recent reading: the early history of god: yahweh and other deities in ancient israel

Mark S Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel

So this is like a companion piece to the other recent book on ancient Jewish religion I just read, Cohen's From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. While Cohen's book was a new one for me, Smith's is a reread.

This is an important thing, the reread.

Maybe some people have better memories than I do. But even if I thought I remembered Smith's book clearly, I don't know how I would use that memory to reevaluate his work in light of everything I had read since -- I don't know how I could rely just on the memory of it to make the new connections a rereading will make. If those decades of other books had been read specifically with Smith's book in mind, that would be one thing, but that would have been a very directed course of reading, and then we would still be having this same conversation about some other book that I hadn't been keeping mentally open while reading everything else.

Anyway, I read The Early History of God at some point in the mid to late nineties, and thought of it again while reading Cohen's book, and realized that I don't own a copy. When I went to buy a copy, I discovered that in the intervening years, Smith had published a second edition.

Let's talk about that first.

This is the model citizen of a second edition of a scholarly book.

He talks about the work that has happened in the field since the first edition, both overall, and as it pertains to his conclusions; because this is ancient history, he addresses the change in the overall balance of archaeological evidence; the impact the first edition has itself had on the field, and the response people have had to it and uses people have put it to; addresses some of his critics and supporters; does some sometimes-catty Inside Baseball stuff; and so on, and this is not a few paragraphs, this is not a few pages, this goes on for a substantial amount of the book, separated by section. In a field that changes not only because of the input of scholars but because of new archaeological or linguistic evidence, this is exactly how things should be. It should not be this remarkable that he did it this way. And yet -- and yet, and yet.

What a wonderful book this is.

So briefly, Smith's book is about the development of monotheism in Israel from Canaanite polytheism, and the way the Canaanite god Yahweh was elevated and combined with the god El (oh, get it, El-evated) to become the only god worshiped, and what happened to the other gods of the pantheon -- some of whom, like Baal, are familiar from the Old Testament. It tells a clear story of monotheism as something that developed slowly, with great struggle. Broadly, Smith describes two periods -- convergence, in which Yahweh absorbs the characteristics and qualities of other gods in order to justify his elevation (and/or as a consequence of his elevation), and differentiation, in which the difference between Yahweh and other gods is underscored and it is made clear that the worship of other gods is not simply the worship of Yahweh under another name.

For instance, the names El and Baal both appear in the Old Testament -- that is, the Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh -- numerous times. The Jewish and Christian explanation for this has always been, for as long as we have had any comment on this, that El is another name for God -- for Yahweh -- and that Baal is a name for a foreign god that Jews were sometimes condemned for worshiping. As an explanation for Baal, this is reasonable enough. But El is known to have been worshiped as a god independent of Yahweh by other Semitic peoples -- and if you don't read the Old Testament with the assumption that Yahweh and El are the same god, certain passages seem to be describing two gods with very different characteristics.

Again, as I've said before, the conventional narrative that the Jews were led out of Egypt, conquered Canaan after wandering the desert for forty years (or any other length of time), and then imposed on Canaan -- now Israel -- a monotheistic religion they had followed since the time of the patriarchs, with laws developed during those years in the desert ... is at best a Robin Hood theory, a theory with a grain of truth blown into mythological proportions. It is a story that describes things that would leave tremendous archaeological evidence where none has been found.

It is much more likely that Canaan became Israel through an internal cultural revolution in which monotheists calling themselves Israel -- who may have shared a common ethnic bond -- overthrew the ruling elite of Canaan, whether through force, religious conversion, political revolution, what have you. This is also a story that is much more consistent with the fact that the Jewish scriptures are filled with the struggles of Jewish leaders to get their people to keep worshiping God-and-God-alone, to abandon foreign gods and foreign religious practices -- even before the Exile (when those "foreign religious practices" are the ones that the people themselves grew up with while living in Babylon after being forced out of Israel for a couple generations), those "foreign religious practices" may very well have been native religious practices that were being rejected by the Yahweh-loyalists, who developed and refined their theology and practices over a period of centuries.

