Who is Yahweh - How a Warrior-Storm God became the God of the Israelites and World Monotheism

The birth, survival, twilight, and ultimate demise of divine beings seem to follow their own evolutionary patterns, such that some gods endure without significant cultic or theological change for centuries, while others blaze onto the world stage only to burn themselves up into extinction almost as soon as they appeared. Indeed, a given god must perform a careful balancing act to persist much through human time, marked by seemingly unending upheavals. On the one hand, a divine being must have a definite enough quality to attract and maintain worshipers, and yet, at the same time, such a god cannot be so rigid, or its cult so conservative, that it cannot endure significant adaptation and change.

The only surety of our mundane world: too far in one direction makes a god unappealing; too far in the other dooms them. Given religious fashion and change, frankly—and surely—through the eons, some gods have adapted and many gods have gone extinct, though one god has proven to be rather successful bodily enough—not that that makes them a better god, or even a real god, beyond all reasonable historical expectation. In fact, this god, whose simple name means something like "the one that exists," emerged from the sands of Bronze Age obscurity to eventually become not just a national god, but in the end, simply the god for the overwhelming majority of the world's population.

Now, but just how did a tribal warrior storm god, Yahweh, go from being a minor god among gods—much more ancient and much more powerful, enduring up till then at least—to simply becoming God, the sole God of all that is, in the mythology of billions? If you're interested in magic and hermetic philosophy, alchemy or Kabbalah, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe and check out my other topics on contents and other terrorism. Also, if you want to support my work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics here and esoterica here on YouTube, freely accessible, I hope you consider supporting my work on Patreon, or with a one-time donation with the Super Thanks option, or perhaps you'd buy a shirt over at our merch store on the channel.

But now, let's turn to a god that all of us know of, but none of us really know much about: Yahweh, or "the one that exists," the deity at the core of the Abrahamic faiths and beyond. I'm Dr Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane and the history, philosophy, and religion. [Music] [Music] As you might imagine, this is an episode I've been wanting to make for a long time and I've been absolutely dreading having to make it for even longer.

The importance of an episode on Yahweh is basically self-evident, but the challenge of making it should be equally self-evident. The literature on this topic is vast, utterly vast; it spreads over a dozen or so languages, performed by ingenious specialists with an encyclopedic grasp of the material, and yet an entire argument or series of arguments can hinge on a single suffix of an inscription. I'm looking at you, contilit-adude pronominal suffix problem.

And, of course, with Yahweh being at the core of the Abrahamic religions, historicizing such a being can easily be taken as an assault on the very core of those religions. If you distort Yahweh, everything else might just disappear into the air; and yet, that's the task at hand. So it should go without saying that virtually everything I'm going to say in this episode can and would be taken to task by an army of specialists, and can in no way, in no way, be taken to be definitive, because there is simply that little consensus among the specialists.

But I'd rather hazard an episode on the topic than just throw my hands up and say, "Oh, it's utterly frustrating by the difficulty, the complicatedness, and the specialization of the topic. " Better, as a famous saying by Beckett goes: "Ever tried, ever failed; no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.

" So here's to failing better in the name of public education. Also, on a personal note, using the name Yahweh is just simply an academic attempt to vocalize the name of the Israelite tribal god and not some attempt to actually utter a magical divine name, much less take such a name in vain. In fact, public education is just about the furthest thing from my mind when I think about doing something in vain.

Lastly, this is an academic channel, and I check my religious commitments at the door; historical facts and evidence are what matter here, not my personal beliefs. Really, when we allow our faith to dictate our history, we really just betray both. I guess I'll just come out of the gate with it: the origins of Yahweh are utterly unknown.

The name may appear first in the 14th century BCE on an enemy list of Amenhotep III, and in a similar but later list in the 13th century BCE by Ramses II as the Shasu of Yahweh or the Shasu of Yahoo. It's not quite clear how that was pronounced. The Shasu were semi-nomadic pastoralists typically associated with raiding and general brigandry.

The Egyptian name for their name actually indicates their nomadic existence: they roamed about. While the name taken up into Semitic and Hebrew means something like "terrain" or "to plunder," so there's a clue what they were. While the name Yahweh does seem to appear here, it also seems to be functioning primarily as a toponym rather than as a Theon.

That other Shasu in the list are also associated with the region of the Seir mountain range in the southwestern Transjordan is probably going to prove salient here in just a moment. Whether the Shasu were proto-Israelites isn't clear, but it seems reasonable. .

