handful of the dozens and dozens that come from the name El, which is the name of a God but becomes a word that means god in a generic sense in ancient Hebrew and other Western Semitic languages. We can see the word El at the end of names, and this means it's a theophoric name, but it's also sometimes at the beginning of names. For example, Daniel means El is my judge or El

(02:23) Elizabeth, my El is an oath, Emmanuel, El is with us. That's one of the Christmas songs, Emmanuel, God is with us, God With Us. Israel struggles with El, Michel, Michael, who is like El, Nathaniel, gift of El, Samuel, El heard. We also have theophoric names for Yahweh, which is the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. Again, there are dozens and dozens of these. I just picked out a couple: Haaiah, Yahweh has grasped, Isaiah, Yahweh is salvation, Jeremiah, Yahweh will raise, Jonathan, Yahweh has given. You can see in some

(03:20) of these it's at the end, like Isaiah, Yah, so that's Yahweh, and so forth. Sometimes it's at the beginning, like Yahoshua or Jonathan, where those are at the beginning. 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 theophoric names from Baal. One of these is Ish, sometimes changed, and the name has been altered to Ishbosheth so that they're not using the word Baal, but the original is Baal. Drew Baal, Jezebel,

(04:12) Jezebel and Meth, Meth. These mean man of Baal, Baal contends, where is Baal from the mouth of Baal. Although Jezebel is pretty famous as a villainess and is portrayed as a foreign enemy, a foreign Queen who has come and married the king of Israel and is an enemy of Yahweh, and therefore very appropriately has a theophoric name for Baal since she is a devotee or worshipper of Baal, Ishbel nevertheless is King Saul's son and successor. Meth is the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, so grandson of Saul. David actually also has a son with a

(05:07) Baal theophoric name. Jeruel is actually another name for the very heroic judge from the Book of Judges, Gideon. At some point or other, they say that essentially they rename or give it this as an alternate name, possibly because again the Deuteronomic historians are aware that these Baal names are contrary to their narrative that they want to be telling because it implies that this hero of Israel is, in fact, he or his parents at least were worshippers of this great enemy of Yahweh, of

(05:56) Baal. As a preface for this whole lecture, I 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, El Shaddai for God Almighty sometimes translated, but God El Elyon, God the Most High, Elohim, which is a plural but is translated as God. Normally when I'm doing these lectures, I will quote the Bible using the New Revised Standard Version, and I almost always get that digitally from biblegateway.com. This is my advertisement for them since I use their service for free all

(06:42) the time. The nice thing about that is that Bible Gateway also has this Names of God Bible translation, and you can go to that, and that will actually highlight the underlying Hebrew word that is being used for God very clearly. If you do want to find out what the English is covering up, which is important to this particular lecture, that's an easy way to get your notes for that. I'm using that translation in some of the TR quotes here. In some cases, I'm just using the Revised Standard Version but changing

(07:22) where it says the Lord back to the original Yahweh. One of the most famous stories, I think, in the Hebrew Bible is Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal. It's so popular that it's in a dozen children's stories that I found that illustrate it. It's a very memorable story. It's found in the first book of Kings 18. We read, so Ahab, who is the king of Israel, sent to 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

(08:09) limping between two different opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow him, but if Baal, then follow him. The people did not answer him a word, so they didn't want to say which side they're on at this point; it's too dangerous. Then Elijah said to the people, I, even I alone, am left a prophet of 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. Then I will prepare the other bull and lay it on wood and put no fire to it. Then you priests of Baal 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. 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 this whole thing once and for all. So, bulls here are, in terms of totem animals, they're sacred to both Baal and also to Yahweh. It's a symbol of both

(09:27) Gods, especially Baal, though. The prophets of Baal took the bull that was given them, and they prepared it, and they called upon the name of Baal from morning till noon, saying, oh Baal, answer us, but there was no voice, and no one answered. They limped around the altar that they had made, and at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, cry aloud, for he is a God. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he's on a journey, or perhaps he's asleep and must be awakened. Some cruel jibes here. They cried aloud and cut themselves after their custom with swords and lances until

(10:09) blood gushed out upon them. 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 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. With the stones, he built an altar in the name of Yahweh, and he made a trench about the

(10:51) altar as great as would contain two seahs, about 15 liters of seed. He put the wood in order, cut the bull in pieces, and laid it on the wood. 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 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 cut up offering cattle here, bull. Then he said, do it a second time, and they did it a second time. He said, do it a third time, and they did it a third time.

(11:33) The water ran all around the altar and filled the trench also with water. So you know this is a badass prophet. At the time of the offering of the oblation, Elijah the prophet came 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

(12:13) water that was in the trench. When the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, Yahweh, he is God, Yahweh, he is God. Elijah said to them, seize the prophets of Baal, let not one of them escape. They seized them, and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there. There's the thunderbolt for the light, I'm sorry, the firebolt 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. Elijah's name, I'll point out

(12:50) here, is a double theophany, so he has both an El name and a Yahweh name. So Eliyah means my El, 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 El. It's essentially Elijah's name is almost the slogan here for Yahwist henotheism, which is to say we are only going to worship one God, there's only our God, our El is going to be Yahweh alone. Okay, so this story is clearly a polemic against Baal, so through a mythic

(13:39) supernatural intervention, Yahweh's power is contrasted with Baal's impotence. This kind of story becomes precedent for Christians after their ascendance. 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 the local, what are now called pagan peoples, the people who are still revering the old gods, hey, if Mars or if Dionysus had some kind of actual power, if that was a real God, Dionysus wouldn't let us just smash his statue like that. Now we've smashed his statue, and we've destroyed the shrine, we've cut down, 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 God is the true God. This is the same kind of story, although it actually happens in history as opposed to the Elijah story from this kind of mythic time period in the

(14:55) Bible. What is the story telling us as we look at it, though? When you're telling this story, what are the authors actually giving us as clues as the background of their context? 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 decide it out once and for all, who's the god of Israel?

