Who is Yahweh - How a Warrior-Storm God became the God of the Israelites and World Monotheism

the birth survival Twilight and ultimate demise of divine being seems to follow its own evolutionary patterns such that some Gods endure without significant cultic or theological change for centuries While others Blaze onto the world stage only to burn themselves up into Extinction almost as soon as they appeared indeed a given God must perform a careful Balancing Act to persist much through human time marked by seemingly unending upheavals on the one hand a Divine being must have a definite enough quality to attract and maintain worshipers and yet at the same time such a God cannot be so rigid or it's cult so conservative that it cannot endure significant adaptation and change the only surety of our mundane world too far in One Direction makes a God unappealing too far in the other Dooms them given religious fashion and change frankly and surely through the eons some gods have adapted and many gods have gone extinct though one God has proven to be rather successful bodily enough not that that makes them a better God or even a real God beyond all reasonable historical expectation in fact this God whose simple name means something like the one that exists emerge from the Sands of Bronze Age obscurity to eventually become not just a national God but in the end simply the God for the overwhelming majority of the world's population now but just how did a tribal Warrior storm God Yahweh go from being a god a minor God among God's much more ancient and much more powerful enduring up till then at least to Simply becoming God the soul God of all that is in the mythology of billions if you're interested in Magic and hermetic philosophy Alchemy or Kabbalah are the history of the occult make sure to subscribe and check out my other topics on contents and other terrorism and also if you want to support my work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics here and as a terrorism here on YouTube freely accessible I hope you consider supporting my work on patreon or with a one-time donation with the super thanks option or perhaps you'd buy a shirt over at our merch store on the channel but now let's turn to a god that all of us know of but none of us really know much about Yahweh or the one that exists the deity at the core of the abrahamic faiths and Beyond I'm Dr Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane and history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music] as you might imagine this is an episode I've been wanting to make for a long time and I've been absolutely dreading having to make it for even longer the importance of an episode on Yahweh is basically self-evident but the challenge is to making it should be equally self-evident the literature on this topic is vast utterly vast it spread over a dozen or so languages performed by ingenious Specialists with an encyclopedic grasp of the material and yet an entire argument or series of arguments can hinge on a single suffix of an inscription I'm looking at you contilit adrude pronomial suffix problem and of course with Yahweh being at the core of the abrahamic religions historicizing such a being can easily be taken as an assault on the very core of those religions if you distort Yahweh everything else might just disappear into the air and yet that's the task at hand so it should go without saying that virtually everything I'm going to say in this episode Cam and would be taken up taken to task by an army of Specialists and can in no way in no way taken to be definitive because there is simply that little consensus among the Specialists but I'd rather Hazard an episode on the topic than just throw my hands up and say oh it's utterly frustrated by the difficulty and the complicatedness and the specialization of the topic better as a famous saying if Beckett goes ever tried ever failed no matter try again fail again fail better so here's to failing better in the name of public education also on a personal note using the name Yahweh is just simply an academic attempt to vocalize the name of the Israelite tribal God and not some attempt to actually utter a magical Divine name much less take such a name in vain in fact public education is just about the furthest thing from my mind when I think about doing something in vain and lastly this is an academic Channel and I check my religious commitments at the door and historical facts and evidence are what matter here not my personal beliefs and really when we allow our faith to dictate our history we really just betrayed both I guess I'll just come out of the gate with it the origins of Yahweh are utterly unknown the name may appear first in the 14th century BCE of an enemy list of amenotep III in a similar but later list in the 13th century BCE by Ramses II as the shasu of Yahweh are the shasu of Yahoo it's not quite clear how that was pronounced the shasu were semi-nomadic pastoralists typically associated with rating and general big brigandry the Egyptian name for their name actually indicates their nomadic existence to roam about while the name taken up into Semitic and Hebrew means something like terrain or to plunder so there's a clue what they were while the name Yahweh does seem to appear here it also seems to be functioning primarily as a