Baalbek Chickpea & Sesame Spread

An oasis town in eastern Lebanon, Baalbek seems to have been the chief religious center of the Phoenician fertility god, Baal, frequently denounced by Old Testament prophets. The Greeks, who occupied Baalbek in the fourth century bce, identified Baal with the sun god, Helios, and named the city Heliopolis; it fell to the Romans in 16 bce and to the Arabs in ce 637. An eighteenth-century earthquake destroyed much of the city, but ruins of temples to Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus, god of wine,