The Yahweh Controversy
A "final" and in-depth look at my arguments relating to the origins of Abrahamic monotheism
If you don’t feel like reading the entire thing, here’s a video of a man in a funny hat saying basically the same thing with a lisp.
I cover different arguments and did not make this article based off it, but we use the same source knowledge & authors.
I am not reserved about my criticisms towards Christianity and its historical progenitors.
Over the past months I’ve posted intermittently about one such criticism, one I consider particularly lethal to the Abrahamic tradition as commonly understood. I don’t doubt it could ultimately survive the facts presented, but it would suffer a blow to its self-acclaimed grandiosity, and above all else its uniqueness.
My arguments are not original. In fact I only argue from the scholarly consensus, supported clearly by evidence of all forms. Others have even argued for it on the app itself, such as Scythian (for those who remember him). That’s what makes the issue at hand particularly infuriating - I have to argue against two camps at the same time, one who accepts the argument as trivial, and another who fights it with intensity. So, I here must prove not only the argument, but also that the argument actually matters.
What I present below is the long-form of what I have made several posts on an app built for shorter attention spans. I argue that the Old Testament's historicizing of Israelite myth misleads its adherents into believing that monotheism is the default religious experience for man, and that the Israelites were always monotheistic from the beginning, interrupted only by impiety imposed on them by foreigners. What arises instead is a clear evolution of Israelite religion from Canaanite polytheism, with Yahweh as a minor Canaanite warrior-god of storms and conquest, to the Scholastic omnis-, the God of St. Aquinas, through the subsummation of all other supernatural essences into a single being. And further, that the evolution can be explained culturally without appeal to any supernatural phenomena.
Why It Matters - Albright's Unique God
First, let’s settle one camp, and set the stakes of the argument. Why should it matter that God revealed himself as a minor Canaanite deity? This is just His mysterious way of implanting himself on Earth, in a way that man is hopeless to rationalize. Maybe so. But this is clearly conjectural (and fallacious), and is not reflected by the Old Testament narrative. (Gen 17, etc.)
But there’s much more at stake here than mere exegesis. In the golden age of biblical archaeology, William F. Albright described the God of Moses (Moses, he believed to be a historically real person) as a fundamentally “unique” being, found nowhere else in the Levant, and one who possessed unique qualities. It’s this uniqueness, which the Bible expounds, which establishes Yahweh as truly “supernatural”. He is a peculiar being who appears suddenly and is the active driver of Israel's history, unlike the gods of pagan Canaan, who merely sprung from the forces of the Earth. It’s this quality of uniqueness at stake. It will be shown that Yahweh was not unique at all, and that the biblical view of a contrast between holy Israel and telluric Canaan is unfounded. The pre-eminence of Yahweh as omnis- will thereby fade back to the time before the theological glossing of the post-exilic writers of the Bible. How much this damages the faith of the believer, I suppose, is up to him. But the implications to a historical narrative of a destiny leading to Christ will be clear.
The General Form of the Argument
Let’s break this into a syllogism and deal with each point in order.
Yahweh is the God of Abraham, and therefore God the Father, Allah, “Elohim” etc.
Yahweh originated in late bronze age Canaan as a divine warrior of storms and conquest, and was later worshipped as a minor deity among the larger Canaanite pantheon
The Israelites gradually subsumed qualities of other national deities into Yahweh in response to conflict with those nations, and finally described contemporary God in the post-exilic period
Therefore, the contemporary God of Abraham arose organically by evolving from the bronze age storm deity Yahweh in response to material events, and possesses no quality of uniqueness that would suggest a supernatural influence upon the Israelites by a personal deity.
1: Yahweh is the God of Abraham
Most take this for granted, but it is important to cement the idea that when we are talking about the supreme uncaused causer, the creator of all existence, Being itself, we are talking about a personal deity that announced himself to the world firstly as “YHWH”, to the Hebrews. This sets the scene and reminds us of the stakes for the argument.
This one's easy. Exodus 6: “I am Yahweh.” There is no dispute that the Abrahamic tradition begins with God announcing himself to the Hebrews as Yahweh.
2: Yahweh the Divine Warrior - Polytheistic Origins in the Bronze Age
To be perfectly clear, the exact origin of Yahweh is uncertain - the same is true for any god. But we can make some things known through etymological, archaeological, and scriptural evidence & inferences.
What can be said with a fair amount of certainty is Yahweh was a relatively new arrival - El, not Yahweh, was the original god of Israel. The proof of this is in the name, Isra-El, and a number of cities/landmarks named after El (i.e., Bethel, El-Bireh) and the seemingly complete lack of Yahwistic toponyms from this period. Evidently people in the region had either never heard of a “Yahweh”, or didn’t think he was important enough to name anything after him. Biblical texts corroborate this: in Deut. 32:8-9, Yahweh is depicted as one of the sons of El, a member of the divine council, who is assigned sovereignty over a people by El.
