The Old Testament Prophets Attack on Baal as a Social & Economic Force
Social, economic, and technological Baalism in the Old Testament
This essay is a continuation of my last essay “Christ’s Attack On The Temple-Banking System”. I am going to show that Christ had arrived within the religious and political tradition of the Old Testament prophets, which was against all things materialist, empire, and mercantile.
The Old Testament is becoming increasingly obscured, disconnected from it’s context, and forgotten. Jesus was a descendent of the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament, which is a politically and socially anti-materialist view. This view takes great concern with social and economic injustice on helpless people. In this essay I am going to show the contemporary relevance of the Old Testament prophets in their dissent against the materialism of Baal and Baalism.
Baal was a merchant cult network in the ancient world, most present among the Canaanites (Canaanite was synonymous for “merchant”) of northern Israel. Northern Israel was an urban and industrial-agrarian economy who traded with the Phoenician merchant states and other economic territories. Baal was known as a “fertility god”, who would bless his people with strong crop cycles if honored with rituals and sacrifices. Temple prostitution for fertility rituals and child sacrifice were part of harnessing the power of the agricultural-weather god. This social and economic order of Baalism was centered around self-empowerment and required an army of diviners, necromancers, and fortune tellers to politically propagate itself.
Baalism was focused on controlling the supernatural world to maximize economic output. Whether it was controlling the weather, predicting the future, or practicing magic, the goal was to subjugate nature for self-empowerment. Rites and rituals also served as a cover to absorb irrational economic mechanisms. Child sacrifice could cut down on mouths to feed in times of economic malfunction, or serve as a solution to impregnating a temple prostitute.
Modern industrial technology used as a tool of economic control is just one reassertion of Baalism in the present day. Federally-funded weather modification technology is the realization of supernatural weather control. Mass data fed to algorithms is used to predict the future as the diviners once tried, and the pharmaceutical monopoly encourages population control as the institution of human sacrifice did. Increasingly complex methods of finance allow for the artificial enforcement of value in trade. All of these mechanisms are required to manage a system founded on irrational self-empowerment for the cryptocracy. In this way, much of the planet has been turned into a sacrificial altar to Baal. The golden age of prophecy began as reaction against these Faustian-Promethean mechanisms by re-asserting the Divine Law and Divine Providence.
Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson writes:
The sacrifice of children existed as a means of securing success, as in America, where abortion is a sacrifice to secure personal success and “career advancement.” The technophilia of Baalism itself demands sacrifice, as seen in America, where the advent of the automobile and the superhighway has led to an estimated 1.2 million deaths per year worldwide, about the size of the population of Nebraska.
The first distinction that must be made is that most of the prophets resided in the southern kingdom of Judea and not northern Israel. Southern Judea could be viewed as a rural-pastoral society while Northern Israel was an industrial cosmopolitan society. King David first united the rural Hebrew tribes and the cosmopolitan Canaanites under one nation called “Israel”. Shortly after, under the reign of Solomon’s monarchy (David’s son), Israel adopted “monopoly capitalism”, or what we may call today “globalism”.
King Solomon embraced occultism and legalized the worship of Baal in Israel, which was more compatible with the empire’s new economics. This led to the erosion of the old social code, and to the suppression of the God of the prophets. Baal was subversively mixed with the prophet’s God to accommodate the “old believers” within the economic engine. A civil war followed King Solomon’s death where Judea became it’s own kingdom separate from Israel. Later on, Judea fell under the same corruption as Israel.
The prophets opposed the social and economic degeneration under Baalism, as well as the corrupted religious institution of state-propagandists they called “False Prophets”. The Biblical prophets were often attacked by kings, priests, and mobs for counter-signaling their prosperity message. Jesus referenced this saying “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee”.
False Prophets were employed by kings at the Jerusalem Temple to work as state propagandists. As I pointed out in my last essay, the Jerusalem temple was also a bank (and Baal was printed on the coins at the bank in Jesus’ time). These paid prophets tended to be diviners, fortune tellers, and dream interpreters. Jezebel even imported 850 prophets of Baal to accommodate her new financial system in Israel, before being defeated by Elijah’s military insurgency.
The social backgrounds of the four major prophets and twelve minor prophets varied widely, from rural sheep herders, to aristocrats, to military leaders. All took major concern of the social and spiritual erosion happening under the merchant-materialist reign, both locally and internationally. All of them wished to separate Baal from God, and reach the small remnant of people who still had the “ears to hear”.
