Moabite Stone, circa 840 BCE, earliest mention of the Hebrew god Yahweh, appearing as יהוה (YHWH)
Yahweh was the national god of the kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah with origins reaching at least to the early Iron Age and apparently to the Late Bronze.
In the oldest biblical literature, Yahweh is a storm-and-warrior deity who leads the heavenly army against Israel's enemies. At that time the Israelites worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal, but in time El and Yahweh became conflated, El-linked epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, and other gods and goddesses such as Baal and Asherah were absorbed into the Yahwistic religion. In the 9th through to the 6th centuries the Yahwistic religion separated itself from its Canaanite heritage as Yahweh became the main god of the Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) and of Judah, and over time the royal court and Temple in Jerusalem
promoted Yahweh as the god of the entire cosmos, possessing all the
positive qualities previously attributed to the other gods and
goddesses. By the end of the Babylonian captivity (6th century BCE), the very existence of foreign gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator of the cosmos and the one true God of all the world.
Bronze Age origins
There is almost no agreement on the meaning and origins of the name Yahweh, which is not attested other than among the Israelites, and seems not to have any plausible etymology: Ehyeh ašer ehyeh ("I Am that I Am"), the explanation presented in Exodus 3:14, appears to be a late theological gloss invented to explain Yahweh's name at a time when the original meaning had been forgotten. One scholarly theory connected with this holds that 'Yahweh' is a shortened form of the phrase ˀel ḏū yahwī ṣabaˀôt, (Phoenician: 𐤀𐤋 𐤃 𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄 𐤑𐤁𐤀𐤕) "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly host accompanying El, the chief god of the Canaanites, as he marched beside the earthly armies of Israel.
The argument has numerous weaknesses, including, among others, the
dissimilar characters of the two gods El and Yahweh, and the fact that el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt is nowhere attested either inside or outside the Bible.
He does not appear to have been a Canaanite god, although the Israelites were originally Canaanites. The current scholarly consensus is that Yahweh was originally a "divine warrior from the southern region associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman". The oldest plausible recorded occurrence of his name is in the phrase "land of Shasu of yhw", in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE), the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia. In this case a plausible etymology for the name could be from the root HWY, which would yield the meaning "he blows", appropriate to a weather divinity. There is considerable but not universal support for this view, but it raises the question of how he made his way to the north. The widely accepted Kenite hypothesis holds that traders brought Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan.
The strength of the Kenite hypothesis is that it ties together various
points of data, such as the absence of Yahweh from Canaan, his links
with Edom and Midian in the biblical stories, and the Kenite or Midianite ties of Moses.
However, while it is entirely plausible that the Kenites and others may
have introduced Yahweh to Israel, it is unlikely that they did so
outside the borders of Israel or under the aegis of Moses, as the Exodus
story has it.
Iron Age I (1200–930 BCE): El, Yahweh, and the origins of Israel
Israel emerges into the historical record in the last decades of the 13th century BCE, at the very end of the Late Bronze Age when the Canaanite city-state system was ending, and the milieu from which Israelite religion emerged was accordingly Canaanite. El, "the kind, the compassionate", "the creator of creatures", was the chief of the Canaanite gods, and he, not Yahweh, was the original "God of Israel"—the word "Israel" is based on the name El rather than Yahweh. He lived in a tent on a mountain from whose base originated all the fresh waters of the world, with the goddess Asherah as his consort. This pair made up the top tier of the Canaanite pantheon; the second tier was made up of their children, the "seventy sons of Athirat" (a variant of the name Asherah). Prominent in this group was Baal, who had his home on Mount Zaphon;
over time Baal became the dominant Canaanite deity, so that El became
the executive power and Baal the military power in the cosmos. Baal's sphere was the thunderstorm with its life-giving rains, so that he was also a fertility god, although not quite the fertility god.
Below the seventy second-tier gods was a third tier made up of
comparatively minor craftsman and trader deities, with a fourth and
final tier of divine messengers and the like.
El and his sons made up the Assembly of the Gods, each member of which
had a human nation under his care, and a textual variant of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes El dividing the nations of the world among his sons, with Yahweh receiving Israel:
When the Most High (’elyôn) gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated humanity,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of divine beings.