toponym rather than as a Theon M but that other shasu in the list are also associated with the region of Sears mountain range in the southwestern trans Jordan is probably going to prove Salient here in just a moment whether the shasu were proto-israelites isn't clear but it seems reasonable to think that there was probably some connection and did it with the hyperoo and the social then ethnic groups the Hebrews that begins as a social group not an ethnic group who were also associated with brigandry so this is a fun origin story Israel first appears to enter history on the menoptos Delhi it's a son of Ramses II like his 13th son where he claims victory such that the Canaan has been plundered into every sort of Woe ashkelan has been overcome gazer has been captured yeah no aam is made non-existent Israel is laid waste and his seed is not huru is become a widow because of Egypt it's perhaps worth mentioning here that the Egyptian determinative on ashkelanoam and gazer indicate foreign city this is the triple Mountain determinative whereas Israel has the foreign ethnic group determinative though to be sure the use of determinatives by Egyptian scribes can be all over the place kinda arbitrary the southernly geographic placement may also be important though note that the Israelites that mernepta claims to annihilate aren't actually Associated here with the shafsu so that's interesting and of course their God the god of Israel and none of these guys is mentioned here the first historical archaeological link between Israel and Yahweh as the god dates to much much later in the Iron Age where the 9th century BCE mesha steli Victory steli Braggs of dragging vessels of Yahweh before hemosh as the malabye kingdom rebelled and escaped amrite Israelite hegemony in the region thus it seems that southern levantine Nomads and Raiders were associated with Yahweh perhaps as a kind of theological toponym and that by the 13th century BCE an ethnic group known as Israel at least to the Egyptians existed in a similar area and that by the 9th century BCE the Israelite House of Omri seems to have had Yahweh as an important probably as their National God as opposed to the moabai before which the those vessels the aforementioned vessels were dragged now given the paucity of the archaeological record which is basically that what can we glean from our other surviving body of evidence that is to say Israelite literature as edited and compiled into the Hebrew Bible about the origins of Yahweh or what we might call primitive yawism are the cult of Yahweh before its assimilation into the Canaanite Heartland the Canaanite cult and the Canaanite Pantheon more generally now to do this it appears that the best methodology would be to take the earliest linguistic strata of the Israelite literature as it appears in the Hebrew Bible especially the song of the sea at Exodus 15 1-18 judges 5 or Divorce Song Psalms 18 29 68 Genesis 49 among other scattered memories of very linguistically archaic mentions of Yahweh in his cult from this a rough sketch of primitive Yahweh can be made it appears that the deities original Heartland was Ser Edom teman with account signing actually probably originally lying in that region recall the chassiser earlier that is to say the Northwestern Arabian Peninsula just east of the Dead Sea it appears that Yahweh was probably originally a warrior God perhaps associated with raiding and women warband prophets further the central manifestation of Yahweh seems to have been storms specifically the catastrophic thunderstorms that result in the deadly flash flooding which actually plagues that region down to this day Petra the same region where Yahweh may have come from was engineered around managing just those thunderstorms oh and you can see video of what those flash floods look like in that region and they are terrifying at some point in the late bronze or probably the early Iron Age the Yahweh cult made its way into the Judean Highlands likely settling at a cult Center in Shiloh this corresponds roughly to the biblical period of the judges the nomadic and possibly Mercantile nature note The Mention Of Caravans and the song of devorah which is by the way probably the earliest text in the Hebrew Bible of primitive yahwas might explain the diffusion of the cult that is to say it was spread through Mercantile trade this diffusion is probably over determined however especially if rating were involved of course the major historical backdrop of all of this is the Bronze Age collapse through the 13th century BCE civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean Experience day cascading systems collapse real scary resulting in Mass migration from the Aegean I.E the sea peoples Imperial border regression and local hegemony collapse on the part of the various Empires especially the Egyptians Imperial collapse just full-blown civilization collapse for the Hittites and the city-state of Garrett and generalized Urban disintegration note at a site like the city of gazer in fact it may be that the conditions of the Bronze Age collapsed allowed for the power vacuum in which one rating as a means of survival would have emerged and a rating cult headed by a warrior raiding God like Yahweh might have proven pretty popular in the chaos I mean imagine what kind of religions would emerge in the