The first prophet Amos, a peasant herdsman from rural Judea, appeared in reaction against the social degeneration during the new Victorian age that had begun in Israel. Amos condemns religious and political institutions for implementing permanent poverty on it’s people through usurious loans, land grabs, and the importation of foreign gods. He accuses political leaders of taking bribes, sacrificing to Molech (Assyrian star god), and driving the wise into hiding. He is harsh on the middle class who are apathetically enjoying the “comfort” of this situation as well. Jesus nearly paraphrases him in condemning the Pharisees for “devouring the homes of widows”.
Amos’ slogan was “The day of the Lord will be a day of darkness, not light”, continually mocking the nation’s “prosperity gospel” propaganda. After telling the kings, priests, and normies of Israel that they were effectively doomed and cursed by God, Amos asserts that there is a universal God and a universal divine law known to all nations, and that the Israelites are not exempt from this law:
7 Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir? - Amos 9:7
Amos undoubtedly puts a strong emphasis on universal social justice (in the true sense of the term) as being in accordance with the divine law. He was banned from Bethel after accurately prophesying the destruction of Israel (this came about through an Assyrian invasion and an earthquake), which is why he wrote his message down to later be added in The Bible.
Although the prophets were against the top-down oppression of poor and helpless people, they had little populist sympathies. By the time Amos began preaching (800 B.C.), they considered much of the population to be as corrupt as the people who were oppressing them, “like people, like priest”, says Micah.
Isaiah the aristocrat, condemns society from top to bottom in comparing Judea and Israel to Sodom and Gomorrah. He notes infantile adults, neighbors hating each other, status signaling, domineering women, oppression of the poor, drunken delusions, real estate scams, and more. He describes the arrogant seductive women who take pride in their fashion accessories, and tells them their male providers will perish (Isaiah 3:16-26). This connects to Amos calling the elite trend-setting women “Cows of Bashan”, who use their husband’s power to wreak havoc on the poor.
The prophet’s battle against Baal is archetypal, and is part of a larger picture. To them, Baal is the negation of all ethical imperatives. An authentic and holistic society is not possible when the principles of Baalism have been infused into the founding religion of the culture. Only self-interest, power-seeking, and ultimately dysfunction can thrive. Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, says Isaiah.
The prophet’s founding mythos called back to the pastoral pre-commercialized life, before the Davidic monarchy. This is of course connected to the symbol of the lamb, as many of them were sheep herders. Reactionary religious movements like the Nazirites and Rechabites refused to assimilate to the then-modern way of living in Israel, choosing to live in tents like nomads instead. They took vows to not cut their hair or drink wine, as their ancestors did. John the Baptist was a product of this sentiment, who was also executed for disavowing King Herod.
Although the prophets were influenced or sometimes descended from these sentiments, most did not live as nomads. They understood God was present in history no matter what was happening, and they looked forward to the future, even if it was grim.
The prophets have an understanding of God that is moving in a qualitative historical fashion. Meaning the past, present, and future are bound together by a rational telos. Hegel called this the “cunning of reason”, while Giambattista Vico called this “Divine Providence”. God is present within both personal and macro events. This is essentially what the prophets are articulating, that by dismissing the divine law, you are going to be on the irrational side of the rational movement of history.
8 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelations 1:8
Although Baal has returned in full renaissance form, we can take the insights and stories of the Prophets to heart, and know that we are not crazy. I don’t need to go on any further about the archetypal re-manifestations of Baal in the world, if you’re reading this I’m sure you already know. The faithful remnant who has the eyes to see and ears to hear will be eternally vindicated through our hope in Christ. So let’s enjoy what God has given us here, and laugh at the petty delusions of the Baalists as Amos did.
Thanks ;)
References:
R.B.Y. Scott - The Relevance Of The Prophets
Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson -
https://www.rusjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Prophets.pdf
The Bible
Great thinking! Now let's apply it to Amerika Babylon. The evil Free Masonic/deist "Founding Fathers" concocted illegally in 1787 A.D. a weak, corrupt U.S. Constitution (1787 USC) based on BS man's instead of God's LAWS 12 of the 13 colonies lived by. The immoral 1787 USC has no baseline of moral behavior leaving it up to the states to play "bad cop". The 1787 USC is a formula for immoral economic exploitation of the North American continent just like Baal worship aka materialistic comfort during our short under 100 year life spans.