There is some early material on source criticism and redaction criticism which I'm not going to get into because a) it doesn't quote well and b) I'm not qualified to paraphrase it without a refresher on the state of the field in redaction criticism, but it was a good pointer to sources on the latter. However, he succinctly makes a point I may come back to if I get into source criticism here: "While the death knell for source theory was sounded often over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, it has not been supplanted by a more persuasive model. Tigay's work in particular suggests that source criticism comports with what is known for the composition and transmission of ancient texts outside the Bible. Moreover, old-fashioned source criticism and redaction criticism could be combined and modified to order to provide a satisfactory range of models of textual composition that would attend to the interrelated processes of memorization and reading, writing and interpretation." Indeed, this is basically what I was taught while in college and grad school, around the same time Smith was writing this overview (the second edition came out while I was in grad school, but it should be no surprise that public university libraries that own the previous edition of a book do not necessarily immediately order the new edition when it comes out, especially in cash-poor states).

Also especially interesting to me:

"The common models for the origins of Israel in the land (conquest, infiltration, and peasant-revolt) have all been inundated by evidence derived from surveys and excavations. Regional variations call into question the viability of a single master thesis to explain the situation on the ground."

"Conquest" is the Biblical Exodus narrative or close variations, i.e. the idea that Canaan became Israel because foreign invaders came in and made it so, whereas "peasant-revolt" is the religious uprising I was talking about. The upshot of what Smith gets into is that the tide of archaeological evidence continues to make certain Biblical accounts of ancient Israel more and more difficult to support -- not only the Exodus but the United Monarchy period (the idea that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were unified under a single monarchy, beginning with Saul, who was succeeded by David and his line; an idea for which there is very little historical support and a growing amount of evidence suggesting the contrary).

Most of our sources for Canaanite religion are Ugaritic texts, which for instance tell us about:

"the deities El, the aged and kindly patriarch of the pantheon; his consort and queen mother of the divine family, Asherah; the young storm-god and divine warrior, Baal; his sister, Anat, likely a martial deity; and finally, the solar deity. Scholars of religion have frequently assumed that because these deities were Canaanite, they were not Israelite ... that Israelite had always been monolatrous; Israel worshipped only Yahweh, although it did not deny the existence of other deities." Furthermore, when these Canaanite gods were worshiped by Jews alongside Yahweh, scholars often assumed that this was the result of syncretism (itself a convoluted and interesting topic and difficult to untangle here, but in short, the result of blending two religious traditions -- analogous to the creation of a creole language when two languages meet*) and/or confined to "popular" or "folk" religion, emphatically never part of Israel's official or state religion.

*("The union of religious phenomena from two historically separate systems or cultures," in Smith's phraseology, though as with any brief discussion of syncretism, tarrying too long here opens questions about whether it is syncretism when Methodists do yoga, when French-Catholic Beats embrace Buddhism, when your humble Protestant-progressive narrator wears a St Dismas medallion, so let us move quickly down the path before the shadows grow too long to find our way out.)

(Like gnosticism, what is at stake in the longer conversation is this: syncretism is a modern idea that originates not in religion but outside it in a conversation about it, in the same way that terminology in biology does not originate in animals and plants but in the attempts at explaining them, but unlike something you can look at in a microscope there is a great temptation to learn the terminology and then perceive the data according to the terms you've just flashcarded, rather than really, actually, truly seeing anything -- okay, now hurry, hurry, down the path we go --)

This remains one of the conventional views, and I've referenced it before. It's the view I was taught: Israel, whether as a religious movement or a nation, began with the religious view that many gods exist but it is appropriate only to worship one of them (monolatry) and in the flurry of theological activity during and following the Exile period, developed the stricter view that only one God in fact exists (monotheism), which became strictly held enough by the first century CE that while Roman gentiles saw no conflict in worshiping Yahweh among their own deities, non-Christian Jews found the idea of elevating Christ to godhood an unthinkable and alien perversion of monotheism.

That view in of itself seemed, at one point, kind of radical compared to the Biblical view of a pure monotheism that began with -- well, with Adam, as far as the literal story, but in terms of the establishment of the religion, with the time of the patriarchs. But as radical as it may seem compared to the Bible story, it was embraced by scholars all over the spectrum who agreed on little else -- scholars who argued for and against the historicity of the Exodus, the United Monarchy, and the patriarchs themselves, Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, atheist scholars, scholars who believe Noah's Flood was a historical event, scholars who believe it is the Jewish version of a story told all over the world.

Smith spells out four points about Israel made by the Biblical point of view in order to discuss how they have been addressed by various scholarly models:

"First, Israel's ethnic identity was originally separate from other peoples of the land.

"Second, Israel was not originally among the peoples in the land.

