Ba'al was not the Devil. He was the most important deity in the Canaanite pantheon — the god of rain, storms, thunder, fertility and the cycle of seasons upon which all agriculture depended. In the semi-arid climate of the ancient Near East, where the difference between sufficient rainfall and drought could mean the difference between abundance and famine, the storm god was the most urgently necessary deity in the entire divine assembly. His name simply means "Lord" or "Master" in the Semitic languages — a title of respect and supremacy. The demonisation of Ba'al is not a theological judgment about his nature but a historical consequence of religious competition: when one religion defeats another, the defeated religion's gods tend to become the victorious religion's demons.
Our clearest picture of Ba'al before his demonisation comes from the Ugaritic texts — a remarkable archive of mythological, religious and administrative documents discovered at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) on the Syrian coast in 1929 and since. These clay tablets, written in an alphabetic cuneiform script in the 14th-13th centuries BCE, contain extensive mythological narratives including the Ba'al Cycle — a collection of texts describing Ba'al's cosmic conflicts and his establishment as the supreme deity.
In the Ba'al Cycle, Ba'al is the son of El (the father of the gods) and the brother of Mot (Death) and Yam (the Sea). The central conflict is between Ba'al and these cosmic forces: his battle with Yam (the chaotic waters) and his seasonal death and resurrection in conflict with Mot. When Ba'al descends to the realm of Mot, the rains cease and the earth withers; when he returns, life and fertility are restored. This is the mythological expression of the agricultural cycle in a Mediterranean climate — the dry summers as Ba'al's death, the return of the autumn rains as his resurrection. The structure is identical to the Osiris myth, the Tammuz myth, the Adonis myth — the dying-and-rising agricultural deity whose fate is mapped onto the seasons.
Why the Hebrew prophets condemned Ba'al so vehemently: the Hebrew Bible contains more than 80 references to Ba'al, almost all condemnatory — describing the worship of Ba'al as the primary form of apostasy that Israelites were tempted toward. This vehemence makes complete historical sense when the context is understood: Israel and Canaan shared the same territory, the same agricultural ecology, the same desperate need for rain, and competing theological claims about which deity controlled the weather. YHWH, in the Hebrew tradition, was claiming the same cosmic territory as Ba'al — the power over rain, storm and agricultural fertility. Elijah's contest with the prophets of Ba'al on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18) is explicitly framed as a competition over which deity can call down fire and rain: the core agricultural question, answered (in the narrative) in YHWH's favour.
One of Ba'al's most famous later forms is Beelzebub (or Beelzebul) — in the New Testament, one of the princes of demons, and in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan's chief lieutenant. The name derives from Ba'al Zebub (בַּעַל זְבוּב) — "Lord of the Flies," mentioned in 2 Kings 1 as the god of the Philistine city of Ekron. This derisive name (flies being associated with dung, decay and the unclean) appears to be a Hebrew polemical distortion of an original name: either Ba'al Zebul ("Lord of the High Place" or "Lord of the Heavenly Dwelling") or Ba'al Zĕbûl ("Lord of the Exalted House") — both dignified titles that were mocked by substituting zebûb (flies) for zebûl (height/house). The Lord of the Heavenly Dwelling became the Lord of the Flies as part of the demonisation process.
William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies takes its title from this tradition — the evil that emerges when civilisation's constraints are removed is named for the ancient storm god who became a demon through his people's military defeat and his name's polemical distortion.