How the Jews Invented God, and Made Him Great
The God of the Old Testament started out as just one of many deities of the ancient Israelites. It took a traumatic crisis to make him into the all-powerful creator of the world.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in a single, omnipotent deity that created the heavens and earth. But if he was and is the only god, why would God need a name?
The Bible explicitly tells us that God has one, which indicates he had to be distinguished from other celestial beings, just like humans use names to identify different people.
What that name might be is another matter. The Jewish prohibition on speaking God’s name means that its correct pronunciation has been lost. All we know is that the Hebrew Bible spells it out as four consonants known as the Tetragrammaton – from the Greek for “four letters,” which are transliterated as Y-H-W-H.
The existence of a proper name for God is the first indication that the history of Yhwh and his worship by the Jews is a lot more complicated than many realize.
In gods we trusted
Modern biblical scholarship and archaeological discoveries in and around Israel show that the ancient Israelites did not always believe in a single, universal god. In fact, monotheism is a relatively recent concept, even amongst the People of the Book.
Decades of research into the birth and evolution of the Yhwh cult are summarized in “The Invention of God,” a recent book by Thomas Römer, a world-renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne. Römer, who held a series of conferences at Tel Aviv University last month, spoke to Haaretz about the subject.
continued
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology...ews-invented-god-and-made-him-great-1.5392677
The main source for investigating the history of God is, of course, the Bible itself.
When exactly the Jewish holy text reached its final form is unknown. Many scholars believe this happened sometime between the Babylonian exile, which began after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE (some 2600 years ago), and the subsequent periods of Persian and Hellenistic rule.
However, the redactors of the Bible were evidently working off older traditions, Römer says.
“Biblical texts are not direct historical sources. They reflect the ideas, the ideologies of their authors and of course of the historical context in which they were written,” Römer explains.
Still, he notes, “you can have memories of a distant past, sometimes in a very confusing way or in a very oriented way. But I think we can, and we must, use the biblical text not just as fictional texts but as texts that can tell us stories about the origins.”
What's in God's name
The first clue that the ancient Israelites worshipped gods other than the deity known as Yhwh lies in their very name. “Israel” is a theophoric name going back at least 3200 years, which includes and invokes the name of a protective deity.
Going by the name, the main god of the ancient Israelites was not Yhwh, but El, the chief deity in the Canaanite pantheon, who was worshipped throughout the Levant.
In other words, the name "Israel" is probably older than the veneration of Yhwh by this group called Israel, Römer says. “The first tutelary deity they were worshipping was El, otherwise their name would have been Israyahu.”
The Bible appears to address this early worship of El in Exodus 6:3, when God tells Moses that he “appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai (today translated as "God Almighty") but was not known to them by my name Yhwh.”
In fact, it seems that the ancient Israelites weren't even the first to worship Yhwh – they seem to have adopted Him from a mysterious, unknown tribe that lived somewhere in the deserts of the southern Levant and Arabia.
The god of the southern deserts
The first mention of the Israelite tribe itself is a victory stele erected around 1210 BCE by the pharaoh Mernetpah (sometimes called "the Israel stele"). These Israelites are described as a people inhabiting Canaan.
So how did this group of Canaanite El-worshippers come in contact with the cult of Yhwh?
The Bible is quite explicit about the geographical roots of the Yhwh deity, repeatedly linking his presence to the mountainous wilderness and the deserts of the southern Levant. Judges 5:4 says
that Yhwh “went forth from Seir” and “marched out of the field of Edom.” Habbakuk 3:3 tells us that “God came from Teman,” specifically from Mount Paran.
All these regions and locations can be identified with the territory that ranges from the Sinai and Negev to northern Arabia.
Yhwh’s penchant for appearing in the biblical narrative on top of mountains and accompanied by dark clouds and thunder, are also typical attributes of a deity originating in the wilderness, possibly a god of storms and fertility.
Support for the theory that Yhwh originated in the deserts of Israel and Arabia can be found in Egyptian texts from the late second millennium, which list different tribes of nomads collectively called "Shasu" that populated this vast desert region.
One of these groups, which inhabits the Negev, is identified as the “Shasu Yhw(h).” This suggests that this group of nomads may have been the first to have the god of the Jews as its tutelary deity.
“It is profoundly difficult to sort through the haze of later layers in the Bible, but insofar as we can, this remains the most plausible the Bible, but insofar as we can, this remains the most plausible hypothesis for the encounter of Israelites with the Yhwh cult,” says David Carr, professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
The many faces of god
How exactly the Shasu merged with the Israelites or introduced them to the cult of Yhwh is not known, but by the early centuries of the first millennium, he was clearly being worshipped in both the northern kingdom of Israel and its smaller, southern neighbor, the kingdom of Judah.
