This is a brief account of how the god of the Israelites
metamorphosed from his original form as one of several deities in the Levantine
polytheistic pantheon into the sole monotheistic One True God of the
Samaritans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims of today.
Southern Levantine deities
The first Israelites were polytheists. Their first chief god was not Yahuweh but
El. That this was the case is evident
from their name, Yisrael in Hebrew, which means “triumphant with El”. El was the chief god of the Levantine
pantheon, those deities known collectively as the Elohim, who were worshipped
by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Amorites, and other West Semitic
peoples, including the Israelites.
El was the father of all the gods and their chief. In the Tanakh, El is often referred to with
an epithet, such as El Shaddai (translated Almighty; means Destroyer), El
Berith (of the Covenant), El Roi (the Omnisicent), El Olam (the Eternal), El
Tzevaot (of Hosts), El Elyon (Most High), Toru El (Bull El), El Qaniyunu (the Creator),
El Gibbon (the Warrior), El Elehe Yisrael (of the gods of Israel).
Use of El referring to the god of Israel is almost entirely
confined to the Book of Genesis, with
the exceptions being twice in the Book of
Psalms.
His consort was Athirat (Asherah). El had seventy sons, known as the “sons (or
children) of El”. To each of these was
allotted one of the seventy nations of humans on Earth. Israel was given to Yahu (Yah earlier, later
Yahuweh) just as Edom was given to Qaws, Moab to Chemosh, Ammon to Milcom, Tyre
to Melqart, Sidon to Eshmun, Byblos to El, Shechem to Resheph, Jerusalem to
Shalim, Philistia to Dagon, Carthage to Hammon, the Nabateans to Dushara, etc.
A triad of gods comparable to the Greek triad of
Zeus-Poseidon-Hades at the apex of the Bene El: Hadad, a sky god of storm; Yam, god of the
sea; and Mot, god of death and the underworld.
As for goddesses, the two most prominent after Asherah were Anath and
Ashtart (Ishtar).
Shachar and Shalim were the twin gods of dawn and dusk,
respectively; Jerusalem is named for the latter (it does not mean “city of peace”).
Attar was the god of the morning star.
There was the group of divine midwives who were only known collectively
as the Kotharat. Shapash was goddess of
the sun, while Yarikh was god of the moon.
Eshmun was the god of healing.
Resheph was protector against plague and war.
Dagon was imported early on from Mesopotamia and became
integrated into the Levantine pantheon as the father of Hadad. Tammuz (Dumuzi in Sumer) was a later import whom
the Phoenicians called Adoni, or Lord; to the Greeks he became Adonis, and in
that guise returned to the Levant, particularly during the era of the Mystery
Cults.
The preeminent human cultural hero of the stories that have
survived is Danel, a generous king famous for his wisdom, whose popular stories
gave flesh to the also mythical Solomon and whose name in somewhat corrupted
form became Daniel, the exile in Babylon.
The central story of Levantine mythology is the rivalry
between Hadad and Yam, whose name in some sources is Yaw. When El decides to step down as king of the
gods, he makes Hadad king in his place after the latter defeats Yam. In a later conflict with Mot, Hadad dies, and
Yam is resurrected to become king.
During Yam’s kingship, Attar attempts to take the throne,
but fails, and falls from heaven to Earth, much the same as “Lucifer, thou son of
the morning” in Isaiah 14. Most High, Elyon in Hebrew, was a title of El
when he was king of the gods, then of Hadad when he ascended, and, of course,
Yam during the brief time he was king.
Although Baal could be a title for any of the gods, if used
alone it almost always meant Hadad (its literal definition is “master”). In fact, Baal in later centuries was the only
way in which the lay people were permitted to refer to Hadad, his priests
keeping his name to themselves, exactly like the Jewish (and presumably
Samaritan) priests of Yahuweh did.
Another deity imported into the Levant, at least by the
city-state of Ebla, was Ia, a Levantine form of the Akkadian-Babylonian god Ea,
who in turn was borrowed from the Sumerian original, Enki. Many tablets of religious writings from the
city replace El with Ia atop their pantheon.
Some claim that “Ia” should be transliterated as “Yah” instead, but they
are in a minority, and even those who did were not suggesting that Yah was the
same as Yahuweh. If not, it is still
quite possible that Ia later morphed into Yah, which became Yahu, then Yahuweh.
Interestingly, the Egyptian pantheon included a lunar deity
whose name was Yah.
