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.
commonly signifies awakening out of ordinary sleep (Zech. 4:1) or out of the
sleep of death (Job 14:12). In Job 31:29, it expresses the idea of “being excited” or
“stirred up”: “If I … lifted up myself when evil found him.…” This verb is found several
times in the Song of Solomon, for instance, in contrast with
&
“I sleep, but my heart
waketh …” (5:2). It is found three times in an identical phrase: “… that you stir not up,
nor awake my love, till he please” (Song of Sol. 2:7; 3:5; 8:4).
B
BAAL, MASTER
(
, 1167), “master; baal.” In Akkadian, the noun
$
(“lord”) gave rise to
the verb
$
(“to rule”). In other northwest Semitic languages, the noun
differs
somewhat in meaning, as other words have taken over the meaning of “sir” or “lord.” (Cf.
Heb.
.) The Hebrew word
seems to have been related to these homonyms.
The word
occurs 84 times in the Hebrew Old Testament, 15 times with the
meaning of “husband” and 50 times as a reference to a deity. The first occurrence of the
noun
is in Gen. 14:13: “And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the
Hebrew; for he dwelt in the plain of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and brother
of Aner: and these were confederate with [literally, "
of a covenant with”] Abram.”
The primary meaning of
is “possessor.” Isaiah’s use of
in parallel with
qanah clarifies this basic significance of
&
“The ox knoweth his owner [
%
], and
the ass his master’s [
] crib: but Israel does not know, my people doth not consider”
(Isa. 1:3). Man may be the owner [ba’al] of an animal (Exod. 22:10), a house (Exod.
22:7), a cistern (Exod. 21:34), or even a wife (Exod. 21:3).
A secondary meaning, “husband,” is clearly indicated by the phrase
/
(literally, “owner of the woman”). For example: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with
child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely
punished, according as the woman’s husband [
/
] will lay upon him; and
he shall pay as the judges determine” (Exod. 21:22). The meaning of
is closely
related to
(“man”), as is seen in the usage of these two words in one verse: “When the
wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband [
] was dead, she mourned for her husband
[
]” (2 Sam. 11:26).
The word
with another noun may signify a peculiar characteristic or quality:
“And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh” (Gen. 37:19); the
KJV
offers
a literal translation of the Hebrew—“master of dreams”—as an alternative.
Thirdly, the word
may denote any deity other than the God of Israel. Baal was a
common name given to the god of fertility in Canaan. In the Canaanite city of Ugarit,