His name appears for the first time outside the Bible nearly 400 years after Merneptah, in the 9th-century BCE stele of Mesha, a Moabite king who boasts of defeating the king of Israel and “taking the vessels of Yhwh.”
While Yhwh’s cult was certainly important in the early First Temple period, it was not exclusive.
“Jeremiah speaks about the many gods of Judah, which are as numerous as the streets of a town. There was certainly worship a female deity, Asherah, or the Queen of Heaven,” Römer told Haaretz. “There was certainly also the worship of the northern storm god Hadad (Baal).”
The plurality of deities was such that in an inscription by Sargon II, who completed the conquest of the kingdom of Israel in the late 8th century BCE, the Assyrian king mentioned that after capturing the capital Samaria, his troops brought back “the (statues of) gods in which (the Israelites) had put their trust.”
As the Yhwh cult evolved and spread, he was worshipped in temples across the land. Early 8th-century inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud probably refer to different gods and cultic centers by invoking “Yhwh of Samaria and his Asherah” and “Yhwh of Teman and his Asherah.” Only later, under the reign of King Josiah at the end of the 7th century BCE, would the Yhwh cult centralize worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.
Nor, in ancient Israel, was Yhwh the invisible deity that Jews have refrained from depicting for the last two millennia or so.
In the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea 8 and 1 Kings 12:26-29 relate, he was often worshipped in the form of a calf, as the god Baal was. (1 Kings 12:26-29 explains that Jeroboam made two calves, for the sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan, so the people could worship Yhwh there and wouldn’t have to go all the way to Jerusalem. Ergo, in northern Israel at least, the calves were meant to represent Yhwh.)
In Jerusalem and Judah, Römer says, Yhwh more frequently took the form of a sun god or a seated deity. Such depictions may have even continued after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile: a coin minted in Jerusalem during the Persian period shows a deity sitting on a wheeled throne and has been interpreted by some as a late anthropomorphic representation of Yhwh.
Römer even suspects that the Holy of Holies in the First Temple of Jerusalem, and other Judahite sanctuaries, hosted a statue of the god, based on Psalms and prophetic texts in the Bible that speak of being admitted in the presence of “the face of Yhwh.”
continued
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology...ews-invented-god-and-made-him-great-1.5392677
The God of the Old Testament started out as just one of many deities of the ancient Israelites. It took a traumatic crisis to make him into the all-powerful creator of the world.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in a single, omnipotent deity that created the heavens and earth. But if he was and is the only god, why would God need a name?
The Bible explicitly tells us that God has one, which indicates he had to be distinguished from other celestial beings, just like humans use names to identify different people.
What that name might be is another matter. The Jewish prohibition on speaking God’s name means that its correct pronunciation has been lost. All we know is that the Hebrew Bible spells it out as four consonants known as the Tetragrammaton – from the Greek for “four letters,” which are transliterated as Y-H-W-H.
The existence of a proper name for God is the first indication that the history of Yhwh and his worship by the Jews is a lot more complicated than many realize.
In gods we trusted
Modern biblical scholarship and archaeological discoveries in and around Israel show that the ancient Israelites did not always believe in a single, universal god. In fact, monotheism is a relatively recent concept, even amongst the People of the Book.
Decades of research into the birth and evolution of the Yhwh cult are summarized in “The Invention of God,” a recent book by Thomas Römer, a world-renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne. Römer, who held a series of conferences at Tel Aviv University last month, spoke to Haaretz about the subject.
continued
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology...ews-invented-god-and-made-him-great-1.5392677
The main source for investigating the history of God is, of course, the Bible itself.
When exactly the Jewish holy text reached its final form is unknown. Many scholars believe this happened sometime between the Babylonian exile, which began after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE (some 2600 years ago), and the subsequent periods of Persian and Hellenistic rule.
However, the redactors of the Bible were evidently working off older traditions, Römer says.
“Biblical texts are not direct historical sources. They reflect the ideas, the ideologies of their authors and of course of the historical context in which they were written,” Römer explains.
Still, he notes, “you can have memories of a distant past, sometimes in a very confusing way or in a very oriented way. But I think we can, and we must, use the biblical text not just as fictional texts but as texts that can tell us stories about the origins.”
What's in God's name
The first clue that the ancient Israelites worshipped gods other than the deity known as Yhwh lies in their very name. “Israel” is a theophoric name going back at least 3200 years, which includes and invokes the name of a protective deity.
Going by the name, the main god of the ancient Israelites was not Yhwh, but El, the chief deity in the Canaanite pantheon, who was worshipped throughout the Levant.