(15:26) Is it going to be Baal or Yahweh? Also, the story is showing us that Baal has royal patronage at least some of the time in the history of Israel. So the king here, Ahab, who is the son of Omri, he's a great villain of the Bible, or he's portrayed as a villain in the biblical account anyway, he's called together all these prophets, and while there are 450 prophets of Baal, Elijah says he's the only prophet of Yahweh left, implying that there had been a whole bunch more in the past, and now, because of presumably it has to be royal patronage in order for these prophets to be able to be making enough money to

(16:11) have this be their business, 450 is a lot. So Baal has royal patronage. The story admits that there's an open question as to which God should be regarded as the god of Israel, and that Baal is in ascendance, but it also presents the claim that Yahweh has priority. So it says Elijah is the only prophet left, and he's not just building a brand new altar, it's suggesting that he is repairing an ancient abandoned altar. This is a claim that the people of Israel have abandoned worshiping Yahweh in order to start worshiping Baal. Elsewhere in this story, the

(16:58) text makes another claim that Ahab's wife, who is the daughter, she's a princess from Sidon, which is one of the main Phoenician cities. The Phoenicians are a completely related people to the Israelites, and they speak a very similar language and at this point are using almost the same alphabet as each other, or abjad, the same consonantal writing scheme. They have Baal as one of their gods. Essentially, the text often blames women as scapegoats for bringing foreign princesses as bringing other gods into Israel, and that's certainly an argument that's made here

(17:46) in the text. In other lectures, we have pointed out that the biblical edifice as related in the Bible is that at its core, prophets and later the 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 antediluvian era of patriarchs, but that the people increasingly are polytheistic, and they are therefore turning away from God, from Yahweh. In fact, then it's suggesting that polytheist rebellions increase over time, and that it ultimately has that as the explanation

(18:39) for why the northern kingdom, why Israel, and later the southern kingdom, Judah, and Jerusalem, and the Temple of Jerusalem are ultimately destroyed. However, that has not proved to be the case, and so through centuries of study of the biblical text, of understanding the history behind the Bible, of doing textual criticism, literary criticism of the biblical sources, studying the archaeology, and also the surrounding historical record of the peoples outside of the Bible, what we actually find out is that throughout the entire period up until

(19:25) the destruction of Israel, nearly all of the Israelites were polytheists 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 paring down the pantheon and ultimately merging everything together so that you worship only one of the gods, Yahweh, that's a reform that is associated with kings and high priests who are centralizing worship within the kingdom at temples that are patronized by the

(20:05) kings of Israel and Judah. Despite the biblical story and an origin story of the Israelites as not being from this land, and that they came from, you know, as slaves from Egypt and or from Abraham as a founder out of Mesopotamia, in fact, the people emerged out of the same people largely as their neighbors, and so the Canaanites, the Syrians, the Phoenicians are largely all, and the Israelites are largely all the same people, of which they develop their own localized identities, which they consider separate from each

(20:57) other. 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 come to Israelite history through the lens of the Bible to see it that way. So we have to adjust our lenses to understand and get at the history, and then so that we can actually understand the Bible in its context. This is because the texts are late, and they're written or edited by henotheists, and then later, much later, by monotheist reformers who are seeking to

(21:37) portray their own ideas as ancient and as the truly ancient practices, 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. So when I'm saying henotheist here, this is the idea that's an understanding that while there are many gods, we are to worship just the one God, and then later monotheism is saying that there are no other gods, there is only the one God. So archaeology backs up this newer

(22:16) understanding of the history of the Bible, but 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 the presence right at the beginning of biblical characters, heroes with Baal theophoric names, 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

(22:57) 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 Canaanite neighboring practices. So we make the case a lot of times here that make the point that if we are going to understand the historical context of any ancient text, the real context is not when the characters 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, you may want to write about

(23:45) that all you want, but you are going to introduce an amazing number of anachronisms. You're going to write about things and how things are in your own time period because history hasn't been invented yet, and you aren't able to, you aren't aware of all of the things that have changed, and so you're going to write about 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

(24:15) author, not for the characters, which the authors don't know much about. So when we're looking at things like the book of Kings here, these are parts of what scholars call the Deuteronomistic histories, which were likely first 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

(24:53) 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 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 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

(25:31) that time period, we're really so focused on Judah when Judah is 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. So this is after the northern kingdom, Israel, had been incorporated into Assyria in 721 BCE.

