Baal-Peor
Mark
(http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=12&letter=B)
This is one of my favorite tunes in the series...
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-In Rabbinical Literature:
Name of a Canaanitish god. Peor was a mountain in Moab (Num. xxiii.
28), whence the special locality Beth-peor (Deut. iii. 29, etc.) was
designated. It gave its name to the Ba'al who was there worshiped, and
to whose service Israel, before the entrance into Canaan, was, for a
brief time, attracted (Num. xxv. 3, 5; Ps. cvi. 28). The god is himself
also called "Peor" by abbreviation (Num. xxxi. 16; Josh. xxii. 17). It
is commonly held that this form of Ba'al-worship especially called for
sensual indulgence. The context seems to favor his view, on account of
the shameful licentiousness into which many of the Israelites were
there enticed. But all Ba'al-worship encouraged this sin; and Peor may
not have been worse than many other shrines in this respect, though the
evil there was certainly flagrant. In Hosea ix. 10 "Baal-peor" is the
same as "Beth-peor," and is contracted from "Beth-baal-peor."
-In Rabbinical Literature:
The worship of this idol consisted in exposing that part of the body
which all persons usually take the utmost care to conceal. It is
related that on one occasion a strange ruler came to the place where
Peor was worshiped, to sacrifice to him; but when he heard of this
silly practise, he caused his soldiers to attack and kill the
worshipers of the god (Sifre, Num. 131; Sanh. 106a). The same sources
mention various other facts concerning the cult, all of which give the
impression that it still existed at the time of the Tannaim. That the
statements of the Rabbis are not wholly imaginative and do not take
their coloring from the rites of some heathen or antinomian-Gnostic
sects is shown by the fact that the worship of Peor is ridiculed, but
nowhere stigmatized as moral depravity, by the Rabbis, which latter
might have been expected, had the assertions of the Rabbis been based
on the Gnostic cults mentioned.J. Sr. L. G.