Hubal

← Encyclopedia

The greatest of the things that stood in the sanctuary of Mecca was carved, the accounts say, in the likeness of a man, and cut from a red stone — a carnelian, or an agate the color of dried blood. Its right hand was broken. When the Quraysh, the tribe who kept the sanctuary, found the figure with its hand gone, they did not leave the wound but made the god a new hand of gold and fixed it to the wrist. Before this image lay seven headless arrows. They were not for shooting. They were the instruments of the god’s voice, drawn and cast to settle the questions that no man could answer, and the figure that presided over them was Hubal, the lord of the Kaaba.

Almost everything in that paragraph comes to us through a single channel, and a late one. The image, the gold hand, the arrows, the lordship of the cube-shrine at the heart of Mecca — these are reported not by anyone who saw them but by Muslim antiquarians writing generations after the cult was gone, gathering the lore of the old gods at the distance of a century and more. Hubal is a god seen almost wholly through later and unfriendly eyes. What follows holds two things at once: the god as the tradition reports him, lord of the arrows of decision, and the thinness and lateness of the record that reports him.

A god come from the north

The name resists. Hubal does not parse cleanly as Arabic, and the etymologies proposed for it run northward, out of the Hijaz and toward the Aramaic-speaking lands. One reading takes it from the Aramaic hu bel — “he is Baal,” the lord — which would make the name itself a foreign title carried south. Philip Hitti connected it instead to an Aramaic word for spirit. Neither is certain, and the god’s origin is among the genuinely contested questions about him.

The case for a northern provenance does not rest on the name alone. The later Meccan historians themselves remembered Hubal as an import. One tradition, in the antiquarian al-Azraqi, held that the image had been brought from the land of Hit, on the Euphrates in Mesopotamia; another, transmitted through the early biographer Ibn Ishaq, made Amr ibn Luhayy — the legendary figure to whom the tradition assigns the introduction of idol-cult into the Hijaz — carry Hubal back from Syria, or from Moab, and set it up in the sanctuary. These are origin stories told by a culture that had come to regard the gods as foreign intrusions, and they cannot be read flat. But they point in a consistent direction.

Against that literary memory stands one hard epigraphic trace. A single Nabataean inscription — a tomb text from Hegra, the carved necropolis the Nabataeans cut into the sandstone of northwest Arabia — names Hubal alongside Dushara, the great god-block of the Nabataean kingdom, and the goddess Manawat. The pairing is slender evidence, a single attestation, but it sets the name in a real cult far to the north of Mecca and in the company of the gods of the Nabataean kingdom, whose betyls — the aniconic standing stones in which their gods were present — studded the rock at Petra and Hegra. John Healey, in his study of Nabataean religion, accepts on this basis that Hubal was likely of Nabataean or broader Aramean origin, while cautioning that we know almost nothing of his myth and can say only that he stood somehow close to Dushara. The honest summary is that the god’s roots run north and the detail runs out.

A Nabataean betyl — the aniconic standing stone in which a god was held present — carved into the rock at Petra. The single inscription that names Hubal sets him among such northern gods. Bjorn Anderson, University of Iowa, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The image itself is worth dwelling on, because it cuts against the northern company the god kept. The deities of the Aramean and Nabataean north were, for the most part, not figured. Dushara was a block of unworked stone, a betyl set upright and honored as the god’s presence without face or limb; the standing stone, the aniconic god-block, was the characteristic form of the northern sacred. Hubal, by contrast, is described in the Meccan memory as a carved man, a figure cut in the likeness of a body, with a hand that could break and be replaced. If the god came from the north, the image did not come with him in that form, or the Quraysh remade him in a shape their own. A god of the betyl-country who arrives in Mecca as a statue is already a god half-translated, and the carved figure with the gold hand may say as much about Mecca as about wherever Hubal began.