(26:03) The leaders and nobles and upper classes of that kingdom had all been taken off to Assyria as the so-called lost 10 tribes, where they assimilated and became regular Mesopotamians up there. So you can kind of see anyway that this is all taking place within the shadow of this kind of first really vast Middle Eastern empire. Although the maps tend to emphasize the independence of the kingdom of Judah, from the destruction of Israel by Assyria, Judah became effectively a client kingdom of Assyria. There were time periods when Judah was actually

(26:48) at war with the Assyrians and was asserting a kind of independence, but generally speaking, they were under siege when that was happening. When that wasn't happening, they were within the Assyrian economic sphere, which actually caused lots and lots of prosperity. So Judah prospered in the 7th century BCE, and Jerusalem, which during the time period when the kingdom of Israel was around, it was a pretty small little hill town of no significance, it now finally develops as an urban center as its quasi-independent, its autonomous Davidic kings

(27:25) especially welcome exiles from the destroyed northern kingdom and create this court that is able to produce 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 at the beginning here is set at a time when Jerusalem was still a hill town and Judah was a minor neighbor of Israel, maybe just a tributary of Israel. So to connect with their Davidic patrons, the kings of Jerusalem, the authors who included priests and other exiles from the north

(28:17) who brought with them northern traditions, including the northern tradition of Yahwism, they're the ones that created the myth of the United Kingdom of Israel, the myth that in fact Jerusalem had been the center of a grand united kingdom, Israel, before the northern kingdom broke away from Judah. So this idea of the kingdom under David and Solomon, which is really important biblically, but does not seem to have existed historically because it doesn't back up in the archaeology. So we'll look at this just by way of a general context so that we

(29:00) can see kind of this timeline for Israel, Judah, and the Bible creation as we're going here from 1200 BCE till we get to 400, and this whole big range of composition for the Hebrew Bible. The beginning of that is this period that we've talked about as so important of the Bronze Age collapse when the Hittite Empire falls. This is the time period for the Trojan War, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans collapse, the Philistines as the sea peoples invade the Egyptians and later are settled in Canaan in Philistia and what gives its name becomes

(29:46) Palestine. Like I say, there's a general collapse. We have in the biblical idea in this kind of dark age set in that kind of shadowed time is this idea of Saul and David and Solomon, a united monarchy, literarily at least. Then what really happens is a strong state emerges in the north under King Omri, the father of Ahab, that king in the story 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 at the earliest down we have

(30:31) here, down here when Jeremiah is active two centuries later. 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 and a second later updated draft is written, not the book of Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomic history. You can see then the kingdom of Judah existing on after Israel is destroyed, and that's where its flowering occurs under Hezekiah, Manasseh, Josiah, and then the destruction of Judah,

(31:14) the Babylonian captivity, the end then of the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Persians sending the exiles back, and then under Ezra, we have the reading of the Torah, maybe in its present edition for the very first time, the five books of Moses. That's possibly when everything was finally all put together there at the end, 400s. You can see why the Saul, David, and Solomon period is so far removed, so many centuries removed from when anybody was writing anything down. This is why it

(31:51) is lacking in a lot of historicity. David is known as the name of the house that rules, 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 are written about him, about that, but these are composed very much later. While scholars agree there was likely a historic Elijah that is active in the 9th century BCE Israel, the stories, like I say, are composed two centuries

(32:33) later, and so they're generally mythic, and this is why they are literary, and they're able to contain so many wonderful supernatural interventions. 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 figure whose writings survive 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

(33:11) and his writings align very much with the Deuteronomist, the 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 things that become the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Samuel, Kings, Kings. So I say all of that so that we can think of the context, right? So the context really is Jeremiah's day as opposed to Elijah's day, and so let's look at what Jeremiah has to

(33:52) say about Baal worship in his day. According to Jeremiah, Baal worship remains completely widespread in Judah in his own time period, that is to say long after the fall of Israel. Yahweh spoke his word to Jeremiah. Jeremiah says Yahweh said, stand at the gate of Yahweh's house, the temple, and announce 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 Sabaoth, which is to 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

(34:38) place. Do not 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 foreigners and orphans and widows or kill anyone in this 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

(35:17) cannot help you. So Yahweh here through Jeremiah is saying this is not an unconditional covenant that you guys have made. You have to obey these commandments, otherwise the covenant that you get to stay here is not going to be kept. You steal, murder, commit adultery, lie when you take oaths, burn incense as an offering to Baal, 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

(35:51) 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 Judeans are worshiping Baal 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 Ephraim here is the leading tribe of the northern kingdom, the leading tribe of Israel, and so that's more or less

(36:34) saying I destroyed Israel because of this, I'm going to destroy Judah as well. So henotheist reformers, including the Deuteronomist, so the people who are writing Kings and also Jeremiah here who has the same themes as the Deuteronomist, they see Yahweh-only worship as a covenant, and a covenant that is in fact not unconditional, it's a very conditional covenant. So when Judah is breaking it by continuing to be polytheist, Jeremiah explains, Yahweh said to me, conspiracy exists among the people of Judah and among those who live

(37:15) 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 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

(37:54) and all those who live in Jerusalem will cry to the gods to whom they've been sacrificing, but these gods will never rescue them when they're in trouble. Judah, you have set up 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 you've been praying to all those gods, so pray to them for help, just like the priests of Baal did when they wanted their altar to be licked with the fire. But here's the

(38:28) difference between what the present day Jeremiah is seeing and the story that the Deuteronomists are writing 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 says, Yahweh has pronounced disaster on you. This is because of evil

(39:01) things that Israel and Judah have done. They have made him furious by burning incense as an offering to Baal. So the context really is this Baal worship is still very central to Judah, as it had been in Israel, because again, this is Jeremiah complaining about it in his present day. Again, the story of Elijah is being written contemporaneously to Jeremiah, so this is a problem that they're seeing as a contemporary issue. A couple of generations before Jeremiah, there was a king, Hezekiah of Judah, and he's really the guy who brought about kind of the early

