Yahweh Controversy Response - El, Yahweh, and Canaanite Polytheism
Restating some things, elaborating on others.
Layne recently posted a response to my earlier stack on Yahweh. Mine can be read here, his response here.
I have to say the form of his response doesn't really lead you anywhere. It responds to some individual lines here or there, but also leaves a lot untouched. Some of that is Substack's fault, some of that is his.
For this response, I narrowed down what I thought was his core argument- that various mentions of El are in fact mentions of Yahweh.
This does not do anything against the theory that Yahweh himself originated in Seir as a storm and warrior deity, but it does step in the way of a clear evolution from poly to monotheism. On the former claim, despite his title alluding to it, not much is said about the original character of Yahweh and what various forms of evidence present about that. There is however a conjecture that the experience of God sort of “shifted essences” from El to Yahweh and then to El-Yahweh - that God is God no matter what people described him as. I am not at all concerned with such conjectures.
So, I will restate my position on some things and elaborate on others. Particularly, I will address the idea of a Yahweh=El relationship espoused by the Old Testament.
The Abrahamic worldview has a tendency to believe, outright or not, that the world began with the Old Testament. It can be difficult for a Christian to interpret a polytheistic religion. This is where confusion sets in, where attempts to see El in Exodus alone and not the Ugaritic texts or neighboring cognates come from. To make any headway, we need every source available. We will look at many of them here.
Real Gods or Mere Titles?
The essence of the criticism here is the common retort that biblical (or archaeological) mentions of some other god is merely a title for Yahweh, unless specifically stated otherwise.
Here's an interesting thought to sit on before we begin. If El is just Yahweh, why introduce the name “Yahweh” at all? You've already named God, you've already named your nation and toponyms after him. We have the word “God”. What good is an additional, sacral, “I am?” Why then suddenly reverse course at some unknown point in time? Keep in mind that this wasn't some addition of one title among many. Yahweh was the name of God. You could be killed for uttering it - but not for saying El. Clearly, something changed.
Back to the theory of titles. Firstly, this isn’t particularly helpful, because the consensus presented claims that these titles were subsumed gradually over time. We should expect the post-exilic writers of the Old Testament to ascribe the names of other deities to Yahweh because that's precisely what the theory states and what the evidence reflects. But we’re not interested in the post exilic writers, of who’s beliefs we are absolutely certain, we are interested in the ancestors they wrote about. That is where the grounds of the investigation is.
Secondly, it’s doubly unhelpful, because the name of *every* god in existence is a title - see Usener's theory of momentary and special gods (which I wrote about partially in this stack). The name of the Germanic god “Tyr” translates precisely to simply “god”, or “the god”. This does not automatically reduce Tyr to a simple title for some other god. Tyr was a distinct god with his own distinct imagery, worship, and etymological origin. The exact same can be said for his rough cognate El.
But Layne gets a little ambitious with this angle:
“El” (אל) is a generic term for “Deity” in Proto-Semitic languages. For example, the title in Exodus 6.3 above is “Ēl Shaddāi”, meaning “God [singular] Almighty”. I already discussed this in my Lightning Round post, where I compared separating “Elyon” (another form of אל) and “Yahweh” as separating “King George” and “His highness”. There is no evidence for them being separate, at all. [his emphasis]
This is an exceptionally bold claim. Because what is being said here is not only that El was never a god in his own right to Canaan, but upon the arrival of Yahweh, results in God being worshipped as two distinct gods, simultaneously, mind the rest of the pantheon.
Let's show this by looking back at the evidence. Some points will be restated, some will be new.
Conflicting Etymological Origins
If Yahweh and El were always seen as one singular god, we would expect to see these two names mentioned interchangeably towards the same being from the beginning.
Considering the wide array of Canaanite toponyms to El (IsraEL, BethEL, etc), and the complete lack of Yahwistic toponyms until closer to the Monarchical period, we can see the name “Yahweh” is somewhat of a new arrival.
Not even the Bible reflects the notion of toponymic congruence. Layne even makes this point for me:
The Abrahamic tradition(s) do not begin with Yahweh “debuting” to the Hebrews because He was quite active amongst them long before they even knew the name Yahweh*.
Clearly, *nobody* had ever heard of Yahweh prior to this mythical meeting. Intended by God's immutable will or not, this is a clear indication that a god known ONLY as El at some point in Iron Age Canaan became known as a god known as Yahweh/El.
Even still, the use of El as a title is not even remotely a universal thing. It of course, also, referred to El himself prior to Yahwism. Looking at El specifically, Ugaritic texts make a specific distinction between the god El and “a god” (el), ‘il mlk refers to “El the King” while ‘il hdhd would refer to “the god Haddad”. El has many cognates across the Levant, including the Syrian Dagon and the Hittite Elkunirsa (“God-who-creates”). Curiously related to Elkunirsa, Joseph Smith translated a set of Egypyian papyri which claims a priest of the god Elkenah, aka El, attempted to sacrifice Abraham until stopped by the intervention of an angel of Yahweh. But, you know, Mormons.
