Beelzebub meaning

Meaning

Lord Of The Fly, Lord Of The Flies

Etymology

From (1) the verb בעל (ba'al), to be lord, and (2) the noun זבוב (zebub), fly.

Related names

• Via בעל (ba'al): Ashbel, Baal, Baalah, Baalath, Baalath-beer, Baal-berith, Baale-judah, Baal-gad, Baal-hamon, Baal-hanan, Baal-hazor, Baal-hermon, Baali, Baalis, Baal-meon, Baal-peor, Baal-perazim, Baal-shalishah, Baal-tamar, Baal-zebub, Baal-zephon, Baladan, Bamoth-baal, Bealiah, Bealoth, Bel, Beulah, Bildad, Eshbaal, Ethbaal, Gur-baal, Hannibal, Jerubbaal, Kiriath-baal, Merib-baal

• Via זבוב (zebub): Zabbai

Beelzebul is the English transliteration of the Greek word for Baal-zebub, and Beelzebub is a bit of a hybrid of the two. Beelzebub, or Beelzebul or Beelzeboul, is the New Testament name for satan, a.k.a. διαβολος (diabolos), a.k.a. Lucifer.

The name Beelzebub is used 7 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.

The Greek name Beelzebub consists of two elements. Firstly the common Hebrew word Baal, meaning owner, husband:

The second part of the name Beelzebub comes from the Hebrew noun זבוב (zebub), meaning fly:

Beelzebub literally means Lord Of The Fly but in this case, the singular should be interpreted with an English plural (for instance: the phrase "king of the Amalekites" would in Hebrew be written as "king of the Amalekite").

Beelzebub means Lord Of The Flies but since flies accept no central rule, it's an empty or even mock title. Its Indo-European counterpart is "King of the Jungle," since the jungle is typically ungoverned and thus has no king, and any claim to the "throne" of the jungle is like a claim to dry water or cold fire. It's nonsensical and jocularly contradictory.

There are crucial and essential differences between the Indo-European King of the Jungle and the Semitic Lord of the Flies — but note with some emphasis that the terms "Indo-European" and "Semitic" denote languages, and not people or (God forbid) "races". Anybody is free to move away from their own language and into any other language, and although a first generation immigrant will never quite lose their accent or be able to align their innermost reflexes to the associations that are native to their host language, their children will do better. It takes about four generations to fully blend in.

All languages have inner structure and inner intelligence according to the depth of the patterns of natural relationships between words. And this is so because the etymological links between words also link the corresponding things in observable reality. For instance, in Hebrew, the words for human (אדם, 'adam), agrarian field (אדמה, 'adama), blood (דם, dam), stillness (דממה, demama), and imitation (דמה, dama) are very close etymological cousins (within the formidable root דמם, damam). That means that where the Greek language requires a vast library to explain the correlation between these concepts, the Hebrew language has these patterns baked into the very material, the very core-logic of the language itself, and these insights are axiomatic before any story even starts. In Greek, an author builds a story to try to explain these things. In Hebrew, an author builds a story to show what vast galaxies of wonder follow from an initial understanding of these things.

Said simpler: Hebrew words are like Lego bricks that match perfectly, whereas Greek words have all kinds of shapes, and leave gaps and holes that nothing can fill. A "house" built from Hebrew words is safe and eternal, but a house built from Greek words is neither wind proof nor rain proof and certainly not earthquake proof. In a Hebrew house, the fire is controlled and the spaces are warm and the people invest most of their time in other pursuits than keeping their house together. In a Greek house, the fire is out of control and the spaces are cold and the people spend most of their time patching the roof and buttressing the walls.

