Baal-berith

Baal-berith (meaning covenant lord or lord of the covenant) was the name of the Baal worshipped at Shechem after the death of Gideon. When Israel again went after the Baals, Shechem's temple of Baal-berith became a center of idolatrous worship, and its treasury funded Abimelech's violent seizure of power — he hired worthless men with seventy pieces of silver from the house of Baal-berith and used them to murder his seventy half-brothers on a single stone (Judges 9:4). The same temple is called the house of El-berith in Judges 9:46.

The deity's name suggests a god of covenants or treaties — possibly a patron of commercial and political agreements in the Shechemite community. His worship represents the type of syncretism the Deuteronomic historians repeatedly warn against: a covenant people turning to a covenant lord who was not the God of Israel. The idol's treasury funding fratricidal violence becomes a pointed irony in the narrative of Judges 9.