. To think that there was probably some connection and did it with the Hyksos and the social, then ethnic groups, the Hebrews, that begins as a social group not an ethnic group, who were also associated with brigandry. So this is a fun origin story.

Israel first appears to enter history on the Merneptah Stele. It's a son of Ramses II, like his 13th son, where he claims victory such that the Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe; Ashkelon has been overcome, Gaza has been captured, and no Ammon is made non-existent. Israel is laid waste, and his seed is not; her who has become a widow because of Egypt.

It's perhaps worth mentioning here that the Egyptian determinative on Ashkelon, Noam, and Gaza indicate foreign cities—this is the triple mountain determinative—whereas Israel has the foreign ethnic group determinative. Though, to be sure, the use of determinatives by Egyptian scribes can be all over the place—kinda arbitrary. The southerly geographic placement may also be important, though note that the Israelites that Merneptah claims to annihilate aren't actually associated here with the Shasu, so that's interesting.

And, of course, their God, the God of Israel, and none of these guys are mentioned here. The first historical archaeological link between Israel and Yahweh as the God dates to much, much later in the Iron Age, where the 9th century BCE Mesha Stele, Victory Stela, brags of dragging vessels of Yahweh before Chemosh as the Moabite kingdom rebelled and escaped Amorite Israelite hegemony in the region. Thus, it seems that southern Levantine nomads and raiders were associated with Yahweh, perhaps as a kind of theological toponym, and that by the 13th century BCE, an ethnic group known as Israel, at least to the Egyptians, existed in a similar area.

And that, by the 9th century BCE, the Israelite House of Omri seems to have had Yahweh as an important, probably as their national god as opposed to the Moabite, before which those vessels, the aforementioned vessels, were dragged. Now, given the paucity of the archaeological record, which is basically that, what can we glean from our other surviving body of evidence? That is to say, Israelite literature, as edited and compiled into the Hebrew Bible, about the origins of Yahweh, or what we might call primitive Yahwism, or the cult of Yahweh before its assimilation into the Canaanite heartland, the Canaanite cult, and the Canaanite pantheon more generally?

Now, to do this, it appears that the best methodology would be to take the earliest linguistic strata of the Israelite literature as it appears in the Hebrew Bible, especially the Song of the Sea at Exodus 15:1-18, Judges 5, or Deborah’s Song, Psalms 18:29, 68, Genesis 49, among other scattered memories of very linguistically archaic mentions of Yahweh in His cult. From this, a rough sketch of primitive Yahweh can be made. It appears that the deity's original heartland was Seir, Edom, with accounts tracing it back to that region.

Recall the Khaziser earlier; that is to say, the northwestern Arabian Peninsula, just east of the Dead Sea. It appears that Yahweh was probably originally a warrior god, perhaps associated with raiding and women warband prophets. Further, the central manifestation of Yahweh seems to have been storms, specifically the catastrophic thunderstorms that result in the deadly flash flooding, which actually plagues that region down to this day.

Petra, the same region where Yahweh may have come from, was engineered around managing just those thunderstorms. Oh, and you can see video of what those flash floods look like in that region, and they are terrifying. At some point in the late Bronze or probably the early Iron Age, the Yahweh cult made its way into the Judean Highlands, likely settling at a cult center in Shiloh.

This corresponds roughly to the biblical period of the judges. The nomadic and possibly mercantile nature—note the mention of caravans in the Song of Deborah, which is, by the way, probably the earliest text in the Hebrew Bible of primitive Yahwism—might explain the diffusion of the cult. That is to say, it was spread through mercantile trade.

This diffusion is probably over-determined, however, especially if raiding were involved. Of course, the major historical backdrop of all of this is the Bronze Age collapse. Through the 13th century BCE, civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean experienced a cascading systems collapse, real scary, resulting in mass migration from the Aegean, i.

e. , the Sea Peoples, imperial border regression, and local hegemony collapse on the part of the various empires, especially the Egyptians. Imperial collapse, just full-blown civilization collapse for the Hittites and the city-state of Gezer, and generalized urban disintegration.

Note at a site like the city of Gezer. In fact, it may be that the conditions of the Bronze Age collapse allowed for the power vacuum in which one raiding as a means of survival would have emerged, and a raiding cult headed by a warrior raiding god like Yahweh might have proven pretty popular in the chaos. I mean, imagine what kind of religions would emerge in the world of Mad Max or something like that.

