Baal or Bel, name signifying lord in the Babylonian tongue, and which the Assyrians attributed to Nimrod when he was deified after his death. Baal was the god of some of the Canaanite peoples. The Greeks thought of him as Mars; others, Saturn or the Sun. The historian Josephus referred to the god of the Phoenicians as Baal or Bel . The same deity figures in Virgil’s Aeneid under the name of a certain King of Tyre.

Implevitque mero pateram, quam Belus, et omnes A Belo soliti . [1]

Noting the similarity in the names, Godwin believed that the Phoenician Baal was the god Moloch.  [2] The first means lord , and the second prince or king . Others take the view that all these peoples worshiped Saturn under the name of Moloch, and Jupiter under the name of Baal , and this because they named this last god, Baal semen , or lord of the sky . Be that as it may, the cult of Baal was well established among the Jews. [3] It spread to Carthage from Tyre by way of that city’s founders. Adults and sometimes children were sacrificed to Baal in remembrance of (Nimrod’s) having immolated his own son in time of a difficult war, first dressing the boy in his princely robes, and then sacrificing him on an altar that he, Nimrod, had himself raised. In one chapter the prophet Jeremiah denounces the Jews for the holocaust of their own children before the altar of Baal . [4] Elsewhere, he writes that in the Valley of Ennon, the Jews sacrificed their children to Moloch . To attenuate the horror of this type of idolatry, the rabbinate usually only references the second of these anecdotes. Non comburebant illos, say they of their ancestors , sed tantum traducebant illos per ignem . [5] Finally, even if can be argued that the cult of Baal did not always involve human sacrifice, the altars of Baal were nevertheless drenched in the blood of the cult’s own priests. This can be evidenced by the instance of the famous sacrifice where Eli defied the priests of Baal . Incidebant se juxta ritum suum cultris et lanceolis, donec profunderentur sanguine . [6] See Belus.

1. “And filled it with wine – one that Belus and all of Belus’s line had been wont to use,” Aeneid 1:729-730.

2. The reference is to Thomas Goodwin (1586 or 1587-1642). He wrote a Synopsis of Hebrew Antiquities, and in 1625 Moses and Aaron, or Civil and Ecclesiastical Rites Used by the Ancient Hebrews.

3. More accurately, the ancient Hebrews.

4. A variation on the familiar accusation of blood libel.

5. “They did not burn them, but only led them through the fire.” A paraphrase of more than one Old Testament reference.

6. 1 Kings 18:28 King James Version (KJV): “And they cried aloud and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.”