1. the chief of the gods of the Phoenicians and Canaanites
2. in Christianity, one of Satan's demons
3. in early Judiasm, Yahweh himself
4. [pej.] Catholic icons and saints
► uses
Uses:
He spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheat and tares. He believed in slaying the prophets of Baal.
Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart, p.184 (1958)
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the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most civilised commercial people of the world in their time, as the English are now, gave their own children to be burnt alive as victims to Baal.
Grant Allen. The British Barbarians
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When a flood inundated the temple of Baal, the Malachites decided Baal wasn’t such a hot god anyway.
Stephen King. The Stand (1990)
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during the agitation on the Catholic Question many had given up the “Pioneer”— which had a motto from Charles James Fox and was in the van of progress — because it had taken Peel’s side about the Papists, and had thus blotted its Liberalism with a toleration of Jesuitry and Baal; but they were illsatisfied with the “Trumpet,” which — since its blasts against Rome, and in the general flaccidity of the public mind (nobody knowing who would support whom)— had become feeble in its blowing.
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped ‘false gods’. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth and the like; probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy.