Baalis is a name found in the King James Bible, appearing 1 time in the text.
Who This Was
Baalis was the king of the Ammonites, a nation whose territory lay east of the Jordan River. He appears in the biblical narrative at a low and fragile moment in Judah’s history. After Jerusalem had fallen to Babylon and the temple had been destroyed, the Babylonians appointed Gedaliah son of Ahikam to govern the remnant of Judah left in the land. Gedaliah set up his administration at Mizpah, and the people who remained gathered around him, hoping to rebuild some semblance of life under foreign rule.
It was against this governor that Baalis directed his hostility. According to Jeremiah 40:14, men came to Gedaliah with a warning: “Dost thou certainly know that Baalis the king of the Ammonites hath sent Ishmael the son of Nethaniah to slay thee?” Baalis had enlisted Ishmael, a man of royal Judean descent, as his instrument. The plot was an assassination, aimed at removing the Babylonian-appointed governor and throwing the fragile remnant into chaos. Notably, the Scripture records that Gedaliah did not believe the report, a disbelief that would prove fatal.
The Bible says nothing further about Baalis himself, his motives, or his later life. He is named only once in the King James Version, and only in connection with this conspiracy. What Scripture preserves of him is not a reign or a record of deeds, but a single act of scheming against a man who had been charged with caring for a broken people. He remains a background figure, yet a dangerous one: a foreign king whose hand reached into Judah’s affairs through the willing arm of a traitor.
The Name
The name “Baalis” is generally understood to be built on the Semitic root *ba’al*, meaning “lord” or “master,” which appears throughout the names of Canaanite and Ammonite deities and rulers. Beyond that, the full meaning of the name is not clearly recoverable. Some have suggested a connection to a word meaning “to rejoice” or “to exult,” yielding a sense like “Baal rejoices,” but this is a proposed reconstruction rather than a firmly established meaning. What can be said with confidence is that the name carries the flavor of Ammonite devotion to Baal, the god so often set in opposition to the LORD in the Old Testament. Its precise sense, however, remains uncertain, and it is better to say so plainly than to assign it a meaning the text does not give.
A Closing Thought
Baalis never appears on the stage of Scripture in his own person; he is known only for the harm he set in motion against a faithful governor. His story is a quiet warning that influence can travel far from where we stand, and that a word spoken or a scheme devised in one place may bring ruin in another. Yet the account also turns our eyes toward Gedaliah, a man of peace who paid dearly for trusting the wrong report. The Lord sees the plots of the powerful and the vulnerability of the trusting alike, and He is not absent from either.
At a Glance
- Gender: Male
- Testament: Old
- Mentions in the KJV: 1
Where It Appears in Scripture
- Jeremiah 40:14 — And said unto him, Dost thou certainly know that Baalis the king of the Ammonites hath sent Ishmael the son of Nethaniah to slay thee? But Gedaliah the son of Ahikam believed them not.