El is not merely a stamp-label for “god”, El himself was worshipped as *a god among others* for millennia prior to Yahwism. So interestingly, the cop-out of “I was El the whole time” just round-a-bouts you back to a polytheistic association with God anyways, and onto a god who is not just likely, but certainly in that category!
A final comment on these use of linguistic “titles” - Yahweh itself is likely a title or epithet of sorts, as rhetoric in the bible suggests with “I am”. The Amorites described Dagon as “Yahwi-Dagan”, meaning “Dagon exists”. Is Yahweh therefore a non-existent being, and merely a placeholder title for true beings, such as Dagon (El)? Or does other evidence say otherwise?
Conflicting Imagery
On the topic of distinction we can go further, because by the imagery of Yahweh and El are clearly different by the time we have both to look at.
The imagery of a divine ruler upon the throne of the heavens who creates the world is a truly perennial motif, and El additionally has clear “phylogenetic” cognates to his North and East. In Hurrian hymns, El is referred to as “El the Judge” and “El of the covenant”, indicating his role as a law-giver and civilizer for the land. In a European lense, he can most accurately fit the essence of Chronos: a chief deity associated with heaven, time, and rulership, who produces the gods of “nature” Ba'al = Zeus, Yam = Poseidon, Mot = Hades. His consort, Asherah (= Hera), is associated with fertility.
The original character of Yahweh, on the other hand, may as well be a polar opposite. He is a warrior god, a despoiler, associated with sudden storms and floods. Layne's stack and lightning round section are titled around some variant of “Yahweh was not a polytheistic storm deity”, but biblical evidence (1 Sam. 12:18; Psalm 29; Job 38:25-27, 34-38; 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.), archaeological evidence (Elephantine papyri, Tel Arad, Tel Dan, Kuntillet Ajrud, Deir ‘Al inscriptions), and ecological/anthropological evidence (see previous stack on connection to the Shasu and storms of Petra) conclusively prove otherwise. On these points, Layne has not offered counter evidence, but a series of conjectural explanations in reference to scripture.
A specific discontinuity between El and Yahweh worth exploring is the prophecy of the Leviathan. This is of course the perennial motif of Chaoskampf, where the storm-god slays the serpent upon the oceans. Zeus, Thunor, Baal Haddad, and Indra participate in this cosmic war - but not El. On this account, Yahweh is cognate with the world's storm-and-warrior gods. El and the imagery of El, which Yahweh later subsumes, remains entirely distinct from the affair.
Conflicting Biblical Mentions
On the account of showing a distinction between Yahweh and El, Genesis 49 offers another rather direct piece of evidence. In verse 18, it specifically names “Yahweh”. In 24 and 25, it names “Shaddai”, followed by a series of epithets associated with El and his consort Asherah. If this is actually one God, we have to wonder why the bible would describe him in ways such as “blessings of the breast and the womb”. Psalms 82 does something remarkably similar. Mark Smith's Early History of God spends about 80 pages on these two chapters, so I'll leave the reader to explore that for himself.
Lastly I want to stick with Deut. 32:8, which he talks about in his stack as evidence of Yahweh-as-El, because it illuminates something very important about the recent history of biblical archaeology. He writes:
8 When the Most High divided the nations: when he separated the sons of Adam, he appointed the bounds of people according to the number of the children of Israel.
[…] Poetic language is common throughout the Pentateuch; attempting to cleave this out as a separate identity is like claiming “His highness” is as separate person from “King George” when everyone knows they’re interchangeable. This verse does not say “El gave Yahweh Israel”, it says “Yahweh took Israel for Himself”, the implication being He allowed the other peoples to be given over to their other gods because of their clear desire to reject God.
Believe it or not, buck broke by the use of NKJV. If the translation above was actually correct, I might have to concede something here. But, written on the dead sea scrolls, is the “original”. The above was a revision. I know Layne knows this because he read commentary from Smith explaining its significance, it's just that he cropped 1 sentence to make it look like Smith believes it to show monotheism. Why he uses the revised translation despite knowing it's significance, I don't know.
When the Most High (Elyon) alloted peoples for inheritance, When He divided up humanity, He fixed the boundaries for peoples, According to the number of the divine sons: For Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob His own inheritance.
