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, Rmer 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, Rmer 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, Rmer 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.
Yhwhs 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 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 Yhwhs 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, Rmer 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 wouldnt 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, Rmer
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.
Rmer 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.
Not all scholars agree that
the iconography of Yhwh was so pronounced in Judah. The evidence for
anthropomorphic depiction is not strong, says Saul Olyan, professor of
Judaic studies and religious studies at Brown University. It may be that
anthropomorphic images of Yhwh were avoided early on.
The God of the Jews
In any case, many scholars
agree that Yhwh became the main god of the Jews only after the
destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, around 720 BCE.
How or why the Jews came to exalt Yhwh and reject the pagan gods they also adored is unclear.
We do know that after the
fall of Samaria, the population of Jerusalem increased as much as
fifteenfold, likely due to the influx of refugees from the north. That
made it necessary for the kings of Judah to push a program that would
unify the two populations and create a common narrative. And that in
turn may be why the biblical writers frequently stigmatize the pagan
cultic practices of the north, and stress that Jerusalem alone had
withstood the Assyrian onslaught – thereby explaining Israel's
embarrassing fall to Assyria, while distinguishing the prominence and
purity of Judahite religion.
Religious reforms by
Judahite kings, mainly Hezekiah and Josiah, included abolishing random
temple worship of Yhwh and centralizing his adoration at the Temple in
Jerusalem, as well as banning the worship of Asherah, Yhwhs female
companion, and other pagan cults in the Temple and around the capital.
The Israelites don't keep the faith
This transformation from polytheism to worshipping a single god was carved in stone, literally. For example, an inscription in a tomb in Khirbet Beit Lei,
near the Judahite stronghold of Lachish, states that Yhwh is the god of
the whole country; the mountains of Judah belong to the god of
Jerusalem.
Josiahs reforms were also
enshrined in the book of Deuteronomy – whose original version is thought
to have been compiled around this time – and especially in the words of
Deut. 6, which would later form the Shma Yisrael, one of the central prayers of Judaism: Hear, O Israel, Yhwh is our God, Yhwh is one.
But while Yhwh had, by the
dawn of the 6th century BCE, become our national god, he was still
believed to be just one of many celestial beings, each protecting his
own people and territory.
This is reflected in the
many biblical texts exhorting the Israelites not to follow other gods, a
tacit acknowledgement of the existence of those deities, Romer
explains.
For example, in Judges
11:24, Jephtah tries to resolve a territorial dispute by telling the
Ammonites that the land of Israel had been given to the Israelites by
Yhwh, while their lands had been given to them by their god Chemosh
("Will you not take what your god Chemosh gives you? Likewise, whatever
Yhwh our god has given us, we will possess.")
Snatching God from the jaws of defeat
The real conceptual
revolution probably only occurred after the Babylonians' conquest of
Judah and arson of the First Temple in 587 B.C.E. The destruction and
the subsequent exile to Babylon of the Judahite elites inevitably cast
doubts on the faith they had put in Yhwh.
The question was: how can we
explain what happened? Rmer says. If the defeated Israelites had simply
accepted that the Babylonian gods had proven they were stronger than
the god of the Jews, history would have been very different.
But somehow, someone came up
with a different, unprecedented explanation. The idea was that the
destruction happened because the kings did not obey the law of god, Rmer
says. Its a paradoxical reading of the story: the vanquished in a way
is saying that his god is the vanquisher. Its quite a clever idea.
The Israelites/Judahites
took over the classical idea of the divine wrath that can provoke a
national disaster but they combined it with the idea that Yhwh in his
wrath made the Babylonians destroy Judah and Jerusalem, he said.
The concept that Yhwh had
pulled the Babylonians' strings, causing them to punish the Israelites
inevitably led to the belief that he was not just the god of one people,
but a universal deity who exercises power over all of creation.
This idea is already present
in the book of Isaiah, thought to be one of the earliest biblical
texts, composed during or immediately after the Exile. This is also how
the Jews became the chosen people – because the Biblical editors had to
explain why Israel had a privileged relationship with Yhwh even though
he was no longer a national deity, but the one true God.
Over the centuries, as the
Bible was redacted, this narrative was refined and strengthened,
creating the basis for a universal religion – one that could continue
to exist even without being tied to a specific territory or temple. And
thus Judaism as we know it was established, and, ultimately, all other
major monotheistic religions were as well.