Download From Baal to Zeus to Satan - The Changing Face of the Storm-God

Ba`al was the main enemy of Yahweh in the Old Testament. One could argue
that he was even more of a villain in the Bible than Satan, who’s only
mentioned in fourteen Old Testament verses, in the books of 1 Chronicles,
Job, and Zechariah. Ba`al, on the other hand, appears 106 times in 88 verses
(including personal and place names, like Baal-zephon).
Ba`al arrives in Exodus and he’s still around in the New Testament. Jesus discussed him with the
Pharisees (see Matthew 12:22-28).
Stela at the Louvre from the ancient
city of Ugarit depicting Ba`al with his
characteristic mace and thunderbolt.
Ba`al isn’t a name, it’s a title. It means “lord”, in the same way we Christians usually say Lord (and
our Bibles read Lord) instead of saying Yahweh or spelling out YHWH. That’s rather arrogant, when
you think about it. And Ba`al wasn’t the only one; over time, Babylon’s chief god Marduk came to be
known as Bel, which also means “lord”.
Ba`al has had a long career. He’s not recognized as an active deity in our world today, to the best of
our knowledge. There may be a few here and there who try to recreate the old religion of the ancient
Canaanites, but like aging pop divas, the old gods reinvented themselves as time and people moved
on. We’ve already seen how Sumerian Inanna became Babylon’s Ishtar, the Semitic Astarte,
Aphrodite of Greece, and Venus of Rome.
Over time, Ba`al replaced the original name of the West Semitic storm-god Hadad (or Haddu), who
was also called Adad/Addu by the Akkadians. Ba`al has also been identified with the Hurrian god
Teššub, the Hittite god Tarhunt (or Tarhun), the Urartian god Teisheba, the Sumerian god Iškur, the
Amorite god Amurru (incorrectly, as it happens), and others.
Of course, Ba`al is best known as Zeus—Jupiter to the Romans.
The earliest of these storm-god manifestations was Iškur (note: the š sounds like “sh”). However,
Iškur was a minor deity in the Sumerian pantheon. That’s logical; in a land that’s mostly desert, a
god of storms and life-bringing rain wasn’t as important as Enki, who controlled the fresh waters of
the Tigris and Euphrates. Irrigation was far more important than rainfall for growing crops in
southern Mesopotamia. Farther north, where rain was key to agriculture, Iškur played a larger role
in the pantheon.
The chief god Enlil and his son, the war-god Ninurta, also had storm-god characteristics. This left
Iškur looking like a pale imitation of the others, a third-tier superhero in a comic book universe. He
was believed to be the son of Anu, although some traditions claimed that Enlil was his father. This
could mean that Iškur wasn’t a native Sumerian deity but an import from Sumer’s Semitic-speaking
neighbors. As the patron god of Karkara, a minor city near Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, Iškur’s
cult center didn’t have enough political clout to elevate him into the upper rank of the pantheon, as
Babylon later did for Marduk.
The first written evidence of the cult of Iškur comes from the cities Lagash and Adab in the middle of
the 3rd millennium B.C. Adab was near Karkara, site of Iškur’s temple, the House of the Big Storms.
Unfortunately, the ruins of Karkara haven’t been discovered yet, so we don’t know much about his
cult or the local traditions about him. But based on prayers and rituals that have been preserved, it
appears Iškur, like most of the Mesopotamian gods and goddesses, could be good or bad depending
on his mood. The storm-god brought necessary rain for the crops needed to survive but he could also
destroy fields with wind, hail, and flood.
He first appeared under the name Hadda at Ebla around 2500 B.C., and as Adad in Old Akkadian
texts, the period of history that began with the empire of Sargon the Great around 2330 B.C. We
know they’re the same because the Sumerian logogram for Hadda/Adad was the same used for Iškur
(dIM). As god of the heavenly waters, Iškur was sometimes praised as the twin brother of Enki. This
may be an early example of the “twin gods” motif in ancient mythology. Sometimes they’re brothersister twins, such as Apollo and Artemis; sometimes divine-mortal twins, like Castor and Pollux; and
sometimes, as in this case, a pair of brothers, one more important than the other, at least in the
early days. Until the early 2nd millennium B.C., it wouldn’t have been a compliment for Enki, the god
responsible for the fresh water of the abzu and the fundamental laws of civilization, the mes, to be
compared with a minor deity like Iškur.
