Yahweh evolved out of existing Canaanite polytheism.
El was the highest god of this pantheon, Ashera was his wife/consort and chief goddess, Ba’al was their child, god of storms and fertility, amongst others gods like Anat and Astarte.
The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, mostly switches between referring to ‘God’ as El, and ‘The Lord’, Adonai, Elohim, which is actually plural and means ‘The Gods’, and YHWH.
Adonai was originally a title given to Ba’al.
Yahwism basically started as a cult, in Canaan, that amalgomated Ba’al and El together into a single God, originally referenced Ashera but then wrote her out of the religion, and then just smashed many of the stories about or involving El and Ba’al together, causing the incongruous naming scheme and duplicatative, often directly adjacent, stories in the hebrew Torah, which are largely the same general plot, but have inconsistent details.
This is why Yahweh is jealous and demands destruction of idols to his predecessors in Canaan, and seems to acknowledge that other gods do actually exist, but he is the best and most powerful.
Where God basically retcons his name. You see I used to go by El, but now my name is Yahweh!
Its integral to establishing the mythic history that Yahweh and his flock are actually not from Canaan, they’re escapees from Egypt, and Yahweh promised them Canaan…
While in reality, the Exodus story is completely impossible as described (would have been something like 2-3 million people leaving Egypt, at a point in history where that was comparable.to the total population of lower Egypt), there is 0 archaeological evidence for anything like that ever occuring… but having a unifying myth is useful for justifying conquering some of your small neighboring Canaanites, even if the stories about thag are also largely mythic and exagerated.
…
Something somewhat analagous seems to have happened something like 600-700 years earlier in Egypt, when Akhenaten decided that actually, Aten was the best and only important god, that the others had died or grown weak.
This attempt at either monotheism or monolatrism didn’t work out so well, it was so unpopular that shortly after Akhenaten’s death, polytheism was reinstated, Akhenaten’s name was removed from official historical records, his monuments were destroyed, and the dynasty that came after him reffered to him as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the criminal’.
A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.
The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.
Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.
I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.
The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.
Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.
The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.
If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.
I believe that in terms of conquering the Canaanites it’s fairly well accepted that they were basically the same peoples, and it was just the relatively rich coastal cities vs the Hebrews who were mostly rural interior peoples unified by their new cult of monotheism and conquest.
Don’t think about how time is a flat circle too hard!
Yahweh evolved out of existing Canaanite polytheism.
El was the highest god of this pantheon, Ashera was his wife/consort and chief goddess, Ba’al was their child, god of storms and fertility, amongst others gods like Anat and Astarte.
The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, mostly switches between referring to ‘God’ as El, and ‘The Lord’, Adonai, Elohim, which is actually plural and means ‘The Gods’, and YHWH.
Adonai was originally a title given to Ba’al.
Yahwism basically started as a cult, in Canaan, that amalgomated Ba’al and El together into a single God, originally referenced Ashera but then wrote her out of the religion, and then just smashed many of the stories about or involving El and Ba’al together, causing the incongruous naming scheme and duplicatative, often directly adjacent, stories in the hebrew Torah, which are largely the same general plot, but have inconsistent details.
This is why Yahweh is jealous and demands destruction of idols to his predecessors in Canaan, and seems to acknowledge that other gods do actually exist, but he is the best and most powerful.
This is why you get Exodus 6:3
https://biblehub.com/exodus/6-3.htm
Where God basically retcons his name. You see I used to go by El, but now my name is Yahweh!
Its integral to establishing the mythic history that Yahweh and his flock are actually not from Canaan, they’re escapees from Egypt, and Yahweh promised them Canaan…
While in reality, the Exodus story is completely impossible as described (would have been something like 2-3 million people leaving Egypt, at a point in history where that was comparable.to the total population of lower Egypt), there is 0 archaeological evidence for anything like that ever occuring… but having a unifying myth is useful for justifying conquering some of your small neighboring Canaanites, even if the stories about thag are also largely mythic and exagerated.
…
Something somewhat analagous seems to have happened something like 600-700 years earlier in Egypt, when Akhenaten decided that actually, Aten was the best and only important god, that the others had died or grown weak.
This attempt at either monotheism or monolatrism didn’t work out so well, it was so unpopular that shortly after Akhenaten’s death, polytheism was reinstated, Akhenaten’s name was removed from official historical records, his monuments were destroyed, and the dynasty that came after him reffered to him as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the criminal’.
So the biblical god was just an amalgamation of stories from the bloody reign of some possibly prehistoric warchiefs, it seems to me
A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.
The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.
Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.
Yes but the first written stories are most probably oral myths handed down for generations before finally being writ
I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.
The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.
Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.
The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.
If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.
I believe that in terms of conquering the Canaanites it’s fairly well accepted that they were basically the same peoples, and it was just the relatively rich coastal cities vs the Hebrews who were mostly rural interior peoples unified by their new cult of monotheism and conquest.
Don’t think about how time is a flat circle too hard!