Behmen. See Boehme.
Beirut. See Berytus.
Be'kah ("£3, be'lca, cleft, i. e. part), a Jewish weight of early use (Exod. xxxviii, 20), being half a shekel (q. v.), the unit of value (Gen. xxiv, 22, " half- shekel"). See Metrology. Every Israelite paid one bekah (about 31 cents) yearly for the support and re- pairs of the Temple (Exod. xxx, 13). See Didrachma.
Bekaim. See Mulberry.
Bekker, Balthasar. See Becker.
Bekorah. See Mishna.
Bel (Heb. id. ^2, contracted from P"2, the Aramaic form of hv~Z ; Sept. B//X and B;/Aor) is the name under which the national god of the Babylonians is cursorily mentioned in Isa. xlvi, 1; Jer. 1, 2; li, 44. The only passages in the (apocryphal) Bible which contain any farther notice of this deity are Bar. vi, 40, and the ad- dition to the book of Daniel, in the Sept., xiv, 1, sq., where we read of meat and drink being daily offered to him, according" to a usage occurring in classical idolatry, and termed Lectisternia (Jer. li, 44?). But a particular account of the pyramidal temple of Bel, at Babylon, is triven by Herodotus, i, 181-183. See Babel. It is there also stated that the sacrifices of this god consisted of adult cattle (-po/3fi~«), °f their young, when sucking (which last class were the only victims offered up on the golden altar), and of incense. The custom of providing him with Lectisternia may be inferred from the table placed before the statue, but it
iii. 16), recognises Hercules in the Belus of India, which is a loose term for Babylonia. This favors the identity of Bel and Melkart. See Baal. The following en- graving, taken from a Babylonian cylinder, represents, according to Munter, the sun-pod and one of his priests. The triangle on the top of one of the pillars, the star with eight rays, and the half moon, are all significant sj'mbols. See Cuneiform Inscriptions.
Ancient Worship of Bel.
Bel AND THE DRAGON, History of, an apoc- ryphal and uncanonical book of Scripture. See Apoc- rypha. It was always rejected by the Jewish ( Jhurch, and is extant neither in the Hebrew nor the Chaldee language. Jerome gives it no better title than that of " the fable" of Bel and the Dragon ; nor has it obtain- ed more credit with posterity, except with the divines of the Council of Trent, who determined that it should form part of the canonical Scriptures. The design of this fiction is to render idolatry ridiculous, and to exalt the true God ; but the author has destroyed the illusion of his fiction by transporting to Babylon the worship of animals, which was never practised in that country. This book forms the fourteenth chapter of Daniel in the Latin Vulgate; in the Greek it was called the proph- ecy of Habald-ul; the son of Jesus, of the tribe of Levi; but this is evidently erroneous, for that prophet lived before the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and the events pretended to have taken place in this fable are assign- ed to the time of Cyrus. There are two Greek texts of this fragment; that of the Septuagint, and that found in Theodotion's Greek version of Daniel. The former is the most ancient, and has been translated into Syriac. The. Latin and Arabic versions, together with another Syriac translation, have been made from the text of Theodotion. — Davidson, in Home's Introd, new ed. i, G39. See Daniel (Apocryphal Addi- tions to).
Be'la (Heb. id. "^3, a thing swallowed), the name of one place and three men.
1. (Sept. BaXatc.) A small city on the shore of the Dead Sea, not far from Sodom, afterward called Zoar,
is not expressly mentioned. Diodorus (ii, 9) gives a ! to which Lot retreated from the destruction of the similar account of this temple; but adds that there | cities of the plain, it being the only one of the five that were large golden statues of Zeus, Hera, and Rhea oil was spared at his intercession (Gen. xix, 20, 30). It its summit, with a table, common to them all, before lay at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea, on the them. Gesenius, in order to support his own theory, j frontier of Moab and Palestine (Jerome on Isa. xv), endeavors to show that this statue of Zeus must have : and on the route to Egypt, the connection in which it been that of Saturn, while that of Rhea represented I is found (Isa. xv, 5; Jer. xlviii, 34; Gen. xiii, Id), the sun. Hitzia, however, in his note to Isa. xvii, 8, i We first read of Bela in Gen. xiv, 2, 8, where it is
BE LA
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BELGIUM
<iamed with Sodom, Gomorrah, Adman, and Zeboiim, as forming a confederacy under their respective kings, in the vale of Siddim, t 1 resist the supremacy of the King of Shinar and his associates. It is singular that the King of Bela is the only one of the five whose name is not given, and this suggests the probability of Bela havm" been his own name, as well as the name of his city, which may have been so called from him. The tradition of the Jews was that it was called Bela from having been repeatedly ingulfed by earthquakes ; and in the passage Jer. xlviii, 34, "From Zoar even unto Horonaim (have they uttered their voice) as an heifer of three years old," and Isa. xv, 5, they absurd- ly fancied an allusion to its destruction by three earth- quakes (Jerome, Qucest. Heb. in Hen. xiv). There is nothing improbable in itself in the supposed allusion to the swallowing up of the city by an earthquake, which "22 exactly expresses (Num. xvi, 30); but the repeated occurrence of "^2, and words compounded with it, as names of men, rather favors the notion of the city having been called Bela from the name of its founder. This is rendered yet more probable by Bela being the name of an Edomitish king in Gen. xxxvi, 32. For further information, see De Saulcy's Xarra- t '»■ , i. 157-481, and Stanley's rah stine, p. 285. — Smith, s. \ . S.-e Zoar.