Beelzebub

Ahaziah went through the lattice screen of his upper chamber at Samaria and did not get back up. Something in him was broken, and the messengers he sent out for a prognosis did not go to a prophet of Israel. They went south and west, out of the kingdom altogether, down the road to the Philistine city of Ekron, to put the question to a god whose name in Hebrew reads Lord of the Flies. Picture the road: white dust, a walled town on the coastal plain, four men arriving with a king’s illness in their mouths.

Elijah met them coming back with the answer already in hand. Ahaziah would not rise from that bed, and he did not. Four verses in the second book of Kings are the entire ancient record of Baal-zebub. He is named, he is consulted, the consultation costs a king his life, and then he vanishes from scripture. No temple of his has been excavated. No image, no hymn, no rite, no myth. What survives is a name and a reputation for knowing whether a sick man will mend, and out of that scrap grew one of the most durable devils in the world.

The name is where the argument starts and it has never finished. Baal means lord, and it sat in front of dozens of local Canaanite gods the way a title sits in front of a surname. Zebub means fly. Read plainly, the god of Ekron is the lord of flies, and there is nothing absurd in that. Flies followed sickness and carrion around the ancient Mediterranean, and the god who could send a plague was the god you asked to lift it. The Greeks at Elis sacrificed to a Zeus who drove flies away. A Ugaritic text has Baal himself expelling the flies that were making a man ill. A fly god at Ekron who could tell a broken king whether he would recover fits that neighbourhood exactly.

The complication is a Ugaritic word, zbl, which means prince, and which turns up at Ugarit fastened to Baal again and again: zbl baal, Prince Baal, and zbl baal ars, Prince, Lord of the Earth. Yam and Mot carried the title too. If Ekron’s god was really Baal-zebul, Baal the Prince, then somebody in Israel changed one letter and demoted a prince to vermin. Rabbinic tradition is entirely comfortable with that habit, since the names of foreign gods were deliberately bent into insults, and zebel in the Aramaic of the Targums means dung. The Greek of the Gospels preserves Beelzeboul, never Beelzebub. The Septuagint gives both the transliteration and a blunt translation, Baal the Fly. The Latin and Syriac gospels put the fly back in, the King James Version followed them, and English has said Beelzebub ever since without noticing it was repeating an insult.

Ekron itself has been dug. In 1996 the excavators at Tel Miqne lifted a royal dedicatory inscription out of the ruins of the temple it had been cut for, five lines naming a ruler of Ekron and the deity the building honoured. The deity is a goddess, Ptgyh, read by some as a Semitic spelling of the Greek potnia, lady. The stone was carved perhaps two centuries after Ahaziah’s messengers walked that road, and Baal-zebub is not on it. He is not on anything recovered from Ekron. The one god of Ekron the Bible bothers to name is the one Ekron’s own surviving royal inscription does not.

By the first century the name had stopped belonging to Ekron at all. In Mark, scribes come down from Jerusalem to explain away a man who is emptying people of unclean spirits faster than anyone can account for, and the explanation they settle on is that he works for management. He has Beelzeboul. He drives out demons by the prince of demons. The reply is a piece of cold logic that has outlived the quarrel that produced it: a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, and if Satan is casting out Satan then Satan is already finished. Nobody in the passage stops to explain who Beelzeboul is. Everyone in the room evidently knew. The name in that form appears nowhere in surviving Jewish or Christian writing before that moment, which leaves the prince of demons walking into the record fully grown, with no childhood.

The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text of the early Christian centuries that presents itself as the king’s own account of building the Temple with conscripted demons, finally gives him a career. Solomon hands his ring to the demon Ornias and sends him to fetch the prince of all the demons. Ornias throws the ring against Beelzeboul’s chest and tells him the king is calling. Beelzeboul cries out once in a voice the text calls mighty, shoots out a great burning flame, gets up and comes. Under questioning he names himself the exarch of the demons and says every other demon has its seat close to his. Later Solomon sits him on a raised chair of honour, a courtesy extended to no other spirit in the book, and asks why he is alone. The answer is the nearest thing Beelzebub has to an origin: I alone am left of the angels of heaven that came down, for I was the first angel in the first heaven.

Asked what his employment is, he does not hedge. He destroys kings. He allies himself with foreign tyrants. He plants his own demons among people so that they will be believed in and their believers lost. Priests and faithful men he works into lust, heresy and lawless acts. He puts envy into people, and murder, and war, and he intends to destroy the world. He also volunteers, without being pressed, that he has a child living in the Red Sea who comes up to report to him and whom he supports. Offered a respite from questioning, he trades a piece of celestial gossip: burn gum and incense and sea-bulb with nard and saffron, light seven lamps at dawn, and you will see the heavenly dragons winding along, dragging the chariot of the sun.

