‘No longer will you call me ‘my Ba’al’’: Hosea’s polemic and the semantics of ‘Ba’al’ in 8th century B.C.E. Israel

Hosea, prophet of doom

In response to Israel’s flagrant idolatry, the prophet Hosea makes a series of shocking accusations against her greatest religious leaders, equating them to adulterous wives. ¹ In one oracle, Hosea delivers a crushing judgment from the mouth of YHWH designed to wake Israel up and call her back to her true roots. Apparently, she has been calling YHWH by the wrong name:

On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband’, and no longer will you call me, ‘My Ba’al’. For I will remove the names of the Ba’als from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more. ²

In studying Hosea, biblical scholars have attempted to reconstruct the situation in 8th-century Israel that would have precipitated such vehement prophetic critique. The answer offered thus far has been rather straightforward: worship of Ba’al-Hadad, a well-known deity in the ancient Near East, closely connected with fertility, field, and cattle. ³ As the argument goes, the Israelites in the North had capitulated to the pressures of the surrounding Canaanite culture, and rather than holding to the uniqueness of their one God, YHWH, they worshipped Ba’al instead. Varieties of this response have been offered according to the particular scholar’s understanding of divine fluidity in the Ancient Near East and its application to Ba’al. Does denigration of Ba’al indicate a generic polemic against all forms of idol-worship? ⁴ Is there one deity named ‘Ba’al’ with many location-specific manifestations? ⁵ Whatever the formulation, the general consensus is that Hosea was incensed that large swaths of Israelites had ceased worshipping YHWH and had started to worship Ba’al instead. Often, this interpretation casts Hosea as a prophet who fears every sort of influence from foreign peoples: cultural and religious alike. This Hosea is nearly xenophobic: his greatest desire is to maintain the ideological purity of the nation of Israel.

Such an understanding is not without warrant from the text. Indeed, Hosea makes it abundantly clear that he is enraged by the fact that the Israelites have, in some sense, neglected to worship YHWH rightly. ⁶ Questions remain, however, as to the exact nature of this failure. There could be many reasons for Hosea to doubt Israel’s commitment to YHWH. Hosea’s words preserve one side of a multifaceted conversation in the 8th century regarding Israelite theology and identity. Insights from elsewhere may be useful in our attempt to reconstruct an accurate picture of Israelite worship in this time period. Specifically, epigraphic and onomastic evidence assist us in discovering alternative possibilities for interpreting the situation of 8th-century Israel. Throughout this article, with the support of such evidence, I will maintain that Hosea’s polemics against Ba’al target Israelites who sincerely believed themselves to be faithfully worshipping YHWH. In their minds, there was nothing adulterous about referring to YHWH as Ba’al.

The conflict reflected in Hosea, therefore, is primarily an internal one: a debate about the integrity of YHWHism itself. As heated as interreligious debates can get, intra-religious debates can be far more contentious. In interreligious disagreement, boundaries between one religion and another are drawn fairly rigidly. Power dynamics become more complex when the debate is internal in nature. When the question is not ‘How will we advance the cause of the Israelites against that of group X?’ but is instead ‘What does it mean to be an Israelite?’ all sorts of questions are necessarily on the line: What is the nature of YHWH’s covenant? How will we insist on conformity to societal standards? Who has the power (political, religious, or otherwise) to decide how to worship YHWH rightly? Studying Hosea’s answers to these questions can bring us to a greater understanding of the internal coherence of Israelite religion in the 8th century BCE.

Evidence for a cult of Ba’al-hadad in 8th century B.C.E. Israel

In addition to the prophetic critique of Hosea, onomastic, iconographic, and biblical evidence have all been amassed to confirm the existence of a cult of Ba’al in 8th-century Israel. The largest source of evidence for Israelite personal names during this time is the Samarian Ostraca. ⁷ Dating from the third decade of the 8th century, this source records a nearly fifty/fifty split between Yahwistic and Baalistic names. Ten names are formed using the word Baal with 11 formed on YHWH. Interestingly, Ba’al names occur more frequently among lower classes (eight compared with six YHWH names) while YHWH names are common among upper classes (five compared with two Ba’al names). ⁸