world of Mad Max or something like that though this was just speculation and that disruption in the Bronze Age collapse was probably what allowed the various states to revolt resulting him or Not by putting them down but also especially the collapse of Egyptian hegemony in the region and this is very important this would have allowed de facto Independence especially in the Canaanite Highlands because who wants to go up there and it isn't surprising to me that yahweh's cult in its military political state-building Wing would settle in relatively remote Shiloh before spreading North and South into the highlands and then pushing West down into the Shayla to contest eventually with the sea people who also got a foothold in former territory of Egyptian hegemony this of course is the peleset as we know them from the Egyptian literature or from the Bible as well you guessed it the Philistines thus by Iron 1 or roughly around 1200 to 1000 BCE Yale had probably come to settle in the Canaanite Highlands thus marking the end of primitive yawism in the beginning of an incredibly complex process by which elements of Canaanite religious and cultic systems would be negotiated with both the cult but also the very Divine person of ihawei through a process of theological convergence and assimilation Divergence and cultic antagonism and especially early monarchic syncretism to appreciate this process it's best to explore this complex dialectic on two axes one being the Canaanite Pantheon itself but the other being the progression through time from the period of the judges and through the monarchy's complex cultic relationships marked by syncretism in the north primarily but more punctuated by yalu monolatry and the South before the eventual transition to monotheism and the exilic and really the post-exilic period so let's begin by exploring the Dynamics of theological convergence and Divergence or cultic antagonism with the Canaanite Pantheon and Yahweh most of our knowledge of the Canaanite Pantheon stems from the discoveries of vast Royal libraries of the city of uguerita another victim of the Bronze Age collapse what has emerged from this Center are significant collections of mythological and cultic documents deeply detailing the nature personalities and Mythic Deeds of the various Canaanite gods in that Pantheon though two caveats are perhaps an order the first is that the just Trove may represent a specifically Royal specifically ugaritic expression of the Canaanite Theology and its myth Cycles the second is that these documents date to the mid 12th century at the latest you know the city itself was probably destroyed around 1185 BCE which is hundreds of years and still quite a distance away from the Locust classicus of the development of the Israelite cult down a good bit southerly in the highlands thus we don't know to what degree the Canaanite occult expressed itself specifically in that region down in the highlands and this is especially true because the Canaanite written record in that area is remarkably poor it's it's basically non-existent so to what degree can we take the ogreidic text to be representative of Southern Highlander text Highlander cult Notch clear but those caveats aside the head of the Canaanite Pantheon was the grandfatherly god L simply God indeed some theories actually have that Yahweh was a local very far Southern manifestation of L but I think that's probably doubtful though Deuteronomy 39 seems to be an archaic recall when Elion a manifestation of L parceled out the world providing Yahweh specifically with the lands of Jacob Israel this is probably a rare survival from a period where Yahweh was still kind of subservient to El Yan and before theological convergence with L more generally however it's clear that the yahwists were pretty comfortable enough with L to allow for significant amounts of assimilation of L fissures onto Yahweh even when those features perhaps stood and significant contrast to the strident Warrior of the Primitive cult one of the more striking features of these is the assimilation of L as an elderly wise God L is known as the father of years and any ugaritic myth cycles and it's perhaps this image of an elderly white bearded deity as assimilated onto Yahweh from Canaanite L that has probably proved the most visibly enduring and popular perception in art if you imagine an old bearded dude as God you're imagining L attached to this elder character is also L's wisdom a trait not typically Associated again with a warrior God they don't need to be wiser smart further you always partially converge as a Creator deity but only partially converged the name Yahweh probably just meant the one that is or he is and was primitively not associated with creative Powers again Warrior gods don't do much creating stuff and the verbal form to twist his name yodehave of hey into a creative form the verbal form that we known as the Phil in Hebrew it never appears in Israelite literature thus it's unsurprising that a great deal of the creative work in the Bible is typically associated with the Divine names like L and especially Elohim even note a name like El Cana El creates never really appears with a yoistic Theo form we never get a yahwistic version of that name thus we have a situation where not only are elements of L assimilated to Yahweh but