In other words, the name "Israel" is probably older than the veneration of Yhwh by this group called Israel, Römer says. “The first tutelary deity they were worshipping was El, otherwise their name would have been Israyahu.”
The Bible appears to address this early worship of El in Exodus 6:3, when God tells Moses that he “appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai (today translated as "God Almighty") but was not known to them by my name Yhwh.”
In fact, it seems that the ancient Israelites weren't even the first to worship Yhwh – they seem to have adopted Him from a mysterious, unknown tribe that lived somewhere in the deserts of the southern Levant and Arabia.
The god of the southern deserts
The first mention of the Israelite tribe itself is a victory stele erected around 1210 BCE by the pharaoh Mernetpah (sometimes called "the Israel stele"). These Israelites are described as a people inhabiting Canaan.
So how did this group of Canaanite El-worshippers come in contact with the cult of Yhwh?
The Bible is quite explicit about the geographical roots of the Yhwh deity, repeatedly linking his presence to the mountainous wilderness and the deserts of the southern Levant. Judges 5:4 says
that Yhwh “went forth from Seir” and “marched out of the field of Edom.” Habbakuk 3:3 tells us that “God came from Teman,” specifically from Mount Paran.
All these regions and locations can be identified with the territory that ranges from the Sinai and Negev to northern Arabia.
Yhwh’s penchant for appearing in the biblical narrative on top of mountains and accompanied by dark clouds and thunder, are also typical attributes of a deity originating in the wilderness, possibly a god of storms and fertility.
Support for the theory that Yhwh originated in the deserts of Israel and Arabia can be found in Egyptian texts from the late second millennium, which list different tribes of nomads collectively called "Shasu" that populated this vast desert region.
One of these groups, which inhabits the Negev, is identified as the “Shasu Yhw(h).” This suggests that this group of nomads may have been the first to have the god of the Jews as its tutelary deity.
“It is profoundly difficult to sort through the haze of later layers in the Bible, but insofar as we can, this remains the most plausible the Bible, but insofar as we can, this remains the most plausible hypothesis for the encounter of Israelites with the Yhwh cult,” says David Carr, professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
The many faces of god
How exactly the Shasu merged with the Israelites or introduced them to the cult of Yhwh is not known, but by the early centuries of the first millennium, he was clearly being worshipped in both the northern kingdom of Israel and its smaller, southern neighbor, the kingdom of Judah.
His name appears for the first time outside the Bible nearly 400 years after Merneptah, in the 9th-century BCE stele of Mesha, a Moabite king who boasts of defeating the king of Israel and “taking the vessels of Yhwh.”
While Yhwh’s cult was certainly important in the early First Temple period, it was not exclusive.
“Jeremiah speaks about the many gods of Judah, which are as numerous as the streets of a town. There was certainly worship a female deity, Asherah, or the Queen of Heaven,” Römer told Haaretz. “There was certainly also the worship of the northern storm god Hadad (Baal).”
The plurality of deities was such that in an inscription by Sargon II, who completed the conquest of the kingdom of Israel in the late 8th century BCE, the Assyrian king mentioned that after capturing the capital Samaria, his troops brought back “the (statues of) gods in which (the Israelites) had put their trust.”
As the Yhwh cult evolved and spread, he was worshipped in temples across the land. Early 8th-century inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud probably refer to different gods and cultic centers by invoking “Yhwh of Samaria and his Asherah” and “Yhwh of Teman and his Asherah.” Only later, under the reign of King Josiah at the end of the 7th century BCE, would the Yhwh cult centralize worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.
Nor, in ancient Israel, was Yhwh the invisible deity that Jews have refrained from depicting for the last two millennia or so.
In the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea 8 and 1 Kings 12:26-29 relate, he was often worshipped in the form of a calf, as the god Baal was. (1 Kings 12:26-29 explains that Jeroboam made two calves, for the sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan, so the people could worship Yhwh there and wouldn’t have to go all the way to Jerusalem. Ergo, in northern Israel at least, the calves were meant to represent Yhwh.)
In Jerusalem and Judah, Römer says, Yhwh more frequently took the form of a sun god or a seated deity. Such depictions may have even continued after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile: a coin minted in Jerusalem during the Persian period shows a deity sitting on a wheeled throne and has been interpreted by some as a late anthropomorphic representation of Yhwh.
Römer even suspects that the Holy of Holies in the First Temple of Jerusalem, and other Judahite sanctuaries, hosted a statue of the god, based on Psalms and prophetic texts in the Bible that speak of being admitted in the presence of “the face of Yhwh.”
continued
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology...ews-invented-god-and-made-him-great-1.5392677