In addition, iconographic and textual evidence suggests shared bull imagery between YHWH and Ba’al. Throughout the ancient Near East, bull imagery is associated with both strength and fertility. ⁹ This is a key feature of Ba’al’s depiction in the Ugaritic texts. ¹⁰ As a result, when scholars encounter bull imagery in reference to YHWH, connections are inevitably drawn between the two deities. Mark Smith cites the discoveries of a deity on a bull from a 9th-century plaque from Dan and an 8th-century stele from Bethsaida. ¹¹ Papyrus Amherst 63 contains the famous line ‘Horus-Yaho, our bull, is with us’. ¹² Moreover, YHWH is frequently referred to within the Hebrew Bible as the ‘Bull of Jacob’. ¹³

Alternative explanations of the evidence

Both of these pieces of evidence have alternative interpretations that do not implicate 8th-century Israel in the ways ordinarily assumed. While the presence of such a large contingent of Ba’al names in the Samarian Ostraca has been interpreted by some scholars as indicative of widespread Ba’al worship in 8th-century Israel, such a conclusion is unwarranted. ¹⁴ Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, when ‘ba’al’ is used as a theophoric element in a personal name, it does not threaten the name-bearer’s Yahwistic identity. Take, for example, Jerubbaal, another name for the judge Gideon. ¹⁵ The name probably means ‘May Baal give increase’. ¹⁶ Additional ‘ba’al’ names include Saul’s son Eshbaal and Jonathan’s son Meribaal. ¹⁷ Both of these names given in 1 Chronicles were distorted in the same way in 2 Samuel: the ‘ba’al’ element was changed to ‘bosheth’, meaning ‘shame’. Furthermore, Baal-zebub, meaning ‘lord of the flies’, is mentioned in 2 Kings 1 as the god of the Philistine city of Ekron, and is likely a deliberate distortion of ‘זבל‎ בעל‎’ or ‘בעל‎ זבל‎’. ¹⁸ It seems that some Israelites, perhaps under the same influence as Hosea, believed the term ‘ba’al’ to be inseparable from its Canaanite, polytheistic roots and thus unacceptable for use within an Israelite name. Despite this later redaction, though, it is still clear that these Ba’al names did not appear to initially threaten the religious devotion of their bearers to YHWH. Only later were they deemed a threat.

It is true that elements of YHWH’s description in the Hebrew Bible mirror that of Ba’al in the Ugaritic literature. Some scholars even conjecture that Psalms 29 and 68 were originally written for Ba’al and only later became co-opted by the Israelites to apply to YHWH. ¹⁹ However, it is difficult to conclude that these similarities are evidence of syncretistic worship. Lines between gods are famously indistinct in the ancient world, and there is a general consensus among biblical scholars that YHWH ‘overtook the earlier functions of Ba’al’. ²⁰ As Frank Moore Cross says, ‘In the earliest poetic sources the language depicting Yahweh as divine warrior manifest is borrowed almost directly from Canaanite descriptions of the theophany of Ba’l as storm god’. ²¹

In other words, centuries before Hosea’s day, in the midst of the emergence of YHWHism itself, the Israelites understood YHWH in terms of the qualities and character of deities already present in their cultural landscape. While the Canaanites called the god who provided rain and ensured the propagation of new life ‘Ba’al’, and worshipped him accordingly, the Israelites came to understand this deity as YHWH. Since they believed that YHWH rather than Ba’al-Hadad was the source of rain and fertility, they would have found it entirely appropriate to write about and depict YHWH in the cultural frames with which they were familiar. What it meant for a deity to be powerful and cosmic had already been answered by their ancient Near Eastern neighbors. Rather than redefine divine power itself, the Israelites chose to reassign its possessor. Thus, the shared imagery does not indicate that YHWH and Ba’al shared ultimate divine power. Instead, the fact that the Israelites borrowed language from Ugaritic myth to describe YHWH is a profound theological statement that YHWH alone is the true God and source of life.