For Yahweh's portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
The Israelites initially worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal. In the period of the Judges and the first half of the monarchy, El and Yahweh became conflated in a process of religious syncretism. As a result, ’el (Hebrew: אל) became a generic term meaning "god", as opposed to the name of a worshipped deity, and epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, diminishing the worship of El and strengthening the position of Yahweh. Features of Baal, El, and Asherah were absorbed into the Yahwistic religion, Asherah possibly becoming embodied in the feminine aspects of the Shekinah
or divine presence, and Baal's nature as a storm and weather god
becoming assimilated into Yahweh's own identification with the storm.
In the next stage the Yahwistic religion separated itself from its
Canaanite heritage, first by rejecting Baal-worship in the 9th century,
then through the 8th to 6th centuries with prophetic condemnation of
Baal, the asherim, sun-worship, worship on the "high places", practices pertaining to the dead, and other matters.
In the earliest literature such as the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–18, celebrating Yahweh's victory over Egypt at the exodus),
Yahweh is a warrior for his people, a storm-god typical of ancient Near
Eastern myths, marching out from a region to the south or south-east of
Israel with the heavenly host of stars and planets that make up his
army.
Israel's battles are Yahweh's battles, Israel's victories are his
victories, and while other peoples have other gods, Israel's god is
Yahweh, who will procure a fertile resting-place for them:
There is none like God, O Jeshurun (i.e., Israel)
who rides through the heavens to your help ...
he subdues the ancient gods, shatters the forces of old ...
so Israel lives in safety, untroubled is Jacob's abode ...
Your enemies shall come fawning to you,
and you shall tread on their backs.
Iron Age II (1000–586 BCE): Yahweh as God of Israel
Solomon dedicates the Temple at Jerusalem (painting by James Tissot or follower, c. 1896–1902)
Iron Age Yahweh was the national god of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and appears to have been worshipped only in these two kingdoms; this was unusual in the Ancient Near East but not unknown—the god Ashur, for example, was worshipped only by the Assyrians.
After the 9th century BCE the tribes and chiefdoms of Iron Age I were replaced by ethnic nation states, Israel, Judah, Moab, Ammon and others, each with its national god, and all more or less equal. Thus Chemosh was the god of the Moabites, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qaus the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh the "God of Israel" (no "God of Judah" is mentioned anywhere in the Bible). In each kingdom the king was also the head of the national religion and thus the viceroy on Earth of the national god; in Jerusalem this was reflected each year when the king presided over a ceremony at which Yahweh was enthroned in the Temple.
The centre of Yahweh's worship lay in three great annual festivals coinciding with major events in rural life: Passover with the birthing of lambs, Shavuot with the cereal harvest, and Sukkot with the fruit harvest. These probably pre-dated the arrival of the Yahweh religion, but they became linked to events in the national mythos of Israel: Passover with the exodus from Egypt, Shavuot with the law-giving at Biblical Mount Sinai, and Sukkot with the wilderness wanderings.
The festivals thus celebrated Yahweh's salvation of Israel and Israel's
status as his holy people, although the earlier agricultural meaning
was not entirely lost. His worship presumably involved sacrifice, but many scholars have concluded that the rituals detailed in Leviticus 1–16, with their stress on purity and atonement, were introduced only after the Babylonian exile, and that in reality any head of a family was able to offer sacrifice as occasion demanded. (A number of scholars have also drawn the conclusion that infant sacrifice, whether to the underworld deity Molech or to Yahweh himself, was a part of Israelite/Judahite religion until the reforms of King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE). Sacrifice was presumably complemented by the singing or recital of psalms, but again the details are scant. Prayer played little role in official worship.
The Hebrew Bible gives the impression that the Jerusalem temple
was always meant to be the central or even sole temple of Yahweh, but
this was not the case: the earliest known Israelite place of worship is a 12th-century open-air altar in the hills of Samaria
featuring a bronze bull reminiscent of Canaanite "Bull-El" (El in the
form of a bull), and the archaeological remains of further temples have
been found at Dan on Israel's northern border and at Arad in the Negev and Beersheba, both in the territory of Judah. Shiloh, Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah, Ramah and Dan were also major sites for festivals, sacrifices, the making of vows, private rituals, and the adjudication of legal disputes.