That said, the Semitic term Lord of the Flies speaks of guiding living things (irrespective of whether they want to be), whereas the Indo-European King of the Jungle speaks of ruling a territory (or Lebensraum, if you will). The Indo-European idea is material, whereas the Semitic idea is soulical (i.e. pertaining to life). And this has a very simple reason:

As was revealed in the groundbreaking study Men and Things, Women and People: a Meta-Analyses of Sex Differences in Interests (Su, Armstrong, Rounds, 2009), "men prefer working with things and woman prefer working with people." That means that men tend to name things and what things look like relative to other things, and women tend to name people and how people behave relative to other people. Whether a collective language tends to name things or behavior then depends on whether the males are dominant or the females. The Indo-Europeans tended to be patrilocal and formed societies in which brides were imported as adopted daughters into male-dominated super-structures (all men were related and formed a united tribe, whereas all women were first generation immigrants), whereas the Semites were matrilocal and formed societies in which grooms were imported as adopted sons (compare Genesis 2:24 to Romans 8:15) into female-dominated super-structures (see this further discussed in our article on γαμος, gamos, marriage).

A swarm of flies is like a living, but decidedly heartless, cloud of dust and the paradoxical "Lord" of the Flies is the chaotic counterpart of Logos (i.e. natural law that is always One) and represents the bondage that is the opposite of a communal alignment with "the perfect law that gives freedom" (James 1:25; see our article on ελευθερια, eleutheria, freedom-by-law). The Semites believed in governance by enlightenment, whereas the Indo-Europeans believed in governance by law enforcement, which explains why there is a lot of law but no police in the Bible (only teachers and prophets and such).

Indo-Europeans are essentially polytheistic and name things after what they look like (something is like a lion when it looks like a lion). This ultimately leads them to render an identity to shadows or clouds of dust that have no singular consistency. Semites are essentially monotheistic and name things after how they behave (something is like a lion when it acts like a lion). This ultimately leads them to deny (or not even consider) identities of shadows and clouds of dust.

If we would let a hugely powerful computer sort out a vast amount of near-random data, we could let it find any pattern we ask for (just like your favorite PIN or phone number sits intact, somewhere in the billions of digits of pi). If an AI would have access to the entire Internet, including all the scientific papers and all the social media feeds in all the world, and we would ask it to prove that Elvis is alive, that the world is flat or that fascism is the best way to organize the human world, it would prove all those thing with an overwhelming amount of arguments and evidence, beyond the shadow of reasonable or even possible human doubt. That then gets published on the Internet, and lavishly commented upon. And that's going to train the next generation of craziness, until the whole world of human wisdom is inundated with information that has the nutritional value of sugar.

But if we would ask it to use all data and leave nothing out, it would not be able to create any such theory. It would only be able to find that all the relationships between all things add up to One, and that Oneness is the only thing worthy of pursuit and that all other pursuits must inevitably fail. It would begin to identify overlap (in exactly the same way that the one word "apple" overlaps all fruits with some degree of "appleness"), and summarize and compress, until the whole world of human wisdom can be summed up by one single statement. That one single statement is what the ancients called Logos.

Any form of polytheism will always result in the complete disintegration of all meaning. Any degree of polytheism must always become a raging fire of madness. Only One is eternal.

Indo-Europeans think that darkness is the opposite of light. Semites understand that darkness is not the opposite but the absence of light, and not the presence of something else. Semites, understand that light is substantial (it is a thing) but darkness is not substantial (it is not a thing). From light (more correctly: photonic energy) comes matter, and light (more correctly: virtual electromagnetic radiation) holds all things together (Colossians 1:16-17). Darkness does none of that but marks disintegration because of the absence of light but not because of the presence of something else. Light does all the doing. Darkness does nothing. Darkness is what happens when light does something (namely leave). Ergo, darkness is a function of light.

Light builds things, but darkness does not destroy: darkness merely marks the absence of building (and maintaining), not the presence of something else. Darkness, ignorance, hate and selfishness are the absence of light, wisdom, love and kindness, but not the presence of something else. All this helps to explain why Indo-Europeans consistently speak of "heaven and hell", whereas the Semites always speaks of "heaven and earth". It also explains why Indo-Europeans tend to be religious, whereas Semites tend to be scientific.

The idea of a King of the Jungle is the twice-opposite of the idea of the City of God, which is synthetic rather than natural (i.e. jungle), and a republic rather than a monarchy (king). The City of God is "governed" by Logos and thus wholly free and without any domination (1 Corinthians 15:24). The jungle king (and ultimately his idiotic and dark empire) depends on human legislation and rule by force (which is fascism).

