Baal bꜥr

Overview

Baal is the most important foreign god in Egypt and the one we can least picture.

Budge: "The greatest of all the Syrian gods known to the Egyptians was Bar, or Pa-Bar, i.e., Baal… Of his form and worship we know nothing" [budge-1904].

What survives instead is how the Egyptians classified him — and how a pharaoh used him.

Attestation history

What he was. "Bar appears to have been a god of the mountain and the desert, and his worship was introduced into Egypt under the XVIIIth Dynasty. Like most of the Semitic gods and goddesses he was primarily a god of war and battle, and he may have been a personification of the burning and destroying heat of the sun and blazing desert wind" [budge-1904].

Why Egypt respected him. "To the Egyptians of the Delta he soon became familiar, and as he was supposed to be the god who supported their foes the Syrians in many a hard-fought battle they regarded him with a certain awe and reverence" [budge-1904].

That is an unusual sentence. The god of the enemy, taken seriously because he was the enemy's — not demonised, not dismissed. Awe and reverence.

Written with Set's animal. "The Egyptians placed after their transliterations of his name a figure of the fabulous animal in which the god Set became incarnate, and it is clear that they must have believed Bar and Set to have qualities and attributes in common" [budge-1904].

The determinative is the classification. Egyptian scribes had to decide what kind of thing Baal was in order to write his name at all, and they filed him under Set.

A king compares himself to him. "Rameses II boasts in his triumphal inscriptions that when he put on his panoply of war, and mounted his chariot, and set out to attack the Kheta soldiery he was like the god Bar" [budge-1904].

Budge draws the conclusion: "the king of Egypt was proud to compare himself to the mighty Syrian war-god."

A temple. "Bar was worshipped in the Delta, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Tanis, where Rameses II carried out such extensive building operations, and where a temple of the god existed" [budge-1904].

What the texts say

A god with a temple and no picture. This is the reverse of almost every other entry here. Usually the corpus has iconography and no cult — a plate, a headdress, no shrine. Baal has a temple at Tanis, a royal comparison, and a Delta following, and not one recorded image.

That absence may itself be Semitic. Northwest Semitic worship was considerably less image-centred than Egyptian, and a god imported without a standard figure would leave exactly this trace. Offered as a reading; no source here says it.

The determinative is a judgement. Egyptian writing cannot avoid categorising: every noun takes a sign saying what class of thing it belongs to. Writing Baal's name required an Egyptian scribe to decide what he was, and the answer was the Set animal — the creature of the desert, of storms, of disorder and force.

Set is also the parent assigned to Anat, and the counterpart of Resheph's desert brief. Egypt had a consistent filing system for Syrian gods, and Set was the folder.

Rameses II's boast is the most interesting political fact in the chapter. He is attacking the Hittites, and he says that in doing so he is like their region's own great god. Not that his gods are stronger — that he himself resembles theirs.

That is a very different posture from suppression, and it fits Budge's framing of Egyptian practice: tolerant of the god, ruthless with the city that owned it.

Iconography

None recorded. The only visual trace is the Set animal used as the determinative after his name [budge-1904].

Cult and practice

Tanis, in the Delta, with a temple, under Rameses II [budge-1904]. Nothing further is described.