Yahweh-worship was famously aniconic,
meaning that the god was not depicted by a statue or other image. This
is not to say that he was not represented in some symbolic form, and
early Israelite worship probably focused on standing stones, but according to the Biblical texts the temple in Jerusalem featured Yahweh's throne in the form of two cherubim, their inner wings forming the seat and a box (the Ark of the Covenant) as a footstool, while the throne itself was empty.
No satisfactory explanation of Israelite aniconism has been advanced,
and a number of recent scholars have argued that Yahweh was in fact
represented prior to the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah late in the monarchic period: to quote one recent study, "[a]n early aniconism, de facto or otherwise, is purely a projection of the post-exilic imagination" (MacDonald, 2007).
Yahweh and the rise of monotheism
Image on a pithos sherd found at Kuntillet Ajrud below the inscription "Yahweh and his Asherah".
The two standing figures are sometimes seen as a representation of the
divine couple, while the seated lyre-player behind them is an
entertainer. Alternatively, many art historians identify the standing figures as representations of the Egyptian dwarf-god Bes, on account of their distinctively bovine faces. Ziony Zevit has argued that Yahweh was represented as a Bes-figure, though there is little evidence for this. It is also possible that the images on the pot have nothing to do with the inscription at all.
Pre-exilic Israel, like its neighbours, was polytheistic, and Israelite monotheism was the result of unique historical circumstances. The original god of Israel was El, as the name demonstrates—its probable meaning is "may El rule" or some other sentence-form involving the name of El. In the early tribal period, each tribe would have had its own patron god; when kingship emerged, the state promoted Yahweh as the national god of Israel, supreme over the other gods, and gradually Yahweh absorbed all the positive traits of the other gods and goddesses. Yahweh and El merged at religious centres such as Shechem, Shiloh and Jerusalem,
with El's name becoming a generic term for "god" and Yahweh, the
national god, appropriating many of the older supreme god's titles such
as El Shaddai (Almighty) and Elyon (Most High).
Asherah, formerly the wife of El, was worshipped as Yahweh's consort or mother; potsherds discovered at Khirbet el-Kôm and Kuntillet Ajrûd make reference to "Yahweh and his Asherah", and various biblical passages indicate that her statues were kept in his temples in Jerusalem, Bethel, and Samaria. Yahweh may also have appropriated Anat,
the wife of Baal, as his consort, as Anat-Yahu ("Anat of Yahu", i.e.,
Yahweh) is mentioned in 5th century BCE records from the Jewish colony at Elephantine in Egypt. A goddess called the Queen of Heaven was also worshipped, probably a fusion of Astarte and the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, possibly a title of Asherah.
Worship of Baal and Yahweh coexisted in the early period of Israel's
history, but they were considered irreconcilable after the 9th century
BCE, following the efforts of King Ahab and his queen Jezebel to elevate Baal to the status of national god, although the cult of Baal did continue for some time.
The worship of Yahweh alone began at the earliest with Elijah in the 9th century BCE, but more likely with the prophet Hosea in the 8th; even then it remained the concern of a small party before gaining ascendancy in the exilic and early post-exilic period. The early supporters of this faction are widely regarded as being monolatrists rather than true monotheists;
they did not believe that Yahweh was the only god in existence, but
instead believed that he was the only god the people of Israel should
worship.
Finally, in the national crisis of the exile, the followers of Yahweh
went a step further and outright denied that the other deities aside
from Yahweh even existed, thus marking the transition from monolatrism
to true monotheism.
Second Temple Judaism
Modern reconstruction of what the Second Temple of Yahweh would have looked like after its renovation during the reign of Herod I
In 539 BCE Babylon itself fell to the Persian conqueror Cyrus, and in 538 BCE the exiles were permitted to return to Yehud Medinata, as the Persian province of Judah was known.
The Temple is commonly said to have been rebuilt in the period 520–515
BCE, but it seems probable that this is an artificial date chosen so
that 70 years could be said to have passed between the destruction and
the rebuilding, fulfilling a prophecy of Jeremiah.