Though this was just speculation, and that disruption in the Bronze Age collapse was probably what allowed the various states to revolt, resulting in more, not just by putting them down, but also especially in the collapse of Egyptian hegemony in the region. And this is very important: this would have allowed de facto independence, especially in the Canaanite Highlands, because who wants to go up there? And it isn't surprising to me that Yahweh's cult, in its military-political state-building wing, would settle in relatively remote Shiloh before spreading north and south into the highlands and then pushing west down into the Shephelah to contest eventually with the Sea Peoples, who also got a foothold in former territory of Egyptian hegemony; this, of course, is the Peleset, as we know them from the.

. . Egyptian literature, or from the Bible as well, you guessed it, the Philistines.

Thus, by Iron I, or roughly around 1200 to 1000 BCE, Yahweh had probably come to settle in the Canaanite Highlands, thus marking the end of primitive Yahwism and the beginning of an incredibly complex process by which elements of Canaanite religious and cultic systems would be negotiated with both the cult and also the very divine person of Yahweh, through a process of theological convergence and assimilation, divergence, and cultic antagonism, and especially early monarchic syncretism. To appreciate this process, it's best to explore this complex dialectic on two axes: one being the Canaanite pantheon itself, but the other being the progression through time from the period of the judges and through the monarchies' complex cultic relationships, marked by syncretism in the north primarily, but more punctuated by Yahweh monolatry in the south before the eventual transition to monotheism and the exilic and really the post-exilic period. So let's begin by exploring the dynamics of theological convergence and divergence, or cultic antagonism, with the Canaanite pantheon and Yahweh.

Most of our knowledge of the Canaanite pantheon stems from the discoveries of vast royal libraries of the city of Ugarit, another victim of the Bronze Age collapse. What has emerged from this center are significant collections of mythological and cultic documents, deeply detailing the nature, personalities, and mythic deeds of the various Canaanite gods in that pantheon. Though two caveats are perhaps in order: the first is that the trove may represent a specifically royal, specifically Ugaritic expression of the Canaanite theology and its myth cycles; the second is that these documents date to the mid-12th century at the latest.

The city itself was probably destroyed around 1185 BCE, which is hundreds of years and still quite a distance away from the locus classicus of the development of the Israelite cult, down a good bit southerly in the highlands. Thus, we don't know to what degree the Canaanite cult expressed itself specifically in that region, down in the highlands, and this is especially true because the Canaanite written record in that area is remarkably poor—it's basically non-existent. So, to what degree can we take the Ugaritic texts to be representative of southern highlander cult?

Not clear. But those caveats aside, the head of the Canaanite pantheon was the grandfatherly god El, simply God. Indeed, some theories actually have that Yahweh was a local, very far southern manifestation of El, but I think that's probably doubtful, though Deuteronomy 39 seems to be an archaic recall when Elyon, a manifestation of El, parceled out the world, providing Yahweh specifically with the lands of Jacob/Israel.

This is probably a rare survival from a period where Yahweh was still kind of subservient to Elyon and before theological convergence with El more generally. However, it's clear that the Yahwists were pretty comfortable enough with El to allow for significant amounts of assimilation of El’s features onto Yahweh, even when those features perhaps stood in significant contrast to the strident warrior of the primitive cult. One of the more striking features of this is the assimilation of El as an elderly wise god.

El is known as the "Father of Years" in any Ugaritic myth cycles, and it's perhaps this image of an elderly, white-bearded deity that has been assimilated onto Yahweh from Canaanite El that has probably proved the most visibly enduring and popular perception in art. If you imagine an old bearded dude as God, you're imagining El. Attached to this elder character is also El's wisdom, a trait not typically associated again with a warrior god; they don't need to be wise or smart.

Furthermore, Yahweh partially converged as a creator deity, but only partially. The name Yahweh probably just meant "the one that is" or "he is" and was primitively not associated with creative powers. Again, warrior gods don't do much creating.

In fact, the verbal form to twist his name, YHWH, into a creative form—the verbal form that we know as "the Phil" in Hebrew—never appears in Israelite literature. Thus, it's unsurprising that a great deal of the creative work in the Bible is typically associated with divine names like El, and especially Elohim. Even a name like El Kana ("El Creates") never really appears with a Yahwistic theophoric form.

