The term “Baal” occurs once in the Christian Greek Scriptures, in Romans 11:4, where it is preceded in the Greek text by the feminine article he. Commenting on the use of the feminine article before “Baal” in the Greek Septuagint and Romans 11:4, John Newton wrote in an essay on Baal worship: “Though he is of the masculine gender in the Hebrew, [hab·Baʹʽal], the lord, yet Baal is called [he Baʹal], = the lady, in the Septuagint; Hos. ii. 8; Zeph. i. 4; and in the New Testament, Romans xi. 4. At the licentious worship of this androgyne, or two-sexed god, the men on certain occasions wore female garments, whilst the women appeared in male attire, brandishing weapons.”​—Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by T. Inman, 1875, p. 119.

The mating of Baal with his wife, presumably Ashtoreth, was believed to ensure fertility for the coming year.

The farming and cattle-raising Canaanites probably thought that their engaging in a prescribed ritual, a sort of sympathetic magic, helped to stimulate their gods to action according to the pattern enacted at their religious festivals and was necessary to ensure productive crops and herds in the coming year and to avert droughts, locust plagues, and so forth. Hence Baal’s coming to life again to be enthroned and mated with his consort apparently was celebrated with licentious fertility rites, marked by sexual orgies of unrestrained debauchery.