"Third, specific cultic objects were alien to Israel.

"Finally, Yahweh was the only deity of Israel.

"Some scholarly works have used these biblical claims as elements in their historical reconstructions of Israelite religion. Syncretism of Israelite religion with Canaanite religion remains a historical reconstruction among biblical scholars.  ... some scholars ... argue that neither Baal nor Asherah was hardly a deity in Israel ... others vigorously defend the biblical witness to Israelite worship of Baal and Asherah."

What we're arguing for in this book and this blog entry is a different model than the above, one that Smith articulated, building on earlier work, and that has grown in acceptance (and for which the evidence has grown considerably) in the last thirty years: that Israel wasn't just a monolatrous cult that sprung out of the polytheistic sea of its surroundings, but rather began polytheistically, and retained at least some polytheistic practitioners (not just "among the common folk" but among the elite, the religious and secular leaders) until ... some point. In either model, the post-Exile religious revival is a period of intensely monotheistic fervor characterized by the association of deep monotheistic devotion to the Jewish God -- Yahweh, also titled as El in texts eventually collected and redacted into the Jewish scriptures -- with Israelite cultural, national, and ethnic identity. On this point, and this is important, both models agree with the traditional Biblical view.

One of the things that is very interesting, though, is that even in this wider polytheistic model, the Israelite pantheon was quite small compared to Israel's neighbors. Israelite worship included very few gods: Yahweh, El, Asherah, and Baal, primarily. (Although as Smith points out, by the time we get to the period in question -- the first millennium BCE -- most of the cultures in the Levant had greatly reduced the number of deities to which they maintained cults, down to rarely more than a dozen, compared to 200 in Ugarit in the previous millennium.)

Smith lays out the shape of his argument that I've already summarized:

"This religious spectrum in early Israel changed, due in large measure to two major developments; the first was convergence, and the second was differentiation. Convergence involved the coalescence of various deities and/or some of their features in the figure of Yahweh. This development began in the period of the Judges and continued during the first half of the monarchy. At this point, El and Yahweh were identified, and perhaps Asherah was no longer continued as an identifiably separate deity. Features belonging to deities such as El, Asherah, and Baal were absorbed into the Yahwistic religion of Israel."

1) "the period of the Judges" is the period right before the United Monarchy, before Judah and Israel had a king. If you're familiar with the story of David, you know Saul, the first king, who became king because -- in the Biblical account -- the people said they were tired of being ruled by these fair-minded judges and they wanted to be a kick-ass nation with a king. (Alternately, as much as they liked Samuel -- prophet and judge -- they hated his sons who would succeed him.) So Saul became the first king of Israel, and Israel and Judah were eventually united under David.

2) "El and Yahweh were identified" means "merged together" in this usage, though that is likely clear from context.

3) It's important to note that the processes we're talking about are familiar from other ancient religions. Smith is not arguing for an event unique in Jewish religion, except insofar as it resulted in monotheism/monolatry. But the processes of identifying previously unrelated deities together -- this happens all the fucking time in the ancient world. Any account of Egyptian religion, for instance, is littered with it.

"Israelite monolatry developed through conflict and compromise between the cults of Yahweh and other deities. Israelite literature incorporated some of the characteristics of other deities into the divine personage of Yahweh. Polemic against deities other than Yahweh even contributed to this process. For although polemic rejected other deities, Yahwistic polemic assumed that Yahweh embodied the positive characteristics of the very deities it was condemning."

"The second major process involved differentiation of Israelite cult from its 'Canaanite' heritage. Numerous features of early Israelite cult were later rejected as 'Canaanite' and non-Yahwistic. This development apparently began first with the rejection of Baal worship in the ninth century [BCE], continued in the eighth to sixth centuries with legal and prophetic condemnation of Baal worship, the asherah, solar worship, the high places, practices pertaining to the dead, and other religious features."

Differentiation is a familiar process not only from the ancient world but from, well, always: we don't do this because X does this and part of who we are is not-X. Like a lot of American boys, I was circumcised at birth independent of religious consideration, but by the time thirtysomething came out a generation later, Presbyterian Hope and Jewish Michael go back and forth about whether to circumcise their baby son because Hope gets hung up on whether this "means he's Jewish," and Michael has been putting off the question of how to raise their children. Now, there's no reason the boy can't be circumcised and be a Christian, obviously, and for generations in this country the practice was common for what were perceived to be medical/hygienic reasons. But for Hope the question is one of religious identity: Jews are circumcised, and Christians aren't -- not because of a proscription, though, but ultimately (though she doesn't say this) because Jews are.