Iškur-Adad, later Ba`al, played a key role in the cosmology of Mesopotamia for the next 2,500 years.
His importance to the cultures of the region grew with the political influence of the Amorites, who
may have introduced Iškur into Sumer, reaching its peak in the 2nd millennium B.C. and lasting
through the time of Jesus.
At Mari, which was located on the Euphrates about 75 miles southeast of the modern city of Deir ezZor, a powerful but short-lived Amorite kingdom grew from the ashes of an older state that had been
smashed by Sargon the Great. The name Haddu often appears in texts found at Mari alongside
Dagan, a grain god (contrary to common belief, Dagan/Dagon was never a fish god), and Itūr-Mēr as
one of the three great gods of the kingdom of Mari.
As political control of Mesopotamia shifted from Akkad to Ur and then to Babylon between 2150 B.C.
and 1900 B.C., powerful Amorite kingdoms in Assyria, Mari, and Yamḥad (modern Aleppo, Syria)
emerged alongside the old Babylonian empire. At the same time, the storm-god’s identity gradually
shifted from Sumerian Iškur to Akkadian Adad and his importance in the pantheon grew. By the time
Hammurabi brought Babylon to the greatest extent of its power, Adad was firmly established among
the great gods of Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, the lion-dragon was replaced by the bull as the animal
associated with Adad, a symbol more familiar to those who know Ba`al from the Bible.
While texts from the Canaanite city-state Ugarit name Mount Zaphon as the site of Ba`al’s palace,
the capital of Yamḥad, Halab (Aleppo), was known across the ancient Near East as the City of
Hadad. The storm-god’s sanctuary there, which lies beneath a massive citadel in Aleppo’s old
quarter, dates to the Early Bronze Age, the mid-3rd millennium B.C. (ca. 2500 B.C.), and it was in use
until about the 9th century B.C.
The importance of the storm-god of Aleppo is highlighted by evidence of his cult across Mesopotamia
and the Levant, from Nuzi, east of the Tigris River, to Hattuša, capital of the Hittite empire, in what
is now north-central Turkey. By the old Babylonian period (1700s B.C.), Hadad was, other than
Marduk, the preeminent god in Mesopotamia. Emissaries from Elam, today’s northwest Iran, once
traveled to Halab to present a bow as a gift to Hadad.
Figurine of Ba`al
found at Ugarit.
Yamḥad certainly enjoyed the benefits of the storm-god’s presence in its midst. The king was called
“beloved of Hadad” and the kingdom was the Land of Hadad. The god bestowed kingship and
assigned territory to kings, even to those outside the borders of Yamḥad. Before the Amorites swept
into southern Mesopotamia and took control from the native Sumerians in the early 2nd millennium
B.C., that power was restricted to Enlil. (After the rise of Babylon, various deities besides Hadad,
including Marduk, Dagan, and the moon-god Sîn, claimed king-making authority at different times
and places.)
If you’re a reader of the Bible, you recognize that this is another bit of propaganda from the spirit
realm. Scripture tells us “there is no [governing] authority except from God, and those that exist
have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1, ESV).
It was believed that the sacred weapons forged for Ba`al by the craftsman god, Kothar-wa-Khasis
(Skillful-and-Wise, or Deft-and-Clever), to defeat the sea-god Yam were kept at the temple of Hadad
in Aleppo. Letters found at Mari confirm that the weapons, clubs named Yagrush (Chaser) and
Aymur (Driver), were transported from Aleppo to the city of Terqa for Zimrī-Līm, the king of Mari
during the time of Hammurabi (c. 1775 B.C.), and placed in the temple of Mari’s chief god, Dagan.