There are additional reasons to suppose that Hosea does not have in mind Israelite worship of Ba’al-Hadad. Throughout the book, Hosea is specific about the sorts of activities he deems to be Ba’al worship: cultic rites on the high places (4.13; 10.8), pillars (3.4; 10.1-2), divining rods (4.12), images (4.17; 8.4; 14.8), and calf figurines (8.5-6; 10.5; 13.2). ²² However, as Gale Yee points out, all of these worship elements ‘were for centuries accepted components of the worship of YHWH’. She concludes that what Hosea condemned was not Canaanite influence upon YHWHism, but ‘early Yahwism itself’. ²³

Relatedly, Alice A. Keefe elucidates the fact that outside of Hosea’s polemics, ‘we have scant confirmation from any other biblical text for rampant Baal worship in eighth-century Israel’. ²⁴ Furthermore, if idolatrous worship of Ba’al in Israel was the immense problem Hosea presented it to be, it is surprising that this fact goes unmentioned by his 8th-century prophetic contemporaries: Amos, Micah, and Isaiah all lack any hint of this phenomenon. ²⁵

Extrabiblical and biblical evidence for Ba’al as category

Now that it has been established that arguments for 8th-century Israelite worship of Ba’al-Hadad are left wanting, we may proceed to lay out an alternative proposal for viewing Hosea’s polemics. Spencer L. Allen argues that various Akkadian and Northwest Semitic deities’ first names are best interpreted not as proper names, but as categorical labels that mask the deities’ real first names. He lists Ba’al (‘master’ or ‘lord’) and Ishtar (‘goddess’) as examples: ²⁶ ‘Because Ba’al can be interpreted as a common noun that serves as a title rather than a name, many scholars accept that there were independent and distinct Ba’al deities who should not be identified with either the Mesopotamian storm-god Adad or the Levantine storm-god Hadad’. ²⁷ If Allen is correct, and ‘ba’al’ was understood as a categorical label rather than a personal name in 8th-century Israel, then surely the Israelites would have seen no contradiction in calling YHWH ‘my Ba’al’. Far from idolatry, this could have been seen as praise of the uniquely all-powerful YHWH.

Plentiful evidence from both biblical and extra-biblical sources suggests that ‘ba’al’ did not always refer to idol worship throughout the history of Israel. The term often simply means ‘lord’ or ‘master’. ²⁸ J. Andrew Dearman suggests that extra-biblical Iron Age inscriptions, particularly Phonecian and Punic texts, should be given methodological priority when assessing the semantics of ‘ba’al’ in Hosea. He finds that ‘These inscriptions demonstrate a plurality of deities, both male and female, who are addressed with the appellative Baal’. ²⁹ Dearman lists not one but four different Ba’alim who attained international stature by the Iron Age: Ba’al Shamem, Ba’al Zaphon, Ba’al Hamon, and Melquart (Ba’al of Tire). ³⁰ Interestingly, he locates a shift between the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age regarding possible referents of ‘Ba’al’: in Ugarit, Ba’al-Zaphon refers to Ba’al-Hadad’s mountain home, but by the 7th century, Ba’al-Zaphon is only one of the three Ba’al deities listed as Tyrian gods. ³¹ He adds, ‘It is difficult to explain the variety of the Ba’alim in the Iron Age on the assumption that there was only one cosmic Ba’al in Canaan’. ³²

Likewise, Ryan Thomas states that throughout the Ancient-Near East, ‘ba’al’ was understood as an epithet that could be applied to any god. ³³ Even when the term referred to a Canaanite god, Dearman adds, ‘ba’al’ did not function as a proper name: ‘A Canaanite god called upon as Baal would additionally have one or more names and perhaps some epithets’. One modern parallel of this phenomenon is the invocation of a specific deity as ‘Lord’. ³⁴ Jeremy Hutton draws a distinction between the various semantic ranges of ‘ba’al’ according to geography: whereas Ugaritic texts typically use the epithet to refer to Ba’al-Hadad, southern Levantine texts (such as the Hebrew Bible and Phonecian inscriptions) exhibit greater variety, often referring to deities other than Hadad. While it is beyond the scope of this article to conjecture as to the cause of Ba’al-Hadad’s fragmentation, the fact of it has important implications for the ways in which we understand Israelite ‘Ba’al worship’ in the heart of the Iron Age.