(39:48) Yahwist reforms in Judah. So Hezekiah is a king who successfully resisted the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE, 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. So previously, in all the past, the Levites, the priestly class in Judah, had had local shrines up in the hilltops where they would offer sacrifices to Yahweh, but also to the other gods in the Israelite pantheon. Now Hezekiah is going around and smashing all of those. No longer is anybody allowed to sacrifice anywhere else. We're now only going to offer sacrifices at the central temple that is directly controlled by the king and his high priest partner. Among things that he destroyed, Hezekiah went so far as to destroy the Nehushtan, and so this is a bronze serpent which had become kind of a pagan cult statue thing. It's a rival cult object, but this object was believed by the people at the time, Hezekiah in destroying it believed that Moses had actually created it, and so

(41:15) this is an actual relic of Moses, and it does take, there's a story about it in the Torah, in the Pentateuch, that may or may not have existed yet, but anyway, is still remembered from this time. Yet he's so concerned about centralizing reforms and eliminating worship of other gods that an important religious item, Mosaic religious item like this, is also caught up in the smashing. It's also because they are trying to create a religion that is iconoclastic, it doesn't have pictures, you know, so God isn't to be pictured anymore, and so having these symbols and animal symbols like this, like a snake, are also something that they're probably trying to get rid of. This Nehushtan is a symbol of a snake wrapped around a pole, and so this is a symbol of healing, and it's used in a healing story, and it is similar to the staff of Asclepius in Greek mythology. It is not the same as the caduceus, which is two snakes with wings. The two snakes with wings is actually the caduceus is actually a thing that Mercury runs around with, and it's about commerce, but because it looks similar and it looks a little cooler

(42:47) because it's got two snakes and wings, that became adopted by medical stuff, so you'll see a lot of that used as a medical symbol, even though really they should be using this one, not the caduceus, which is a symbol of commerce. This is just a mistake that people made. So Manasseh, who is Hezekiah's son, so Hezekiah's reforms were reversed when his son came to power. So Manasseh restored the previous Israelite pantheon back to the temple. So King Manasseh rebuilt all of those illegal places of worship, the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed. He set up altars dedicated to Baal, and he made a pole dedicated to the goddess Asherah, as King Ahab of Israel had done. Manasseh, like Ahab, worshipped and served the entire army of heaven, so the whole pantheon. He built altars in Yahweh's temple, where Yahweh 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 being worshipped in the temple in

(44:12) Jerusalem. He burned his son as a sacrifice, so he also restored, it says here in the Bible, Manasseh restored the ancient West Semitic pagan religious practice of child sacrifice, which is something that continued in certain circumstances. The Romans, we talk, you know, used as a polemic against the Carthaginians, the Carthaginians who were also Phoenicians or Punic colonists, so from this same Canaanite, Punic, West Semitic culture, that they would sacrifice their children, and that was, you know, firstborn, and that was

(45:01) a, you know, the Romans considered that to be a very barbaric practice, and the Romans had their own barbaric practices, but this was the one that they singled out as being that their enemies were doing. We also know that, for example, this great leader of Carthage, Hannibal, you can just see right there the theophoric name, right? So Hannibal, right? Right, so that's, and so that's where that continues, this Baal worship. So he burned his son as a sacrifice. You know, we've talked about before how actually the Isaac story,

(45:40) the Abraham-Isaac myth is 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 substitute. We can use a young ram to do that, and indeed the Passover story itself is also referencing this. So the firstborn is being killed by the destroying angel, everybody who hasn't sacrificed their firstborn, but if you take ram's blood and you put it over your door, that shows that you've done a

(46:16) substitute, and so then your firstborn is not going to be killed by Baal or Yahweh or the destroying angel, by Moloch or whoever the sacrifice is 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 Asherah made, then he set it up in his temple where Yahweh had said to David and his son Solomon, I have chosen this temple and Jerusalem from all the tribes of Israel. So Manasseh overturns his father's reforms, he restores the

(46:57) traditional pantheon to the temple and the various polytheistic practices, which the reformers saw as abrogating the covenant with Yahweh. The Deuteronomists believed that Yahweh would punish Judah for reverting to polytheism, and thus if they were correct, if that was a true thesis or theodicy, then King Manasseh really ought to have been chastened somehow by God or frankly even killed by foreign enemies. That's certainly what always happens in the literary component of the Deuteronomistic history. So Israel forgets God and

(47:38) they start worshiping 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. There's a big empire right here, Assyria, that could easily conquer Manasseh to prove, to remind everybody that actually you should go back to worshiping Yahweh. That does not happen, though. In fact, instead, because of the general context of Israel, I'm sorry, of Assyria's decline, so one of the things that happens is Canaan, Syria, Palestine,

(48:12) this area, because it is wedged between two larger powers, it's when those powers are in decline that it can see its flowering. So this is a time period when really Judah is able to start flourishing, affording Manasseh a really long, relatively peaceful, and incredibly prosperous reign. So he reigns 55 years, according to the Bible, completely doing what should not have happened according to the Deuteronomistic theology. So Manasseh's son and successor, King Ammon, is assassinated very early in his reign, and that presented an

(48:53) opportunity for another reversal of policy when Ammon's son Josiah assumed the throne as a minor, according to the Bible, an eight-year-old. During his reign, during Josiah's reign, 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 Jeremiah's immediate context. So this is why we come back to Josiah so

(49:30) often, and indeed the Deuteronomistic history praises Josiah above all other kings, 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, Hilkiah, sent him news, and so we read there, the chief priest Hilkiah told the scribe Shaphan, I have found the book of Moses' teachings in Yahweh's temple. So this

(50:12) 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 had said, he tore his clothes in distress. So many scholars have proposed that the book that Hilkiah found here 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 probably here the idea is that Hilkiah and his school are composing this book. Regardless of when it arose, the book hadn't been read before or seen

