Baal-Peor

Lord of the Gates of Hell

Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied,
and never satisfied are the eyes of man.
— Proverbs 27:20 (ESV)

During the Exodus, one of the more unusual confrontations between Hebrews faithful to Yahweh and those who preferred a more tolerant view of the pagan religions they encountered occurred in the plains of Moab, the fertile area northeast of the Dead Sea, across the Jordan from Jericho.

While Israel lived in Shittim, the people began to whore with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And the Lordsaid to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people and hang them in the sun before the Lord, that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel.” And Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Each of you kill those of his men who have yoked themselves to Baal of Peor.”

And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Midianite woman to his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping in the entrance of the tent of meeting. When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand.
— Numbers 25:1–9

This requires some unpacking. To our twenty-first-century minds, the reaction of Phinehas seems excessive. Today, many would call him out for his intolerance and accuse him of xenophobia, racism, or both. To atheists and skeptics, this story makes God out to be a monster, since He obviously approved of Phinehas’ violent act. But that’s because most Americans today, especially those most likely to throw around that kind of epithet, view the world through a naturalistic bias. There is a lot here that’s only obvious if you understand what was happening in the spirit realm.

The first clue that there’s more to this story than is obvious at first read is the description of Phinehas’ killing stroke: He killed both the Israelite prince and the Midianite princess with one thrust of his spear. Putting it delicately, there are only a couple of physical positions in which Phinehas could have speared them both with one jab.

There is other evidence in the text that suggests that the sin of the young lovers Zimri and Cozbi was sexual, and “in the sight of all Israel,” no less. The Hebrew word translated “belly,” qevah, means the lower abdomen and can refer to the womb or pubic region,^[1] which implies that Phinehas caught the young couple in the act. The word translated “chamber” in the ESV (other translations use “tent” or “pavilion”), qubbah, appears only here in the Old Testament. The passage is a bit obscure, but the sense is that the couple were engaged in some rite to the Baal of Peor, possibly a fertility ritual. So, what do we know about this pagan deity?

This is an excerpt from our 2024 book The Gates of Hell. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish it here at no charge. If you want to own a copy, it’s available in paperback, as a Kindle e-book, and as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible.

The name Baal-Peor is a title that means “lord of Peor.” The location of Peor isn’t known exactly, but based on the account in Numbers 23 it had to be near Mount Nebo where Moses got his only look at the Holy Land.^[2] On a clear day, present-day visitors to Nebo can see the Dead Sea, Jericho, and the Mount of Olives, which is only about twenty-five miles away. Shittim, or Abel-Shittim, was the name given to the place of the Israelite camp on the Plains of Moab, directly below the western slope of Mount Nebo. Shittim means “acacia,” the desert tree that provided the wood of the Ark of the Covenant. It’s a hardy plant that survives where most other vegetation can’t because of its resistance to drought and tolerance for salt water.

A team led by Dr. Steven Collins of Trinity Southwest University excavated at a site in Jordan between 2005 and 2023 that overlooks the ancient Plains of Moab. Dr. Collins is convinced that this site, Tall el-Hammam, is the biblical Sodom. Based on its estimated population, it would have been the largest city in the southern Levant in the time of Abraham, second only to Hazor north of the Sea of Galilee.

The evidence suggests that it was destroyed around 1700 BC by an air blast like the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia.^[3] Soil samples taken from the lower city revealed a high concentration of salts and sulphates in the ash layer from the city’s destruction. The chemical composition of those salts and sulphates was “virtually identical to the chemical composition of Dead Sea water.”^[4] So, whatever exploded over the north end of the Dead Sea around the time of Abraham had enough force to spray brine over the lower part of the city. The blast was devastating—the lower city was built on a hill seventy-five feet above the Jordan valley eight miles northeast of the Dead Sea!

Investigation of the plain itself, the Kikkar, found that salt had poisoned the ground there for centuries. It was at least six hundred years, around the time of Saul, David, and Solomon, before agriculture and civilization resumed.^[5]So, when the Israelites arrived on the plains of Moab, it was well named Abel-Shittim, which means either “meadow of acacias” or “acacias of mourning.”^[6] Both definitions of the Hebrew word ʾāḇēl, “meadow” and “mourning,” are appropriate; because of the concentration of Dead Sea salt in the soil, nothing would grow on the plains of Moab except salt-tolerant acacias for another three to four hundred years.^[7]

Additionally, the area east of the Dead Sea, and especially near the ruined city of ancient Sodom,^[8] was believed to be a place where the dead intervened in the affairs of the living. In fact, two stops along the Exodus route in that vicinity refer to places where the veil between worlds was believed to be thin.

And the people of Israel set out and camped in Oboth. And they set out from Oboth and camped at Iye-abarim, in the wilderness that is opposite Moab, toward the sunrise.
— Numbers 21:10–11

The name of the first, Oboth, derives from ʾôb, which, as we’ve noted, refers to necromancy, the practice of summoning and consulting with spirits of the dead.^[9] This suggests that the site had a reputation for supernatural activity, or was perhaps a center for the cult of the dead.

