Baal

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 3: The Meaning of the Landmark

§ 1. THE Hebrew history tells us that the Law was promulgated in the wilderness at a time when the Israelites had as yet no land of their own to dwell in. Their wanderings at last brought them to the borders of the land of Canaan, and within sight of the fulfilment of the promise made to the founder of their race, the Chaldæan sheikh, Abraham. But they found the country already in possession of a number of tribes — the oft-mentioned "Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites," etc. — entrenched in their hill-fortresses. Moses was dead, having only seen the promised land from afar, from Mount Nebo. But Joshua, his appointed successor, led the nation in arms against the peoples of Canaan. The country to the east of the Jordan had, indeed, been already conquered, and allotted to the pastoral tribes of Reuben and Gad, and the "half-tribe" of Manasseh, on condition that the warriors of those tribes assisted the rest of the nation also to win its inheritance. Then followed a ruthless war of extermination against the peoples in possession. With a view to striking terror into their foes, Joshua took and burnt Jericho, utterly exterminating its inhabitants, and placing the rebuilding of the city under a ban. One after another, Canaanite strongholds were carried by assault, looted, and their inhabitants put to the sword. The Gibeonites, crafty in diplomacy, saved themselves from the general massacre by entrapping the Israelites into an alliance; but, although their lives were spared, their deceit was punished by reducing them to a servile condition. The remnant of the inhabitants, who could only be conquered gradually, were in later times "put to tribute."

§ 2. The Hebrew view of the war of conquest is well expressed by one of the later writers—

"For it was Thy will to destroy by the hands of our fathers both those old inhabitants of Thy holy land, whom Thou hatedst for doing most odious works of witchcrafts, and wicked sacrifices; and also those merciless murderers of children, and devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood, with their priests out of the midst of their idolatrous crew, and the parents, that killed with their own hands souls destitute of help; that the land, which Thou esteemedst above all other, might receive a worthy colony of God's children."

§ 3. Not only the sacrifice of children, but also the degradation of both men and women, seem to have been inseparable from the obscene ritual with which the local Baals were worshipped. It is only when one realises that the sins which have linked the memory of Sodom and Gomorrah with undying infamy were part of the religious rites of the Hebrews' heretic neighbors, that it is possible to understand the savage hatred with which the Hebrew lawgivers and reformers assailed the idolatry which came so near, in their eyes, to being the unpardonable sin. It brought in its wake "red ruin and the breaking up of laws." It was more than a rival cult; it was the negation of moral and social order. There was no remedy for it but the extermination of all its professors. The Israelites conceived themselves as the instruments chosen and used by Jehovah to this end. "Conduct, character, is the one end of the Mosaic system. The heathen — the Canaanite nations especially — are punished not for false belief, but for vile actions."

But behind the mission, there always lurked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ["Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" ] The leaders of Hebrew thought had no hesitation as to the answer. It is one of the most insistent notes in Jewish literature. The Law which prescribed equal weights and measures for buying and selling between one citizen and another; which had only "one manner of law" for the home-born citizen and the alien immigrant; could not possibly fail, in a matter of such supreme importance, to apply the same law to the Israelite as to the Canaanite. If Israel polluted the land as his predecessors had done, his fate would be as theirs. The israelites may have been, at times, a little too conscious that they were "the salt of the earth." But there were always some among them who realised that "if the salt have lost his savor, it is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." The legislators, the chroniclers, the reformers and the poets of Israel tell their people, in passages far too numerous to be fully quoted or even referred to, that drought and dearth, disease and pestilence, civil war and the breaking-up of the national unity, defeat before invading enemies, and, finally, captivity and exile; the "four sore judgments" of Ezekiel — "the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence" — were God's appointed punishments for the Israelites, if they lapsed into the idolatry which was the butt of the bitterest satire of their religious and political teachers, or committed the social injustices against which the stern prohibitions of the Law and the Prophets were directed. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

The new wave of Latin American theologians couple their critique of "individual Christianity" with an affirmation of the broader concept of being a "people of God." In the Bible, we are reminded, God has a chosen people. He loves the poor, oppressed, and landless — as a group. He hates the oppressors — as a group. It is the people who leave the Wasteland and enter the Promised Land. And although the generations had passed away, their children and grandchildren repeated the history of Egyptian oppression and God's salvation in the first person: "And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord... and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand." (Deut. 26:5-10)

The Judeo-Christian meaning of liberation is clarified by some attention to Baal, the most active "foreign god" of the Canaanite pantheon. To the Canaanites, fertility depended upon sexual union between Baal and his sister and consort, Anath. Baal worship consisted in reenacting the mating of the gods in orgiastic rites with temple prostitutes. Beyond maintaining natural fertility and harmony, Baal religion was used by the aristocracy to uphold the social order. Canaanite tenants worked as dispossessed farmers on estates owned by magnates, the temple, and the king. They worshiped the landowners, the baals, who held dominion over both the land and the peasants themselves. Old Testament exhortations against Baalism emphasize the proper way to worship Yahweh: by acting with mercy and justice towards one's fellow humans.

Because justice does not prevail when some, like the baals, claim the land and its bounty while others are excluded from these privileges, Hosea denounces Israel for betraying its covenant to recognize God as the true owner of the earth. And Amos, referring to the greed for possessing the land and its fruits, said God is angered by those "who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end" (Amos 8:4). Amos' indictment of Israel mentions oppression of the poor and cultic prostitution as if they were one (Amos 2:6-8). This seems strange until one recognizes that the link between these two sins is a wrongful concept of land ownership. Recall that Baal-worship and its sexual rites glorified inequitable land possession and control. In the Prophets, the role of land is crucial in the divine providential scheme, and the flouting of just principles of land possession has grave consequences. Human beings are caretakers, not the owners, of God's creation.

Amos and Hosea underscored that being a caretaker of the earth, while defining people's relationship to the land, also defined people's relationship to one another. Being a caretaker meant loving justice and doing mercy, letting go of selfish possession and the desire for power over others by usurping their means of livelihood, and instead becoming, like God, compassionate. Consider what a revolutionary break this represents from Baal worship, which idolized control of the soil and deified the landowners!

... Read the whole synopsis