that the early Israelites or even comfortable enough with a theological identity made between the two they combine El in Yahweh it's very clear in the Hebrew Bible thus many elements of Canaanite L though not all of them definitely not all of them as we'll see in a moment are assimilated to Yahweh or with the identity being established the powers and features of L de facto become those of Yahweh an element of this transfer especially in the earlier period was Elle's Divine Council including a retinue of Quasi Divine bureaucrats such as the prosecuting attorney hassatam but also the military leader the Tsar Sava but also including the 70 signs of el are El Yom of course these Sons would also later become demoted to angels as monotheism took root before descending to Earth to mate with human women and Genesis 6 and all that gets developed of course in The Book of Enoch though like creation this assimilation of the Divine counsel was not total the Suns always appear as sons of el the Divine Appalachian there never of the sons of Yahweh though along with these originally quasi-devine beings would also come my entire retinue of celestial objects because the sky especially things like stars the Sun and the Moon that were all worshiped in the region as well one of those beings are probably Venus appears in the Divine Council as a kind of insurgent upstart cast down to Canaanite the underworld of the Israelites in an oracle against the king of Babylon probably Nebuchadnezzar of course this character would later go on to become modified in Christian mythology to become the satanic Lucifer in that tradition showing just how long of a half-life these beings can have that being goes all the way back to ancient Canaanite Celestial mythology another interesting instance has a deceptive Spirit of ruach Shakir being recruited by Yahweh to fool some of prophets to ensure the death of King akhav of course Psalm 82 also captures this assimilation of Elle's Divine counsel very clearly he's speaking to members of the Divine Council that cult Gods perhaps the most peculiar assimilation of this to the warrior God Yahweh are actually else trait says merciful and compassionate this is a outstanding trait and sensible for the grandfather Lee l who even has a bit too much to drink from time to time there are some great stories in the ugaritic myth Cycles about that and it is an interesting but reasonable assimilation onto a god whose prehistory of warfare and brutal rating must transition it has to transition when you go into a more sedentary cult where you know you can't solve all your problems through violence anymore even most of your problems through violence thus this results in contemporary readers Whiplash reading the Hebrew Bible where the deity there seems to absolutely Delight in waiting and blood of his foes and killing people and then you turn a few pages later and this is a god whose mercy and compassion never fail that's because you have two Gods being welded together here who have very different traits of course not all elements of Yahweh were assimilated equally by the Israelites one of the important epithets of L was Bull L and bull iconography eventually all iconography especially in the South whilst apparently the polarizing among the Israelites it appears that the northern variants of the cult accepted El Yahweh bull iconography with jeroboam the first setting up very distinct bull imagery at his Yahweh shrines Yahweh shrines at Bethel the name there House of L and Don the actually Don is the only surviving Yahweh Shrine in the world from Antiquity at least along with tell a rod in the South but it's mostly then deconstructed and put in the Israel Museum these are the only two Yahweh shrines that survive into the archaeological record now while this bull imagery might have been primitive to Yahweh it's much more likely that it was a northern assimilation from the El cult that the southern cult by the way preferring the arcs cherubim as its major cult symbol but it was actually just more generally anaconic in its disposition generally grouped to detest especially as the northern kingdom grew in power and Prestige and well the am rides were very powerful and the southerners probably felt jealous of them and hated their cows indeed the golden calf narrative itself may be a southern polemic against the Norse assimilation of this dimension of Elle's cult the importation of this bull imagery finally L had a Divine consort a theoret but I'll come back to her when I discuss ashirah in just a moment if the relationship of Yahweh and Elle was assimilation to convergence then the relationship with the Canaanite Warrior and storm God but all literally the Lord is going to be characterized by assimilation to not only Divergence but also just straight up cultic antagonism the discovery of the ugaritic bile cycle has done more to inform our understanding of the local ancient mythology of that region than perhaps any other group of texts outside of course from the Hebrew Bible here but all is famous for his triumphs over the chaotic forces of the sea or yam his fight with death to the death when he subsequently resurrected and achieved the taunt with moat or the god of death with the aid of the Fierce fertility Warrior goddess anat thus providing for the life-giving winter range in the