References to ‘ba’al’ as an appellative or category are not limited to extra-biblical sources. There are several instances throughout the Hebrew Bible when ‘ba’al’ is unapologetically applied to YHWH. One such instance occurs in 1 Chronicles 12.5, in which of David’s heroic warriors is named בעליה‎, meaning ‘Ba’al is Yah’. ³⁵ N. Avigad reports one occurrence of the name יהבעל‎, or ‘YHWH is Ba’al’, on a Hebrew seal inscription dated between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. ³⁶ In addition, several Psalms depict YHWH as the ‘one who rides on the clouds’. ³⁷ While this may appear to the modern exegete to be simply a poetic description of YHWH’s power, it is in fact a clear reference to Ba’al, who is often mentioned identically within the Ugaritic texts. ³⁸ P. Kyle McCarter identifies פרזים‎ בעל‎ in 2 Samuel 5.20 as an originally local god who came to be equated with YHWH with the establishment of YHWHism in Palestine. ³⁹ These were not merely names or titles, but profound theological statements about the identity of YHWH vis-à-vis Ba’al.

Finally, in Hosea’s prophetic denouncement, YHWH does not tell Israel to stop calling him ‘ba’al’. What YHWH tells Israel instead is to stop calling him ‘my ba’al’. ⁴⁰ If Ba’al were here understood as a personal name, the addition of the ‘my’ would be difficult to explain. Just as it would make more sense to refer to ‘my friend’ than ‘my Taylor’, Hosea’s addition of ‘my’ can be seen as further evidence that he intends to reference Ba’al as a category meaning ‘lord’ rather than as Ba’al-Hadad of Ugarit.

The many Ba’alim of the ancient near east

Ultimately, though, to automatically conflate Hosea’s encounter with Ba’alism with the Ba’alism of ancient Canaan is to make an unwarranted assumption that neglects to account for the ways in which even official state religions change through time and place. There is not just one Ba’al. As Benjamin Sommer helpfully elucidates, deities in the ancient Near East are not bound by the same ontologies as those of us influenced by Greek philosophy might expect. ⁴¹ He refers to the phenomenon of fragmentation, in which multiple deities exist under a single unifying name. Sommer cites Mesopotamian and Assyrian treaties in which the deity Ishtar is referenced multiple times, usually in two or three local manifestations: Ishtar of Arbela and Ishtar of Carchemish, for example. ⁴² Recent discoveries at Kuntillet Ajrud may suggest that YHWH was a fragmentable deity as well. ⁴³ There is thus some sense in which ancient Near Easterners were comfortable with seeing Ishtar as ‘unified yet multiple’, existing in ‘several independent yet parallel beings’. ⁴⁴ Because of these ideas of divine fluidity in the cultural and religious air of 8th-century Israel, we must consider the ways in which the fragmentation of Ba’al would further nuance the discussion.

Originally, Ba’al functioned as the proper name of the Syrian Storm-god Hadad. ⁴⁵ His terrestrial home was Mt. Zaphon, ⁴⁶ but he was equally at home among the gods of the Ugaritic pantheon. ⁴⁷ Most interpreters of Hosea have assumed that his targets were worshippers of Ba’al-Hadad. However, different ‘fragmentations’ of Ba’al cropped up throughout the centuries: Ba’al-Shamem, Ba’al-Zebub, and Ba’al-Berith, to name a few. Ba’al-Shamem, ‘Lord of the Heavens’, designates the Ba’al who has power over the entire cosmos. Though Ba’al-Hadad was initially a minor god in the pantheon of the all-powerful El, in the first millennium BCE, El was eclipsed by Ba’al-Shamem: ‘Lord of the Heavens’. ⁴⁸ Eventually, Ba’al-Shamem came to be seen as the all-powerful god of the cosmos.

