The Signature in the Swarm — Hollywood

Named at Ekron

Here the swarm does not warn. It preaches.

Lord of the Flies — William Golding, 1954. Filmed 1963 and 1990. Required reading in most school districts in the country.

The Fly on Screen

English schoolboys are stranded on an island with no adults. Their order comes apart, and the fear among them is given a name. They call it the beast.

The hunters kill a sow. They cut off her head, sharpen a stick at both ends, drive one end into the ground, and jam the head onto the point. They leave it there as an offering, so the beast will let them alone. Flies settle on it and cover it.

A boy named Simon comes on it alone in a clearing and sits down in front of it. The head speaks to him. It calls itself the Lord of the Flies.

What the Fly Is Doing

In the other four films on this page the swarm is a sign. Here it is the speaker.

Strip the literary label off that scene and look at the mechanics. There is a blood sacrifice. It is mounted on a pole. It is dedicated by name to a spirit the boys are afraid of. And then a human being sits down and receives instruction from it. That is an offering to a devil followed by divination, and it is not symbolism laid over the plot — it is the plot.

What the flies tell Simon is the doctrine of the whole book. The beast is not out in the jungle waiting to be hunted. It is inside them, part of them, and there is no killing it.

Nothing in the story contradicts it. The book is built to prove it true.

Simon carries the true report down the mountain and the crowd kills him with their hands. His death buys nothing. Nobody is cleared, nobody changes, and another boy is murdered a few chapters later. Rescue finally arrives as a naval officer stepping onto the beach — a uniform, by chance. Not a redeemer, not a covenant.

The Name Behind It

Ahaziah, king of Israel, was badly hurt and sent men to ask Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether he would live. Baal-zebub means lord of the fly. Elijah met the messengers on the road with a question and a sentence — is there not a God in Israel, and the king will not come down off that bed (2 Kings 1:2-4). He did not build the fly-god a temple. He asked him one question. That was enough. The same name is the title of the prince of devils in the gospels (Matthew 12:24).

Golding named his book after that devil. It is on the cover, on the spine, and on the syllabus, and it has been for seventy years. Nobody reads the sign.

What Scripture Says

Sin is a broken command, not a condition of the flesh (1 John 3:4). Where there is no law there is no transgression (Romans 4:15) — which is exactly why the island has no way out. Golding removed the courtroom in the first chapter and then spent the rest of the book proving that nobody can leave the room.

On the Day of Atonement the sin was carried away into a land not inhabited, and only after blood was shed (Leviticus 16:21-22; Hebrews 9:22). Carried away. Not left sitting in the meat, and not relocated into another boy.

That is the difference between the head on the stake and the goat in the wilderness. One says the evil is permanent. The other says it was carried off, and says who paid to carry it.

The Line

It is a sacrifice on a stake that talks back, and it is named after a devil.

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