region before being exalted as virtually the king of the entire world virtually every element of the Baal cultists will intercept with Yahweh in his cult very probably because of just how similar the deities were and how very popular but all must have been compared with the relative upstart Yahweh in the region as I mentioned both gods were associated with storms especially for their life-giving Reigns in the region however they're both associated with storms of very different kinds Yahweh was likely associated with the terrifying thunderstorms and flash floods of the Southern Arava regions whereas ball was Associated primarily with the coastal winter storms without which the Arid region would struggle to bloom both storm gods very different kinds of storms however as Yahweh settled into the region the motif of him as a writer upon the clouds one virtually shared with ba'al would be extended not just to the thunderstorms of the South but also the coastal rains as well this element becomes assimilated easily onto Yahweh numerous evidence of these storm theophonies abound though Psalm 29 conforms so much with Baal imagery that some Scholars have just kind of argued that it's a literal Yahweh for all substitution him it's like cut and paste Yahweh four but although it's a little simplistic further elements of all's contests with the c are yam and it's Dragon loton are mirrored in early Israelite yawism with a similar contest most notably in the third creation story of the Bible found in Psalm 74 and of course in job where the defeat of sea monsters specifically Leviathan were a necessary aspect of forging the world from watery chaos to order this is a pretty common myth cycle in the ancient New Year East ironically this defeat of Leviathan would be later transposed into a world-ending apocalypse and later mutations of the myth both in Judaism and in Christianity for their ball contest with death or moat is often just demythologized in general such that Yahweh has control over both life and death and in some passages you always even described as swallowing up death this is a very big Flex an ironic Flex over yahweh's power over life and death because it's exactly death best described in the great myth as having a gaping Mall it does the swallowing not Gods further The Dwelling Place of Baal on Mount zafon modern-day Jebel Akra became autonomized into Hebrew as just the word for North with Yahweh also primitively associated with mountains especially Sinai Mariah the title El Shaddai probably is just another reference to how a mountain L was assimilated over to Yahweh from the Acadian word for mountain though eventually Mount Zion is eventually going to be substituted out for mount zathon for pride of place but the metonymy zephon is the word for North it continues into Hebrew to this very day of course with both being Warrior and storm Gods it's unsurprising that Yahweh would be pitted against by all in cultic combat it seems to be a video game but all's popularity can be seen in the numerous over a dozen theonomic place names associated with them these are probably local manifestations of Baal akin to the way that Roman gods were locally manifest or even the way you get sort of avatars of Mary in various places Our Lady of so and so and further the horror baal's worship seems to have inspired in certain Israelite writers and Prophets and further it's also pretty clear that at least the first half of the monarchy there was a pretty strong attempt to syncretize Yahweh but all worship which seems reasonable with but all Coptic objects placed in otherwise specifically holistic shrines probably to please both the local population but also the exogamous wives for whom ball was the central native God in their religion the Israelites would marry outside of the Israelite group in order to basically secure International relationships like everyone else thus this was very likely an attempt to assimilate Baal to Yahweh just as with L in the north however the southern cult was never quite this comfortable and purges by several Southern Kings such as by Hezekiah jehu and most famously Josiah sought to completely duracinate non-yahweh worship and even non-jerusalemite Yahweh worship I didn't want you Worship in Yahweh somewhere else however it appears that by the 8th Century BCE that the Israelite prophets such as Elijah and Elisha really really rejected any form of syncretism and the narrative describes multiple contests like ordeals between the Israelite Yahweh partisans and the Baal cult and the Ashera cult especially as backed by Ahab and his Phoenician wife Jezebel who gets an unwarrantedly evil reputation you can hear by the way the all theonm and her name in fact the scribes of the Hebrew Bible so hated by all that theonimics employing his name underwent taboo replacement with the Hebrew word for shame thus names like even the goddess astarta becomes ashtareth using the vowel pattern from the word for shame to muck about with her name further the phrase principal or bowel's bull famously becomes the Lord of the Flies and even Daniel's term for the abomination of desolation may become actually a pun on Baal Shaman or ball of the heavens thus that the Heavenly is thrown down thus but all in Yahweh are probably of mutual victims of what Freud called the narcissism of minor difference