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. (Deut. 32:8-9)
So where did Yahweh actually come from? The sum of evidence points to, rather clearly, Edom. Firstly, the earliest mentions of Yahweh point to him being from the southern Levant. The Egyptian temple of Soleb, from the reign of Amenhotep III, bears hieroglyphic inscriptions naming a “Shasu of YWHA”.
The Shasu were a nomadic semitic tribe known for raiding and banditry from Edom and Midian. Secondly, the Biblical texts explicitly say that Yahweh came from this region, and routinely depicts the south as a land of piety in arms againsnt the rebellious and idolatrous north.
Lord, when you came from Seir,
when you marched from the fields of Edom,
the earth trembled,
the skies poured rain,
and the clouds poured water.
The mountains melted before the Lord,
even Sinai, before the Lord, the God of Israel. (Judges 5:4-5)
The imagery from this verse segways nicely into my next point. The Lord “marches”… storms follow him, “the skies poured rain”. Yahweh’s original character was clearly that of a divine warrior associated with storms. More Biblical evidence is laid out by Mark Smith in his Early History of God:
Biblical material deriding other deities reserves power over the storm for Yahweh (Jer. 10:11-16; 14:22; Amos 4:7; 5:8; 9:6). Biblical descriptions of Yahweh as storm-god (1 Sam. 12:18; Psalm 29; Job 38:25-27, 34-38) and divine warrior (Pss. 50:1-3; 97:1-6; 98:1-2; 104:1-4; Deut. 33:2; Judges 4-5; Job 26:11-13; Isa. 42:10-15, etc.) exhibit this underlying unity and pattern explicitly in Psalm 18 (= 2 Sam. 22):6-19, 68:7-10, and 86:9-19.
The depiction of Yahweh as a storm-and-conquests god fits perfectly to the region of the Shasu. They were a nomadic warband during the Bronze Age Collapse, war was practically a daily activity in this setting. Coastal storms are rare in this part of the desert, however, flash floods are frequent (see the flash flooding at Petra, which was engineered specifically to survive such storms). The terrifying image of a deadly flash flood coming upon the desert fits Yahweh’s original character quite nicely, and so did his worshippers.
A few centuries later, Yahweh was brought to the north and worshipped as a minor deity among gods such as El, Baal, and Asherah. He takes his place upon the divine council of the preceding Ugaritic traditions, and in turn, a son of El.
For who in the skies can compare with the Lord?
Who among the sons of gods is like the Lord?
God is greatly feared in the council of the holy ones,
more awe-inspiring than all who surround him. (Psalm 89:6-7)
How exactly this occured isn’t particularly relevant here, but the Kenite hypothesis is the most commonly held theory. Once this contact began, various theological factions began seeing that these gods either merge or compete - a contest Yahweh (or perhaps, El?) ultimately wins.
3: The Organic Evolution of Monotheism - A Divine Warrior Becomes God
It is now established that Yahweh's origin comes from the southern Levant as a minor Canaanite deity, among a pantheon of Canaanite gods, who are worshipped by Canaanites well into the Iron Age. So how do we get from here to God?
Once again the Biblical texts point us in a general direction, and the material evidence hones in on the true answer. Recall that there are 3 major gods in the Canaanite pantheon prior to Yahwism - El, Baal, and Asherah. However in Israel, by appointment of El, Yahweh is the national god of the Israelites and their progeny. Thereby material conflicts between Israel and its neighbors become divine contests between Yahweh and his fellow councilmembers in the same way the Trojan War became a contest between the gods. Yahweh molds with these gods in 3 steps.
First, Yahweh became El.
We know from earlier points that El preceded Yahweh, and that Yahweh was imported into Israel from the south, and that El was seen as a ruler over Yahweh - so the bible’s theological gloss of “Actually, I was El the whole time” won’t work here. The Yahwistic faction employed a tactic that is very well known to the Abrahamic tradition: inculturation. Rather than simply “defeat” the god and its religion, they instead made concessions, and adopted the imagery of one tradition into the former.
In the case of El and Yahweh, a divine warrior of conquest and storms is suddenly associated with that of rulership. The imagery oh Yahweh we were all raised on is that of an old bearded man who rules over the heavens from a throne, who orders divine beings upon the earth, and who gives the law to man. This is not the Yahweh of the Bronze Age - it’s simply El. This is precisely the character of El described in Ugaritic text. How exactly this convergence occurred is not known, so I won’t conjure theories. But we do know it occurred, because we see two gods with two distinct characters become one. Interestingly, the process was so complete, it is difficult to say which god the world still worships today. On the level of imagery, it appears we worship El the divine ruler more than we do Yahweh the warrior of storms.
Secondly, Yahweh destroys Baal.