We never get a Yahwistic version of that name. Thus, we have a situation where not only are elements of El assimilated to Yahweh, but that the early Israelites were even comfortable enough with a theological identity made between the two; they combined El and Yahweh. It's very clear in the Hebrew Bible.

Thus, many elements of Canaanite El, though not all of them—definitely not all of them, as we'll see in a moment—are assimilated to Yahweh, with the identity being established; the powers and features of El de facto become those of Yahweh. An element of this transfer, especially in the earlier period, was El's divine council, including a retinue of quasi-divine bureaucrats such as the prosecuting attorney, Hasatan, but also the military leader, the Tsar Sabaoth, and also including the seventy sons of El, or El Yom. Of course, these sons would also later become demoted to angels as monotheism took root, before descending to earth to mate with human women in Genesis 6, a theme that gets developed, of course, in the Book of Enoch.

Though, like creation, this assimilation of the divine council was not total; the sons always appear as "sons of El," the divine appellation—they're never referred to as "sons of Yahweh. " Along with these originally quasi-divine beings would also come a retinue of celestial objects because the sky, especially things like stars, the sun, and the moon, were all worshiped in the region as well. One of those beings, probably Venus, appears in the divine council.

As a kind of insurgent upstart cast down to Canaanite, the underworld of the Israelites, in an oracle against the king of Babylon—probably Nebuchadnezzar—of course this character would later go on to become modified in Christian mythology to become the satanic Lucifer. In that tradition, it shows just how long of a half-life these beings can have; that being goes all the way back to ancient Canaanite celestial mythology. Another interesting instance has a deceptive spirit, Ruach Shakir, being recruited by Yahweh to fool some of the prophets to ensure the death of King Akhav.

Of course, Psalm 82 also captures this assimilation of El's divine counsel very clearly; He’s speaking to members of the Divine Council, the cult gods. Perhaps the most peculiar assimilation of this to the warrior god Yahweh are actually El's traits: merciful and compassionate. This is an outstanding trait and sensible for the grandfather El, who even has a bit too much to drink from time to time.

There are some great stories in the Ugaritic myth cycles about that, and it is an interesting but reasonable assimilation onto a god whose prehistory of warfare and brutal raiding must transition. It has to transition when you go into a more sedentary cult, where you know you can't solve all your problems through violence anymore, or even most of your problems through violence. Thus, this results in contemporary readers’ whiplash reading the Hebrew Bible, where the deity there seems to absolutely delight in the waiting and blood of His foes and killing people; and then you turn a few pages later, and this is a god whose mercy and compassion never fail.

That's because you have two gods being welded together here who have very different traits. Of course, not all elements of Yahweh were assimilated equally by the Israelites. One of the important epithets of El was Bull El, and bull iconography—eventually all iconography—especially in the south, was apparently polarizing among the Israelites.

It appears that the northern variants of the cult accepted El Yahweh bull iconography, with Jeroboam the First setting up very distinct bull imagery at his Yahweh shrines. Yahweh shrines at Bethel: the name there, House of El; and Dan—the actual Dan is the only surviving Yahweh shrine in the world from antiquity, at least along with Tel Arad in the south. But it's mostly then deconstructed and put in the Israel Museum.

These are the only two Yahweh shrines that survive into the archaeological record. Now, while this bull imagery might have been primitive to Yahweh, it's much more likely that it was a northern assimilation from the El cult, that the southern cult—by the way—preferring the Ark's cherubim as its major cult symbol. But it was actually just more generally aniconic in its disposition, generally grouped to detest, especially as the northern kingdom grew in power and prestige.

And, well, the Amrites were very powerful, and the southerners probably felt jealous of them and hated their cows. Indeed, the golden calf narrative itself may be a southern polemic against the northern assimilation of this dimension of El's cult—the importation of this bull imagery. Finally, El had a divine consort, a theoret, but I'll come back to her when I discuss Asherah in just a moment.

If the relationship of Yahweh and El was assimilation to convergence, then the relationship with the Canaanite warrior and storm god Baal—literally "the Lord"—is going to be characterized by assimilation to not only divergence but also just straight-up cultic antagonism. The discovery of the Ugaritic Baal cycle has done more to inform our understanding of the local ancient mythology of that region than perhaps any other group of texts, outside of course from the Hebrew Bible. Here, Baal is famous for his triumphs over the chaotic forces of the sea, or Yam; his fight with Death to the death, when he subsequently resurrected and achieved the taunt with Mot, or the god of death, with the aid of the fierce fertility warrior goddess Anat—thus providing for the life-giving winter rains in the region—before being exalted as virtually the king of the entire world.