He is not invincible in his own text, which is the genuinely interesting part. The ring compels him. A name breaks him, and he says so himself, admitting that he disappears at once at the sound of the holy name the Greeks write as Emmanuel. And in one of the more satisfying scenes in the whole literature of demons, Solomon sets the prince of hell to sawing Theban marble, and the other demons gather outside and howl aloud for their king while the blade rasps on.

For most of his history he had no appearance whatsoever. Scripture gives him none. The Testament gives him a shout and a flame and nothing to look at. Milton put him second in hell, wrote that none but Satan sat higher, and made him a statesman rather than a monster: a pillar of state rising to speak, deliberation cut deep into his face, shoulders like Atlas built to carry the weight of the mightiest monarchies. The fly waited until 1863, when Louis Le Breton drew him for the illustrated Dictionnaire Infernal and took the name at its word. What he produced is not a cartoon devil but an insect rendered with an entomologist’s patience: long pinching mandibles, wings thin as paper carrying a pale skull and crossbones, and eyes that are unmistakably a person’s. It is the most reproduced image of Beelzebub on earth and it is barely older than the telephone.

The demonologists could never agree what he was the demon of, either. The Lanterne of Light, an English Lollard tract from around 1409, filed him under envy. Peter Binsfeld in 1589 said gluttony. Sebastien Michaelis, an exorcist writing in 1612, gave him pride and ranked him among the three greatest of the fallen alongside Lucifer and Leviathan. Francis Barrett later made him prince of idolatry. Johann Weyer has him leading a revolt against the Devil and winning it. Nobody has ever agreed on what he is.

The name did real damage on its way through. It surfaced at Aix-en-Provence in 1611 in the possession of the nun Madeleine de Demandolx de la Palud, an affair that ended with her confessor Gaufridi tortured and executed. It came up over and over at Salem, and when the trials were finished Cotton Mather sat down and wrote a pamphlet called Of Beelzebub and his Plot. Whatever the god of Ekron had actually been, by then he was simply a name available to anyone who needed one, and people died in the space it opened.

What limits him in the end is the same thing that made him. He has no cult anyone can trace, no myth cycle, no iconography that came from a worshipper rather than an enemy. He is a name that gets handed to whatever an age most fears, which is how the same three syllables can hold an oracle at Ekron, a rival exorcist in Galilee, a parliamentarian in hell and a housefly with a death’s head on its wings, and why none of those versions ever manages to finish off the others. When Golding wanted a title for a novel about schoolboys and a rotting pig’s head on a stick, he took the name and did not bother explaining it. He did not have to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Beelzebub?

Beelzebub is a demon known as the Lord of the Flies and, in the New Testament, as the prince of demons. He began as Baal-zebub, a god of the Philistine city of Ekron consulted as an oracle in 2 Kings, and was later absorbed into Jewish and Christian demonology as one of the highest-ranking powers of hell.

What does the name Beelzebub mean?

Read literally, Baal-zebub means “lord of the flies” in Hebrew. Many scholars think it is a deliberate Israelite insult that altered an original Baal-zebul, “Baal the Prince” or “lord of the exalted house”, since zbl is a well-attested Ugaritic title for Baal. The Greek Gospels preserve the form Beelzeboul, while the Latin and Syriac versions restored the fly.

Is Beelzebub the same as Satan?

The Gospels treat them as effectively the same power: when Jesus is accused of casting out demons by Beelzeboul, he answers by talking about Satan casting out Satan. Later Christian tradition usually separates them and ranks Beelzebub second, most famously in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where none but Satan sits higher.

Why is Beelzebub drawn as a giant fly?

The image comes from Louis Le Breton’s illustration for the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, which took the name “Lord of the Flies” literally and drew a huge insect with pinching mandibles, human eyes and a skull and crossbones on its wings. No ancient source describes Beelzebub’s appearance at all.

What are Beelzebub’s powers and weaknesses?

In the Testament of Solomon he claims to destroy kings, ally with tyrants, spread false worship, corrupt priests and stir up envy, murder and war, and he commands every lesser demon. His weaknesses in that same text are Solomon’s ring, which compels him to appear, and the divine name rendered as Emmanuel, at which he says he vanishes instantly.

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Baal, Hadad, Dagon, Anat, Asherah, Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan, Lilith, Onoskelis, Angels, Demons, Shaitan