Baal started as an ordinary word for owner, and still means husband
Before Baal was a god, baʿal was simply a Semitic title meaning owner or lord. It became the favoured name of the storm god Hadad, perhaps because his true name was too holy to say. The same word survives today as the everyday Hebrew term for husband, and Arabic uses its cousin the same way.
Across Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Amorite and Aramaic, baʿal meant owner and by extension master or husband, with relatives in Akkadian bēlu and Arabic baʿl. Used as a divine title, it could refer to many gods, so context had to show which one was meant. By the third millennium BC it appears as a proper name in a god list from Abu Salabikh. Most scholars equate this Lord with Hadad, suggesting the title replaced a name reserved for the high priest, just as Bel stood in for Marduk and Adonai for Yahweh.
Texts from Ugarit portray him as a weather god commanding lightning, wind and rain. Dry summers were explained as his time in the underworld, and the autumn storms that revived the fields marked his return. That fitted Canaan's reliance on rain rather than on great rivers like the Nile, and Levantine Arabic still calls rain-fed farmland Ba'al land. His titles included rider of the clouds, echoed in Zeus the cloud-gatherer, and his epic, the Baal Cycle, pits him against Yammu the sea and Mot, death. He battled serpents including Lotan, the biblical Leviathan.
Phoenician colonists carried his worship across the Mediterranean in the early 1st millennium BC, and before Ugarit's rediscovery his many epithets were thought to name different gods. In Carthage, Baal Hammon became the supreme deity, probably after ties with Tyre weakened following the Battle of Himera in 480 BC, and he was linked with the ram rather than the bull.
The Hebrew Bible uses the word about 90 times, generally for rival gods, and in 1 Kings the prophet Elijah challenges Jezebel's priests in a contest to bring down fire. Christianity and Islam inherited that hostility, turning him into demons such as Beelzebub, and during the Reformation Protestants stretched Baal to mean any idol.
Source: Baal