Virtually every element of the Baal cultists will intercept with Yahweh in His cult, very probably because of just how similar the deities were and how very popular Baal must have been compared with the relative upstart Yahweh in the region. As I mentioned, both gods were associated with storms, especially for their life-giving rains in the region. However, they're both associated with storms of very different kinds.

Yahweh was likely associated with the terrifying thunderstorms and flash floods of the southern Arava regions, whereas Baal was associated primarily with the coastal winter storms, without which the arid region would struggle to bloom. Both storm gods, very different kinds of storms; however, as Yahweh settled into the region, the motif of Him as a rider upon the clouds—one virtually shared with Baal—would be extended not just to the thunderstorms of the south but also the coastal rains as well. This element becomes assimilated easily onto Yahweh.

Numerous evidences of these storm theophonies abound, though Psalm 29 conforms so much with Baal imagery that some scholars have just kind of argued that it's a literal Yahweh-for-all substitution—it's like cut and paste; Yahweh for Baal—but although it's a little simplistic, further elements of Baal's contests with the sea, or Yam, and its dragon, Lotan, are mirrored in early Israelite Yahwism with a similar contest, most notably in the third creation story of the Bible found in Psalm 74 and, of course, in Job, where the defeat of sea monsters—specifically Leviathan—were a necessary aspect of forging the world from watery chaos to order. This is a pretty common myth cycle in the ancient Near East. Ironically, this defeat of Leviathan would be later transposed into a world-ending apocalypse.

And later mutations of the myth, both in Judaism and in Christianity, for their ball contest with death or Moat, are often just demythologized in general, such that Yahweh has control over both life and death. In some passages, He is even described as swallowing up death. This is a very big flex—an ironic flex—over Yahweh's power over life and death, because death is best described in the great myth as having a gaping maw; it does the swallowing, not gods.

Furthermore, the dwelling place of Baal on Mount Zafon (modern-day Jebel Akra) became autonomized into Hebrew as just the word for North, with Yahweh also primitively associated with mountains, especially Sinai and Moriah. The title El Shaddai probably is just another reference to how a mountain (El) was assimilated over to Yahweh from the Akkadian word for mountain. Though eventually, Mount Zion is going to be substituted out for Mount Zathon for pride of place, the metonymy "Zephon" is the word for North and continues into Hebrew to this very day.

Of course, with both being warrior and storm gods, it's unsurprising that Yahweh would be pitted against Baal in cultic combat. It seems to be a video game, but Baal's popularity can be seen in the numerous—theoretically over a dozen—theonomic place names associated with him. These are probably local manifestations of Baal, akin to the way that Roman gods were locally manifest or even the way you get sort of avatars of Mary in various places, Our Lady of so-and-so.

Further, the horror Baal's worship seems to have inspired in certain Israelite writers and prophets is evident. Additionally, it's pretty clear that at least the first half of the monarchy, there was a pretty strong attempt to syncretize Yahweh with Baal worship. This seems reasonable, with Baal cultic objects placed in otherwise specifically Holistic shrines, probably to please both the local population and the exogamous wives for whom Baal was the central native god in their religion.

The Israelites would marry outside of the Israelite group in order to secure international relationships, like everyone else. Thus, this was very likely an attempt to assimilate Baal to Yahweh, just as with El in the north. However, the southern cult was never quite this comfortable, and purges by several southern kings—such as by Hezekiah, Jehu, and most famously Josiah—sought to completely eradicate non-Yahweh worship and even non-Jerusalemite Yahweh worship.

They didn't want you worshiping Yahweh somewhere else. However, it appears that by the 8th century BCE, the Israelite prophets such as Elijah and Elisha really rejected any form of syncretism. The narrative describes multiple contests, like ordeals, between the Israelite Yahweh partisans and the Baal cult and the Asherah cult, especially as backed by Ahab and his Phoenician wife Jezebel, who gets an unwarrantedly evil reputation.

You can hear, by the way, the alliteration in her name. In fact, the scribes of the Hebrew Bible so hated Baal that theonymics employing his name underwent taboo replacement with the Hebrew word for shame. Thus, names like Even the goddess Astarte become Ashtareth, using the vowel pattern from the word for shame to muck about with her name.