they're just that similar the stage of ancient Canaan of ancient Israel just being well too small for two Warrior storm gods and with only a minor exception but all basically vanishes from the religious record and Canaan by the post-exilic period though of course but all would go on to continue to function in The Phoenician deity system as melkart as late as the rise of Christian hegemony in the late Classical period so one God had to go and at least in that region it ended up being ba'al though while not directly bearing on the development of Yahweh as a God but more so on yahuism as a cult is a question of how else consort a theraat would or would not be incorporated Ashira she appears in the Hebrew is mentioned some 40 times throughout the Hebrew Bible though overwhelmingly in reference to a kind of wooden ritual poll that probably represents a sacred tree of fertility which in turn of course represents the goddess herself though there are a couple times where she's mentioned as a peso Asha ra set up by Menasha this is probably an engraved representation of her maybe like those ones from the Bronze Age of her cupping her breath so we don't know unsurprisingly the cult of asherah was very popular and it seems reasonable for many reasons fertility is popular that Yahweh L assimilation convergence would also result in consort exchange such that El athirat would become Yahweh ashirah and that seems to be precisely what happened though of course not without some hella theological controversy several Israelite and Judean Kings seem to have placed her cultic symbol in Yahweh temples and equally stridently Elijah contested with her prophets and the prophets of Baal and murdered them all at least according to the text and Josiah targeted her cult in his Inquisition reforms indeed it's the deuteronomists particularly that have the most deeply concerned worries about the elimination of her cult her exact status in this period is contested while the two famous inscriptions at kuntalit adrude and kirbat elkom seemed to indicate that her status was as consort of Yale despite that pesky pronomial suffix which no one quite seems to know just what to do with and there is 50 000 volumes on that one polynomial suffix the overwhelming concern about her is the Adoration of her cult object itself especially in Yahweh shrines they may have been okay with Yahweh having a wife but not her occult object in the same Shrine while we have to acknowledge the policy of evidence here it seems reasonable to me that she did function as you always consort but that this ill assimilation was heavily theologically contested especially in the South with the more emergent Yahweh monoliters the cult object probably represented the Goddess that seems almost ipso facto true it clearly became associated with Yahweh the deuteronomous constantly complained about it and the logic of L convergence seems likely that the two were conceived together despite again the general anaconic and Yahweh monology parties eventually that would emerge and obtain cultic hegemony especially in the south now to what degree asherah and astarte Ishtar were assimilating this period is unknown the answer is probably maybe and further there's a vague reference to a being called the Queen of Heaven very disdained by Jeremiah who this is is also unknown though the term for the cakes that are offered to the Queen of Heaven and that text there are actually Acadian loan words they're coming over from the Acadian language so it seems like a nod in the direction of Ishtar a start day assimilation but we don't know with the exception of a few names especially in very archaic sources there in the song of devorah the fertility and Warrior goddess anat seems to play basically little to no role in this period of the development of yahwism and maybe just in the whole cultic environment of Canaan though the Bloodshed imagery associated with ugaritic are not her wading through blood and gore and decapitated heads rolling about her feet and dismembered hands flying into the air about her like locusts this needs to be metal song why isn't there a bang metal band called anat you see very similar kinds of depictions of Yahweh delighting and warfare and Carnage in the song of devorah but honestly I would just suspect that primitive Yahweh and I'm not actually would just have made a better couple than Yahweh and asherah given their proclivity to massacring people you get kind of Natural Born Killer vibes from that couple but I suspect the similarities are probably just endemic to ancient total warfare hacking people to death on the battlefield than any actual theological convergence or assimilation between Yahweh and anat of course your wisdom would undergo further assimilation to Canaanite mythology especially the the mythologizing of the plague God's reshef and devair literally burning and plague terrifying Gods who come to serve as nightmarish steeds pulling the Divine Chariot that is an image in the Hebrew Bible or metal or the literary transfer of the mighty Regal dead of the Rapa Uma of the ugaritic mythology to the refaim as Giants defeated by biblical figures as a show of force in the Hebrew Bible in fact I've done an entire episode tracing out just the development and history of the refaim from ancient Canaanite into ancient Israelite