Freud famously divided the human mind in compartments like the id, ego and superego, and although that was of course wonderfully creative, he missed the obvious fact that man's mind covers a spectrum whose very fabric changes from one end to the other:

• The ratio consists wholly of words and numbers and is entirely lawful and thus predictable (i.e. algorithmic; its functioning depends on rules that are always the same for everybody), and not in any way lawless and thus unpredictable. Both words and numbers don't exist in nature but are synthetic and exist only in human heads, and only those human heads that agree on how to call things (Matthew 18:20). That means that ratio never sits in a single head, but is always a network of "heads holding hands".
  The unitless or abstract number "3" describes the ratio of six sheep and two sheep (and the sheep are "real" but the ratio is literally imaginary; see our article on δοξα, doxa, meaning "glory" or rather "image-forming" or imagination). Entirely likewise, the word "apple" describes the imaginary ratio of the "appleness" of all real and observable apples. That means that man's celebrated rational consciousness (and thus man's celebrated individual identity) is not a private thing but a communal thing (Ephesians 3:15).
  We humans are humans because we think in words, and the words exist solely by merit of our language, which is a manifestation of our community, our economy of information, which is a technological thing. Language is a perfect socialistic republic (there is no boss and all speakers are equal). And all language is synthetic and technological: speech is where all information technology begins and writing is where information technology culminates. This explains the (sorely underemphasized) technological nature of Paradise.
  The tabernacle, where man and God meet (compare Exodus 19:17 with 25:22), was not a natural but a technological marvel (see Exodus 31:1-6), and the tabernacle became the temple and the temple became the Body of Christ, which means that the Body of Christ is essentially technological. This also explains why mankind is perfected within a city (a technological complex) and not a jungle or a beach resort.
  The earthly profession of Jesus was that of τεκτων (tekton), or "assembler", which is a word closely related to the words "technology" and "textile" and "text", which all describe synthetic things that are artificially woven together from many individual strands (Psalm 139:13). The human κοσμος (kosmos), world, is a machine, and a single human ratio is a node: a farm whose farmer (George from geo, from γη, ge, earth, which is the Indo-European equivalent of the Semitic Adam, from אדמה, adama, arable soil), exists by merit of the greater agricultural world. All the farmers of George's world fence off their private farms from the world at large, and seek animals who willingly show up for domestication, so as to build a peaceful and safe world for all to live in.
• The emotional core of the human mind consists wholly of feelings, which are always private and cannot be shared — when we talk about our feelings, we use words, which aren't emotions; words we can share but feelings we can't. That means that feelings are fundamentally lawless (because law is always communal and feelings never are). And that means that feelings are prisons, and that the many prison and pit stories in the Bible are essentially about the failure of one's words. The famous prisoners Joseph, Daniel, Jeremiah and Paul were all prisoners of the darkness of the people that they were trying to inform.
  Feelings isolate, reason connects. Only words create a common world in which we can truly meet others, but feelings keep us isolated from others and always ignorant of the others' concerns. Better yet: all feelings, including emotions, are physical (see chapter 9 of Being You, Anil Seth, 2021). All feelings, including emotions, stem from physical stimuli within our body. That means that "feeling" joy is essentially the same exercise as stubbing one's toe (or taking drugs); there's nothing "spiritual" about that.
