Who the Devil is Beelzebul?

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Three passages in the Synoptic Gospels identify the enigmatic figure of Beelzebul as the ruler of demons (Matthew 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15). In each of these passages, Jesus’ enemies attribute his ability to heal to the powers of “Beelzebul, the prince of demons.”^a No more information is given. Other verses where Beelzebul appears (Matthew 10:25, 27; Luke 11:18, 19) are even less helpful, mentioning only his name. That’s it. There are no references to Beelzebul in early Jewish literature—or in any other early literature, for that matter.¹

Popular consensus equates Beelzebul with Satan, a connection that dates back at least to the time of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (c. 316–318 C.E.).² Yet nowhere does the New Testament explicitly correlate these two figures; rather, the identification of Beelzebul with Satan is but a possible contextual reading of Matthew 12:26–27, in which Jesus answers his critics: “Every kingdom divided against itself is an evil waste…If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand?” The Hebrew Bible and other Jewish writings list many names for Satan—Mastema, Sammael, Asmodaeus, Belial—but Beelzebul is not among them.

So where does this shadowy character come from? One explanation sometimes offered by scholars is that Beelzebul is a derisive corruption of Baalzebub (Lord of a Fly), the Ekronite (Philistine) god mentioned in 2 Kings 1:2–6, 16. Others suggest that the New Testament Beelzebul should be translated “Lord of Dung,” for in rabbinic literature zibbuÆl means “dung” or “filth.”³ This reading, however, must be rejected on linguistic grounds. If the word “dung” were intended, the Greek transliteration would read Beelzibboúl rather than Beelzeboul; instead, the Greek reflects the Semitic noun zebul(u), meaning a “lofty abode” or “prince.” A further problem with the “Lord of Dung” theory is the underlying assumption—probably false—that Baalzebub was an authentic, commonplace epithet upon which the New Testament writers drew.

One piece of the puzzle comes not from first-century Palestine but from ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, which flourished from about 1400 to 1300 B.C.E. In 1929 a vast archive of cuneiform tablets was discovered at the site. With the decipherment of Ugaritic, a Canaanite dialect akin to Hebrew that uses an alphabetic system and cuneiform script, a new literature became available that provided a 044detailed and intriguing picture of Canaanite religion in the second millennium B.C.E. In these ancient literary texts, divine epithets play an important literary and theological role.^b They are for the 045most part formulaic and frequently recur in the general corpus of the material.

Numerous appellations for the Canaanite fertility god Baal, probably to be equated with the Amorite weather god Hadad, appear in the Ugaritic texts. Prominent among Baal’s epithets is “Prince Lord of the Earth” (zbl.b‘l.ars, vocalized zabulu ba‘lu arsi). This epithet appears 14 times in eight separate texts,⁴ for example, “Almighty Baal is dead, Prince Lord of the Earth has perished” (kmt.aliyn.b‘l.khÉlq.zbl.b‘l.ars) and “Alive is Almighty Baal, Prince Lord of the Earth lives” (khy.aliyn.b‘l.kit-.zbl.b‘l.ars). Although this epithet does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, its vocalization in Hebrew would be zebul ba’al (the variance in pronunciation between Ugaritic and Hebrew can be attributed to the loss of case endings in biblical Hebrew). The similarity between the divine epithet zebul ba’al and the New Testament Beelzebul is obvious—the only difference lying in the word order.⁵ In the Ugaritic corpus, however, the reverse (b‘l zbl) never appears. So we must look elsewhere to establish an irrefutable link between Baal’s divine name and the Synoptic Gospels’ ruler of demons.

There is a vital piece of evidence. It comes from a Punic funerary inscription of the eighth century B.C.E. containing the feminine personal name b‘l’zbl (probably read Baalazbul).⁶ Ancient Near Eastern personal names commonly consisted of, or incorporated, divine epithets; so it is reasonable to identify this Phoenician name with its Ugaritic counterpart.⁷ A variant of this Baal-name found its way into the New Testament as Beelzebul.⁸

Thus we should recognize Beelzebul as the Canaanite god Baal, reduced from deific grandeur to a malevolent spirit. Such a pattern of deliberate debasement of foreign deities into demons was common in the ancient world. Revelation, for instance, urges us to “give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk” (Revelation 9:20). Paul, too, makes the connection between pagan deities, or idols, and demons: “What do I imply then? That food sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:19–20).

In the ancient Near East, in other words, you dealt with foreign gods by subjecting them to ridicule. In numerous instances in the Hebrew Bible, people are castigated for respecting “dumb” or “mute” gods, gods that do not even have a voice (see, for example, Jeremiah 10:8).^c The principal deity of the Sumerian pantheon appears in mid-third-millennium B.C.E. tablets from Ebla as ^dEN-LÍL,^d but in the Hebrew Bible the name appears as ’eliÆl (plural, ’eliÆliÆm), meaning an idol or a non-deity (see Leviticus 19:4).⁹ In Eblaite, ^dEN-LÍL was pronounced i-li-lu, a cognate of the Hebrew ’eliÆl.¹⁰ Cyrus Gordon has opined that in 14th-century B.C.E. Ugarit, ill was a minor deity.¹¹ Thus there is a clear pattern of debasement from the third-millennium Eblaite i-li-lu (the great god) to the 14th-century B.C.E. Ugaritic ill (a minor deity) to the Hebrew eliÆl (an idol or non-deity).

The references to Baalzebub in 2 Kings 1 also fits this pattern of debasement. Apart from the reference in this chapter of Kings, Baalzebub appears nowhere else in ancient Near Eastern literature. It is likely, therefore, that the epithet was newly coined by the author of the Kings passage rather than being a common epithet that the author merely borrowed (which suggests, in turn, that the New Testament references do not derive from a common contemporaneous epithet either). By altering a single letter (“l” to “b”), the Israelites reduced the Lord Prince, (Baal zebul), Yahweh’s chief rival, to the Lord of a Fly, an insignificant being: Baalzebul the high god became, in the flick of a stylus, Baalzebub, a powerless idol.

Similarly, in the New Testament, the lordly Baalzebul is reduced to the demon Beelzebul, a powerless minor deity associated with mute idols. The New Testament writer followed the same Near Eastern practice of debasing foreign gods.

Still, many questions remain. Why does the name Beelzebul not appear in any writings contemporaneous with the New Testament? Does the fact that Jesus is accused of healing with the help of Beelzebul suggest that Beelzebul was central to the magical practices of first-century Palestine? Unfortunately, for these questions, we have, as yet, no answers.