Yahweh Origin Of A Desert God

Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahweh-worshiping Midianites of the Early Iron Age brought their deity along with metallurgy into ancient Palestine and the Israelite people.

Provides a ground-breaking new interpretation with which to consider and contextualize the name Yahweh before its relationship with Israel.

This special issue publishes most of the contributions of a three-day workshop of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe" held on July 2019 at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. It seeks to explore and contextualize the configuration of the varied desert cultic practices from the southern Levant and northern Arabia during the Late Bronze/Iron Ages that may have contributed to the emergence of the Yahwistic cult. By this it raises also crucial questions on the early history of the Israelite and Judean religions in the first millennium BCE. Recent archaeological excavations in the Negev, southern Transjordan and Hejaz and new interpretations of old epigraphic and iconographic evidence are rapidly changing the biblical-based paradigm of the interactions between the desert cults and the Iron Age Levantine religions. Cultural contacts and the entanglement of religious networks are paramount for the understanding of this early history. Recent archaeological, iconographic and epigraphic studies of the Southern Levant contribute to the question of the emergence and early development of a Yahwistic religion. The issue adopts an interdisciplinary approach, assessing textual, archaeological, as well as epigraphic and iconographic data.

In this history of the development of monotheism, the author explains how Israel's religion evolved from a cult of Yahweh as a primary deity among many to a fully defined monotheism with Yahweh as sole god. Repudiating the traditional scholarly premise that Israel was fundamentally different in culture and religion from its Canaanite neighbors, he shows that the two cultures were fundamentally similar.

According to the Bible, Abraham hears the voice of god. God instructs Abraham to leave Ur, a city southeast of present-day Baghdad, and go to Canaan, where God would make Abraham a “great nation.” Abraham goes to Canaan where Isaac is sired. Isaac begets Jacob, who sires 12 sons. The offspring of those twelve sons represent the Twelve Tribes, or Children of Israel. Jacob's favorite son Joseph is sold into Egyptian slavery by his jealous brothers. He rises to become the most powerful man in Egypt next to Pharaoh because of his ability to interpret the Pharaoh's dreams. When a famine strikes Canaan, he brings the Children of Israel down to Egypt, where they settle in the Land of Goshen, the land from which the Hebrews later left Egypt at the time of the Exodus. After Joseph dies, a new pharaoh comes to power who “knew not Joseph,” and the Hebrews are enslaved. Their captivity lasts for 430 years. When Pharaoh learns that a Hebrew “deliverer” is born, according to prophesy, the first male of every Hebrew family is killed by Pharaoh's soldiers. One Hebrew male baby is sent down the Nile River where he is found by the Egyptian princess Bithiah, who adopts the child. She names him Moses. Moses later learns of his Hebrew heritage, and in a rage kills an Egyptian soldier. He then flees Egypt. He meets Sephora in the desert, marries her, and is introduced to the location where the “god of the mountain” lives.Moses meets “God” and learns that His name is YHWH, pronounced Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton which is loosely translated as, “I am that I am.” The God of Abraham instructs Moses to tell Pharaoh to let his people go. Pharaoh refuses. God inflicts the Ten Plagues of Egypt upon Pharaoh's people. After the firstborn son of Pharaoh dies as a victim of the 10th plague, Pharaoh lets the God of Israel's people go. Moses takes the Hebrews into the desert. While they are waiting for Moses to return from Mount Sinai, where Moses is receiving the Ten Commandments, they build a “golden calf” to worship the pagan god of the Canaanites, Ba'al. The God of Abraham condemns the Hebrews to wander the desert for 40 years until all those who worshiped the false idol have died. Moses gets the Hebrews to the edge of Canaan where he dies and is buried on Mount Nebo. Joshua takes the Hebrews into the “Promised Land” where he leads the Hebrew tribes in the conquest of Canaan. Joshua fights the Battle of Jericho, where the soldiers of the Israelite army blow their trumpets and the “walls come tumbling down.” This is the biblical narrative which chronicles the early rise of the Jewish nation and people, Israel and the Israelites, and how they came to know and exclusively worship the God of Abraham, YHWH. And not a word of it is true! This book will attempt to reconstruct the most likely series of events which can best describe how Israel and the Israelites came to be. The biblical stories of creation, of the universe and of humans, as well as the origin of Israel, are works of fiction.Around 4,000 years ago, an Asiatic horde known as the Hyksos invaded Egypt and rose to prominence. By 1675 BCE they were in control of Lower Egypt, the northern half of Egypt, which had separated from Upper Egypt, still under control of the Egyptians. By 1550 BCE, Upper Egypt regained control of Lower Egypt and expelled the Hyksos, who left Egypt (in an "Exodus"). As they transited through the Sinai Peninsula, they were introduced to the pagan god (YHW) of the Shasu, Bedouin nomads. As the Hyksos made their way into Canaan, YHW evolved into YHWH, Yahweh. The God of Abraham who "spoke to Moses," YHWH, is most likely a new and improved version of the pagan god YHW. The god of Jews, Christians and Muslims is most likely an updated version of a pagan god of desert nomads. The Hyksos, with their "new" god Yahweh, merged with the pastoral nomads of the Canaanite highlands. A nation was formed, Israel. The Hyksos and pastoral nomads of the Canaanite highlands became the Israelites.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the deity Yahweh is often portrayed as an old man. One of the epithets used of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, the Ancient of Days, is a source for this depiction of God as elderly. However, when we look closely at the early traditions of biblical Israel, we see a different picture: God is relatively youthful, a warrior who defends his people. This book is an examination of the question How did God become old? To answer this question, Bembry examines the way that aging and elderly human beings are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Then he makes a similar foray into the texts written in Ugaritic (a language quite close to ancient Hebrew), which provide a window into the ancient culture just north of Israel during the Late Bronze Age. He finds that Israel’s God shared attributes with the Ugaritic deities Baal and El. One prominent aspect of the similar attributes was that Yahweh’s depiction as a youthful warrior paralleled the way Baal was portrayed. The transformation from young deity to Ancient of Days took place at the intersection of two trajectories in the traditions of Israel. One trajectory is reflected in the way that apocalyptic traditions found in the book of Daniel recast the old Canaanite mythic imagery seen in the Ugaritic and early biblical texts. This trajectory allows Yahweh to take on qualities, such as old age, that were not associated with him during most of Israel’s history but were associated with El in the Canaanite traditions. The second trajectory, a depiction of Israel’s God as elderly, is connected with the development of the idea of Yahweh as father. The more comfortable the biblical tradents became with portraying Yahweh as a father—a metaphor that was not embraced in the early traditions—the easier it became for the people of Israel to think of Yahweh as occupying a stage of the human life cycle. These two trajectories came together in the 2nd century B.C.E., the chronological backdrop for Daniel 7, and found expression in a new epithet for Yahweh: Ancient of Days.

This insightful work examines the variety of ways that collective memory, oral tradition, history, and history writing intersect. Integral to all this are the ways in which ancient Israel was shaped by the monarchy, the Babylonian exile, and the dispersions of Judeans and the ways in which Israel conceptualized and interacted with the divine-Yahweh as well as other deities.

Introductory Matters -- The History of Scholarship on Ancient Israelite Religion : A Brief Sketch -- Methodology -- El Worship -- The Iconography of Divinity : El -- The Origin of Yahweh -- The Iconography of Divinity : Yahweh -- The Characterization of the Deity Yahweh : Yahweh as Warrior and Family God -- The Characterization of the Deity Yahweh : Yahweh as King and Yahweh as Judge -- Characterization of the Deity Yahweh : Yahweh as Holy.