Furthermore, the phrase "Baal's bull" famously becomes "the Lord of the Flies," and even Daniel's term for the "abomination of desolation" may actually become a pun on Baal Shaman, or Baal of the heavens, thus suggesting that the Heavenly is thrown down. Thus, Baal and Yahweh are probably mutual victims of what Freud called the narcissism of minor difference—they're just that similar. The stage of ancient Canaan, or ancient Israel, was just too small for two warrior storm gods.

With only a minor exception, Baal basically vanishes from the religious record in Canaan by the post-exilic period. Though, of course, Baal would continue to function in the Phoenician deity system as Melqart as late as the rise of Christian hegemony in the late classical period. So one god had to go, and at least in that region, it ended up being Baal.

However, while not directly bearing on the development of Yahweh as a god, but more so on Yahwism as a cult, is the question of how else the consort Asherah would or would not be incorporated. Asherah appears in the Hebrew Bible some 40 times, though overwhelmingly in reference to a kind of wooden ritual pole that probably represents a sacred tree of fertility, which in turn, of course, represents the goddess herself. There are a couple of times where she's mentioned as a pesa' Asherah set up by Menasha.

This is probably an engraved representation of her, maybe like those from the Bronze Age of her cupping her breasts. So we don't know. Unsurprisingly, the cult of Asherah was very popular, and it seems reasonable for many reasons—after all, fertility is popular—that Yahweh-El assimilation convergence would also result in consort exchange such that El Athirat would become Yahweh-Asherah.

That seems to be precisely what happened, though of course not without some theological controversy. Several Israelite and Judean kings seem to have placed her cultic symbol in Yahweh temples, and equally stridently, Elijah contested with her prophets and the prophets of Baal and murdered them all, at least according to the text. Josiah targeted her cult in his Inquisition reforms.

Indeed, it's the Deuteronomists, particularly, that have the most deeply concerned worries about the elimination of her cult. Her exact status in this period is contested, while the two famous inscriptions at Kuntalit 'Adrud and Kirbat el-Kom seem to indicate that her status was as consort of Yahweh, despite that pesky pronominal suffix which no one quite seems to know what to do with. There are 50,000 volumes on that one pronominal suffix.

Overwhelming concern about her is the adoration of her cult object itself. Especially in Yahweh shrines, they may have been okay with Yahweh having a wife, but not her occult object in the same shrine. While we have to acknowledge the policy of evidence here, it seems reasonable to me that she did function as Yahweh's consort, but that this ill assimilation was heavily theologically contested, especially in the South with the more emergent Yahweh monolaters.

The cult object probably represented the Goddess; that seems almost ipso facto true. It clearly became associated with Yahweh. The Deuteronomists constantly complained about it, and the logic of convergence seems likely that the two were conceived together, despite, again, the general aniconism and Yahweh monolatry parties that would eventually emerge and obtain cultic hegemony, especially in the South.

Now, to what degree Asherah and Astarte/Ishtar were assimilating during this period is unknown; the answer is probably maybe. Furthermore, there's a vague reference to a being called the Queen of Heaven, very disdained by Jeremiah. Who this is is also unknown, though the term for the cakes that are offered to the Queen of Heaven in that text are actually Akkadian loan words.

They're coming over from the Akkadian language, so it seems like a nod in the direction of Ishtar/Astarte assimilation. But we don't know, with the exception of a few names, especially in very archaic sources there in the Song of Deborah, the fertility and warrior goddess Anat seems to play basically little to no role in this period of the development of Yahwism, and maybe just in the whole cultic environment of Canaan. Though the bloodshed imagery associated with Ugaritic are not her wading through blood and gore, and decapitated heads rolling about her feet, and dismembered hands flying into the air about her like locusts.

This needs to be a metal song! Why isn't there a metal band called Anat? You see very similar kinds of depictions of Yahweh delighting in warfare and carnage in the Song of Deborah.

But honestly, I would just suspect that primitive Yahweh and Anat would just have made a better couple than Yahweh and Asherah, given their proclivity to massacring people. You get kind of Natural Born Killer vibes from that couple, but I suspect the similarities are probably just endemic to ancient total warfare, hacking people to death on the battlefield, than any actual theological convergence or assimilation between Yahweh and Anat. Of course, Yahwism would undergo further assimilation to Canaanite mythology, especially the mythologizing of the plague gods Reshef and Devir—literally burning and plague-terrifying gods who come to serve as nightmarish steeds pulling the Divine Chariot.

