Ex Shlomo Moussaieff Collection, Israel, 1948 - 2000
Exported from Israel with the export license of the Israel Antiquities Authority at Gorny & Mosch 248, 2017, 517.
See H. Seeden, The standing Armed Figurines in the Levant, PBFI, I (1980) Pt. 113 No. 1806.
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Solid bronze statuette in lost wax, representing the Phoenician god Baal-Arwad, the Semitic weather and fertility god depicted standing striding with the left leg forward. He has a naked torso and his lower extremities covered with a Shenti. On the shoulders he has two vertical channels in the shape of a dovetail that serve to fit the arms originally worked separately, today lost. On his head he has an Egyptianizing conic helmet (similar to the crown of upper Egypt) ending in a prominent knob. Green patina.

Baal was a title and honorific meaning 'owner', 'lord' in the Northwest Semitic languages spoken in the Levant during antiquity. From its use among people, it came to be applied to gods. Scholars previously associated the theonym with solar cults and with a variety of unrelated patron deities, but inscriptions have shown that the name Ba'al was particularly associated with the storm and fertility god

Thus he became known as a rider of clouds, most active during storms. Although the most vigorous and aggressive of the gods, he was the one on whom mortals depended most. Baal’s disappearance into the netherworld with the rainclouds was believed to bring about the dry summer. The cult of Baal was linked to the economy, which depended on the regularity of rainfall in order to flourish and celebrated his death and resurrection annually.