Deity · Canaanite · c. 1400 BCE
Baal Hadad
Also called Ba'al, Hadad, Baal-Zebul, Rider of the Clouds
The Canaanite storm and fertility god who defeats Sea and Death — and whose title, *baal* ('lord'), the Hebrew Bible turns into a generic term for false gods.
Well sourced
The Baal Cycle gives him a full mythology: he defeats Yam, the Sea, is swallowed by Mot, Death, and returns with the rains. He is called *zbl b'l arṣ*, 'prince, lord of the earth'. This is the origin of Beelzebub — 'Baal-Zebul', prince Baal, deliberately misvocalised in Hebrew as *Baal-Zebub*, lord of the flies, to make the title an insult. Almost the entire vocabulary of biblical idolatry is Baal's, and the Goetia's Bael, first of the seventy-two, is the far end of the same chain.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
*Baal* is simply 'lord' or 'master', a title rather than a name; *Hadad* is the name proper. The Hebrew Bible uses the title alone, which turns a specific god into a generic idol.
Where it was actually worshipped
Ugarit, Tyre, Sidon, and across the Levant. Carmel, where Elijah confronts his prophets, was one of his high places.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) · c. 1400-1200 BCE
- Named there as
- Ba'lu / Haddu
- Rank
- Storm God
- Pantheon
- Canaanite
- Order
- Ugaritic pantheon
- Base of operations
- Ugarit, Tyre, Sidon, and across the Levant. Carmel, where Elijah confronts his prophets, was one of his high places.
- Era
- c. 1400 BCE
- Traditions
- Canaanite & Ugaritic
- Placed in
- The Deliverance Taxonomy
Traits
- Domain
- Storm, rain, fertility, kingship
- Element
- Air and water
- Traditional form
- A striding warrior with a thunderbolt-spear and a bull's horns
- Sacred animal
- Bull
3 sites
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
now Saida
33.562, 35.373 · Pleiades 678393
now es-Sur
33.269, 35.202 · Pleiades 678437
now Mt. Carmel
A high place of Baal, and where 1 Kings has Elijah confront his prophets.
One of his high places, and the setting of the contest in 1 Kings 18.
32.730, 35.050 · Pleiades 678084
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Baal Hadad, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
- malefic1
- material1
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Baal Hadad, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 900 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Ba'lu / Haddu, Baal
- Rank: given as Prince, lord of the earth; False god
Defeats Yam the Sea, builds his palace, is swallowed by Mot and returns; gives the rains.
“Our king is Mightiest Baal, our judge, and there is none above him.”
Reduced from a named deity to the generic idol; his prophets are defeated at Carmel.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Opposes Mot
Swallowed by Death and returned with the rains.
Identified with Zeus
Equated directly in the Hellenistic period as Zeus Kasios and Jupiter Heliopolitanus.
Serves El
Baal must obtain El's permission to build his palace.
Opposes Yam
Struck down with the clubs Yagrush and Ayamur.
Ancestor of Beelzebub
Baal-Zebul, 'prince Baal', deliberately misvocalised in Hebrew as Baal-Zebub, 'lord of the flies'.
Ancestor of Bael
The first spirit of the Goetia carries the bare title 'lord' as a personal name, three thousand years downstream.
Identified with Moloch
Baal Hammon at Carthage is the likely referent of the classical child-sacrifice accounts.
Commanded by Dagon
Baal is called the son of Dagan in the Ugaritic texts.
Identified with Susanoo
Storm gods who kill a many-headed serpent; the Japanese case is independent of the Near Eastern one.
Ancestor of Adramelech
A Sepharvite god of the Baal type, made chancellor of hell by early-modern demonology.
Ancestor of Baalberith
Baal-berith, 'lord of the covenant', a god of Shechem before he was made hell's notary.
Ancestor of Rimmon
The Aramean storm god of Damascus, later given a diplomatic posting by de Plancy.
Served by Jezebel
Maintains the prophets of Baal at the royal table.
Opposed by Asherah
Paired with Baal in the biblical polemic and in territorial-spirits writing, though at Ugarit she is El's consort rather than his.
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
His title supplies more demon names than any other single source: Beelzebub, Baalberith, Belphegor, the Goetic Bael, and the generic 'Baals' of the biblical polemic.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Baal Hadad?
Is Baal Hadad the same as Zeus?
What rank is Baal Hadad?
How else is Baal Hadad spelled?
What is Baal Hadad said to do?
How old is Baal Hadad?
Nearest in the corpus
If Baal Hadad is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Anat
Warrior Goddess · Canaanite
Baal's sister and avenger. She grinds Death himself to pieces and sows him in a field, which makes her the most violent figure in the Ugaritic corpus.
Astarte
Goddess of Love and War · Canaanite
The West Semitic goddess of love and war, cognate with Ishtar — and the direct ancestor of the Goetic duke Astaroth, who kept the name and lost the gender.
Chemosh
God of Moab · Canaanite
National god of Moab, known from the Bible and from the Mesha Stele — where a Moabite king describes his own history in language almost identical to Israel's.
El
Father of the Gods · Canaanite
The aged high god who presides over the assembly at Ugarit — and whose name is one of the Hebrew Bible's own words for God.
Lotan
Chaos Serpent · Canaanite
The seven-headed sea-serpent slain in the Baal Cycle, described in language Isaiah reuses almost verbatim for Leviathan.
Mot
God of Death · Canaanite
Death itself as a god, with a throat wide enough to swallow Baal. The later mouth-of-hell is this image, several cultures downstream.
The books behind Baal Hadad
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets)
Anonymous; recovered at Ras Shamra · c. 1400-1200 BCE · Ugaritic
Read The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) in full ↗Cover: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Unknown artist · Wikimedia file page
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.