Yahweh

• 1. Introduction

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  Yahweh may first appear in writing on an Egyptian inscription at Soleb, dating from the time of Amenhotep III, who ruled from 1390 to 1352 BCE. The inscription names a place as 'YHWA in the Land of the Shasu.' The Shasu were nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia. Scholars are still unsure whether that place name has anything to do with the god. Even so, it is the oldest plausible mention of a deity who became the national god of the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel-Samaria and Judah.

  Yahweh was an ancient Semitic god of the southeastern Levant. His worship goes back to at least the early Iron Age and apparently to the late Bronze Age. Most modern scholars favor a southern origin for him, but they agree on very little else about where he began.

  Several puzzles run through his story. Why did the name of a god become something that nobody could pronounce? Where did he come from, when no one outside Israel seems to have worshipped him? How did a god of storms and war, once one deity among many, become the only god worth worshipping? And how did the Greeks and Romans, who met him centuries later, make sense of him?

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• 2. A Name Nobody Speaks

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  The god's name was written in Paleo-Hebrew with four letters, which scholars transliterate as YHWH. Modern scholarship has reached a consensus to transcribe those letters as Yahweh. Because the name has four letters, it is commonly called the Tetragrammaton.

  Shorter forms of the name survive inside other words. Yeho-, Yahu-, Yah- and Yo- appear in personal names. The cry 'Hallelujah' carries the same short form.

  The sacredness of the name, together with the Commandment against taking it 'in vain', led to increasingly strict limits on saying or writing it. Rabbinic sources suggest that by the Second Temple period the name was officially pronounced only once a year. The High Priest spoke it on the Day of Atonement.

  According to a pious interpretation, Jews also began to put other Hebrew words in its place. The main substitute was ăḏōnāy. The Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures, made by Jews of the Egyptian diaspora in the Hellenistic period, followed the same habit. They rendered both Yahweh and adonai as kyrios, which means 'Lord'.

  Then came the Jewish-Roman wars. After the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the original pronunciation was forgotten entirely. What the word actually meant had been a puzzle for far longer.

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• 3. Meaning in Dispute

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  Exodus 3:14 offers an explanation of the name in the phrase ehyeh ašer ehyeh, 'I Am that I Am'. Many scholars see it as a late theological gloss, invented after the original meaning had been forgotten. Some scholars dispute that view.

  Theodor Lewis looks instead to the Amorite element yahwi-, found in personal names in the Mari texts. It means 'brings to life' or 'causes to exist', as in yahwi-dagan, 'Dagon causes to exist'. Frank Moore Cross cautioned that this verbal form only helps reconstruct the verbal root of the name. He argued 'vigorously' against treating yahwi- as a divine epithet.

  J. Philip Hyatt thought yahwi- more likely described a god who creates and sustains the life of a newborn child, rather than the life of the universe. Hillel Ben-Sasson went further. He found insufficient evidence that Amorites used yahwi- for gods at all. In his view the element comes from the root hwy, which means 'he will be'.

  A second theory holds that Yahweh began as a shortened form of ˀel ḏū yahwī ṣabaˀôt, 'El who creates the hosts'. Cross considered this one of El's cultic names. The phrase, however, appears nowhere, inside the Bible or outside it. El was also elderly and paternal, without Yahweh's links to storm and battle. Scholars generally agree the name had a non-causative sense, because a causative form would give YHYH rather than YHWH.

  Gérard Nissim Amzallag, of Ben-Gurion University, proposes something stranger. He argues that Yahweh was first portrayed as a fire deity tied to volcanic activity and metalworking. In the Bronze Age, he explains, gods of metallurgy were honored as gods of weapons and also as gods of creation.

  Etymology has settled nothing, so many scholars turn to geography instead.

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• 4. Southern Roots

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  Yahweh is not attested anywhere except among the Israelites. The dominant view still places him in the south, in the region associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman. Many scholars support this, though not all do. It raises an obvious problem: how did a southern god reach the north?

  Many scholars find the Kenite hypothesis plausible. It holds that traders carried Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan. The idea ties together several points. Yahweh is missing from Canaan, the biblical stories link him with Edom and Midian, and Moses has Kenite or Midianite connections.

  Its weaknesses are serious. Most Israelites were firmly rooted in Palestine, and the historical role of Moses is problematic. If the hypothesis is kept, the Israelites must have met Yahweh, and the Midianites and Kenites, inside Israel itself. That meeting would have come through the earliest political leaders of Israel.

  Christian Frevel doubts the southern evidence. Inscriptions that mention 'YHWH of Teman' may only show his presence there at a later time. Teman, he notes, can refer to any southern territory, Judah included.

