So who's this Baal guy?

[Boerseun]

Reading through the Old Testament, you'll find constant references to Baal, and how people would act badly in the eyes of the Lord and build golden calfs and pray to Baal. Those people are promptly smitten, but that's besides the point. What I'm getting at, is that the actions performed by the people are always the same: You build a golden calf in order to pray to Baal. And the exact same description of events span generations! For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, the practice of praying to Baal never changed. It always involved a golden calf.

So, it seems as if there was a well-established religion existing in parallel with the emerging Judaism of the Old Testament. What kind of cross-pollination could there have been between the believers in Baal and the early Jews, and would there still be relics of it visible today? Is there anything left of the belief in Baal today? Did it morph into some other modern-day religion that I don't know of, or did it contribute equally with Judaism in the formation of Christianity and Islam?

Anybody know anything about this Baal guy? I think it'll be cool to have a golden calf in my living room, if only as a conversation piece...

[Freddy]

From Wikipedia:
"Baal (baʕal; Hebrew: בעל) is a Northwest Semitic title and honorific meaning "master" or "lord" that is used for various gods, spirits and demons particularly of the Levant, cognate to Assyrian bêlu."
Baal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[HydrogenBond]

The calf is a symbol connected to the nature gods. I think in Ezekiel, Ezekiel has a vision of the throne of God. The throne was surrounded by four living creatures, a lion, calf, man and eagle. In that respect, Baal was sort of a middleman. God was telling them to cut out the middleman and talk to the big guy. Or nature worship was now passe' and something deeper was at hand. Baal was from the childhood of humanity and it was time to stop acting like children and become adolescents.

[Dov Henis]

A few clarifications:

- The Hebrew word ba'al is still in use today in hundreds of words combinations.

- The coexistence with Ba'al's religion was not by "Jews" but by Israelites. The term "Jew" is short for Judean, member of the kingdom with capital Jerusalem, comprising two tribes, Juda and Benjamin. The term Jew came into being hundreds of years after the Israelites co-lived with the Ba'al people, even hundreds of years after (a) the exile of the ten Israelite ("lost") tribes by Assyria (722 BCE) and the Assyrian installing of another people in their stead around the ex-Israelite capital Samaria (to be named Samaritans, who accepted the then local-regional Israel god), and (b) see
Yahoo! 360° - Dov's Blog - Humanism can accommodate a variety of phenotypes
following the Babylonian destruction of Judea and exiling the Judeans to Babylonia.

- In the 13th - 10th century BC Ba'al was in Canaan and Phoenicia the parallel of Setti in Egypt, the local-regional "Owner/Master" of the people that earned livelihood by farming. After the small band of nomad Jacob's (whose other name was Israel) shepherds family arrived in Egypt due to the famine in Canaan, and grew into a "people" and eventually exodused back to Canaan, the now Israelite people settles down from nomading to farming and thus begins a feverish dynamic relationship with the local Ba'al's canaanite people...

Dov

[arkain101]

Idol worshipers is the theme I recall in that section of the bible.

In reference to teaching of the bible:
People were lost in what created things in life. They'd worship idea's made up and call it wisdom, when it was never an answer but just meerly an explaination that became a belief. God keeps interjecting on humanity to set them on course and see the bigger picture.

A summation I find is that it mentions between the lines, you will never understand purely if you look at something physical for the answer. And god says look to me, I am not something you can see, but believe in my, and you will believe in yourself, because I am in you, in that place you can not see. And in doing this it overtime awakened people to something deeper, something even words can describe because it isnt physically describeable it is only experiencable.

Thus the bible, which is noted as the word of god through people, the holy spirit awakened within and motivates there intentions and thoughts and ideas of those particular people and explains as best as it could be done in those times how to move in the direction god wanted us to.

So the baal theme is effectively a message to look within, investigate the being and not the seeing.

When you worship something physical you speak or motion in your AWE of its wonder.

When you find yourself in awe and wonder of something you can not see nor put into words you have worshipped god, says the word.

And the message I gather is to give us time to learn how to see that inner realm of our existence because it warns, eventually this book of life will close and god intends to have as many understand as possible before that time comes, and it is god who speaks through certain people and stresses that they record this knowledge and it ended up in the book is to teach us what god finds important for you to find him and at some point return. It says all mans seperate wisdom and pride is of no use to me and where I am and it will not help you open a part of you that is needed for you to return from mystery into truth.