(50:58) before 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 Hilkiah, the priests who served under Hilkiah, and the doorkeepers to take out of Yahweh's temple all of the utensils that had been made for Baal, Asherah, and the entire army of heaven. So now we're getting rid of the pantheon again. Josiah burned the utensils outside Jerusalem in an open field near the Kidron Brook, then he carried their ashes to Bethel. Josiah got rid of the pagan priests whom the kings

(51:37) 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 Asherah 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 common people. He tore down the houses of the male temple prostitutes who were in Yahweh's temple, where the women did

(52:13) weaving for Asherah. So there is a lot of paganism going on in the temple precinct all the way up until 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 in the middle of pretty unreformed Israelite Canaanite religion that is taking place at the very heart in the temple itself. So then one of the ironies of the Deuteronomistic history that has so far looked forward to Josiah and has always promised again that if you obey the Lord

(52:57) and stop worshiping other gods, you're going to prosper, and if you forget the Lord and you start worshiping other gods, you will be chastised. Manasseh had that great long reign despite doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord, whereas Josiah, just completely unexpectedly, when a resurgent Egypt starts to come out and the Pharaoh brings an army to meet him, Josiah goes to see him, maybe to offer himself as a client king, and very unexpectedly in 609, the Pharaoh Necho II just kills Josiah, and that is later

(53:47) interpreted as a battle, which later becomes the precursor to the idea of a battle there, Armageddon, but it's probably nothing so grand, but it is very unexpected for the present-day reformers who really believed their theology that if you were to just not be polytheist, if we're going to just be henotheists like Josiah was being, he should be being prospered. 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 Baal worship was

(54:26) 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 Asherah, the goddess Asherah, the sun, the moon, and so 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 Jeremiah and the

(55:08) Deuteronomists are complaining many people think should be the god of Israel. So first off, there is more than one Baal. So in ancient Northwest Semitic languages, so all of these Syria, Syro-Palestine, Canaan, Israel area here, Phoenicia area, Baal is a title that means Lord, means owner. So it's like the later ancient Semitic word Adon, which also means Lord, and that word is pluralized as Adoni, my Lord, my Lords. That word is used also as an honorific for a number of gods, and in some cases, it becomes the

(55:58) theonym or the name of a god in particular. So for example, Adonis, so the Greek god Adonis, who the Greeks really did understand had come from this Canaan area, from Syria, this name itself is a loanword from this word Adon, which means Lord, Adonai. So we'll bring it, we got to find out more about Baal because we have come upon another source of a lot of literature from Western Semitic, the Western Semitic region. So Ugarit was a wealthy Northwest Semitic kingdom with close ties to the Hittite Empire before

(56:54) 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, very likely collapsing when the sea peoples overran it and other places. So on this little map here of the Levant and Egypt, the little places that have castle symbols, those are the cities like Tyre and Tanis and Haran, those don't fall, whereas cities like Ashkelon and Kadesh and Ugarit, those, Tarsus, those all are conquered and those are destroyed during the collapse, and the Hittite state collapses, although the Egyptians are

(57:38) weakened, they survive. So it's a fortuitous collapse, not for the people of Ugarit at the time, but for history because all of their texts, which were written on clay tablets, some 1500 texts survive, and because nobody ever rebuilt Ugarit after it was destroyed, it just stayed there buried, and it was only in 1928 when it was dug up that all of these texts, these tablets, clay tablets, were discovered, and that gives us a very rare glimpse into ancient Northwest Semitic religion. As important as, you know, the Phoenicians are with the very early alphabet, we just don't have like a cache of, you know, all of the writings from Tyre or something like that so that we can know all of Phoenician mythology the way that we know Greek and Roman mythology. So getting this survival of texts in 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 relief sculptures and so forth of Baal from Ugarit. The texts make it clear that

(59:03) Baal, that the Baal, I said there's other ones, more than one possible Baal because it means Lord, the Baal 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 Levant, so in this area, and so Hadad, the Lord Hadad, was introduced into eastern Semitic areas, Mesopotamia, by the Amorites, the kind of Bedouin attacking people who, barbarians who overran at different times Mesopotamia, and so there in Mesopotamia,

(59:51) Hadad became known as Adad for the Assyrians, the Babylonians, etc. So among the most famous myths recovered from Ugarit, those 1500 texts, is called the Baal cycle of stories. So in the pantheon, while El is their supreme god who's essentially representing kind of the heavens, he is sort of like the, if you think of, if you're more familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, you know, there's a succession of sky gods where the sky gods begin with Uranus and then Kronos and then Zeus, and each one, you know, Uranus is just the heavens alone, and Kronos is more, each one is like more present among people until you get to finally get to Zeus, a young, active storm god who is much more active in people's lives than just the distant heavens. So in that same way, El is more distant and removed, and Baal is going to be a much closer at hand storm god, and so there's sort of an equivalence there between when Baal is overthrowing El, it's sort of like Zeus overthrowing Kronos, if you know those stories. So then at the beginning of this Baal cycle, 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 his claim for dominion is initially, it has the support of El. So El likes Yam, and Yam is beloved of El, and he summons the divine craftsman figure in the story who's called Kothar-wa-Khasis, which is skilled and wise is what his name means. So it's the wise kind of craftsman of the gods, the architect of the gods, to

(1:01:58) build a grand palace for Yam. But when he goes and talks to Yam, Kothar-wa-Khasis tells him that Yam has really risen presumptuously, that he's not glorious enough to take over as the king of the gods, and you know, Baal is going to resist him, he predicts, and indeed that's what happens. So Baal has a big long fight against Yam, and Yam again is the sea, and it has sea creatures there who are initially very scary and are fighting Baal a lot, but ultimately Baal wins and slays Yam. So we have a missing part of the tablets, so we don't have all the tablets, because this fight of Baal against Yam, this kind of primordial sea chaos kind of thing, that's very similar to other Middle Eastern, other Semitic mythic stories, like for example Marduk, who slays Tiamat, the Babylonian personification of the sea, as part of the Babylonian creation story. So a lot of scholars speculate here that what we would have here now is Baal having a creation story for this earth out of kind of the carcass of Yam, out of the chaotic, the waters of chaos.

