The fly and Beelzebub: the god of Ekron and the lord of the flies
Baal-Zebub in the Second Book of Kings, Beelzebul in the Gospels, Zeus Apomyios at Olympia, Milton and the Dictionnaire infernal: the fly as demonic sign.
Of all the demons of the Western tradition, Beelzebub perhaps has the most evocative name, since it is usually translated as «lord of the flies». The fly, companion of decay, disease and death, thus became the symbol of one of the highest figures in the infernal hierarchy. Yet the origin of this name is more complex than it seems, and its history runs through Canaanite religion, the Bible, the Greek world and modern demonology.
The god of Ekron
The name first appears in the Second Book of Kings. Ahaziah, king of Israel, having fallen from a window of his palace in Samaria, sends messengers to consult Baal-Zebub, god of the Philistine city of Ekron, to learn whether he will recover. The prophet Elijah stops them and announces the death of the king, guilty of seeking an answer from a foreign god instead of the God of Israel.
Many scholars believe that Baal-Zebub, literally «lord of the flies», is an ironic distortion of an original title, Baal-Zebul, which would mean «lord prince» or «lord of the lofty dwelling». The texts of Ugarit, discovered from 1929 onwards, do in fact attest the title zbl b'l, prince Baal. The biblical authors would thus have twisted the name of the foreign god in order to mock him.
From the Gospel to the demonologists
In the Synoptic Gospels Beelzebul is the prince of demons. The Pharisees accuse Jesus of casting out demons through him, and Jesus replies that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. From here the name entered Christian language permanently as one of the names of the devil or of one of his powerful lieutenants.
In the following centuries treatises on demonology gave Beelzebub a prominent place in the infernal hierarchy. John Milton, in the first book of Paradise Lost of 1667, presents him as Satan's closest companion, «one next himself in power, and next in crime». The demon thus became a fully formed literary figure, endowed with eloquence and tragic grandeur.
The fly as symbol
The fly already had a place in ancient religions. In Exodus the fourth plague of Egypt is a swarm of flies, and in the epic of Gilgamesh the gods gather around the sacrifice after the flood like flies. Pausanias relates that at Olympia sacrifices were offered to Zeus Apomyios, the averter of flies, a cult that tradition traced back to Heracles.
In 1818 Jacques Collin de Plancy published the Dictionnaire infernal, a vast repertory of demons and superstitions. In the 1863 edition, illustrated by Louis Le Breton, Beelzebub appears as a gigantic fly with skulls marked on its wings, an image that deeply influenced later iconography. In the twentieth century the title of William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, made the name known to a vast public.
The story of Beelzebub shows how a small insect can become the emblem of a great demon, through a play on words, a religious polemic and a long iconographic tradition. Behind the lord of the flies we glimpse an ancient Canaanite god, honoured by his worshippers and mocked by his adversaries, whose image was transformed over the centuries until it became a universal symbol of corruption.