What he was at home, before the journey south, the record does not preserve. Older scholarship reached for the moon: Hugo Winckler and others made Hubal a lunar god, on the strength of pattern more than evidence, and the identification once hardened into a commonplace. More recent work has set it aside; there is nothing in the sources that requires the moon, and the lunar reading belongs to an older habit of assigning every Semitic high god an astral office. Mircea Eliade and others described him rather as a god of rain and a warrior — a power of the storm and the battle-line. The truth is that his nature in his own land is unrecoverable. By the time he enters a record we can read, he is already the god of Mecca, and what we know of him is what the Quraysh made of him there.

The arbiter of the arrows

In Mecca, Hubal was the lord of the lot. His image stood in or beside the Kaaba, the cube at the center of the haram, the sacred precinct in which blood could not be shed and to which the tribes came under truce. The later tradition makes him the greatest of the figures the sanctuary held — Karen Armstrong, following the sources, counts some three hundred and sixty in all, a figure for the days of the year — and the one whose oracle the Quraysh consulted on the matters that mattered most. He was a god not of myth but of decision.

The setting gave the office its weight. Mecca’s standing among the towns of western Arabia rested less on trade than on cult: it was a haram, a sanctuary in which violence was forbidden and within which the tribes, otherwise at feud, could meet in truce during the sacred months. The Quraysh held the hereditary custodianship of the precinct and its rites, and to be the keepers of Hubal’s arrows was part of what made them the keepers of the haram. A man who came to the sanctuary with a quarrel his own tribe could not resolve — a disputed inheritance, a killing that demanded blood-money, a child whose father could not be agreed — came to neutral ground, and to a god who stood above the parties. The arbiter of the arrows was, in that sense, an instrument of the peace of the precinct: a way of closing the disputes that would otherwise have run to bloodshed, by referring them to a judgment no party could be accused of having authored. The god of the lot was also a god of order.

The instrument was the arrow. Before the image lay seven of them, the azlam: headless, featherless shafts, marked but not for flight. When a question arose that could not be settled by judgment — the line of a child whose paternity was in doubt, the rightness of a marriage, the laying of blood-money for a killing, the digging of a well, the undertaking of a journey — the questioner came to the god, and the custodian of the arrows shuffled and drew them, and the answer was read in the shaft that fell. Two of the seven, in the account preserved by the antiquarian Hisham ibn al-Kalbi, bore the words that decided a contested birth: one marked sarih, “pure,” for the child the tribe would own as legitimate, and one marked mulsaq, “associated alien,” for the child it would cast out. Others governed the dead, the marriage, the water. Whatever the drawn arrow said, the matter was held closed; the god had spoken, and the Quraysh did what it bid. The divination by arrows — istiqsam bi-l-azlam, the casting of the lot — was among the most solemn acts of the sanctuary, and Hubal its presiding power.

It is worth marking what this made him. He was not a god approached chiefly for rain or victory or the harvest, though the storm and the battle may once have been his. In Mecca he was the arbiter — the one to whom a man brought the question that had no human answer, and from whom he carried away a decision he would treat as binding. The arrows were the seam between the human world of doubt and the divine world of certainty, and Hubal stood at that seam. To consult him was to submit a quarrel, a paternity, a venture to a judgment beyond appeal. The sources describe the practice; they do not, and this account will not, lay it out as a thing to be done. It is enough to say what the god was for: he closed the questions men could not close, and the closing was held to be his.

How old this was, and how exactly it ran, the record will not say. The whole scene — the carnelian figure, the gold hand, the seven arrows, the custodian who drew them — reaches us through the Kitab al-Asnam, the Book of Idols of Hisham ibn al-Kalbi, who died around 819, more than a century and a half after the cult had ended. It is the only Arabic work given over wholly to the old gods to come down to us, and it is a salvage operation: a Muslim antiquarian assembling, from oral report and earlier compilers, a catalog of the powers his own faith had abolished. The detail is vivid and it may well be substantially true. But it is not contemporary witness, and many historians now read the Book of Idols with considerable caution, alert to how much of its picture may be shaped by the later need to give the age before Islam a fully furnished idolatry to have been saved from. Where Hubal is concerned there is no inscription from Mecca, no image recovered, no second independent witness — only the one northern tomb text and the late, internal, Muslim memory. The detail collated in the surviving accounts of the god is vivid, and may be substantially right, but the lord of the arrows of decision is himself a question the record can only partly decide.