  Some scholars reverse the direction entirely. They argue that worship of YHWH grew from the native culture of the Kingdom of Israel and was promoted in the Kingdom of Judah by the Omrides. Frevel suggests that conquests by Hazael in the Kingdom of Israel forced the two kingdoms to cooperate. That cooperation spread YHWH worship among ordinary Judeans, who had earlier seen him as the patron god of the Judean state.

  The Edomite god Qōs adds another wrinkle. From the Kenite viewpoint, some propose that Qōs and Yahweh were one deity, with Qōs as a title of Yahweh. Doeg the Edomite is shown worshipping Yahweh with no difficulty and is at home in Jewish sanctuaries. The Tanakh also declines to name Qōs explicitly, unlike the chief gods of Ammon and Moab. Some scholars say the two gods were too alike to reject one of them. Others say they were separate from the start and blame later tensions between Judeans and Edomites for the silence.

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• 5. The Divine Assembly

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  Michael D. Coogan wrote: 'Many biblical writers frequently used polytheistic concepts, depicting Yahweh as the head of a large pantheon whose members advised him and celebrated his accomplishments. This pantheon functioned, as in Mesopotamian and Greek religion, as a kind of divine council or assembly, under the rule of the high god.'

  The picture begins in the early Iron Age, from 1200 to 1000 BCE. Modern scholars find no distinction in language or material culture between Canaanites and Israelites. They define Israelite culture as a subset of Canaanite culture. Its religion therefore included Canaanite gods: El, ruler of the pantheon, his consort Asherah, and Baal.

  The earliest biblical literature gives Yahweh the traits of a storm god, common in ancient Near Eastern myth. He marches out from Edom or the Sinai desert, leading an army of stars and planets against the enemies of Israel. Some of this storm imagery may instead come from Baal.

  By the late Iron Age, from 1000 to 586 BCE, nation states had appeared, each with its own national god. Chemosh belonged to the Moabites, Milcom to the Ammonites, Qōs to the Edomites and Yahweh to the Israelites. In each kingdom the king headed the national religion, serving as the god's viceroy on earth. The Kingdom of Israel emerged in the 10th century BCE. Judah may have emerged a century later, and the Bible mentions no 'God of Judah' anywhere.

  The original pantheon had tiers. El and Asherah stood at the top, followed by their children, who formed the divine assembly. Below them came deities of traders and craftsmen, and then minor or messenger gods. It has been argued that Deuteronomy 32:8-9 once described Yahweh as one of the sons of El, and that a later emendation removed this.

  At some point the second tier collapsed. Yahweh became conflated with El, who had originally headed the pantheon. The remaining gods of the assembly were turned into angels.

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• 6. Struggle for One God

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  During the reign of Ahab, and especially after his marriage to Jezebel, Baal may briefly have replaced Yahweh as the national god of Israel. Judah was not affected. In the 9th century BCE, the prophets Elijah and Elisha are associated with a rejection of Baal worship.

  The Yahweh religion then began to separate from its Canaanite heritage. From 800 to 500 BCE, legal and prophetic writers condemned the asherim, sun worship, worship on the high places and practices connected with the dead. Yet features of Baal, El and Asherah were absorbed into Yahweh. Epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to him alone.

  A struggle emerged between those who held that Yahweh alone should be worshipped and those who worshipped him within a larger group of gods. The Yahweh-alone party of the prophets and the Deuteronomists finally won. Their victory lies behind the biblical story of an Israel that swings between 'following other gods' and loyalty to Yahweh.

  Some scholars see early supporters of a Yahweh-only faction in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, in the time of Elijah and Hosea. By becoming 'Lord of the Land' (adon), Yahweh took over the roles of Baal and El. This picture had only marginal impact under Josiah. It did not become lasting until the exilic and post-exilic periods.

  The Babylonian exile was a national crisis, and in it Yahweh is described as the sole deity. He takes on every attribute of earlier gods and goddesses. The 6th-century BCE Second Isaiah praises him as supreme in order to restore Israel's confidence in its own historical gods. The claim of monotheism is aimed at the gods of Nebuchadnezzar II, who built his reign on Marduk and Nabu.

  The change was gradual. It was not complete in the First Temple period. At Elephantine in the 5th century BCE, some Jews appear to have worshipped Yahweh and Anath as separate from Asherah and El.

  Scholars generally agree that Persian monotheism shaped the next stage. In post-exilic and prophetic writings, under Zoroastrian influence, Yahweh becomes a distant and more merciful supreme deity. Only then does Elohim, once a term for the Canaanite High God, become another name for him. Hellenistic influence made the beliefs more exclusive still. They rejected lesser deities and emanations of deities, in favor of Yahweh as an abstract single god.