The god Dagon came to Ugarit, where inscriptions to him were
first identified, via the city of Ebla, where he served the same role as Hadad
did among the West Semitic peoples.
Regardless of who their early god was or from whence the
later one derived, by the ninth century BCE when the Israelites were a major power
in north Palestine, their chief god was Yahuweh. And alongside him, they worshipped a divine consort,
Asherah. Asherah’s chief epithet was
Qadesh, the Holy One, by which name she entered the Egyptian pantheon in the
eighteenth century BCE. Presumably by
this time, El had been reduced to functioning merely as a generic word for
“god”. Tammuz is another deity whom we
know had a popular cult among the Israelites of that era.
“Houses of Yahuweh” and cult
motifs
Archaeologically, three pre-Babylonian Conquest temples to
their national god, each termed “House of Yahuweh”, have been found in
Palestine. The largest and most opulent
is that at Samaria, where Yahuweh and Asherah were worshipped
side-by-side. Omri and his son Ahab also
built temples there to Hadad, and several other deities, undoubtedly the major
deities of the local pantheon and many imports, such as Tammuz. It was built in 878 BCE.
The other two known places called “House of Yahuweh”, both
rather small, have been found in the south, one a shrine in a citadel at Tel
Arad, near the modern city on the border of the Judean and Negev deserts, and
the other a temple at Tel Motza, on the western outskirts of modern Jerusalem. The shrine at Tel Arad dates from about 820
BCE; the temple at Tel Motza about the same date.
Archaeologists have concluded almost universally that Jerusalem
was uninhabited until the return after the exile to Babylon, so there is no
“first temple” to find.
Horned altars identified as Israelite have been discovered
at Dan, Megiddo, Beersheba, and Ekron, indicating outdoor shrines, but no
temples in those cities.
There was a fourth House of David, though not in
Palestine. It was in Egypt, at the
military colony of Elephantine, built in about the year 650 BCE. From surviving papyri, we known that Yahuweh
was worshipped there along with his consort Anath-Yahuweh, plus Bethel, Haram,
Eshem, Nabu, and Anath-Bethel, as well as Khnum (whose temple was adjacent), his
consort Satet, and his daughter Anuket.
Three inscriptions and images at Kuntillet Arjud, c. 800
BCE, depict Yahuweh, Asherah, El, and Baal (presumably Hadad). Two inscriptions mention “Yahuweh of Samaria
and Asherah” and “Yahuweh of Teman and Asherah”. Teman, of course, need not refer to a city as
its literal meaning is “the South”, just like “Samaria” could refer to the
kingdom based out of the city.
Again, inscriptions at a tomb in Khirbet al-Qom in the Har
Yehuda west of Hebron dating to about 750 BCE mention “Yahuweh and Asherah”.
Given this preponderance of evidence, there is no other
conclusion but that before the Persian period (and well into it) the Yahuweh
cult among the Israelites north, south, and in Egypt was polytheist, though
almost certainly the henotheist variety.
That this is the undeniable case does not preclude the existence of
Yahwist fanatics pursuing monotheist worship of their deity.
The “House of Yahuweh” at Samaria was destroyed, along with
the other temples, in the Assyrian conquest of 722 BCE. Both in the South fell to Nebuchadnezzar II
in 586 BCE.
That left the House of Yahuweh at Elephantine as the only
remaining temple of the Israelite religion to the Israelite national god. A temple which he shared with several other
deities, including his consort.
Beginnings of monotheism
The change in Israelite religion from henotheism to
monotheism came with the arrival of their new Iranian overlords.
Iranians were the original monotheists. They were monotheists centuries before the
Israelites, or any other peoples for that matter. The fact that the Israelites became monotheists
because of the Iranians may be why Koroush Kabir, aka Cyrus the Great, is the
first person referred to as a “messiah” in the sense of “savior”.
The deity of the Iranians, revealed to them by the prophet
Zartosht (Zarathustra, Zoroaster) was called Ahura Mazda in ancient Persian,
“Ahura” being a title, and Assara Mazas in the Aramaic language that became the
official language of the empire. The
name “Mazas” looks suspiciously like “Moses”, which could very well be its
Greek form. One of the phrases recurring
throughout the teachings of Zartosht is the “law of Mazda”, which would be “law
of Mazas” in Aramaic.