Some evidence suggests a view of Ba’al-Shamem as conceptually distinct from Ba’al Hadad in the Iron Age. In a treaty with the nation of Tyre, 7th-century king of Assyria Esarhaddon mentions Ba’al-Zaphon and Ba’al-Shamem as separate signatories. ⁴⁹ Scholars have puzzled over the meanings of inscriptions of various divine names, including ‘Ba’al’, at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, an archeological site preserving religious artifacts from the late 9th/early 8th centuries in the northeast Sinai peninsula. B. A. Mastin concludes based upon the script and theophanic imagery that ‘ba’al’ in this context does not reference the Phoenician god, but is consistent with the usage of the term in the Hebrew Bible. ⁵⁰

Though it is impossible to definitively conclude the conceptual distinctions between all of Ba’al’s manifestations, it is probable that 8th-century Israel was more familiar with Ba’al-Shamem than Ba’al Hadad. Martti Nissinen records the discovery of the Zakkur Stele in Syria, dated at 785 BCE, wherein King Zakkur recounts the providence of Ba’al-Shamem in his military victories. ⁵¹ Syria’s geographic proximity to Israel is suggestive of shared religious influence. Keel and Uehlinger trace iconographic depictions of Ba’al at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud to conclude that, sometime between the late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, Ba’al morphs from ‘a warrior in the service of some other distant god’ to the ‘Lord of Heaven’ himself. ⁵²

Ultimately, Ryan Thomas agrees that huge semantic shifts in the meaning of ‘ba’al’ take place during this period: ‘Apart from being associated with weather and fertility, the Ba’al described in biblical literature bears little resemblance to Baal Haddu of Ugarit’. ⁵³ The semantic domain of ba’al has already shifted considerably from its Ugaritic origins such that it refers to the chief of a pantheon, not a young warrior struggling for a place in the divine household. ⁵⁴ Because of this, we ought not assume too close a similarity between the Ba’alism of ancient Canaan and whatever was occurring in 8th-century Israel.

If it is true that Ba’al had begun to be seen as Ba’al-Shamem during the late Iron Age, he would have been remarkably similar in character and function to YHWH. ⁵⁵ YHWH and Ba’al undergo a similar process of religious development during the latter half of the Iron Age: both begin as local gods and gradually absorb ‘the characteristics of a celestial/solar “Most High God” making them virtually indistinguishable from one another’. ⁵⁶ One pair of commentators even suggests that these gods underwent ‘a merging of identities’. ⁵⁷ Other evidence indicates that centuries later, during the Hellenistic era, Ba’al Shamem began to be more straightforwardly identified with YHWH. For example, while the Seleucids were in power, a group of Syrian soldiers apparently renamed the (Yahwistic) Jerusalem Temple ‘Ba’al Shamem’. ⁵⁸ Perhaps this trend started as early as the Iron Age.

Who is YHWH’S wife?

Even as they argue for the virtual equivalency of YHWH and Baal in 8th-century Israel, Keel and Uehlinger discuss one key difference between the deities: the presence of a female consort. While YHWH does not appear to have had any consort whatsoever, ⁵⁹ ‘Baal … seems to have had a different consort in each city: Baalat in Byblos; Astarte in Tyre and Sidon’. ⁶⁰ Perhaps Hosea is all too aware of the many location-specific Ba’alim and, consequently, their many female consorts. It may be these quasi-polygamous relationships Hosea has in mind when he denounces the plural Ba’alim in 2.19 and elsewhere. ⁶¹ Scholarship on Hosea has long recognized that Hosea associates worship of Ba’al with marital infidelity, but it may also be the case that the metaphor works both ways: perhaps it is Ba’al’s own promiscuity that disqualifies his title from use in YHWHistic circles. In other words, just as Israel is chastised for taking on new lovers in addition to YHWH, so YHWH ought not be confused as a God who takes multiple wives. In this case, YHWH’s lack of a consort is directly related to his identity as Israel’s ‘husband’. This is an arena in which, Hosea wants to insist, YHWH is utterly unlike the Ba’al deities. Thus, for Hosea, Israelite use of the Ba’al appellative for YHWH failed to recognize an essential distinctive about YHWHsm vis-à-vis the religions of surrounding nations: the presence of a marital covenant. Israel must recognize that she was the true ‘wife’ of YHWH: he had none other.