  God meets man in fire that doesn't consume the bush it burns within. "So Moses said, 'I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up'" (Exodus 3:3). The word for "bush", namely סנה (seneh), obviously corresponds to the name Sinai (סיני, sinay), where the Law was issued. Hence, from the bush that securely contained the fire, from the Law, came the tabernacle (a.k.a. the Tent of Meeting, where God meets man), which is technological and lawful (algorithmic, based on rules, predictable), not emotional and lawless (without rules, unpredictable).
  The presence of God is experienced by collective and communal peace and order and thus technology, physical and mental health and other such scientific accomplishments. The presence of God is not experienced in one's elation. One can "feel" only one's own imprisoned self and one's own body. God is experienced solely by the ratio, which is communal and technological. Animals have feelings and emotions, and without ratio (before mankind had developed speech), human beings are animals in the full biological sense of the word, says the Bible on several occasions: Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10. Fortunately for all of us, the bestial emotional core of man's mind in turn consists of two sides:
  • The domesticated beast (see our article on δαμαζω, damazo, to tame or to synchronize), and particularly the riding animal (ιππος, hippos, horse; ονος, onos, donkey). Mentally, the horse represents those essentially not-rational feelings that can nevertheless be made to listen to reason: our sense of art and beauty, our sense of kindness and affection, patience, calmness, selfless generosity, and so on. This is the horse that Indo-European farmer George rides (whereas the Semites are more prone to riding the καμηλος, kamelos, camel).
    The domesticated horse carries and extends George. This is why the term "humanity" extends to the entire human world, including creatures like pink pigs, wooly sheep, dogs and tomatoes and such: such creatures are as human as any song by Taylor Swift (who doesn't create music from scratch, but composes synthetic songs from already existing musical principles). Likewise, the human ratio (that which builds the domus, the οικος, oikos, the house) extends well into the emotional core, so as to also include "domesticated" feelings.
  • The serpent (see δρακων, drakon, snake or dragon), which are the base and limbic feelings that cannot be domesticated or governed: anger, lust, desire, selfishness, hate, and which are often poisonous and fanged. The snake slithers past any obstacle that isn't perfectly impassable (Luke 16:26) and can't be reasoned with or even enticed. It cannot even be killed because the desire to kill it is precisely what helps it feed. Snakes literally see body heat and thus excitement and zeal and anger, which means that stoic calmness is the only cloak (Romans 16:20). The only way to outmaneuver the snake is to expose it to pure and unemotional ratio.
    The seat of the snake is in the serpentine coils of the bowels in the κοιλια (koilia), belly (see Philippians 3:19), which explains why encounters with the snake often are accompanied by eating: Genesis 3:6, Matthew 4:1-2. The snake was created along with the rest of perfect Paradise, but it can never be allowed to escape one's private prison and join up and entice people to bundle their collective feelings into a fascistic mob. Unlike Indo-European George (or Egyptian Horus, or Greek Bellerophon or English Beowulf) the Semitic Jesus put the emotional snake behind him, not by slaying him violently but by reciting the perfectly rational Scriptures.
    When the Indo-European Longinus aimed to stir up the snake by stabbing Jesus in the side (the belly, the seat of the snake) with his λογχη (logche), spear-head, out came water and blood but no feces (compare John 19:34 to Judges 3:22; both smoke and feces demonstrate an incomplete combustion and hence inefficiency and greed). But the whole of Jesus resurrected, and the first thing he did after that was eat an οψαριον (opsarion), a bit of prepared fish, to demonstrate that his bowels were in perfect working order (hence also Matthew 26:26-29 and 1 Corinthians 11:17-34).

