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This article is about the national god of the Iron Age kingdoms of
Israel and Judah. For other uses, see Yahweh (disambiguation). See
also: Tetragrammaton.
Yahweh was the national god of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah,[2]
and appears to have been worshipped only in these two kingdoms. [10]
This was unusual in the Ancient Near East but not unknown–the god
Ashur, for example, was worshipped only by the Assyrians.[11] His
origins are mysterious: his name may be a shortened form of a cultic
formula relating to El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon (el dū yahwī
ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army
accompanying El as he marched beside the earthly armies of
Israel),[12] but the earliest possible occurrence is as a place-name
("land of Shasu of YHW") in an Egyptian inscription from the time of
Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE),[13] the Shasu being nomads from
Midian and Edom.[14]
Israel emerges into the historical record in the last decades of the 13th
century BCE, at the very end of the Late Bronze Age, as the Canaanite
city-state system was ending.[19] Recent scholarship suggests the
Israelite community arose peacefully and internally in the highlands of
Palestine[20]—in the words of archaeologist William Dever, "most of
those who came to call themselves Israelites … were or had been
indigenous Canaanites"[21][Notes 2]—and that Israelite religion
accordingly emerged gradually from a Canaanite milieu.[22]
El, not Yahweh, was the original "God of Israel"—the word "Israel" is
based on the name El rather than Yahweh.[23] He was the chief of the
Canaanite gods, described as "the kind, the compassionate," "the
creator of creatures".[24] He lived in a tent on a mountain from whose
base originated all the fresh waters of the world, from where he
presided over the Assembly of the Gods with the goddess Asherah as
his consort.[24][25] The pair made up the top tier of the Canaanite
pantheon;[24] the second tier was made up of their children, the
"seventy sons of Athirat" (another name of Asherah). [26] Prominent in
this group was Baal, with his home on Mount Zaphon; he gradually
became the dominant deity, so that El became the executive power and
Baal the military power in the cosmos.[27] 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.[28] The third tier was made up
of comparatively minor craftsman and trader deities, and the fourth
and final tier of divine messengers and the like.[26] Yahweh, the
southern warrior-god, joined the pantheon headed by El and in time he
and El were identified, with El's name becoming a generic term for
"god".[25] Each member of the divine council had a human nation
under his care, and a textual variant of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes
the sons of El, including Yahweh, each receiving his own people: [23]
“ When the Most High (Elyon, i.e., El) gave the nations their
inheritance,
when he separated humanity,
he �xed the boundaries of the peoples according to the
”
number of divine beings,
for Yahweh's portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.[Notes 3]
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. [29]
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:[30]
”
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)
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. [31][32]
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).[33][34]
In each kingdom the king was also the head of the national religion
and God's viceroy on Earth,[35] reflected each year in Jerusalem when
the king presided over a ceremony at which Yahweh was enthroned in
the Temple.[36]
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:[34] 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.[43] 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. [44]
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. [45] 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).[46]
Yahweh and the rise of monotheism
The tetragrammaton in
Paleo-Hebrew (10th
century BCE to 135
CE), old Aramaic (10th
century BCE to 4th
century CE) and
square Hebrew (3rd
century BCE to
present) scripts.
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.[48] The process
by which this came about might be described as follows: 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; finally, in the
national crisis of the exile, the very existence of other gods was
denied.[9]
See also
Notes
3. ^ For the varying texts of this verse, see Smith, 2012, pp.139–140
and also chapter 4.
References
Citations
1. ^ Edelman 1995, p. 190.
3. ^ Miller 2000, p. 1.
Bibliography
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Eastern Archaeology:A Reader . Eisenbrauns.
ISBN 978-1-57506-083-5.
Cohn, Norman (2001). Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The
Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith . Yale University Press.
Davies, Philip R.; Rogerson, John (2005). The Old Testament World .
Westminster John Knox.
Davies, Philip R. (2010). "Urban Religion and Rural Religion". In
Stavrakopoulou, Francesca; Barton, John. Religious Diversity in
Ancient Israel and Judah . Continuum International Publishing Group.
Day, John (2002). Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan .
Continuum.
Dever, William G. (2003b). Who Were the Early Israelites and Where
Did They Come From . Eerdmans.
Grabbe, Lester (2010). " 'Many nations will be joined to YHWH in that
day': The question of YHWH outside Judah". In Stavrakopoulou,
Francesca; Barton, John. Religious diversity in Ancient Israel and
Judah . Continuum International Publishing Group.
ISBN 978-0-567-03216-4.
Hackett, Jo Ann (2001). " 'There Was No King In Israel': The Era of
the Judges". In Coogan, Michael David. The Oxford History of the
Biblical World . Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513937-2.
Mafico, Temba L.J. (1992). "The Divine Name Yahweh Alohim from an
African Perspective". In Segovia, Fernando F.; Tolbert, Mary Ann.
Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in
Global Perspective 2. Fortress Press.
Smith, Mark S. (2002). The Early History of God: Yahweh and the
Other Deities in Ancient Israel . Eerdmans.
Van der Toorn, Karel (1999). "Yahweh". In Van der Toorn, Karel;
Becking, Bob; Van der Horst, Pieter Willem. Dictionary of Deities and
Demons in the Bible . Eerdmans.
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