mythology if you want to check it out that's a fascinating development with the refahim all in all what we have is a complex non-linear process whereby primitive yawism and Yahweh become implanted into the post Bronze Age collapse of the area of the Canaanite Israelite Highlands becoming the chief though not the sole god of the immersion Israelites again this is a famous henotheism of the period and he becomes a core aspect of their emergent National hegemony in the region the earlier period is marked by theological convergence and Divergence assimilation and conflict all with the local Canaanite Cults and their gods with a tendency towards syncretism and originally the more affluent northern areas but this earns the ire of both the southern Yahweh partisans who have may have been already on the path or developing in the direction of monolatry and anachronism along with a small fraction of Northern Prophet shamans with the destruction of the north and 722 BCE the northern Yahweh refugees would be absorbed into the more anti-syncretistic anaconic in Yahweh monolatres Southern cult this would develop in fits and starts until the rule of Josiah and the deteronomists whose reforms are better Inquisition not only sought out to eliminate non-yahweh worship from this Kingdom but also non-jerusalemite Yahweh worship again Theology and politics are the same thing here in centralizing one centralizes the other by necessity hence the destruction of even Yahweh shrines in the region like that one that was torn down there at Tel a rod with the 6th Century BCE Exile of the Judean Elites who are probably majority Yahweh monoliders or even early monotheists maybe the Theology of the Exile and the post-exile would represent a massive shift from a parochial Judean God to a singular Cosmic god with a clear expression of monotheism first emerging in texts like trito Isaiah monotheism would Mark the post-exilic period yaw wism went into exile Judaism came back and that's the point I'd like to drive home in my mind the transition to the universal monotheism of Judaism would come at a price and that price would be the particularism of Yahweh as Yahweh far from the Primitive Warrior storm god of the desert Wilds of the Arava or even the Quilted together deity Forge in the religious Crucible of contestation and assimilation of the period of the judges in the northern and southern kingdoms the theological tension would now be between the god of Judaism as a people both Sovereign and diasporic with a truly Universal being transcending all differences responsible for even the cosmos itself even abstracted to utter Transcendence by both apocalyptic mysticism and Hellenistic philosophy the distinction now would be what kind of universal God are you going to get a parochial Judaism one or a more philosophical abstract one and it would be the promise of universal salvation reserved once only for the judeans Matched by this Cosmic apocalypticism and escotherological fervor in which Yahweh would become a father to a sacrifice son for the Salvation of both Jew and Gentile that would set the stage for the next part of this epic Story the transition of Yahweh from a Judean God to Simply God for billions and billions of human beings as I mentioned the literature in this field is vast and highly technical however I'd like to recommend a few volumes if you want to dive deeper into this topic and if this episode interests you you need to by all means the early history of God and the origins of biblical monotheism by Mark Smith is fantastic John day's Yahweh and the gods and gods of Canaan is a classic Frank Moore crosses Canaanite myth and Hebrew epic along with the religions of ancient Israel by sioni zevitt are all both and great for a diplomatic history of Israel from a archaeological point of view rather than just the text the aptly name book by devair beyond the text and archaeological portrait of ancient Israel in ancient Judah it's very diplomatic in a fine text although his book has archeology buried the Bible it's kind of like the too long didn't read it version of the book I just mentioned so if you want to read another one that one's a good one it's kind of a digest of the more specialized text Theodore Lewis's more recent the origin and character of God ancient Israelite Israelite religion through the lens of divinity is also just a beast of a text a magisterial approach and well worth the effort as I said this episode is a testament to not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good this episode is incomplete it throws way too fast over a lot of topics and honestly this could just be an entire semester class at the very least and require sophisticated knowledge of ancient near East history and several ancient languages not to mention just an encyclopedic grasp of the Hebrew Bible and Canaanite myth more generally despite the Myriad shortcomings of this episode I hope it's still useful for grasping at some level where Scholars are on the mysterious origin and development of Yahweh a God we all know and yet we still have to admit we know so little of until next time I'm Dr Justin Sledge and thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion

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Length: 43min 11sec (2591 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023