There have been periodic movements within Christian groups to abandon Christmas traditions like the Christmas tree or even the celebration of Christmas itself, because of perceptions that the holiday is a) ultimately a secular one with a religious name or b) a pagan celebration with a Christian name. Again: we don't do Y because X does Y and we are not-X. These are simple but familiar examples; moral panics by Christian (and occasional Jewish or Muslim) groups surrounding Harry Potter or D&D because they "promote magic" are similar, especially if they are not predicated on the argument that magic is "real" or that children will somehow accidentally summon demons by waving a pretend wand around. We are this, and at our core we are not that.

So too in ancient Israel: we are Israel now, not Canaan. These practices were Canaan's practices, and we are Canaan no longer. Do them no longer. These practices were associated with other gods, or with religious observances we have not adopted as part of our Yahweh cult, so abandon them. To some extent, this is necessary not just to promote loyalty to Yahweh but to reinforce the clear line between X and Y, us and them, to build that sense of identity. And one thing is clear in all of these reconstructions, from the Biblical story to Smith: the Yahwists were very invested in that sense of identity.

The conventional view as I was taught it has generally portrayed the monarchy as often hostile to or resistant to the establishment of the Yahwist monolatry as the religion of Israel (punctuated with a few notable exceptions chronicled in the Biblical account), hence our many stories of prophets railing about what jerks these kings be and how they're gonna get what's coming to them. Smith's reconstruction instead casts the monarchy (from 1000-587 BCE) as involved in the creation of the Yahwist monolatrist cult as the national religion, but also tolerating and sometimes encouraging the worship of other gods. This is in keeping with the practices of state religions in Egypt -- Akhenaten aside -- and Mesopotamia at large.

"Royal religion was both conservative and innovative. It incorporated practices traditional in popular religion, such as the cult of Baal, the symbol of the asherah, high places, and practices pertaining to the dead. During the second half of the monarchy, religious programs ... contributed to the differentiation of Israelite religion from its Canaanite past." The monarchy heavily influenced the association of storm and solar imagery with Yahweh, which eventually influenced the religious revivalists of the Exile and post-Exilic period who created the aforementioned strict monotheism.

(There are knowledge gaps, of course, when it comes to weighing who likely contributed what first, and who merely favored it or encouraged it once it was contributed. We have more data from Judah than from Israel, and more data from the second half of the monarchy period than from either the first half -- especially the early monarchic period, which is why the historicity of the United Monarchy itself is still in question -- or the Judges period. But the differences in data are not just in volume. The Biblical account, and the ways in which we are accustomed to speaking of "ancient Israel," both obfuscate the fact that there are non-trivial cultural, language, social, and material-culture differences between Judah and Israel in these periods. The depth and significance of those differences is, thanks to that data gap, not always fully understood. If a given word appears eleven times in Judah and once in Israel, it's tempting to assume it means the same thing all twelve times and will mean the same thing the next time you see it too. But the Israelite data set isn't always large enough to make that conclusion comfortable.)

Smith brings up the point I made in my Cohen post:

"The study of Israelite religion often involves studying practices more than creedal beliefs because the Bible more frequently stresses correct practices than correct beliefs or internal attitudes. Christian scholars, however, tend to focus more on beliefs or internal attitudes because Christian theology has often emphasized this aspect of religion. The study of Israelite monotheism as complicated by this factor, as monotheism has usually been defined as a matter of belief in one deity whereas monolatry has been understood as a matter of practice ... however, if ancient Israelite religion is to be viewed primarily as a matter of practice, then the modern distinction between monotheism and monolatry os problematic. Nonetheless, the distinction is retained in this study for two reasons. First, the appearance of both monolatry and monotheism remains a matter of current interest. Second, the distinction between the two phenomena emerged within Israelite religion."

"Early Israelite culture cannot be separated easily from the culture of 'Canaan.' The highlands of Israel in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 - 587 BCE) reflect continuity with the 'Canaanite' (or better, West Semitic) culture during the preceding period both in the highlands and in the contemporary cities on the coast and in the valleys. ... Though Hebrew and Canaanite are the linguistic labels applied to the languages of the two periods in this region, they cannot be easily distinguished in the Iron I period. ... Canaanite and Hebrew [languages] so closely overlap that the ability to distinguish them is premised more on historical information than linguistic criteria." So too for material culture -- "both" cultures used the same kinds of storage jars, cooking pots, overall pottery tradition, four-room houses, and rock-cut tombs, among other examples.