Deut. 32:8-9
What this verse, in its original form, is telling us is the well-documented Ugaritic myth of El assigning national gods to the nations: “according to the number of divine sons”, or gods. And interestingly, Yahweh is mentioned separately, as the role of the beneficiary, not the assigner. An understanding of the Ugaritic tradition of the divine council is important here: El did not receive nations, he was de-facto over all of them by way of his rulership over the divine council itself. If Yahweh is El in this text, we'd have a remarkable inversion of the traditional role of El in Canaan. Mark Smith writes:
This perfectly encapsulates the methodological problem here. Layne is unfortunately re-presenting the biblical view of history that died in the 20th Century with “The Albrightists”. We have dug new sites, we have genetic studies, and breakthroughs in philology. So on. This argument is going to fall under the same sheer weight of evidence that killed it in the first place. I, again, only have to show the current consensus and why it is that. Biblical evidence put the Albrightists in a ball-park, but no longer is that alone sufficient. Interpreting archaeology with the bible won't cut it - it is archaeology that is interpreting the truth of the bible.
We know what the translators of the KJV thought. We know what the writers of the OT thought. We know what Aquinas thought. But the moment we peer behind this era through evidence such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, we immediately see evidence of a polytheistic origin. This is the chronological theme we return to time and time again. It's incredibly revealing that this continues to be a recurring theme.
El and Yahweh - Conclusions
Clearly, when we name these two beings, we are not describing one God and another title for that same God. Rather, we are describing two gods, each with their own unique etymological origins, divine imagery and association in myth, and cultural and ecological roles. Further, they are described as and worshipped as different gods in the archaeological record.
A lot of my points in the original stack remain unaddressed, such as the theory of lineage worship vanishing with the need for polytheism in the exilic period, and the broad evidence for Asherah worship entirely. I recommend those be read again in context of these criticisms. It does not appear Layne disputes anything particular about the origins of Yahwism, only that he can say a thing or two about what that means for a Christian. I predicted this response entirely in my original stack.
Confusion should be expected when dealing with linguistic labels for gods who are themselves linguistic labels. Inquiring into the distinction between Ba'al, “lord”, and ‘il Ba'al, “the lord who is a god”, requires more than a casual purview into the available evidence.
But to go as far as pretend that these gods simply had no prior existence until the Bible sprach them into existence at the behest of Yahweh is delusional at best, and at worst intentionally done for the sake of convenient apologetics. I suspect the latter is what's going on, because that's exactly what happened for the first 2 centuries of biblical archaeology.
It took several generations for Christianity to accustom itself with Darwinian evolution, astrophysics, and other novel methods brought forth by the onslaught of materialism. For many, that adaptation has yet to come.
Archaeology is but one of those many sciences that poses such a lethal threat to the foundations of Abrahamism. It will wiggle itself into one ideological crevice until new revelations inevitably force it into a smaller one. At each jump, the hole will be too small to fit every adherent of the previous. At some rate, nobody will be small enough to fit. This has played out for generations, and will continue to do so.
The only unknown factor is how much Christians are willing to suck in their stomachs to keep fitting.
General Comments
I consider the article over here. If you want, below are particular claims I thought needed addressing beyond the scope of the stack.
In-line responses. His in block quote as before.
Aquinas himself clarifies:
“In the demons there is their nature which is from God, and also the deformity of sin which is not from Him; therefore, it is not to be absolutely conceded that God is in the demons, except with the addition, "inasmuch as they are beings." But in things not deformed in their nature, we must say absolutely that God is.”
We know what Aquinas thought. This isn’t particularly interesting because what we are inquiring into is how the conception of God evolved over time and culminated in Aquinas assigning these concepts to Yahweh. Aquinas was, of course, a “doctor” - it was his job to suture logical wounds in the biblical narrative. What I am interested in is how those wounds formed in the first place, and what they reveal about the roots of Abrahamic monotheism.
This one is quite silly when we know the above context. They called Yahweh “El” because He had not yet revealed His name to them. About 400 years passed between Abraham and Moses, in which cities were constructed, wells were dug, and places were named. Keeping El in mind (as a singular deity, btw) does not invalidate the actual primary source but instead reaffirms their commitment to El (Yahweh).
This would only be the case if you adopted the laughable, yet certainly biblical, notion that the Israelites had no existence in the Levant prior to the Exodus and that they had brought El with them into the Levant. Both are materially false. They named wells after El because their god during this era was El, not Yahweh. Yahwistic toponyms DO arise, but much later into the monarchical period. That's telling us something very important and clear.
OP will then go on to cite Mark. S. Smith as a scholar who agrees with the Canaanite Storm god hypothesis. Ironically, Mark Smith explicitly disagrees with this reading of Deuteronomy 32.8:
This is egregiously cherry-picked. Smith spent three books partially on this one verse and clearly is of the position that it reveals a polytheistic origin of Yahwism. Here he is explaining why he thought such a slip “got past the editors”. At the end of the same paragraph Layne cropped, he writes: “Thus the passage shows something of the older worldview of translatability of the national gods even as it ultimately rejects it.” I highly doubt he disagrees with his own PhD, and frankly, his lifetime contribution.