This is a controversial topic among Christians. Those of us who take the Bible seriously are inclined to believe that there’s no such thing as ghosts. But there is nothing in the biblical account to suggest that the spirit who delivered God’s message to Saul was anything but the ghost of Samuel—who, it’s important to note, was called an elohim as he emerged from the earth.^[10]

“Elohim” is not a proper name, and it doesn’t refer specifically to “gods.” It’s a designator of place, like “American” or “New Yorker.” Spirits live in the spirit realm, but not all spirits are equal. Some are archangels and others are demons, but all are spirits. In the same way, spirits are all elohim, even the spirits of dead humans, but there is only one capital-E Elohim.

But this goes deeper. ʾÔb, in turn, is related to the Hebrew word ʾab, which means “father.” In the Old Testament, the word “fathers” often refers to one’s dead ancestors. For example:

And when the time drew near that Israel [Jacob] must die, he called his son Joseph and said to him, “If now I have found favor in your sight, put your hand under my thigh and promise to deal kindly and truly with me. Do not bury me in Egypt, but let me lie with my fathers [ăbōṯ].
— Genesis 47:29–30

Looking at all of this in context, we can safely say that Oboth, one of the stations of the Exodus named in Numbers 21:10–11 and Numbers 33:43–44, essentially means “Spirits of the Dead.”^[11]

The other location mentioned in those verses, Iye-abarim (or “ruins of the Abarim”), is based on the same root. Abarim is the anglicized form of ōbĕrîm, a plural form of the verb ʿbr, which means “to pass from one side to the other.”^[12] In this context, it refers to a spirit that passes from one plane of existence to another, or crosses over, in the same sense that the ancient Greeks believed that the dead traveled across the River Styx to reach or return from the underworld.

The placement of Oboth and Iye-abarim in Numbers 33 suggests that they were east of the Dead Sea, close to Mount Nebo and the Plains of Moab. This is confirmed by the proximity of Shittim to Beth-Peor. And that’s a name that needs a deeper dive.

Peor is related to the Hebrew root p’r, which means “cleft” or “gap,” or “open wide.”^[13] In this context, that’s consistent with Isaiah’s description of the entrance to the netherworld:

Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened [pa’ar] its mouth beyond measure.
— Isaiah 5:14

This is similar to the Canaanite conception of their god of death, Mot, who was described in Ugaritic texts as a ravenous entity with a truly monstrous mouth:

He extends a lip to the earth, a lip to the heavens, he extends a tongue to the stars.^[14]

It appears, then, that Baal-Peor was the “lord of the entrance to the netherworld,” or, perhaps, “lord of the gates of hell.” So, Beth-Peor, the “house (or temple) of the entrance to the netherworld,” was near the plains of Moab and Mount Nebo, which God called “this mountain of the Abarim.”^[15]

All of this leads to the real reason God was angry with the Israelites when they camped at Shittim. Contrary to the impression given in the Book of Numbers, the worship of Baal-Peor was not about sexual fertility rites:

Then they yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor,
and ate sacrifices offered to the dead;
they provoked the Lord to anger with their deeds,
and a plague broke out among them.
Then Phinehas stood up and intervened,
and the plague was stayed.
— Psalm 106:28–30, emphasis added

Writing four hundred years after the incident at Shittim, the psalmist didn’t even mention the young couple caught in the act by Phinehas. It was eating sacrifices offered to the dead—an effort to open the gates of hell and communicate directly with the gods of the netherworld.

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^[1] Barry, J. D., Mangum, D., Brown, D. R., Heiser, M. S., Custis, M., Ritzema, E., … Bomar, D., Faithlife Study Bible [Nu 25:8] (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).

^[2] King Balak of Moab took the prophet Balaam to Peor, where he was able to see the tribes of Israel camping on the Plains of Moab.

^[3] Phillip J. Silvia, “The 3.7kaBP Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization.” American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting (Denver, November 17, 2018), p. 1.

^[4] Ibid., p. 3.

^[5] Ibid., p. 1.

^[6] Based on Strong’s Hebrew H58, “grassy meadow or plain,” or H57, “lamenting:—mourn(-er, -ing).”

^[7] T.E. Bunch, M.A. LeCompte, A.V. Adedeji, et al. “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea.” Scientific Reports 11, 18632 (2021), p. 48.

^[8] Collins and Scott, op. cit.

^[9] Joseph Tropper, “Spirit of the Dead.” In K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, & P. W. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd extensively rev. ed.) (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), p. 806.

^[10] 1 Samuel 28:13.

^[11] Spronk (1986), op. cit., p. 229.

^[12] Klaas Spronk, “Travellers.” In K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, & P. W. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible(2nd extensively rev. ed.) (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), p. 876.

^[13] Klaas Spronk, “Baal of Peor.” In K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, & P.W. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd extensively rev. ed.) (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), p. 147.

^[14] KTU 1.5, ii, 1. In Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit (2nd ed.) (London; New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), p. 120.

^[15] Deuteronomy 32:49.