Smith goes on to describe, in specificity I am not going to reproduce here, specific religious terms that are the same in "both languages," including many terms for various sacrifices and offerings; priests and other religious figures; and divine forgiveness resulting from the performance of a ritual. Features unique to Israelite culture, which are just as important, include the tradition of Yahweh's sanctuary in the south "variously called Sinai, Paran, Edom, and Teiman, and Israel's early tradition of the Exodus from Egypt."

Interestingly, "that Israel was in some form distinguished from Canaan ca. 1200 [BCE] is clear from an inscribed monument of the pharaoh Merneptah," which refers to Canaan and Israel separately as areas within the Syro-Palestine region. Canaan here is written with a determinative denoting a land, while Israel is written with a determinative denoting a people, meaning Israel may have existed as a distinct ethnic group in this time, and was recognized as such.

HOWEVER.

The problem with assuming too much from ancient textual evidence is that formal precise grammar as we think of it is a modern invention -- which is not to say that grammar instruction for scribes or the nobility did not exist, because obviously literacy is a specialized skill in the ancient world. But where in the modern world we can split hairs and make much of minor grammatical differences, in the ancient world -- or the Medieval world -- or any time before now -- these are very often just mistakes. Even calling them mistakes is not quite right, because that assumes a level of intent that did not exist -- furthermore, we have access to grammar guides and authoritative style guides that tell us the right and wrong way to use determinatives, which this scribe did not, and we know that scribes of his era used these determinatives inconsistently, even though we know how they were "supposed" to be used. People did not generally attempt to write as precisely and clearly as we do now. The Bible itself, for instance, is full of grammatical errors, despite the fact that the texts we have were edited many, many times, with ample opportunity to find and correct those errors. A monument goes through no such editing process.

(It's not like we moderns are consistent either. We say podium when we "mean" lectern. So if we say podium every time, in what sense do we actually "mean" lectern? You know?)

So what I'm saying here is that we know that Canaan and Israel are separately mentioned on a monument in the 13th century BCE. It is very hard to say more than that with accuracy. But it does seem to be the case that from a very early point, Israel -- whatever its political position -- considered itself culturally distinct from Canaan:

"In sum, the Israelites may have perceived themselves as a people different from the Canaanites. Separate religious traditions of Yahweh, separate traditions of origins in Egypt for at least some component of Israel, and separate geographic holdings in the hill country contributed to the Israelites' sense of difference from their Canaanite neighbors inhabiting the coast and the valleys."

Yahweh and El

Now here's where we get to some interesting stuff.

The monotheism of Israel, the monotheism that Christianity built its foundations on, is centered around the worship of the god Yahweh. So too, needless to say, for the monolatry that preceded it. However.

Yahweh is not even the original god of Israel.

Whaaaaaat.

It's right there in the name, and this of course is one reason why the identification of Yahweh and El is so important, not only to the Yahwist monotheistic cult but to the Christians who made the Old Testament part of their Bible. Israel has El's name right there, and he was clearly the chief god, the Zeus, the Odin, of the pantheon. But there is just as clearly a tradition that began very early of Yahweh -- the son of El -- having a special relationship with Israel:

"When the Most High ('elyon) gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated humanity,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of divine beings.
For Yahweh's portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage."

That's Deuteronomy 32:8-9, in which Yahweh (who we know to be a warrior-god from Sinai, Paran, Edom, or Midian, in the south) is identified as the god overseeing Israel. As Smith points out, one indication that the identification of El and Yahweh began early is that we have no polemics against El the way we do against Baal.

One side effect of the identification of Yahweh with El, by the way?

The name El began to be used as a generic noun 'el meaning "god," as a result of which we have the Judeo-Christian tradition of referring to the Judeo-Christian deity as simply God -- because while El is named, over and over again, in the Jewish Scriptures, the nameness of that name has been worn off.

(Of course, translations tend to obscure the difference between Yahweh and El by translating them both as God, or by titles like Most High, Lord, etc.)