(1:03:31) So now that Baal has defeated the person who was the god who was going to take dominion, Anat, his very close ally, maybe his sister, the exact relationship isn't clear, Anat, the goddess of hunting, Anat as it's called in the Ugaritic, but is also in other West Semitic iterations is Asherah, who we've already heard of. So Asherah, who is the wife of El, they together persuade El 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. This is an important power in civilization, and it takes a seven-day kind of cosmic period to build this palace for Baal. Baal then has the divine architect Kothar-wa-Khasis install a window in his palace's roof, and that window allows him to open and close the heavens, giving Baal control over the rain and thus fertility of the land. You might remember we just talked about the biblical background cosmology of the world is that the world is flat, that is resting upon cosmic waters, and there is a kind of a hemispheric-like firmament that is the sky that is

(1:05:07) over top of the earth, and then there is a window in the heavens that God, that Yahweh can open up, and he does open up to cause the flood, and this is a window that Baal has made in his own palace that gives him control over fertility, and it's very important in this arid land to be able to bring rain. So in the next cycle, because Baal has struck the seven-headed serpent monster Lotan, in other words, he's expressed, and he's also done things to express his dominion over everything, including death,

(1:05:46) Mot, the god of death, is very offended. So Mot threatens Baal in the underworld and says all the gods will know you're dead when that happens, and after some fighting, proceeds to kill Baal. El and Anat then have a big long mourning of Baal's death. El and Asherah decide, well, Baal's gone now, who can be, now who should have dominion? 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 Athtar, which is the morning star, Venus, the lightbringer. But Athtar proves unsuitable, he's not able to be a strong enough god to be ruling, you know, ruling as king of the gods. The story continues, we saw that Anat, the goddess of hunting, is either Baal's sister or some other close relative of Baal. She goes and kills Mot. El then has a dream that Baal is still alive. Anat goes into to seek him. Baal is still alive because rain is still coming, and then they're able to find him. Anat restores him to his palace. Mot, even though, you know, I guess he's god of death, you can't kill him forever, he returns too. He fights

(1:07:19) he, you know, doesn't like that Baal's back in charge, he fights Baal, they fight on and on and on to a standstill. But ultimately, Mot has to concede the fact that Baal has, Baal's back and is bestowing his favor, that means he's going to, Baal has to be considered the king of the gods. So this very quick simplification of the Baal cycle here. So what can we say then about this Baal? So Baal Hadad is also likely to be the main biblical Baal. So although Baal, Lord, began as an epithet for Hadad, the word also then

(1:07:59) 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 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 Baal in the Old Testament that sometimes it simply is the word Lord is meant. So one of the examples of that is when we have things like Ishbaal, you know, the son of Saul, that theophoric word name. So it's saying that he is a man of Baal, but what's not clear there

(1:08:44) is, is Saul's son here a worshipper of Baal, the rival of Yahweh, or is he representing a different Yahwist understanding where they were trying to say Yahweh is Baal? So there might have been, there were a couple different paths that could have been taken. One is to insist that Baal simply is Yahweh in the same way that they have later, as we'll see, insist that El simply is Yahweh. And so the Baals in those names could mean Lord, but also be referring to Yahweh as opposed to a distinct god

(1:09:27) who is Baal, who is distinct from Yahweh. So we'll see how that goes. So essentially, as we kind of have looked at all of those, we have just an abbreviated from the story I just summarized, West Semitic pantheon. So we had El, who is the supreme heavenly deity. El has a wife, Asherah, the mother goddess. At different times, El then was favoring Yam, who was the god of the sea, and then later, when Yam and Baal were dead, he wanted to have maybe Athtar, the god of the morning star, Venus, to be the chief of the gods. We had Baal

(1:10:08) and Anat, Baal Hadad and Anat, who are related, maybe they are the children of Dagon, the god of crops, it's not entirely clear from the text. They, Baal in turn fights Yam and Lotan, the monster of chaos, and also Mot, the god of death. So those are just some of the gods in the pantheon, and there are more because we've already talked about how even in the Bible, they're saying there were shrines or altars to also the sun god, the moon god, and the whole zodiac. 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

(1:10:56) I'm missing one slide, so I'll explain what happens. So where does Yahweh come from? So this is kind of an important slide that I skipped. So in the charts, so essentially, as we have an abbreviated, more abbreviated pantheon, what we're going to continue to have be important here especially is El and Asherah, and then we're going to have that include El and Asherah have sons of El, among whom one of the sons of El is Yahweh, and then there are other unnamed in the Bible, other sons of El. Then we

(1:11:33) also continue to have Baal, and Baal continues to have, for example, the 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 El. So Asherah, who had been El's consort, now becomes, and maybe Yahweh's mother, now becomes Yahweh's consort. So there's a bunch of phrases in the Bible where it talks about Yahweh and his Asherah. Then there are sons of El that are still remembered here and mentioned here, and so Yahweh, who is now