Though the marriage metaphor as traced throughout Hosea has often been deemed problematic, it is key for understanding what Hosea believed to be the distinctive truth of YHWHism. Based on YHWH’s declaration of divorce in Hosea 2.2, ⁶² M. A. Friedman has reconstructed an analogous marriage formula possibly in use in ancient Israel: בעלה‎ ואנכי‎ אשתי‎ היא‎ ‘She is my wife and I am her husband’. ⁶³ He locates additional support for this formula in Aramaic Jewish marriage documents from Elephantine containing an identical formula: עלם‎ ועד‎ זנה‎ יונא‎ מן‎ לה‎ בע‎ וענה‎ אנתתי‎ הי‎ ‘She is my wife and I am her husband from this day and forever’. ⁶⁴ Hosea apparently adopted this formula to describe the new relationship between YHWH and Israel, although he made one small change: YHWH’s referent is altered from ‘ba’al’ to ‘ish’.

For Hosea, what the ba’al appellative lacked was the relational intimacy of the covenant represented by ‘ishi’. ⁶⁵ Just as it would signal relational estrangement for a wife to call her husband by his formal title at home, it is not fitting for Israel to call YHWH ‘ba’al’. Even if ‘ba’al’ is semantically a proper appellative for YHWH, the intimacy of the covenant renders the use of the term by Israelites sinful. Israelite use of ‘ba’al’ is idolatrous not in the sense of its referring to a deity distinct from YHWH, but in the sense that its use is evidence of a lack of trust in Israel’s unique covenantal bond to YHWH.

Gale Yee cautions against the view that Hosea’s resistance to the ba’al appellative stems from his desire for a more intimate partnership between YHWH and Israel. ⁶⁶ After all, marriage in ancient Israel was clearly patriarchal regardless of the particular name by which a wife refers to her husband. While I share Yee’s impulse against reading anachronistic, modern ideas about marriage into the text, I find additional reasons to suppose that Hosea was concerned with intimacy and partnership as well as loyalty and obedience.

As Yee affirms, Hosea evidently connects the renewal of the covenant in chapter 2 with the renewal of all creation. ⁶⁷ There appears to be an underlying echo of the Genesis creation accounts in the future Hosea describes. For example, the three groups of living creatures with whom YHWH establishes a covenant in verse 18 (the beasts of the earth, the birds of the sky, and the living creatures that move along the ground) take their precise order directly from the first creation account. ⁶⁸ Thus, it is not unlikely that in his insistence on the use of ‘ish’, Hosea is calling to mind the second creation account, and with it, the natural parallelism that exists between ‘ish’ and ‘ishah’. Both Walter Bruggeman and Phyllis Trible have argued that, in contrast to certain later patriarchal interpretations, in these terms themselves there lay an implied mutuality between the created man and woman. ⁶⁹ This shift toward mutual partnership is particularly poignant relative to the divorce faced earlier in the book. Although there unquestionably remains an inequality between YHWH and Israel, the shift from ‘ba’ali’ to ‘ishi’ represents Hosea’s desire for a trajectory toward greater mutuality in the covenant partnership between YHWH and Israel than perhaps existed within actual marriages of the time.

A common covenant

In her study of the rhetorical style of prophetic indictment, Cathleen Kaveny has found that the most effective way to decry a social evil is to ground the critique in a shared understanding of identity. ⁷⁰ Rather than lambast others for not sharing one’s own moral values, the truly prophetic style is to ‘call listeners back to a commonly agreed-on covenant’. ⁷¹ What motivates change of behavior is not being convinced to adopt a foreign moral framework, but being convinced that one’s own actions, however well intended, do not match one’s own self-disclosed moral framework. This was precisely Hosea’s angle.

What Hosea condemned was not idolatrous worship of Ba’al Hadad of Ugarit, but incorrect worship of YHWH. He did not pit Baalism against YHWHism as two different religions vying for Israelite loyalty, but called Israel back to a greater appreciation for the covenantal aspect of her own religion. He was no mere social agitator, but a prophet. To worship in such a way that maligned the significance of the covenant for Israelite religion was, for Hosea, to forfeit Israelite identity altogether. It was no better than acting as an adulterous wife. What we see in Hosea 2.16-17 is a prophet desperately pleading for his people to live and worship in congruency with their professed identity as the chosen and covenanted people of God.