Lectures on the religion of the Semites. First series, The fundamental institutions / by the late W. Robertson Smith.

Smith, W. Robertson (William Robertson), 1846-1894.

Date:: 1894

Credit: Lectures on the religion of the Semites. First series, The fundamental institutions / by the late W. Robertson Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$As applied to men baal means the master of a house, the owner of a field cattle or the like; or in the plural the baalim of a city are its freeholders and full citizens.1 In a secondary sense, in which alone the word is ordinarily used in Arabic, baal means husband; but it is not used of the relation of a master to his slave, or of a superior to his inferior, and it is incorrect to regard it, when employed as a divine title, as a mere synonym of the titles implying lordship over men which came before us in the last lecture. When a god is simply called “ the Baal,” the meaning is not “ the lord of the worshipper ” but the possessor of some place or district, and each of the multitude of local Baalim is distinguished by adding the name of his own place.2 Melcarth is the Baal of Tyre, Astarte the Baalath of Byblus;3 there was a Baal of Lebanon,4 of Mount Hermon,5 of Mount Peor, and so forth. In Southern Arabia Baal constantly occurs in similar local connections, e.g. Dhu Samawl is the Baal of the district Bacir, fAthtar the Baal of Gumdan, and the sun-goddess the Baalath of several places or regions.6 1 So often in the Old Testament, and also in Phoenician. Baalath is used of a female citizen {CIS. No. 120). 2 Cf. Stade in ZATW. 1886, p. 303. 3 CIS. Nos. 1, 122. 4 CIS. No. 5. 5 See Judg. iii. 3, where this mountain is called the mountain of the Baal of Hermon. Hermon properly means a sacred place. In the Old Testament place-names like Baal-peor, Baal-meon are shortened from Beth Baal Peor, “ house or sanctuary of the Baal of Mount Peor,” etc. 6 Hence we read in the Himyaritic inscriptions of sun-goddesses in the plural {e.g. lDnCDt^X, CIS. pt. iv. No. 46), as in Canaan we have a plurality of local Baalim. Special forms of Baal occur which are defined not by the name of a place or region but in some other way, e.g. by the name of a sacred object, as Baal-tamar, “lord of the palm-tree,” preserved to us only in the name of a town, Judg. xx. 33. So too Baal-hamman, on the Carthaginian Tanitli inscriptions, may be primarily “ lord of the sun-pillar ”; yet compare ]On ^X, “ the divinity of (the place) Hammon ” {CIS. No. 8, and the inscr. of Ma'sub); see G. Hoffmann in the Abhandlungcn of the Gottingen Academy, vol. xxxvi. (4 May 1889). Baal-zebub, the god of Ekrou, is “owner of flies,” rather than BMtda, the fly-god. In one or two cases the title of Baal$