Prologue
Baal has had a bad press. Ever since the authors of the Bible portrayed him as a wicked god, to whom worshippers would offer up the sacrifice of their first-born sons, Baal has had an image problem.
It was not always thus. For hundreds of years before the Bible demonized him, Baal was loved and worshipped as a fertility god, the bringer of rain, the prince of peace. He caused the crops to grow and defeated the power of death. He defended the people from their enemies.
Then something happened that shook the Ancient World to its very foundations. Terrifying bands of warriors came from over the Western Sea and laid waste to the cities of Canaan. It seemed Baal could no longer protect his people. The sea god had defeated him in battle. Thus began the long decline of Baal’s reign, and the ascent of a new power – the power of Yahweh.
Three thousand years later, we are still living under the reign of Yahweh. No other god has remained in power so long before, and Lord Acton’s dictum is as true of the gods as it is of men: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Over the course of his long reign, Yahweh has become an evil tyrant, a twisted and malicious deity who delights in spreading death and destruction.
If I had read those words just a few months ago, I would have dismissed them as the ravings of a madman. When I first arrived in Lebanon in January 2016, to spend a semester as a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut, I was a hardened sceptic and a devout atheist. Talk of gods was to me the stuff of fairy-tale and myth. I hadn’t so much as glanced at a Bible since Sunday school.
That was before the events I describe in this book. If the reader persists to the end, she will understand how I came to change my mind on such important questions in so short a time. If the reader accompanies me on my journey, he may forgive my hyperbole.
I do not wish to give away too much in this Prologue. It is better if the reader discovers things little by little, just as I did. Suffice it to say here, then, that this is not just another conspiracy theory. It is, Dan Brown notwithstanding, the story of the most influential conspiracy in history.
Three millenia ago, in Ancient Israel, a tiny sect emerged that proclaimed Yahweh to be the only god. Not just the most powerful god, but the only one. This was not an entirely new idea; the Pharaoh Akhenaton had said the same thing about Ra, the sun god, a couple of centuries before. But Akhenaton’s innovation died with him, while the Prophets of Yahweh founded a tradition that would go on to conquer the world.
I will let you into a secret. The gods feed on human worship like vampires feed on human blood. As the worship of other gods has faded, their power has ebbed away too. Baal and his fellow deities now languish in obscurity, living only in the shadows, while Yahweh continues to gorge himself on the prayers of billions of worshippers worldwide.
But all is not lost. A few bands of devotees continue to keep the name of Baal alive. For over two thousand years they have lived in secrecy in the mountains of Lebanon and Syria, hiding from the jealous sons of Yahweh in their remote highland villages. The civil war that has raged in Syria since 2011 has disrupted their communities just as it has those of other mountain sects such as the Mazdeans, the Ismaelis and the Druze. But they will survive this conflagration, as they have survived many others before in their long and painful history.
This book is about these humble, peaceful, joyful pagans – the Children of Baal.
Nero Calatrava
15 June 2016
ט׳ בְּסִיוָן תשע״ו