For instance, Joshua 22:22:

'el 'elohim yhwh, 'el 'elohim yhwh

God of gods is Yahweh, God of gods is Yahweh

This "X of X" superlative is a common Hebrew construction -- Christians are familiar with "king of kings" to refer to Jesus, but the phrase is borrowed from the Old Testament books of Ezra and Daniel. Ecclesiastes opens with the phrase "vanity of vanities," and one of the most oddball books of the Old Testament, the almost certainly secular collection of love poems, is Song of Songs.

Consider Yahweh's introduction of himself to Moses:

"In this passage Yahweh appears to Moses: 'And God said to Moses, "I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El Shadday, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them.'" Like so many Biblical passages, the meaning here must have been obvious to its original readers, became obscure over time, and has been read and reread by generations of Jewish and Christian readers who have thought little of it. The original readers likely understood the explanation that Yahweh and El were the same, that in some sense the worship of Yahweh was more recent than the worship of El; they may have been aware that Yahweh and El were originally considered different deities. (As Smith notes several times, there is no evidence of a surviving cult of El; the Yahwists absorbed it completely, rather than competing with it as with the cult of Baal. Or perhaps, rather than saying the Yahwists absorbed the cult of El, we should be thinking of this as the cult of El having converted en masse to Yahwism very very early -- the cult of El in Israel in essence creating the cult of Yahweh in Israel, since Yahweh is not native to the region. I don't know.)

It's from El that we get a lot of the characteristics we associate with "God" -- the creator of the earth (which has been true of El since the second millennium BCE), the wise elderly bearded figure on a throne, a fatherly figure or literal father, the head of a divine council, an ageless figure, a wise figure, a figure who passes judgment. Soon, Yahweh -- originally the son of El and a vigorous young warrior god -- is described in Biblical and extracanonical (that is, apocryphal Jewish texts like Tobit, Esdras, Ben Sira) texts as an elderly bearded patriarch. By the time Daniel -- the last book of the Old Testament -- is written, Yahweh is "the ancient of days" and "the Most High," an epithet originally used for El.

The polytheistic tradition that surrounded El with a divine council and described him as a perfect king, reflecting ideals of earthly royal power into heavenly analogues, contributed imagery that wasn't stripped away as polytheism became monolatry, and the clear but never fully explained presence of other unnamed divine beings around El/Yahweh in the Bible probably contributed in part to the development of Jewish beliefs in angels. Because Jewish religion is concerned with practice rather than belief and angels are not an important part of that practice, we're on shakier ground when we talk about the early history of Jewish beliefs in angels and other non-deity supernatural beings -- but in the Cohen entry I talked about how the existing belief in angels became more sophisticated in the Second Temple era, so all I'm talking about here is how the belief in El's pre-Yahwist divine council could have turned into, or been retrofitted for, the belief in angels. (This is again where the fact that most of us, your humble blogger included*, read the Bible in translation obfuscates things: where many translations may say "angel" again and again throughout the Bible, a word meaning "messenger," "servant," or "watcher" is actually what is written in the earliest books, and only in later books are these early verses reinterpreted to refer to angels.)

*(Non-academics may not be aware, but a key difference between the Master's programs that I did and a PhD program is that a PhD program in the humanities always has a language requirement, specifically to show fluency in a language relevant to your field -- which in my case would have meant an ancient language like Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. Although I did a lot of foreign language study in college, it wasn't in Biblical languages, nor at that level of fluency.)

Yahweh and Baal

Baal is probably the foreign god most familiar to Bible readers. He comes up fairly often when prophets are railing at the Israelites to stop worshiping him, or condemning people who do so.

His name also appears in a number of Biblical names. Divine names are often used as part of peoples' names, if that's not clear, referred to as the theophoric element -- Micha-El, Dani-El, those stand out as common today; Yehoshuah -- anglicized as either Joshua or Jesus depending on the context -- is a name with several possible etymologies, one of which includes the theophoric element Yahweh.

As far as names with a Baal theophoric element, there are several in Chronicles (a series of two Biblical books retelling much of Biblical history up to the point of the return from Exile), for instance, that are changed to remove the theophoric element in 2 Samuel -- indicating a shift in attitudes toward Baal sometime in the second half of the monarchy period. Eshbaal (possibly "man of Baal") becomes Ishboshet ("man of shame"), while Meribbaal ("Baal is my master or advocate") becomes Mephiboshet (possibly "from the mouth of shame").

