Who or what is Beelzebub?
Question 8043
The name Beelzebub, or more accurately Beelzebul, is one of the more arresting titles applied to Satan in the Gospels, and its appearance in the controversy over Jesus’ exorcisms reveals both the depth of the Pharisees’ hostility and the extraordinary accusation they were prepared to make. Tracing the name back to its origins illuminates something of the contempt and theological seriousness embedded in its New Testament usage.
The Old Testament Background
The name originates in 2 Kings 1:2-3, 6, and 16, where King Ahaziah of Israel, having been injured in a fall, sends messengers to enquire of “Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron,” whether he will recover. Ekron was one of the five principal Philistine cities, and Baal-zebub was the deity worshipped there. The angel of the LORD intercepts the messengers and rebukes Ahaziah through Elijah for consulting a pagan god rather than the God of Israel.
The name “Baal-zebub” literally means “lord of flies.” It has long been debated whether this was the deity’s actual name or a deliberate Hebrew mockery of the original. The leading alternative reconstruction is that the Philistine deity was known as “Baal-zebul,” meaning “lord of the high dwelling” or “lord of the exalted house” — a title of genuine religious dignity in the Canaanite context, where zebul connotes an elevated or heavenly dwelling. The Israelites appear to have transformed zebul into zebub (flies) as a contemptuous pun, reducing the great lord of the high place to the lord of flies. This kind of polemical word-play appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures as a way of deflating the pretensions of pagan religion, and it carries the theological point that the object of Philistine devotion deserves nothing but derision.
The Name in the Gospels
When the name appears in Matthew 12:24, Mark 3:22, and Luke 11:15, the manuscript tradition strongly favours “Beelzebul” rather than “Beelzebub,” and this is what the ESV and most modern translations use. The significance of the form “Beelzebul” in the New Testament context is that it resonates with the meaning “lord of the house” or “master of the dwelling.” This is not accidental. In Matthew 10:25, Jesus says to his disciples: “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household.” Jesus takes the very name the Pharisees used as an accusation against him and applies it to his relationship with his disciples — he is the householder, they are the household. What was intended as a slur becomes, in Jesus’ reframing, a description of belonging.
The context in Matthew 12 is a direct confrontation. Jesus has healed a man who was blind and mute, and the crowds are asking whether Jesus might be the Son of David. The Pharisees, unwilling to acknowledge the possibility, accuse him of casting out demons “only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Matthew 12:24). The phrase “prince of demons” is their identification of Beelzebul with Satan himself — they are saying that Jesus is operating in league with the ruler of the demonic realm. This is the accusation Jesus calls blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in the very next passage (verses 31-32): attributing the work of the Spirit of God to the power of Satan.
What the Accusation Reveals
The Pharisees’ accusation was not a denial that an exorcism had taken place. They could not plausibly claim that the man had not been healed. What they challenged was the source of the power. Their argument was that Jesus was working through demonic means, that his authority over demons derived from a demonic source. Jesus demolishes this with the simple observation that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand — if Satan is casting out Satan, he is working against his own interests, which is absurd (Matthew 12:25-26).
The logic remains relevant whenever genuine spiritual work is attributed to a demonic source. An exorcism accomplished through Satan would be Satan weakening his own grip. The fact that Jesus’ exorcisms were real, complete, and resulted in genuine liberation is itself evidence of a power greater than Satan at work. As Jesus puts it in verse 28: “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” The kingdom has not arrived by Satan’s permission; it has arrived over his opposition.
So, now what?
Beelzebul is the name of an old Philistine deity reduced by Hebrew wit to “lord of flies,” repurposed in Jesus’ day as a title for Satan as ruler of the demonic realm, and levelled at Jesus by the Pharisees as an accusation with consequences that Jesus described as the unpardonable sin. The passage as a whole is a sobering reminder that the most spiritually dangerous position is not honest doubt or theological confusion but the hard-hearted attribution of divine work to demonic sources. The Pharisees were not uninformed bystanders; they were men who refused what the evidence demanded and chose accusation over acknowledgement.
“But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, ‘It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.'” Matthew 12:24
