BEL. See Baal.
BEL, or Belius, Matthias, an Hungarian divine and historian, was born in 1684, and was educated partly at Halle. In 1719 he was made rector of the evangelical Lyceum at Presburg, where he remained till his death in 1749. His great work was the History of Hungary (Notitia Hungarioe novae historico-geographicd), 4 vols., 1735-42, which was not completed. Other works devoted to the history of his native country are— Hungarioe antiques et novcc prodromus, 1723; Adparatus ad Historiam Hungarioe, 1735-46. He also wrote on the literature of the Hungarians.
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or BELUS, a name by which many Heathens, and particularly the Babylonians, called their chief idol. But whether under this appellation they worshipped Nimrod, their first Baal, or lord, or Pul, king of Assyria, or some other monarch, or the sun, or all in one, is uncertain. It is, however, probable, that Bel is the same as the Phenician Baal, and that the worship of the same deity passed over to the Carthagenians, who were a colony of Phenicians. Hence the names Hannibal, Asdrubal, &c, compounded with Bel or Baal, according to the custom of the east, where great men added the names of the gods to their own. Bel had a temple erected to him in the city of Babylon, on the very uppermost range of the famous tower of Babel, wherein were many statues of this pretended deity; and one, among the rest, of massy gold, forty feet high. The whole furniture of this magnificent temple was of the same metal, and valued at eight hundred talents of gold. This temple, with its riches, was in being till the time of Xerxes, who, returning from his unfortunate expedition into Greece, demolished it, and carried off the immense wealth which it contained. It was, probably, the statue of this god which Nebuchadnezzar, being returned to Babylon after the end of the Jewish war, set up and dedicated in the plain of Dura; the story of which is related at large, Dan. iii. See BABEL....
AND THE DRAGON, an apocryphal and uncanonical book. It was always rejected by the Jewish church, and is extant neither in the Hebrew, nor in the Chaldee languages; nor is there any proof that it ever was so, although the council of Trent allowed it to be part of the canonical book of Daniel, in which it stands in the Latin Vulgate. There are two Greek texts of this fragment, that of the Septuagint, and that found in Theodotion’s Greek version of Daniel. The Latin and Arabic versions are from the text of Theodotion. Daniel probably, by detecting the mercenary contrivances of the idolatrous priests of Babylon, and by opening the eyes of the people to the follies of superstition, might furnish some foundation for the story; but the whole is evidently charged with fiction, though introduced with a pious intent. St. Jerom gives it no better title than, “The fable of Bel and the Dragon.” Selden thinks that this history ought rather to be considered as a poem or fiction, than a true account: as to the dragon, he observes, that serpents, _dracones_, made a part of the hidden mysteries of the Pagan religion, as appears from Clemens Alexandrinus, Julius Firmicus, Justin Martyr, and others. See SERPENT.
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BEL AND THE DRAGON, one of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament. See Apocrypha.
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BELA, or Beyla, a town of Baluchistan, capital of the province of Lus, on the north-eastern bank of the River Poorally, 293 miles N. of Khelat. Long. 66° 4' E., lat. 26° 1' N. About one-third of the town in the western quarter is encompassed by a mud wall. The streets are narrow; but from the elevated situation of the town, and its rocky site, they are always clean, even in wet weather. The bazaar is very neat. The governor’s residence is surrounded by a castellated mud-wall, which also encloses a dome-covered mosque. Population about 5000.
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