Stephen Hawking once famously asked "what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" And that was a very smart question for an Indo-European.

The Semites have known for a while now that fire came first. But it was void and formless and had an entropy of zero. The smarter question then is: how did reason come about, so as to forge a cage for the fire to be captured in? Where did the inflammable bush come from?

The obvious answer: the Logos came from heaven and assumed human form. Does that mean that the Logos existed before the fire, and that the Logos first foolishly let the fire escape and then breathed it into himself so as to become meaningful? No it doesn't, because time is a function of the universe and not the other way around (the universe did not begin at a point in time, but time began at a point in the universe). There is no "before" the beginning (Hawking was right about that), just like you cannot swim out of a pool. Time may seem a formidable dictator, but it's nothing but a mere dimension. Once you know the math, you can run hoops around time.

The Logos is more fundamental than the fire; not in a temporal sense but in a complexity sense. Since the quantum mechanical revolution we know that even zero has margins, which means that there is no such thing as zero entropy, and that the most fundamental quality of the Logos is negative entropy (Matthew 7:12). And that explains why the arrow of evolution is opposite that of time. As Barbra Streisand sang so beautifully, memory, upon which life and consciousness and all information technology is based, is more essentially based on speeds greater than light (i.e. a bit has negative mass). A decrease in entropy must always be paid for. That payment is commonly made by increasing chaos somewhere else in space. But there is no law that prohibits the payment to come from somewhere else in time. There is literally nowhere in spacetime you can go so as to successfully hide from the justice that is the Logos (Psalm 139:7-12). The beginning of the universe is indeed the bottom of an endlessly deep pit. But the cage that came and caught the fire, came from above, not from below (see for more on these complicated things, our article on ταχυς, tachus).

The witnesses of the Logos are a cloud (Hebrews 12:1) but the Logos itself is One and not a cloud: the Ratio of Everything, that ultimately adds up to the singular Theory of Everything. Not the singularity was One (or else it would have remained a singularity) but its description is One, and its description (like Jeff Lebowski's rug) is what ties the whole thing together, has always done so and will always do so, no matter who tries to pee on it.

The universe came out of the singularity of the Big Bang, and that singularity was never compromised, which is why everything that exists can be understood in terms of its relationship to everything else (its ratio to everything). But life started not in a singularity but in a vast cloud of utterly unrelated living creatures that had no means to understand that they were something new and that there were countless others in the space around them. Life began to evolve from the utter heat-death of the first hyper-antisocial generation of living things, and has ever since evolved toward the Attractor of utter unity, which is why our living creatures grew senses and developed communication, formed colonies and cities, devised first human law and then discovered natural law and slowly but surely became the embodiment of their collective understanding of One, having "become partakers of the divine nature", which is One (2 Peter 1:4, Deuteronomy 6:4, Ephesians 4:1-6, John 17:21-23).

So yes, Aristotle's Prime Mover got the whole thing going by shooting off the pinball that is the material universe, but life began in the Diaspora (hence Nazareth) and is forever drawn toward its attractor (John 12:32), which means that the Logos is not material but soulical and thus alive, conscious, intelligent and spiritual.

The first term of the Bible is בראשית (bersheet), which Europeans (Greeks and Latins and modern Bibles) interpret in a material sense as "in the beginning [of the material universe]". The Semitic original, however, speaks not of the but of a, and not of the material world but of a living consciousness that regards the material world. We know since the quantum mechanical revolution that, quite literally, the universe has no form until something, anything at all, "observes" it and prefers one way over another, and the path-integrals of the particles involved collapse into rocks and iPhones and such. The Semites knew that it's not particles that make up reality, but rather a consciousness that's built from words; words that not only name things but also (and more so) the relationships between things.

Said simpler: to dogs, there never was an Elvis. And that is because you cannot have a past tense without language. To dogs, there is also no New Jerusalem (Revelation 22:15), simply because you cannot have a future tense without a language. Dogs only have a presence. Humans have eternity, and that is because humans have language.

The material world exists literally like a blank canvass when nobody is around to render meaning onto it, but the world that is the consciously understood reality of the universe, exists only in every individual conscious, and thus word-filled, mind. Such a mind masters time and is free to assume a perspective from any point in time, including the first (John 1:15).

Our word ברשית (bersheet) may also (or more so) be constructed from a diminutive of the word ראש (rosh), head, namely ראשית (resheet), little or individual head, relative to an implied "Big Head". The dynamic interplay between the One Big Head and the many little heads is very common in the Bible. It's the same dynamic interplay that exists between the conceptual light of day one and the many agents of light of day four, or between the father named Israel and the sons that are the Israelites, or between the conceptual Logos and the many agents of science that are the saints: Genesis 15:5, Daniel 12:3.

The Logos, like DNA, sums up the entire spectrum in which entities can exist while still being a perfect manifestation of that one Logos. The Lord of the Flies is a cloud, whose elements are forcibly driven into each other's vicinity, against the inclinations of their rationalities (or whatever is left of that). When heads and ratios string together, they seamlessly form a collective "super-head" or "super-ratio" that in turn perfectly reflects the Creator (Hebrews 1:3), and which utterly subdues the dragon. When bowels and feelings combine, they form a cloud of lawless chaos that utterly overwhelms any trace of reason and results in a formless and empty, steaming and heaving pile of slithering poop (also see our article on the ever useful verb βδεω, bdeo, to fart). And poop attracts flies.