"Eshbaal and Meribaal belonged to the clan of Saul, in which Yahwistic names are also attested, such as Jonathan, the son of Saul. Why would a Yahwistic family give Baal names, if Baal were a god inimical to Yahweh? The answer is perhaps implicit in the name of another family member provided in the genealogy of Saul's clan in 1 Chronicles 8:30 and 9:36. In this verse, Baal is the name of Saul's uncle. The name is hypocoristic (i.e. lacking a divine name) and is usually interpreted as "(Yahweh is) lord." ... [There are] three possibilities. In Saul's family, either ba'al was a title for Yahweh, or Baal was acceptable in royal, Yahwistic circles, or both. The same range of possible interpretations underlies the names of Eshbaal and Meribbaal; both were possibly Yahwistic names, later understood as anti-Yahwistic in import. The later defensiveness over these names points to the fact that the language of Baal, though criticized during the monarchy, was used during the Judges period."

Baal and Yahweh, before his identification with El, were similar gods with overlapping characteristics -- young warrior gods who basically filled similar niches and were natural competitors. "The question why the cults of Baal and Yahweh were considered irreconcilable beginning in the ninth century needs to be addressed ... El was not a threat to the cult of Yahweh in ancient Israel. Phoenician Baal, on the contrary, represented a threat in the ninth century and onward, especially thanks to the efforts of Ahab and Jezebel to elevate him in the northern kingdom."

Josiah, one of the more important religious reformers, purged the Jerusalem Temple of Baal's cultic objects, but the prophet Jeremiah claims that Baal worship was not only permitted by the monarchy in the southern kingdom right up to its end, it was responsible for the fall of the northern kingdom and of Samaria. This is a pretty common claim for prophets, of course, and you hear the same thing from politicians and pundits these days -- everything's going to shit because Obama.

Yahweh absorbs a lot of Baal's good stuff too, though, like he did with El -- specifically his storm god portfolio, not only his rivalry with cosmic enemies like the sea (which is abstracted in but still critically important to the creation story) but his mighty stormy chariot, as in Habukkuk 3 here:

Was your wrath against the rivers, O Yahweh?
Was your anger against the rivers,
or your indignation against the sea,
when you rode upon your horses,
upon your chariot of victory?
You trampled the sea with your horses,
the surging of the mighty waters.


Yahweh and Asherah

Asherah is a mother goddess who appears in several Mesopotamian pantheons. In the Ugaritic pantheon, she is the consort of El. In addition to Asherah the goddess, there is the asherah, a cultic object of some kind -- not a female figurine like you might expect from the name (though there are also female figurines found all over Iron Age Israel that were likely fertility charms, and may have had cultic use), but a wooden pole that is possibly meant to have represented a stylized tree. As Smith discusses in the introduction to the second edition, there has been a flurry of activity attempting to establish that redactors have obfuscated the fact that "the Hebrew God" originally had a consort, but most of the books on this topic make claims that go way too far.

Asherah was El's consort. Yahwah became identified with El. However, there is no real support for the idea that Asherah came along with El for the ride, or that the cult of Asherah existed in Israel in the Yahwist period -- which is to say, in the overall period in which we refer to this culture, to these people, as "Israel." Books referring to her as "God's Wife" and arguing that she continued to occupy this role until a late date, or that folk religion continued to honor her even as she was removed from official records and Biblical texts, are thus far making arguments with little evidence to support them -- but they do sell.

That said, the ambiguity of the asherah cultic object has helped those scholars make that argument, because its nature and use is so unclear. It may have been used in the worship of asherah, it's just unusual that we would have so little other evidence of this cult. Or its use may have been a leftover from earlier religious practices, originally associated with Asherah and El, carried over as a result of Yahweh's identification with El.

Consider the yule log.

"Yule" is not Christmas, but a Germanic midwinter festival. The burning of the Yule log probably originates with this festival (although it is not attested until Christian times), but Yule as a whole and the Yule log specifically became associated with Christmas as the region and the peoples within it became Christianized.

Today, at Christmas time, you can watch the Yule log on television or Netflix, and not only does it have nothing to do with a midwinter festival, it really has nothing to do with whether you're Germanic or not. It became part of Anglo-American Christmas culture.

