4 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. XII 



Phoenician. In the time of Lihth the Phoenicians may or may 

 not have completed their migration overland from the lower Red 

 Sea district to the coast of Palestine. At all events they pre- 

 sumably maintained trade routes by sea or caravan along the 

 coast. A Ba-al is merely a leading man, a captain, governor, 

 anybody above the rank and file. This particular Ba-al, Samael, 

 is beyond much doubt the man who appears in the Old Testament 

 as Baalzebub, and in the New Testament as Beelzebub The 

 word sebul is Phoenician adopted into Hebrew. It means rad- 

 ically any elevation of ground, big or small. In Phoenicia this 

 man was presumably lord of a mountain. In Hebrew, where he 

 was to be spoken of only with contempt, he becomes master of 

 a dunghill. Commentators of all ages have not overlooked that 

 a manure pile is the breeding place of flies. In the New Testa- 

 ment only Beelzebul appears as a devil, not easily differentiated 

 from Satan. The word zebub is also Phoenician, but it is also 

 Hebrew from Exodus downward. It is most frequently trans- 

 lated "flies," but quite probably includes all pestiferous insects. 

 It occurs in four connections in the Old Testament, invariably 

 as flies or the equivalent in other languages. There are the dead 

 flies which cause the ointment to stink (Ecclesiastes) ; in Isaiah, 

 "the Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part of 

 the rivers of Egypt." For the references from Exodus one 

 must await the paper on the Plague of Arob. Schindler's " Bib- 

 lische Lexicon " defines zebub as winged insects including Culex, 

 Vespa, CEstrum, and Crabro. Others define it more broadly to 

 include terrible things such as lions, tigers and scorpions. 



The earliest Biblical allusion to Beelzebub is in 2 Kings. Here 

 he is the false god of Ekron, whom children of Israel ran to in- 

 voke, just as they frequently worshipped a golden calf or other 

 false divinity, meriting the rebuke of the orthodox. Inasmuch 

 as Beelzebub is to appear as a devil, with home in Hell, and, as 

 in Greek mythology Acheron is the river flowing around the boun- 

 daries of Hades, one naturally wonders whether the resemblance 

 between the two words is accidental, or whether the origin of the 

 myths is not similar. There is a passage in Pliny, the Roman 

 bibliographer of natural history, first century A. D., mentioning 

 the Cyreneans (a Greek colony on Phoenician soil) invoking the 