(1:12:20) El, is the leader of a heavenly court, lesser gods who were the sons of El, and now in this stage, Baal is largely seen as a rival, and so it shouldn't be the god of Israel, at least as far as the Yahwists are concerned. The people who are Baalists would maybe are saying, no, we can have both side by side, or maybe Baal should be the god of Israel. So Yahwists anyway paint Baal as a rival to Yahweh's dominion. So then in the next phase, then Yahweh also absorbs Asherah as Yahweh becomes now the more removed cosmic god in whose image, whose divine image both male and female are created. Yahweh at this time also takes on all of Baal's roles. So even though Baal is not Yahweh, and indeed Baals are not gods at all in this final understanding of the Yahwists, they're just merely idols, now everything that Baal did, like fight the Leviathan, that's something that Yahweh did. Meanwhile, the sons of El, which had been gods, they're no longer gods, now they are understood to be angels of Yahweh. So that's sort of the stage of the progression of Yahwism from kind of polytheism,

(1:13:52) henotheism, and ultimately monotheism in the first temple period. All right, and so that is my overall glimpse on who was Baal. 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. Boy, I want to thank everybody for their donations.

(1:14:43) Puges writes, waking up Wednesday morning and seeing the new stream going is the highlight of my whole week. Well, thank you so much, Puges, for your support and your donation. Thanks also to Dave Anderson, to Michael Rogers, thanks Philip Dudo for a couple of donations, lots of donations, I appreciate that. And Jared says I should have dressed up as Baal for the lecture. It is Halloween, happy Halloween. I didn't have a Baal costume, so I should have, you're right, I apologize for not doing that. Landro, let's advance the getting there, sorry, very active chat.

(1:15:22) It's a very active chat. Okay, Ron Wagner comments or in question, 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 they're not supposed to because it says, I am God, and you're not to have any other gods before me. What it's saying is that they believe in multiple gods, and so this is not a, you know, this is from the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy, I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have

(1:15:57) any gods before me. That means that we're not to, we are not to a monotheist understanding of God yet. So when that is written by the Deuteronomist or whatever, that could even be an older formulation, when that commandment exists, it's representing a henotheism. 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 the reality that we really have kind of demonstrated that the Bible demonstrates a lot. Forever Seeking Wisdom says, how

(1:16:34) does the Baal cycle compare to Jesus as dying and rising gods? Does it fit any mythological themes? So the dying and rising god theme is like this very popular thing from the 19th century that 19th century scholars have kind of imposed on stuff. And so mostly this dying and rising god framework has been largely abandoned. What is in the Baal cycle, it isn't entirely clear what Baal's dying and rising, which he does do here, what this in fact represents. So sometimes, for example, when in the Greek mythology, when Persephone is taken by, you know, the daughter of Ceres, of Demeter, who is this fertility god that is creating all of this, when creating the flourishing of the earth, when her daughter is taken to the underworld by Hades, by Zeus's brother, and brought into the world of death, then Demeter in her grief causes all the plants to die. And then that's why plants die in winter. This is an etiological myth to explain that. And then because of a deal that Hades made with Zeus and Demeter, when the spring comes, Persephone gets to come back with her mother and makes her mother happy, and so the plants all come

(1:18:09) again. So for the Baal cycle, some scholars have suggested that the Baal going into the underworld with Mot and then his sister bringing him back in the form of a rain, that maybe that would be seasonal like that. Others have said that no, maybe in this case it's because it's from this more arid area as opposed to a seasonal annual thing, an annual cycle like we experience where we are, that it's talking about catastrophic droughts. And so Baal is in the underworld during a time of catastrophic droughts, and then El sees him come again because the rains have come again. That maybe is not an annual seasonal explanation of an etiological myth, but it is that it is not entirely clear because we have so little, unfortunately, in all of these West Semitic mythology in contrast to what we have for the Greeks. Donnie Lee Gringo writing from Brazil says, what connection, if any, are there between Eden's snake and the Mosaic snake on a pole? Well, there's not any direct links in the text, so they don't suggest that there is. And specifically, the Mosaic snake on a pole that existed, an actual historical artifact at the time of Hezekiah, that's an artifact of a snake on a pole that was attributed to Moses, who was not a historical figure. So Moses, so it is something that they understood one of their ancestral heroes, Moses, would have had as his own thing, and so it's seen as an artifact of that. But it's more likely, you know, but it is simply an ancient religious cult item

(1:20:15) that Hezekiah destroyed. So later when they have the, when people wrote down stories about what their understanding of Moses and where Moses would have made it, it's in relationship to healing, and so it has no relationship with the Eden snake that I know of. So because the Eden snake has nothing to do with healing, and so it's more related to this idea even of the Asclepius is, you know, the staff of Aaron and the staff of Asclepius as opposed to the Eden, the snake from

(1:20:55) Eden. You know, the idea of snakes is that they, you know, in terms of healing, so they shed their skins, and then it looked like a way to heal to people. I mean, it's how they grow. They can't grow the way we grow skin, so the way the scales work is they shed their skin, and then they seem like they've healed. And so there was an idea that snakes had the ability of healing, and so that's why it's associated with that. It's not why it's associated necessarily with Eden. Sandra Byrne asks, I'm assuming

(1:21:32) that the sacrifice of children is historically accurate. Why was it done to keep control or to hurt? I would say it's done because, yeah, it is historically accurate, yes. It isn't done, it's not like, I don't think that we have an example that it was insanely widespread, but it was certainly done, especially among the elite. It is not done, well, I mean, it was done because, I would say ancient religion is especially superstitious, and so your world is fairly chaotic. The gods are fairly chaotic. You do not know what will