People tend to vilify the way the Christianization in the West has assimilated and redefined pre-Christian practices -- and in a great many cases it is appropriate to vilify the way specific peoples and regions were converted to Christianity -- but this yule log business is just a natural process. This is just the way cultures work. It isn't cultural appropriation -- these are the same people, changing their own culture over time on a generational scale -- and, absent specific political or authoritarian forces of coercion, it has no more moral content than shifts in fashion or pronunciation. It is simply what happens to cultures over time.

For a Martian terralogist to observe these Yule log practices and argue in favor of a living, vibrant Germanic Yule cult in the California suburbs, public acknowledgment and historical record of which is being suppressed by the authorities, would be ... off base.

The asherah may very well be a yule log. History is full of yule logs.

That said! While there is little evidence of Asherah worship, evidence is not entirely absent.

"There is one passage that may point to Asherah as an Israelite goddess at some point in early Israel. Genesis 49 reports Jacob's blessings to his twelve sons. Vawter, Freedman, and O'Connor argue that 24-26, part of the blessings to Joseph, represent a series of divine epithets, including two titles of Asherah... 'the blessings of Breasts-and-Womb.'"

There follows some discussion about which goddess or goddesses could be referred to here, with Asherah as by far the most likely choice, though she is not explicitly identified, and even the implicit identification comes down to "it is rather more likely to be Asherah than any other goddess, given the Ugaritic character of the other epithets and her relationship to El in the Ugaritic pantheon."

In the archaeological evidence, there has been recovered a cultic stand depicting a naked female with her hands on the heads of lions flanking her. There are reasonable theories suggesting its identification with either Asherah (one of the designs is a tree called an asherah, named for the goddess), Astarte (whose cult was active outside of Israel in the period and was associated with lions in Egypt), or Anat. Given that it also includes designs likely associated with either Baal or Yahweh as well as a solar disk, it was probably associated with polytheistic practices. If it has been dated correctly, it dates to the 10th century BCE.

Whether or not this tells us about Israelite religion, though, is still an open question, because of where the stand comes from -- Taanach, which according to the Biblical account did not become fully Israelite until after the rise of the Davidic dynasty, which is later than this dating. Finding evidence of worship of Asherah and/or other goddesses alongside Baal and/or Yahweh in a city established to include Canaanite worshipers doesn't even challenge the Biblical account, in other words, much less the traditional historical account of monolatry. We don't know who in the city used this stand.

Other notions

"The rise of writing as an authoritative medium also contributed to the development of Israelite monolatry in the period of the monarchy. [This] feature of Israelite religion generally distinguish[es] it from Israel's neighbors, as far as the evidence indicates."

There is no Ugaritic Bible. This is another thing Christians take for granted, the existence of the Jewish Scriptures, the breadth and depth of the Old Testament. Now, it took a long time for it to actually be collated into the Bible, longer than Christians tend to realize, but long before there was a "Bible," there was the Torah, along with the histories, books of prophecy, and other books that circulated before being collected with it. Scribes didn't become authorities until the Second Temple period, but writing was important before then, as evidenced by how much religious writing Israel produced, and how much it preserved. Much is made of the contradictions in the Bible, but in order to generate those contradictions you need to have a sufficient volume of material in the first place, and that in of itself is significant and set Israelite religion apart.

Rabbinical Judaism, of course, would become an even more literacy-driven religion.

So far we've talked about specific deities. But Israelite religion also encompassed, to some degree, worship of the solar deity, especially associated with the royal family; and the continuation of Canaanite ritual practices associated with the dead, such as the offering of drinks and cereal to corpses. This continued at least sporadically right through the Second Temple period, as did prayers to the dead for help.

There is also a section on child sacrifice (mlk or Moloch sacrifice) -- obviously a disturbing topic, and not my area of expertise, but various forms of child sacrifice were performed in parts of the ancient world especially in times of famine. It's like finding a religious rationale for infant exposure, the method of ridding oneself of the infant you can't care for because there isn't enough food to go around -- instead of just putting it on a hill and letting the elements kill it, you offer it to the gods as a sacrifice, hoping to end whatever it is that caused the situation preventing you from being able to care for it. (I'm making broad generalizations about a terrible topic here.)

Point being: the fact that there are specific Biblical denials that these sacrifices were made in Yahweh's name are a good indication that, in fact, they were part of early cultic practice for the Yahwists, though it's not clear when or to what extent. Stories like Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac (and the firstborn of Egypt being killed in one of the plagues) may of course be relevant here, though I don't need to point out that they would have a place in the culture even if it was only Israel's neighbors that were known to perform the sacrifices.