That is an image in the Hebrew Bible of metal, or the literary transfer of the mighty Regal dead of the Raphaim in Ugaritic mythology to the Rephaim as giants defeated by biblical figures as a show of force in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, I've done an entire episode tracing out just the development and history of the Rephaim from ancient Canaanite into ancient Israelite mythology. If you want to check it out, that's a fascinating development with the Rephaim.

All in all, what we have is a complex, non-linear process whereby primitive Yahwism and Yahweh become implanted into the post-Bronze Age collapse of the area of the Canaanite-Israelite Highlands, becoming the chief, though not the sole, god of the emerging Israelites. Again, this is a famous henotheism of the period, and he becomes a core aspect of their emergent national hegemony in the region. The earlier period is marked by theological convergence and divergence, assimilation and conflict, all with the local Canaanite cults and their gods, with a tendency towards syncretism and originally the more affluent northern areas.

But this earns the ire of both the southern Yahweh partisans, who may have been already on the path or developing in the direction of monolatry and anachronism, along with a small fraction of northern prophet shamans. With the destruction of the North in 722 BCE, the northern Yahweh refugees would be absorbed into the more anti-syncretistic aniconic and Yahweh-monolatrist southern cult. This would develop in fits and starts until the rule of Josiah and the Deuteronomists, whose reforms, better understood as an Inquisition, not only sought out to eliminate non-Yahweh worship from this kingdom but also non-Jerusalemite Yahweh worship.

Again, theology and politics are the same thing here; in centralizing, one centralizes the other by necessity. Hence the destruction of even Yahweh shrines in the region, like that one that was torn down at Tel Arad, with the 6th century BCE exile of the Judean elites, who were probably a majority of Yahweh monolaters or even early monotheists. Maybe the theology of the exile and the post-exile would represent a massive shift from a parochial Judean god to a singular cosmic god, with a clear expression of monotheism first emerging in texts like Tritojesiah.

Monotheism would mark the post-exilic period: Yahwism went into exile, Judaism came back. And that’s the point I’d like to drive home. In my mind, the transition to the universal monotheism of Judaism would come at a price, and that price would be the particularism of Yahweh as Yahweh—far from the primitive warrior storm god of the desert wilds of the Arava, or even the quilted together deity forged in the religious crucible of contestation and assimilation of the period of the Judges in the northern and southern kingdoms.

The theological tension would now be between the God of Judaism as a people, both sovereign and diasporic, with a truly universal being transcending all differences, responsible for even the cosmos itself, even abstracted to utter transcendence by both apocalyptic mysticism and Hellenistic philosophy. The distinction now would be: what kind of universal God are you going to get—a parochial Judaism one, or a more philosophical abstract one? Be the promise of universal salvation reserved once only for the Judeans, matched by this cosmic apocalypticism and eschatological fervor in which Yahweh would become a father to a sacrificial son for the salvation of both Jew and Gentile.

This would set the stage for the next part of this epic story: the transition of Yahweh from a Judean God to simply God for billions and billions of human beings. As I mentioned, the literature in this field is vast and highly technical; however, I’d like to recommend a few volumes if you want to dive deeper into this topic. If this episode interests you, you need to, by all means, read "The Early History of God and the Origins of Biblical Monotheism" by Mark Smith, which is fantastic.

John Day’s "Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan" is a classic. Frank Moore Cross’s "Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic" along with "The Religions of Ancient Israel" by Sioni Z. V.

Zevit are both great for a diplomatic history of Israel from an archaeological point of view rather than just the text. The aptly named book by Dever, "Beyond the Text: A Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Ancient Judah," is very diplomatic and a fine text. Although his book, "Archaeology Buried the Bible," is kind of like the "too long; didn't read" version of the book I just mentioned, so if you want to read another one, that one's a good one; it’s kind of a digest of the more specialized texts.

Theodore Lewis’s more recent work, "The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity," is also just a beast of a text—a magisterial approach and well worth the effort. As I said, this episode is a testament to not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This episode is incomplete; it glosses way too fast over a lot of topics, and honestly, this could just be an entire semester class at the very least, requiring sophisticated knowledge of ancient Near Eastern history and several ancient languages, not to mention just an encyclopedic grasp of the Hebrew Bible and Canaanite myth more generally.

Despite the myriad shortcomings of this episode, I hope it’s still useful for grasping, at some level, where scholars are on the mysterious origin and development of Yahweh—a God we all know, and yet we still have to admit we know so little of. Until next time, I’m Dr Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.