Can anyone suggest a good commentary that not only mentions, but thoroughly comments on the Ugaritic Ba'al cycle in Psalms? OR, a commentary on the Cycle? mm. More on community.logos.com

I believe Baal comes from the Punic pantheon (around Carthage and thereabouts?), and may have just been a title as opposed to a name of one specific Deity. There were several Baals in the religion, and it seems unclear whether they were aspects of one entity or different beings. I think the word was supposed to mean "king" or "chief," so would have been used to differentiate your "head honcho" masculine gods, similar to Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. I don't think the child sacrifice, or human sacrifice, thing has been fully substantiated archaeologically. From what I recall, there is some tentative evidence that this may have been a thing in some specific iterations of the broader culture at certain points in history, but it's also quite possible that these connections are made through the lens of confirmation bias, working backwards from the stories. I think there were some bones in some jars that were stored in some certain way, and that's about it. Kind of hard to draw CSI quality conclusions from millennia old remains. Of course, it's possible that human sacrifice was a thing. It was a thing in a lot of places, presumably mostly during periods of time when a given population became driven to desperation in the face of some looming or ongoing catastrophe. Even Yahweh once asked Abraham to do it ... and then, as we all know, went "psyche, that was just a prank bro, you should have seen the look on your face!" In general, I think there's a bit of a paucity when it comes to concrete archaeological evidence of specific Punic religious practices, so unless the smoking ceremonial dagger turns up, we seem to mostly have stories from rival cultures to go on, which is not the most reliable source. Either way, it seems that Baal was basically just a normal god, insofar as gods are normal. More like Zeus (probably still a terrible role model in many of the stories) and less like some sort of monstrous demonic entity. Honestly, even if some priests did decide to sacrifice people to their god in desperation, I wouldn't necessarily blame the god. Those tend to reflect back at us what we want or expect to see. More on reddit.com

The entire book of Judges is about God being angry with Israel for associating Him with pagan deities since all the way back at Sinai, and this argument continues through the rest of the Old Testament until Israel is punished with defeat by Assyria and Babylon. I would be more surprised if archaeologies didn't find pottery and idols with combinations of YHWH and Canaanite gods, and it's interesting to me that YHWH is commonly treated as their "God of War" when most interactions the common people had after rebelling was being rescued by Him from occupations/raids. More on reddit.com

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