  Yahwism eventually developed into Judaism and Samaritanism. Other deities were denied outright, and Yahweh was proclaimed creator and the only god worthy of worship. Throughout these centuries, ordinary worship followed a calendar of lambs, grain and fruit.

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• 7. Festivals, Altars and Images

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  Three great annual festivals stood at the center of Yahweh's worship, each matching an event in rural life. Passover came with the birthing of lambs, Shavuot with the cereal harvest and Sukkot with the fruit harvest. These festivals probably pre-date the arrival of the Yahweh religion. They were then tied to the national mythos: Passover to the exodus from Egypt, Shavuot to the law-giving at Mount Sinai and Sukkot to the wilderness wanderings. The earlier farming meaning was never entirely lost.

  Sacrifice was presumably part of the worship, but the details are thin. Many scholars conclude that the rituals of Leviticus 1-16, with their stress on purity and atonement, came only after the Babylonian exile. In practice, any head of a family could offer a sacrifice when the occasion called for it. A number of scholars also conclude that infant sacrifice was part of Israelite and Judahite religion until the reforms of King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE. It was offered either to the underworld deity Molech or to Yahweh himself. Psalms were presumably sung or recited, while prayer played little role in official worship.

  The Hebrew Bible suggests that the Jerusalem temple was always meant to be the central or only temple of Yahweh. That was not the case. The earliest known Israelite place of worship is an open-air altar in the hills of Samaria, from the 12th century BCE. It features a bronze bull reminiscent of Bull-El, which is El in the form of a bull.

  Archaeologists have also found the remains of temples at Dan on Israel's northern border, at Arad in the Negev and at Beersheba, in Judah. Shiloh, Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah and Ramah joined Dan as major sites. People came there for festivals, sacrifices, vows, private rituals and the settling of legal disputes.

  The ban on depicting Yahweh is a late idea, which entered around the time of the Deuteronomy texts. No explanation for this aniconism is universally accepted. A number of scholars argue that Yahweh was represented before the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah late in the monarchic period. One study puts it bluntly: 'an early aniconism, de facto or otherwise, is purely a projection of the post-exilic imagination'. Other scholars find no certain evidence of any human-shaped image of Yahweh in the pre-exilic period.

  How Yahweh looked remained an open question, and outsiders offered their own answers.

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• 8. Seen by Outsiders

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  Papyrus Amherst 63, written in Imperial Aramaic in ancient Egypt, invokes Yahweh. So do the Greek Magical Papyri from Roman Egypt, which are Jewish or Jewish-influenced and date from the 1st to 5th centuries CE.

  Greco-Roman magical texts between the 2nd century BCE and the 5th century CE call on him often. He appears under the names Iao, Adonai, Sabaoth and Eloai, usually beside Greek, Roman and Egyptian gods. The archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Ouriel are invoked too, along with heroes such as Abraham, Jacob and Moses. Folk magicians likely hoped a prestigious foreign deity would make their spells stronger.

  A coin issued by Pompey to celebrate his conquest of Judaea shows a kneeling, bearded figure holding a branch. The branch was a common Roman symbol of submission. The inscription reads Bacchivs Ivdaevs, which can mean either 'The Jewish Bacchus' or 'Bacchus the Judaean'. Some read the figure as Yahweh, shown as a local form of Bacchus, also called Dionysus.

  Others object that coins with such imagery normally showed conquered people, not the gods of conquered peoples. On that view the coin simply shows a Judean called 'Bacchius' surrendering. He is sometimes identified as the Hasmonean king Aristobulus II, who was overthrown by Pompey's campaign.

  Whatever the coin means, Tacitus, John the Lydian, Cornelius Labeo and Marcus Terentius Varro all identified Yahweh with Bacchus-Dionysus. Jews themselves often used symbols that were also linked to Dionysus, including kylixes, amphorae, ivy leaves and clusters of grapes. Plutarch used that overlap to argue that Jews worshipped a form of Bacchus-Dionysus. In his Quaestiones Convivales, he adds that Jews hail their god with cries of 'Euoi' and 'Sabi', phrases tied to Dionysus worship.

  According to Sean M. McDonough, Greek speakers may simply have confused Aramaic words with more familiar ones. He names Sabbath, Alleluia and possibly some variant of the name Yahweh itself. Other Roman writers, among them Juvenal, Petronius and Florus, identified Yahweh with the god Caelus.

  Among Greek readers of Genesis, the picture could turn dark. The Secret Book of John, written under Hellenistic influence, says that Eve lay with Yaldabaoth and bore two sons, Abel and Cain. It identifies Abel with Elohim and Cain with Yahweh. Abel is righteous, while Cain, corrupted by his father, is unjust, and by murdering his brother he brings envy and death into the world.

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