Individual flies, wasps and bees may look alike (that's Indo-European), but they act quite differently (that's Semitic). Flies have no house, no sting, no language, don't care for their offspring, focus on crap and dead things and spread only disease and death. Flies serve the world by processing already discarded wastes and by being food for bigger animals. Bees, on the other hand, have a house, a sting, a language, care for their offspring, focus on flowers and help them procreated and spread life and beauty. Honey is literally liquid sunlight and bees produce more honey than they need themselves, which spills over into the world at large and ends up feeding other animals. Wasps are flies that imitate bees but don't produce honey. Their sole use is to teach the world not to mess with bees.

Human minds tend to be of the fly, the wasp or the bee variety. And honey is technology (see our articles on μελι, meli, honey, and χαλκος, chalkos, bronze). The bees are the Hebrews and their honey is the alphabet, the Sabbath and thus the calendar, the postal service and thus the Internet, the wisdom center and thus the academia and the scientific tradition that let the lame walk and the blind see (Zechariah 8:20-23). Wasps are those religions that likewise gather into centers and have huge libraries of stinging dogma but produce no useful technology (Jesus said that his followers would make the lame walk and the blind see, which means that the followers of Jesus can be found in hospitals and universities; the followers of the serpent can be found wherever people raise their hands in joy but nobody gets healed).

The human ratio is the temple in which God is encountered; all we can "feel" is the dragon. But our feelings is what makes life worth living, so this seems to add up to a bit of a problem. The solution is that the serpent — which was created entirely perfect along with the rest of creation — may only exist within the air-tight confines of a contract or covenant. And a covenant must always be purely rational and wholly devoid of emotion (we can't keep a covenant only when we feel like it), which is why we "train" our dragon with reason.

Within the confines of a rational covenant, the serpent is contained. And just like an emotional out-of-control mob adds up to a pixelated dragon, so a belly in which the emotions are contained isn't really home to a single serpent but rather a loose collection of worms (in the worst case) or else bowels with a perfectly functioning microbiome. And yes, modern research has shown that, indeed, one's emotions are crucially linked to the health of one's microbiome.

When one goes ape at a rock concert, one goes back to human as soon as the music stops and the doors open and one mounts one's car and drives home in rational submission to the covenantal rules of traffic. When one goes ape at a soccer game, and one fails to contain the dragon when the doors of the stadium open and the dragon pours out into the neighboring residential area, chaos and combat ensue. The whole secret of enjoying the dragon is the venue, and one's discipline to wrestle the dragon back into the belly when the doors swing open.

But the secret is to not take dragon food to a dragon fight: trying to violently subdue the dragon will only feed it, and leave the aspiring dragon tamer with a much angrier dragon to deal with. The best way to control the dragon is by learning which chemicals make you do what and why. That's not always an easy task, also because human behavior is a vastly complex network of causality, but it's the only way that works. Just like a phobia can be overcome by studying the object of one's phobic fears, so any undesired behavior can be unlearned when it is unraveled.

Everybody's favorite manifestation of the dragon is sex, because everybody knows that when that thing starts to fly around the bedroom, the very stars come out. But what few people realize is that the whole secret of a happy and healthy sex life is the bedroom. As long as the sex-dragon is contained within the covenant of marriage — which has nothing to do with feelings, or with a stamp on a piece of paper from some stranger, but with a community that intimately knows and expresses and helps to sustain that union like it would a word that describes an obvious rational reality — that dragon is paradisical and beautiful and life-giving. But as soon as it escapes, it becomes a fire-breathing drake who burns worlds and leaves nothing standing.

Fire (πυρ, pur) is utterly irrational madness, which is the very engine of soul and inquiry and excitement and newness. Fire is the heart of all civilization and all production, but it must always be contained within the oven of a rational covenant. Then it is the fire that sits within the lamp that gives light upon the world. But if the lamp is not strong enough to contain the fire, and burning fuel breaks out, then death and destruction ensue.