Now Ahaziah had fallen through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria and injured himself. So he sent messengers, saying to them, “Go and consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, to see if I will recover from this injury.” – 2 Kings 1:2

Today’s Scripture Reading (December 7, 2019): 2 Kings 1

The “Lord of the Flies” is a Nobel Prize-winning novel written by William Golding. The book follows the adventures of a group of boys who are marooned on an island during an unspecified war. It is about their struggle to form a civilization on the island, but it ends up as a story of a group of boys who are stranded in paradise but transform their beautiful surroundings into a descent into savagery, regressing into a primitive state. The title of the book is taken from 2 Kings 1 and the name of the Philistine god, Baal-Zebub. Baal means Lord, and Zebub means flies.  Ahaziah of Israel (there was also an Ahaziah of Judah) was literally wanting to discern his future from the “Lord of the Flies.”

Or maybe not. There is a second interpretation, which makes a little more sense, at least to me. Transcribing ancient documents, especially in ancient times, which could mean more than twenty years ago, was all done by hand. That is why translations are weighted. A little while ago, I argued with a “King James Only” bible scholar who insisted that just because the King James Version was based on later documents, in this case the Latin Vulgate, which itself is a translation, does not mean that it is not accurate. Which is true? But as anyone who has played the “Telephone Game” (you know, sit in a circle and whisper a phrase to the person sitting next to you and let the message go around the circle and see what the message is when it gets back to the original message giver) at a party knows, the more people involved in a process, the higher the likelihood that error will be introduced somewhere in the translation. That is why translators weight the earlier documents heavier than later ones.

So when it comes to Baal-Zebub, the theory is that somewhere in antiquity, one letter might have been changed. It actually wouldn’t have been all that hard because 2 Kings 1 is the only place in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible where this “Lord of the Flies” is mentioned.  So, according to this line of thought, it was the last letter that was changed during the transcribing of the document. The god of Ekron was not Baal-Zebub, but rather Baal-Zebul, which turns “Lord of the Flies” to the “Lord of the Heavenly Dwelling.” If this is true, then Baal-Zebul was likely intended to mock the Israelites and their God, who they believed dwelled in heaven.

But whether the god of Ekron was Lord of the flies or the Heavenly Dwelling, it was this God that Ahaziah wanted to inquire of as to his future health. We have changed the name a little further, calling him Beelzebub, chief among the demons who roam the earth. Oh, and while the King James Version calls him Beelzebub in the Christian Testament, the New International Version opts for Beelzebul.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Kings 2