(1:22:17) offend them, and there was an idea that emerged here in, we call, Syrio-Canaanite religion that sort of a dedicatory offering had to be made. So the firstborn of every womb is mine, saith the Lord, and so that's actually made its way into the Bible, even that statement. And so there was an understanding if you didn't do that, you would be punished. So paganism, polytheism is largely about all kinds of ritual things that you have to do to make sure that you can not have gods be angry with you and curse you and do horrible things to you, or if they have been doing horrible things, that you can propitiate them and get them to stop, or at least make some kind of amends to make sure that would be. And so it's just an understanding of ancient religion. And so one of the, this is one of the things that people often think, just think that religion is always bad. Actually, the Israelite religion that is having a reform that is saying, no, you don't have to kill

(1:23:39) 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 eliminating animal sacrifices, which is another religious reform that comes later, is also a big improvement. And so reform continuously happens. And some modern reformers would like to say, well, let's just get rid of religion. And many people have, but the problem with that is that they are only really getting rid of organized religion. People immediately 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 fall into all kinds of other things like they read books about manifesting, and they start to believe in manifesting, or they, you know, there's all kinds of different things that, 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, just because you get rid of organized religion, that doesn't get rid of religion. And instead, actually, what I think we need, or this is my personal belief, is that we need rational organized religions so that we can help people, or we can, as a people, try to understand things that are healthy and that make sense and that are workable and that are true, as opposed to things that aren't. And so when we have traditions that are horrific like this, those should be abolished like they did in this historic time period. And indeed, that's certainly part of what the Yahwist reform was about getting rid of. So Jason Kulo, oh, thank you so much for your support. So he asks, you also ask, was Baal a man, a king later deified? So that is also some things that happen. So a lot of times, there are examples where there might have been a historical person who was a hero who is eventually revered as a god, or their name in kind of an ancestor worship eventually, they have a shrine, it becomes mythicized over time. And so when it's a name like Baal, which just means Lord, anybody who was an earthly person who was a lord who used the title Baal, yes, in theory, sometimes as they're remembered or as their remains or their shrine or their statue gets remembered, it could also be understood as one of the many manifestations of Baal or a different Baal. Okay, so Landro says there's several examples in the tablets of that. Ry the King 2 asks, is there any evidence of a henotheism towards Baal in any of the northern Levant? 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, which is just a neighbor of Judah, and the Moabites seem to be having henotheism towards a national god for them, Chemosh. I'm not aware of a Baal henotheism 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, a city-state like Tyre could maybe have a, I'm not just saying that out of hand, any one of them might have a very particular patron that they get really focused on. That wouldn't necessarily be henotheism, but it might be kind of moving towards that. But I'm not aware of any of the examples of that. Baal in the northern Levant, as far as I know, continues to be worshiped as part of a regular large pantheon where he gets equated syncretically with Zeus during the Hellenistic period. Hector Herrera says, can you talk about how Elohim, technically the plural of El, yet is used as a singular in post-first temple Judaism? So yeah, the name that we see almost all the time that gets translated as God in the Bible is technically, you know, would be pronounced gods, and there is also a plural. And so there's another bunch of different ways that this can be described. So it can be described essentially as how God, as God is getting more cosmic, is effectively having a divine we, you know, like we talk about the royal we, you know, that is our pleasure that you come to us and so forth. That this is, that God, as God is absorbing these lesser gods like Yahweh into being one, the one God, that maybe the whole council of the gods is being kind of referred to, even though it's now understood as one. And so I guess I would say it is a sign of, it's a tradition that develops, it's potentially like a sign of respect and reverence. It isn't, it isn't a sign that the Israelites are believing, 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 is plural. Rain Weber says, when in Genesis God kicked out Adam and Eve, he put a cherubim to guard the garden, lest they eat also of the tree of life and become like us. Would Baal have been considered one of us at that time? So who, Yahweh here in that story, which is from the Yahwist source of the book of Genesis, when Yahweh is talking about that, the other gods are these sons, other sons of El that are part of the court who are going unnamed. And so he's talking to the other gods that are getting reduced, ultimately going to get to reduce to angels. And so Baal could have been, but probably isn't anymore. It could have been one of the sons of God, one of the sons of El, like Yahweh, but 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 Baal is collapsing into Yahweh. And so, you know, and Yahweh is saying he'll become like, they'll become like us. Yahweh is Baal. And so Baal wouldn't be one of the other people. But, or if Baal is a rival, 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, we're more or less speculating because it's not mentioned in the text directly what is meant there. But I would say the sons of El are meant there, the heavenly host. Eric Taylor says, was worshiping Baal sort of like praying to St. Peter for modern Christians? No, 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 Baal, like praying to Baal is like praying to Yahweh or it's like praying to Zeus. Praying to St. Peter is like praying to any one of the, you know, what the sons of El, essentially, it's like praying to an angel. So if you can pray to Michael, who is not a human, Michael is an angel. 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 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 put in a good word for you with God. Michelangelo says, why is Michael phrased as a question? Oh, is it meant as an attack to non-believers or doubt since Michael is an archangel? Why isn't the name sort of equivalent as nobody is like El? So I was just repeating like this out of an etymological dictionary. And so it may be these are, every time I've seen these etymological meanings for these names, there are a reconstruction. And so the scholar is making an argument of what it's posing. So usually, often they will look at the biblical etymology that's sometimes given in the Bible. So a lot of times when the name is mentioned, the person will say something that's kind of like a pun