This is fascinating on a couple levels. First, it’s clear that the clubs were actual physical objects that
could be brought out and displayed during ceremonies. Second, the weapons apparently had some
ritual function. Whether the clubs were returned to Aleppo, we don’t know, but it raises a disturbing
thought: This is sheer speculation, but is it possible that these weapons, whatever they were, still
exist, are in Aleppo today, and are somehow spiritually linked to the savage violence of the ongoing
Syrian civil war?
Roughly 80 miles west of that city, Mount Zaphon, the home of Ba`al’s palace, was known to the
Greeks as Mount Kasios. The Greek storm-god Zeus was naturally identified with Ba`al-Hadad, and
the aspect of Zeus who reigned there was known as Zeus Kasios (Jupiter Casius to the Romans).
We mentioned earlier that Mount Zaphon/Kasios was the site of the epic battle between Zeus and
the chaos monster, Typhon, which is a clear parallel with Ba`al’s victory over Yam and his minion,
the sea dragon Lotan (the Canaanite name for Leviathan).
The victory of a god over the chaos monster representing the sea or, as scholar Robert D. Miller
termed it, the storm-god-slays-dragon myth, is a theme that stretches back to Sumer. The ZeusTyphon and and Ba`al-Yam conflicts were preceded by the Hittite myth of Tarhunt and the dragon
Illuyanka, the Indian myth of the god Indra’s defeat of the dragon Vrtra (with a thunderbolt,
naturally), and before that, the account of Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian creation epic, the
Enuma Elish.
In the god lists found at Ugarit, which serve as a lexicon between Ugaritic and Akkadian, Tiamat is
equated with Ba`al’s nemesis, Yam. After his victory over Tiamat, Marduk, like Ba`al, was declared
king of the gods and had a palace built in his honor.
Some scholars have observed that because no copy of the Enuma Elish predates the tablets
containing the Baal Cycle found at Ugarit, and it probably originated no more than two hundred
years before the Baal Cycle, the storm-god-slays-dragon myth may have traveled to Babylon from the
region around Mount Zaphon and not, as is generally assumed, the other way around. This makes a
lot of sense. It’s far more likely that people near the Mediterranean would envision the sea as a
monstrous opponent of the gods than the inhabitants of arid central Mesopotamia.
As we mentioned earlier, the Sumerian storm-god Iškur may well have been a Semitic import. The
Amorites were in contact with southern Mesopotamia from an early age. As with the belief that the
storm-god was king of the gods, the account of his triumph over chaos may have traveled west to
east with Amorite caravans. Of course, these tales were a PSYOP to lay claim to the victory that
Yahweh had won over Leviathan and chaos.
And there is another connection linking all these stories: We previously mentioned a letter to ZimrīLīm, the king of Mari, confirming receipt of the weapons of Hadad at the temple of Dagan in Terqa.
The king also received a message purportedly from the god himself through one of his prophets:
Thus says Adad, I brought you back to the throne of your father, I brought you back.
The weapons with which I fought Tiamat I gave to you. With the oil of my bitter
victory I anointed you, and no one before you could stand.
A Prophetic Letter of Adad to Zimrī-Līm (A.1968), emphasis added
The word translated “Tiamat”, têmtum (a variant form of Tiamat), is a cognate of the Hebrew word
tehom, which appears in the very second verse of the Bible:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without
form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep (tehom). And the Spirit of
God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:1-2 (ESV)
Linking the Sumerian chaos goddess, Tiamat, and “the deep” of Genesis 1:2 puts that verse in a new
light. Why did the Spirit of God hover over the waters? Is it possible Yahweh defeated a divine rebel
before creating Adam and Eve? And having cast Tehom/Tiamat into the abyss, did His Spirit remain
to guarantee the monster would stay there?
Thus, the creation of the world as recorded in Genesis is linked to the Enuma Elish, the Baal Cycle,
and the storm-god-slays-dragon myths of ancient Anatolia and Greece, and probably the nightly
contest between Set and Apophis, the Indian myth referenced above, the battles between Thor and
Jörmungandr, and others. Not surprisingly, scholars generally believe the biblical account was
inspired by the Babylonian myth instead of the other way around—as we said, a PSYOP.
Remember, the oldest written account isn’t necessarily the one that’s true.