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Old Testament
Beelzebub, or Baalzebûb, the
Philistine god of Accaron (Ekron), scarcely 25 miles west of
Jerusalem, whose
oracle King Ochozias (Ahaziah) attempted to consult in his last illness, IV (II) Kings, i, 2. It is only as an
oracle that the god is known to us; no other mention of him occurs in the
Old Testament. The name is commonly translated "the lord of the flies", and the god is supposed to be so called either because as a sun god he brings the flies, though the Ba'al was probably not a sun god, or more likely because he is invoked to drive away the flies from the sacrifice, like the Zeus Apomuios, who drove them from Olympia, or the hero Myiagros in Arcadia. Halévy and Winckler interpret the name, according to the analogy of very many names compounded with
baal, as "the lord of Zebub", supposed to be a locality in Accaron; there is no
proof, however, for the existence of such a locality, and besides Beelzebub is called the god of Accaron. Cheyne thinks the original form of the name is Ba'al Zebul, "the lord of the mansion," or high house, which would refer to the god's temple or to the mountain on which the gods dwelt, or rather, in his opinion, to both. But the textual evidence, as Lagrange objects, is entirely in favour of
Zebub. Cheyne, admitting this, holds that the title "lord of the high house", which would suggest to the writer of Kings a reference to
Yahweh's temple or to His heavenly dwelling place, would be considered offensive, and would induce him, in contempt, to change it to
Ba'al Zebub, the lord of flies. The tradition of the
true name, lingering on, accounts for its presence in the Gospels (Zeboul). This conjecture, which has a certain plausibility, leaves unexplained why the contempt should lead to the particular form,
Baal Zebub, a name without parallel in
Semitic religions. It seems more reasonable, then, to regard
Baalzebub as the original form and to interpret it as "lord of the Flies".
New Testament
In the
New Testament, there is question of an
evil spirit, Beelzeboul. On account of the great similarity of names, he is usually identified with Baalzebub,
beel being the Aramaic form of
baal, and the change from the final
b to
l such as might easily occur. But there were numberless names for demons at that time, and this one may have been newly invented, having no relation to the other; the fact that one element of the compound is Aramaic and the other Hebrew would not disprove this. The meaning of the term is "lord of the mansion" or dwelling, and it would be supposed by the
Jews of this time to refer to the nether regions, and so be an appropriate name for the prince of that realm. Beelzeboul (Beelzebub) is used, then, merely as another name for
Satan (
Matthew 12:24-29;
Luke 11:15-22) by whom the enemies of
Our Lord accused Him of being possessed and by whom they claimed He cast out demons. Their charge seems to have been that the good
Our Lord did was wrought by the
Evil One in order to deceive, which
Jesus showed to be absurd and a wilful blindness. If the
New Testament name be considered a transformation of the old, the question arises as to how the god of the little town of Accaron came to give a name to the Prince of Darkness. The mission on which Ochozias sent his followers seems to show that Beelzebub already had a wide renown in Palestine. The narrative (
2 Kings 1) was a very striking one, well known to the contemporaries of
Our Lord (
Luke 9:54); from it might easily be derived the
idea of Beelzebub as the special adversary of
God, and the change in the final letter of the name which took place (
ex hypothesi) would lead the
Jews to regard it as designating the prince of the lower regions. With him was naturally connected the
idea of demoniacal possession; and there is no need of Cheyne's conjecture that Beelzebub's "name naturally rose to Jewish lips when demoniacal possession was spoken of, because of the demoniacal origin assumed for
heathen oracles". How can we account for the
idea of Beelzebub
exorcizing the demons? On the assumption that he is to be identified with the
Philistine god, Lagrange thinks the
idea is derived from the special prerogative of Beelzebub as fly-chaser (
chasse-mouche). In the
Babylonian epic of the deluge, "the gods gather over the sacrificer like flies" (see Driver, Genesis, 105). It was easy for the
heathen Semites, according to Lagrange, to come to conceive of the flies troubling the sacrifice as images of spirits hovering around with no
right to be there; and so Beelzebub, the god who drove away the flies, became the prince of demons in whose name the
devils were
exorcised from the bodies of the possessed. Others think the
idea naturally arose that the lord of the demons had power to command them to leave the possessed. It seems much more reasonable, however, to regard this faculty of Beelzebub not as a tradition, but simply as a change invented by
Our Lord's enemies to throw discredit on his
exorcisms. His other
miracles were probably accounted for by ascribing them to Beelzebub and so these likewise. Allen (Comm. on Matt., 107, 134) has endeavored to simplify the problem by the use of
higher criticism. According to him, the role of Beelzebub as arch-demon and
exorcist was not a Palestinian
belief; in Mark's Gospel, Beelzebub is simply the demon said to possess
Our Lord. Matthew and Luke by mistake fuse together two independent clauses of Mark, iii, 22 and identify Beelzebub and
Satan, to whom the faculty of
exorcism is ascribed. The fusion, however, seems to be justified by the next verse of Mark, which is more naturally interpreted in the sense of Matthew and Luke, though Allen's interpretation may be admitted as possible. Beelzebub does not appear in the Jewish literature of the period; there we usually find Beliar (Belial) as an alternative name for
Satan.
Mr. Harris