Lord of the Flies / Beelzebub — The Game of Pretend-Grownups
I. The Translation You Didn’t Know “Lord of the Flies” is not Golding’s invention. It is a translation — and like all translations, it reveals more than it conceals. The title comes from Hebrew and Aramaic: Beelzebub, Ba’al Zevuv, the Lord of the Flies. In Christian theology, Beelzebub is not merely a demon; he is the prince of demons, the bureaucratic tempter, the god of the swarm. When William Golding chose this title for his 1954 novel about stranded schoolboys, he was not simply describing a pig’s head on a stick. He was naming the spiritual energy that emerges when civilization withdraws. …