The fall of the image

Hubal’s last clear appearance in the tradition is as a war-cry. After the battle fought below the hill of Uhud, in which the Meccans had the better of the early Muslim community, the Quraysh leader Abu Sufyan is remembered calling out over the field, “Show your superiority, Hubal” — ula Hubal, let Hubal be exalted — claiming the day for the god of the sanctuary. The answer his Muslim opponents were told to give names the whole coming reversal in a phrase: God is higher and more majestic. The two cries set the lord of the Kaaba against the one God who would displace him, and the sources frame the moment as the old order asserting itself for the last time before it broke.

The breaking, in the traditional account, came with the taking of Mecca. When Muhammad entered the city, the tradition holds, the images of the sanctuary were cast down and the Kaaba cleansed — Hubal among them, the carnelian figure with its golden hand shattered or carried out, the arrows scattered, the cube rededicated to the worship of God alone. One sacred order gave way to another at the same center: the precinct that had been the seat of the gods of the tribes became the House of the one God, and the rites that had gathered the Arabs were not abolished so much as turned. This account, too, belongs to the tradition that records it, and it carries the tradition’s own theology of supersession; it is told here as the tradition tells it, the displacement of one sacred world by the faith that reads its own scripture, the revelation, as the recovery of an older and truer worship.

After that, silence. Hubal does not survive as a living god anywhere; he survives as a name in the books of those who recorded the gods their fathers had given up. He has no temple to excavate, no corpus of inscriptions to read against the literary memory, no image in any museum. The contrast with the gods of the south is sharp: where the Sabaeans and the Minaeans left their gods’ names cut by the thousand into stone, in their own monumental script and their own words, Hubal is known almost entirely from the outside and from afterward. Even his sisters in the northern pantheon — Allat, the great goddess whose name is Goddess; al-Uzza, the Mightiest, the morning star of the Quraysh; Manat, the apportioner of fate — are named in the Qur’an itself and so leave a firmer trace in the record of the faith that succeeded them than Hubal does. He is the lord of the Kaaba in the tradition’s memory and almost nowhere else.

This is the deepest fact about Hubal, and it is a fact about the record rather than the god. The powers of the south speak; the powers of the Hijaz are spoken of. Almaqah, the national god of Saba, stands in the dated stone of the Awwam temple at Marib with his own name and his own worshipers’ words around him. Hubal stands in a paragraph written by a man who never saw him, in a book composed to record what Islam had ended, copied from oral report at the distance of generations. The fascination he holds is partly the fascination of that gap — a god once great enough to be the arbiter of a sanctuary, reduced to a description and a name, his image gone, his arrows scattered, his cult attested in his own homeland by a single line on a tomb. The lord of decision left almost nothing for us to decide him by.

So the god comes down to us doubly removed: a power of the Hijaz whose name may have been carried from the Aramean north, attested in his own homeland by a single tomb inscription, and known in Mecca only through the salvage-work of the antiquarians who cataloged him after his cult was finished. The carnelian image and the gold hand, the seven arrows and the questions they closed — these are what the later record kept of the lord of the sanctuary. Whether they are the god as he was, or the god as a later age needed to remember him, is a thing the arrows themselves could not be asked to decide.

→ Related: Allat · Al Uzza · Manat · Almaqah · Kaaba · Divination · The Nabataeans · Nabataean Kingdom · Hegra · Petra · Idolatry · Revelation · El God · Astarte Goddess · Sin Moon God · Kingdom Of Saba · Himyar · The Sabaeans · The Minaeans