When the change came about, no record shows, but when the
new temples called House of Yahuweh were constructed in Palestine in the fifth
century BCE, there was only one deity worshipped there, Yahuweh. Under the influence of their overlords, the
Israelites both north (in Samerina) and south (in Yehud) became firmly
monotheist. The temple in Samerina was
built in 450 BCE at the newly reoccupied Bronze Age site of Shechem, where it
was placed atop the adjacent height of Mount Gerizim. The temple of Yehud was built in 425 BCE on
Mount Moriah in the eastern part of the newly reoccupied Bronze Age site of
Jerusalem.
The temple at Elephantine remained until it was burned down in
411 BCE by the priests of Khnum, the most likely explanation being that the
priests of Yahuweh had recently ceased to sacrifice to Khunm also, which
pinpoints their switch to monotheism.
The temple was rebuilt four years later, but there is no record, written
or archaeological, of how long it remained in use.
Turn of the era dualism
At the three centuries at the turn of the Common Era (2nd-1st centuries BCE and 1st century CE), there was a strain or strains of Judaism that had crossed the line into dualism, but a dualism the mirrors more the variety expressed in Mazdaism, the modern form of Zoroastrianism, which began to develop in this time period, in opposition to the then dominant strain, Zurvanism. In Mazdaism, Ahura Mazda is the supreme creator, with the Spenta Mainyu over Asha, basicially the "light side of the Force", and Angra Mainyu over Druj, or the "dark side of the Force". In the Jewish version, Yahweh is the supreme creator, with the good angel Michael over the Way of Light or the Way of Life and the evil angel Beliar over the Way of Darkness or the Way of Death.
One of the most notable examples of this occurs in the Essene War Scroll, which describes the War of the Son of Light and the Sons of Darkness. But it is not just an Essene phenomenon, as the same dichotomy appears in several apocalyptic works of the era, and even in the Christian Didache. Another apocalyptic work in this period featuring the "Two Ways" was the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
Allegory of the Golden Calf
Many have suggested that the “golden calf” portrayed in
Aaron and Miriam making for the Israelites at the foot of Mount Horeb/Sinai/Paran
was be an image of Hathor, Egyptian goddess of fertility, inebriation, and
musics (i.e., sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll).
Her usual icon, after all, was of a cow.
Of course, even while reiterating that the whole Exodus is a myth, I
suggest that this particular part of the myth is an allegory of a return to
worship of El, whose usual icon was a bull, as supreme god rather than Yahuweh.
Use of “The Name”
In the first century CE, Jews still used the name Yahuweh,
at least in their worship at the temple in Jerusalem, and perhaps also at the
one in Leontopolis in Egypt. Elsewhere,
it was used, but not as commonly. One of
the complaints of first century Samaritans
about the Jews was, in fact, that they still did this. By 200 CE, the Jews had likewise ceased its
use entirely.
The most common reference in the Tanakh to the Supreme (or
only) Deity is “Elohim”, a plural version often used as a singular. What’s tricky about its use is that at
various points in the Tanakh, “elohim” clearly refers to “the gods”, though
this has been retconned out in other places.
Yahuweh is not the only god
It is a widespread misconception that the Tanakh holds that
there is only one deity. In truth,
several passages allude to other deities or mention them explicitly, some by
name, and not in a way to suggest other deities do not exist. One of the latest
examples is found in Micah 4:5, following the messianic passage in the preceding
verses: “For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will
walk in the name of Yahuweh our God forever and ever.”
As late as the first century CE, Paul of Tarsus affirmed the
existence of other deities in his First
Epistle to the Corinthians (8:5), “Indeed, even though there may be
so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many
lords…”.
The Name
In this case, I mean specifically the one represented by the four Hebrew letters transliterated as YHVH. Earlier forms of The Name were Yah and Yahu, both of which can still be found in personal names and in words like Halleluyah. When the Masoretes of Babylonia were putting the Tanakh into its current from the seventh thru the eleventh centuries BCE. By the time, superstition about saying the Name aloud was throughly engrained in Jewish culture, even that of the non-Rabbanate Masoretes, who were Karaites. In order that no one pronounce The Name accidentally, when pointing the Tetragrammaton, the Masoretes substituted the vowels for the word Adonai, which means 'Lord', which is how we get 'Jehovah', which too many evangelicals (and other for that matter) forget was pronounced 'Yehowah'. The actual Name, if transliterated into English, would be Yahuweh, but most seem more comfortable with the modern form, Yahweh.
2 comments:
hey.
what do u think about the Hebrew word for God(Il/Yil)
Well done. Excellent article
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