This is another example of putting the cart before the horse. On the Isrealites’ journey out of Egypt, they passed through Edom and Midian (among many other places). The indigenous people recording that the Israelites followed Yahweh is only affirming my position.
The Israelites didn't come from Egypt. The Exodus is a complete fiction, as per, again, scholarly consensus. See Israel Finkelstein's (a name you can trust on this topic!) Iron Hills hypothesis for example. Yahwism and the Israelite nations arose organically out of Canaan, archaeological and genetic evidence is pretty clear. There was never an Exodus, and the idea that Yahwism came from the south is supported by plenty of evidence unrelated to an adoption of the Exodus myth as historical.
Using natural imagery to display God’s power over matter does not constitute an argument for God literally crawling out from Mt. Seir like a Tolkien Orc while conducting magic tricks.
He goes on to say that “The Lord is like a rock” should in turn be read literally that he is a rock. Come on now. First, very dangerous to outright claim that there is a specific “literalism quota” that an exegesis has to make - any serious Christian apologetic knows that. Secondly, the verse is just showing that the Israelites believed he came from the south associated with storms. Layne is, again, not actually disputing it. Just conjecturing that it might mean something else. What exactly he thinks it means, he never says.
This is a misconstruction of Old Testament history.
Again, I don't really care at all what the post-exilic writers said. By this point they had been monotheistic for hundreds of years. The only interesting things they say are when they make a mistake in scrubbing evidence. In fact, “misconstructing the old testament” is the entire point here. They lied to you.
Eventually, the 12 tribes are subdivided further into the 10 wicked tribes of the North and the 2 righteous tribes of the South
Does this not corroborate perfectly that Yahwism came from the south in contest with the idolatry of the north?
The “Canaanite Storm Deity” that is not omnipresent is somehow omni-presently from Edom and Moab simultaneously, where he has little to do with storms.
Because by this point he was already subsumed with El. I am not presenting an alternative biblical text. I am telling you what happened prior to the old testament, and especially prior to the writing of it. For association with storms, please see 1 Sam. 12:18; Psalm 29; Job 38:25-27, 34-38; 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.
Asherah: It’s funny because Asherah is typically mentioned as a contemporary of Yahweh, specifically “Yahweh’s wife” (also not true). The fact she’s now invoked as “prior” to Yahweh directly contradicts this.
Because Yahweh received Asherah upon his subsumation of El. It was never claimed Yahweh always had Asherah, in fact it's essential to the theory that he didn't. I spent several paragraphs on this - objectively poor reading on your end.
I thought this version of Yahweh was merely an amalgamation of Canaanite deities including “Ba’al”, or literally “the Ruler”? So how does he sporadically gain rulership as a trait when usurping El when he would’ve already had it from subsuming Ba’al (despite “destroying Ba’al”)?
Because Baal was not the ruler of the divine council. He was a son of El, like Yahweh. He was Zeus, not Chronos. Ugaritic texts are explicitly clear.
Which “Lord” (“Ba’al”) are we discussing here? The Philistine Insect/Fly Lord known as Beezlebub? Hadad?
As mentioned in context of the reading of Mt Carmel, Melqart. This is like asking, “which striker are we talking about? Indra? Thunor?” They're just regional manifestations of the same essence. By “Yahweh destroys Baal”, I mean he takes on each regional manifestation of the same divine essence, and therefore, the same being.
Notice the plural of Ba’al and the absence of Asherah. 1 Kings 11.5 demonstrates Ashtaroth is from Phoenicia, not Canaan
Mt. Carmel occurred over 200 years after the events of Solomon as mentioned here. You're critiquing the wrong event.
No. The Israelites will continue to find new pantheons and individual gods to worship, as they continually reject Yahweh.
Not what happened - you're amiss chronologically. Asherah worship continued up until Ezekiel (as mention in the stack), and after him was the exilic period. After Asherah was gone, they were permanently and truly monotheistic. Indicates a clear progression marked by historical events.
The “Yahweh is a Canaanite Storm Deity” meme does not have much evidence.
Only when you ignore it!
This was well written, I’ll probably do my own research but not write out a full stack seeing as my other response flopped on engagement. You make some points that warrant further reading, and others I obviously reject.
Btw, the Smith quote is a screengrab from an Inspiring Philopsophy YouTube short, I didn’t deliberately edit a PDF or something. But it’s pretty clear that he explicitly rejects using Deuteronomy 32.8 as evidence for the polytheism theory
The Elephantine letter from a Jewish colony in Egypt showed that Asherah was still worshipped as the wife at the colonists’ own temple during the late Persian period. This means the monotheistic idea didn’t really developed until after Alexander the Great’s invasion.