In recent decades, it has become increasingly common among scholars to assume that much of the Hebrew bible was assembled, revised and edited in the 5th century BCE to reflect the realities and challenges of the Persian era. The returnees had a particular interest in the history of Israel: the written Torah (the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), for example, may have existed in various forms during the Monarchy (the period of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah), but it was in the Second Temple that it was edited and revised into something like its current form, and the Chronicles, a new history written at this time, reflects the concerns of the Persian Yehud in its almost-exclusive focus on Judah and the Temple.
Prophetic works were also of particular interest to the
Persian-era authors, with some works being composed at this time (the
last ten chapters of Isaiah and the books of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi and perhaps Joel) and the older prophets edited and reinterpreted. The corpus of Wisdom books saw the composition of Job, parts of Proverbs, and possibly Ecclesiastes, while the book of Psalms
was possibly given its modern shape and division into five parts at
this time (although the collection continued to be revised and expanded
well into Hellenistic and even Roman times).
Second Temple Judaism was centered not on synagogues,
which began to appear only in the 3rd century BCE, and the reading and
study of scripture, but on the Temple itself, and on a cycle of
continual blood sacrifice (meaning the sacrifice of live animals). Torah, or ritual law, was also important, and the Temple priests were responsible for teaching it, but the concept of scripture
developed only slowly. While the written Torah (the Pentateuch) and the
Prophets were accepted as authoritative by the 1st century CE, beyond
this core the different Jewish groups continued to accept different
groups of books as authoritative.
During the Second Temple period, speaking the name of Yahweh in public became regarded as taboo. When reading from the scriptures, Jews began to substitute the divine name with the word adonai (אֲדֹנָי), meaning "Lord". The High Priest of Israel was permitted to speak the name once in the Temple during the Day of Atonement, but at no other time and in no other place. During the Hellenistic period, the scriptures were translated into Greek by the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora. Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures render both the tetragrammaton and adonai as kyrios (κύριος), meaning "the Lord". After the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the original pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was forgotten.
The period of Persian rule saw the development of expectation in a
future human king who would rule purified Israel as Yahweh's
representative at the end of time–that is, a messiah. The first to mention this were Haggai and Zechariah, both prophets of the early Persian period. They saw the messiah in Zerubbabel, a descendant of the House of David who seemed, briefly, to be about to re-establish the ancient royal line, or in Zerubbabel and the first High Priest, Joshua
(Zechariah writes of two messiahs, one royal and the other priestly).
These early hopes were dashed (Zerubabbel disappeared from the
historical record, although the High Priests continued to be descended
from Joshua), and thereafter there are merely general references to a
Messiah of (meaning descended from) David. From these ideas, Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam would later emerge.
Graeco-Roman syncretism
A 4th century BCE drachm (quarter shekel) coin from the Persian province of Yehud Medinata, possibly representing Yahweh seated on a winged and wheeled sun-throne.
Yahweh is frequently invoked in Graeco-Roman magical texts dating from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, most notably in the Greek Magical Papyri, under the names Iao, Adonai, Sabaoth, and Eloai. In these texts, he is often mentioned alongside traditional Graeco-Roman deities and Egyptian deities. The archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Ouriel and Jewish cultural heroes such as Abraham, Jacob, and Moses are also invoked frequently.
The frequent occurrence of Yahweh's name was likely due to Greek and
Roman folk magicians seeking to make their spells more powerful through
the invocation of a prestigious foreign deity.
Tacitus, John the Lydian, and Cornelius Labeo all identify Yahweh with the Greek god Dionysus. Jews themselves frequently used symbols that were also associated with Dionysus such as kylixes, amphorae, leaves of ivy, and clusters of grapes. In his Quaestiones Convivales, the Greek writer Plutarch writes that the Jews hail their god with cries of "Euoi" and "Sabi", phrases associated with the worship of Dionysus. According to Sean M. McDonough, Greek-speakers may have confused Aramaic words such as Sabbath, Alleluia, or even possibly some variant of the name Yahweh itself for more familiar terms associated with Dionysus.
