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John Benefiel, who has said that the Statue of Liberty is a demonic idol, is crusading against Baal. But I think the Baal Benefiel is crusading against is not the Baal of the Old Testament, who is supposedly bad mojo enough, but the Baal of the video game Diablo. We’re talking bada** towering over the world evil, with minions galore.

Benefiel says Baal has control of the United States and that he – Level 30 Demon Hunter Benefiel – has made it his personal quest to break that control. It won’t come as a surprise to you, I am sure, to learn that Benefiel says Allah’s original name was Baal-Allah and HuBaal.

What is really interesting is how Benefiel thinks Baal came to be in control of America (and no, Obama did not bring him from Kenya!). Ready: it is because the ancient Egyptians sailed to America and dedicated the continent to a deity that wasn’t even an Egyptian, but a Canaanite, god. For Benefiel, this is, as Right Wing Watch points out, “an established fact.” There are, it is claimed, “rock carvings spread all over the nation literally claiming the land in the name of Baal.”

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Oh those wily, wily Egyptians. Doing a little housecleaning at our expense, eh? Don’t they know that a Midianite god named YHWH, who has stolen the identity of the Caanaanite god El, has special plans for America?

Please, stay calm as you check out the video below, courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

If panic has not consumed your household, then let me point out that both ancient Judaism and, for whatever odd reason, modern fundamentalist Christianity, share an obsession with the Canaanite god Baal. Even my Assembly of God mother-in-law talks about Baal like he’s an infestation of particularly noxious cockroaches oh my!

Just as a couple of examples, back in 2011, Rick Perry asserted that homosexuality is one of Baal’s strongholds. In the summer of 2013, Glenn Beck blamed Occupy Wall Street on Baal. The Illuminati are watching. You can’t escape. Don’t even try, because the Eye of Moloch is upon you!

Some facts: First of all, Baal, whom Benefiel denigrates as a “counterfeit Jesus,” is a god of the Canaanites, and therefore, a god of the Israelites, who are, after all, just Canaanites themselves. As Michael Coogan writes, “It is essential to consider biblical religion as a subset of Israelite religion and Israelite religion as a subset of Canaanite religion.”[1] In the Ugaritic texts, Simon Parker tells us, we see the “raw material that the biblical writers adopted and adapted” and we can “recognize more clearly both their dependence on their transformation of what was already in their day ancient tradition.”[2] That was before YHWH, the Midianite god, came along; before YHWH’s rabid and hateful followers gave America’s Religious Right a blueprint for theocracy.

In Canaanite mythology Baal is the “Cloud Rider, the weather god who rides across the heavens daily in his chariot, governing wind and weather.”[3] He was known to the Egyptians as Baal Zephon (Baal of the North) and to the Hebrews as Baal of Hazor, Baal of Hermon, Baal of Meon, Baa of Peor, Baal of Tamar.[4] Baal is also the storm god, who lives on Jebel Aqra (ancient Sapuna), where, gift of the gods, he has “a palace of blue lapis and silver which they brought down from the clouds”[5] ‘Anat, his consort, a “fierce warrior goddess…a goddess of love and death.”),[6] lives on Mount Sapuna with Baal, [7] and hymns were sun to them there on the lower slopes while the god’s thunder rumbled above. What Baal is not is a god of “homosexuality” though like any other pagan god, he is not against homosexuality.[8]

No, it’s not only Disney you must fear!

To show just how much YHWH himself owes to Baal we have to look at stories of how the Storm God triumphed over “a snaky monster” called “Ltn”(“Litanu” or “Lotan”), ‘the coiling serpent, the tyrant of seven heads.” The tablets referring to this epic contest date from the thirteenth century BCE, far before the composition of the Hebrew Bible. So indebted to Canaanite religion were the Old Testament’s authors that they had YHWH fight a “snaky ‘Leviathan.'” As Robin Lane Fox puts it,

Once again Israel’s Yahweh was credited with deeds like those of his neighboring heathen gods. On his holy mountain Sion he had prevailed over ‘the dragon and the sea,’ just as Baal had prevailed over a dragon on his holy mountain Sapanu, the Jebel Aqra.[9]

Thunderclaps would sound from Holy Sapuna and kings would seek Baal’s protection just as the kings of Israel and Judah sought that of YHWH, who was in his earliest incarnation, the Canaanite El. The cult site on the summit of Holy Sapuna is a mound of ash 180 feet wide and a staggering 26 feet deep, a testament to the enduring nature of Baal lordship. Robin Lane Fox relates that when investigators looked at the mound in 1937, Baal’s thunder drove them from it.

On the north slope of Holy Sapuna dwelt the Storm God, Teshub, whose exploits mirrored those of Baal, and the mountain was known as Mount Hazzi. But these Hurrian, and later Hittite beliefs, did not matter to the people of Syria and Canaan. To the late-arriving Greeks – who always translated the gods of other peoples into their own – Baal was Zeus, his consort Anat Athena, and Sapuna/Hazzi was Kasios, and Baal’s thunder that of Zeus Kasios: a reflection of Olympus in their homeland. As Robin Lane Fox puts it, Holy Sapuna was a beacon of ancient paganism, the Olympus of the Near East.

Now Benefiel claims it was not the Canaanites who brought Baal, their god, to America, but the Egyptians. This would be a strange thing, though not impossible, for Baal Saphon himself was a wide-ranging god, who had many more adherents than the Midianite YHWH; in Memphis in Egypt – where he and Anat were brought by the Canaanite Hyksos – he was known as Baal Zephon, the “Baal of the North,” and he was known to bring prosperity. Travelers wore blue amulets as Christians wear crosses to invoke the lord. So wide was Baal’s influence that the biblical Jeremiah is named for him – his name means “Saphon in Yahweh.” There are many Baals in the Bible – Baal of Hazor, Baal of Hermon, Baal of Meon, Baal of Peor, Baal of Tamar just as there were multiple YHWHs – YHWH of Samaria, and YHWH of Teman (Yemen).

It would therefore make more sense for the Egyptians to have brought their own pantheon to these shores, but the Old Testament is not obsessed with Ra and Amun and Isis like it is with Baal. It was not Ra’s or Amun’s attributes that were stolen to bestow upon YHWH but those of El, the old man with the white beard, and this is only natural since the Jews themselves were Canaanites and it was El and Baal who were their gods, not Ra and Amun. But since it was supposedly the nasty Egyptians who held Moses and his people hostage, it is from Egypt that Baal must have come. But Benefiel has mixed up his bad guys, and like the Old Testament itself, let his bigotry run away with him.

Honestly, I think we’d all rest easier if North America DID belong to Baal, because Baal is a wise, tolerant god who brings prosperity, and his followers, being polytheists and recognizing the existence of all gods, would not now be busy trying to shove him down all our throats. Look, I’m a Norse Pagan, not a Middle Eastern, but I think Baal is a pretty swell god, and we could do a lot worse – and have: Just look at what passes for Christianity in the likes of people like John Benefiel.

And remember, wherever Rick Perry runs for office, John Benefiel – and his Baal obsession – follows.

Note: This post contains material from previous posts