The simultaneous worship of Yahweh and Baal posed an obvious problem. You can’t have two warrior gods associated with storms. The Bible depicts an intense and bloody rivalry between the two opposing religious factions -the apostasy of Ahab against Elijah. Contradictory to the biblical narrative, we can assume that in the north Yahweh was worshipped alongside Baal - Ahab of course promoted Baal, but he also named his children after Yahweh (Ahaziah and Joram), and he even consults priests of Yahweh (1 Kings 20:13-15). Inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud confirm something similar occuring deep in the south due to the contemporaneous mentioning of Yahweh, Baal, and Asherah in a single pantheon.
The victory of the Yahwistic faction came after a serious of military and revolutionary victories against the polytheistic factions of neighboring states. One such victory is depicted in biblical literate at Mount Carmel, where the priests of Baal and Yahweh call both their gods to summon the storms. Only Elijah and his followers are able to bring forth the rain associated with either god, and the cultists of Baal are immediately slaughtered to the last. From here, Yahweh alone is associated with storms and war, and Baal’s historical record thins. It appears the bible reflects an accurate tale of a bloody removal of Baal from the region.
Thirdly, Yahweh steals Asherah.
On Mount Carmel, a third god and her followers were present - Asherah. But the text states nothing regarding them following the defeat of Baal. Why? The text is telling us something. The dog did not bark. In 2 Kings 13, we learn that Asherah is still worshipped alongside following the contest. Archaeological evidence from the period supports this. Only two temples from the period have been excavated, Tel Arad and Tel Dan. Both are constructed each with two stele, two pillars, and two incense stands - one to Yahweh, and one to Asherah.
Asherah was formerly the consort to Baal. Now that Yahweh is Baal in the most literal sense to the Israelites, Asherah becomes the consort to Yahweh. The pithos at Kuntillet Ajrud famously depicts this relationship - Yahweh and his Asherah. Over 300 years after Mt. Carmel, Jeremiah complains of Jerusalem continuing to worship Asherah, the Queen of Heaven (Jer. 44:15-30). Evidently, the default religion of both the northern and southern kingdoms had no problem with a simultaneous worship of Yahweh and Asherah. By this point, there are only two gods in Israel. Eventually, Asherah will fade from the picture, leaving only one.
What cemented this transition from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism was the Exile. Mark Smith’s first book, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, puts this massive point relatively succinctly. With the traditional religion itself destroyed by conquest, new conceptions of Yahweh had to evolve:
The reduction of Judean kingship, especially following Josiah and the subsequent loss of Judean kingship, changed the parallel or mirroring worldview known from the royal psalms. The rise of the Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian empires issued in a serious religious reflection on Yahweh’s power over the nations. The loss of identity as a nation changed Israel’s understanding of the national god. Looming empires made the model of a national god obsolete. Moreover, the rise of supranational empires suggested the model of the super-national god. As a result, the figures of Assur and Marduk assumed such proportions, the super-gods whose patronage of empires matches their manifestation as the sum-total of all the other deities […] The events leading to the Judean exile of 587 extended Israel’s understanding of its deity’s mastery of the world even as the nation was being reduced. This shift involves a most crucial change in different Judean presentations of the relationship between the mundane and cosmic levels of reality (or, put differently, between the immanence and transcendance of divinity).115 As Judah’s situation on the mundane level deteriorated in history, the cosmic status of its deity soared in its literature. The timing of the emergence of Israelite monotheism in the late Iron Age and exilic period fits Karl Jaspers’s the “Axial Age,” a period in world history (ca. 800–200) that “witnessed the emergence of revolutionary new understandings of human understanding,” including the awareness of “the separation between transcendant and mundane spheres of reality.”
In other words, a conquered people had to justify why their national god had failed them. This took time to digest. The writers of the old testament first made sure to principally blame impeity, but the historical record shows a different story: in response, they made Yahweh God. The entire point of a national god is pointless without a nation, and when the gods of other nations overpower your own. Rather, God is now God, the omnis-, he cares little for nations all of a sudden.
This theological slight of hand is the last step in formulating monotheism, and the first in formulating Christianity.
Conclusions
What I present here isn’t at all novel. It is in fact the default scholarly consensus based on the available evidence, and has been the consensus for a few decades now.
Maybe apologists will be able to whip up a conjectural shoulder-brush and live with themselves, maybe not. But what they can’t do is refute the evidence. Alternative hypotheses have not survived. It is important to remember that the Old Testament was written and compiled in the post-exiling period, and tells an angle of history beneficial to their national and religious status. But archaeology points to a much different chronology in the development of Yahweh into God.
Eventually, the central point will sink in further as this is increasingly stressed: God as we conceive it is entirely divorced from the national god of the Israelites who brought war upon the Canaanites. Yahweh is an invention of resentful conquered semitic peoples, and so too is their prophecy of a Messiah.
For the meaning of all existence, perhaps we’re better suited in entertaining ideas unbeholden to the geopolitical musings of a race of conquered slaves.