«E presero Ba'al-Berith come loro Dio». Nuove prospettive storico-religiose su El/Ba'al-Berith

This paper deals with the identity and the features of the obscure deity found only in Judges 9 and known by the two names Ba‘al-Berith and El-Berith by means of a joint methodological approach integrating textual criticism of the biblical sources with archaeological and epigraphic data and with the tools of comparative analysis. in retracing the past scholarship about the topic, the various hypotheses have been split into three groups according to a typological criterion and have been evaluated: this brought to light some significant factors which had been misinterpreted or overlooked, but it also helped in sketching a more detailed portrait of some aspects of the religious backdrop of Palestine in the last centuries of the II millennium BCE. At a final examination, the most likely option seems to be the identification of the god with a local manifestation of El, to which is attributed the epithet ba'al bərît (“lord of the covenant”).