I would like to say that I LOVE the LORD and the LORD LOVES ME. There Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti made lavish offerings to the solar god Aten. As one reads the Hebrew Bible, the worship of Asherah and Baal is a recurring problem in the enforcement of monotheism and the Yahweh cult. Piecing Together God's Body, From Head to Toe He made this world and gave it to man to live in it. No attempt will be made to discuss the values and strengths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three great religions that hold God as their core. Indeed, Israelite Yahwisma became universal monotheism in the Babylonian Exile. God Ashera created the heavens and earth and ( he) said it was good. Please keep it up. Another common replacement is the name Elohim, which simply means God. Whats interesting is that these two replacement names are both used for other things as well, not just God, whereas Yahweh is reserved exclusively as a name for God. In a wilderness dream, the ancient patriarch Jacob envisioned a ladder connecting heaven and earth with angels climbing up and down. This analysis is an example of heads down it focusses on the written words. (Exodus 19:1-25) And we are told the prophet Elijah ascended bodily into the skies above while still alive. Article Images Copyright 2023 Getty Images unless otherwise indicated. I do believe what you are saying here is great. He is completely whole within himself, and he iseternal he has always existed, and he always will. It only took him six days with no hired help. In the ancient history of the Israelites, Yahweh was initially viewed as a tribal war god, a deity of liberation and conquestleading the Hebrew slaves out of captivity in Egypt and enabling them to conquer the land of Canaan. The Hebrew texts often refer to God by the Canaanite term Elohim (el-o-HEEM). 6:7 Yahweh says: "I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God"- a form of expression which implies that Yahweh first became the God of Israel in con- sequence of the revelation to Moses. Elohim is plural in Hebrew. That this article does not discuss any of this is a serious omission. Counting from Adam, Abraham would have been born in 1948 while Noah would have died in 2006 and Shem in 2058. [2] See Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), p. 512. Can you pray to both? As Jesus comes down to the earth, the saints (both living and dead) will rise to greet him. Jacob is one who strives with El. If one becomes aware of the many Hebrew names for God, one realizes the importance of the Canaanite tradition on the evolution of Hebrew religious ideas and the development of Yahweh. Let there be God: The origin of Yahweh worship - Big Think In 1514, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the Polish astronomer, formulated the first explicitly heliocentric or sun-centered model of the solar system. Hell has no counterpart dimension for a heaven, which is now located somewhere out there. The ancient language has begun to completely fall apart for most Christians. Why is Yahweh important in Judaism? - Short-Fact In these texts, the word El is used for God about 238 times while Elohim is used about 2,600 times. That does not mean it was adopted by everyone. I wouldnt go as far as to say these good things you are doing are pointless, they are clearly good things, but they do not satisfy the whole point of our existence. This article is pure speculation that is not borne out either by the Biblical text or archaeology. Historian Bart Ehrman You do find Jesus calling himself God in the Gospel of John, or the last Gospel. I will attempt to leave a longer post when I have more time. God reveals his name to Moses as "I am," from the Hebrew root .., "being.". In my view, that is only a tease, for both are rhetorical questions, with the clear answer that there is no one like Israels God, YHWH. The ancients had little idea of what these forces were so they sometimes imagined that these were cosmic beasts, or stars or animals or whatever. This teaching can be difficult to grasp because the Bible also says there is only one God: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" ( Deuteronomy 6:4 ). You wont be able to say, Here it is! or Its over there! For the Kingdom of God is already among you'" (Luke 17:20-21). Based on archeological discovery of figurines and inscriptions on storage jars in Israel, some scholars believe that at one time Asherah may have similarly been worshiped as the consort of Yahweh and was referred to as the Queen of Heaven. Also associated with El were lesser godsmost often his sonsknown by the title Baal (BAH-al) or Baal which means master or lord. The chief among these was Baal Hadad (BAH-al hah-DAHD), the son of El who was lord of the skythe god of thunder and lightningproviding rain and fertility to the land. Excellent exposition. Instead of the name Yahweh, P refers to God by the Canaanite term Elohim. Think about it. While herding sheep near the mountain, Moses encounters Yahweh in a burning bush. Anthropomorphic gods were the norm in the ancient world. In Exodus 15:11 and following, Moses sang, Who is like You among the gods, O YHWH? As a young man, he kills an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave and then flees to the land of Midian to avoid prosecution. From the time (around 1900 BCE) Abraham left Ur for Canaan, the nomadic Hebrew tribes are described as a monotheistic people. They come from two independent sources who were writing hundreds of years apart in ancient Israel. El, in the Torah is used to mean Power. Laban famously uses the word El to describe that he has the power to hurt Jacob. We know His name and His title. According to the Apostles Creed, after his death on a Friday, Jesus descended into Hades/Hell based on an obscure passage in the New Testaments First Letter of Peter. Extensive evidence of figurines that may have been prayed to in some fashion, and the struggles against idolatry reported in the Books of Judges, Samuel and Kings, likely testifies to the proposition that it took centuries for Jewish monotheism to take hold among Israelite society as a whole. 1 The Song of the Sea is the song that Moses and the Israelites, followed by Moses's sister Miriam, sang after the crossing of the Reed Sea. we love to create a GOD that suits our needs so we continue any way we want even if its harms others.(destructive). While many biblical scholars view monotheism as a relatively late development within Israelite religion, I believebased on evidence from early Israelite poetrythat the origins of biblical monotheism can be located early in Israels history, most likely by early in the first millennium B.C.E. Your email address will not be published. As the sacred, personal name of Israel's God, it was eventually spoken aloud only by priests worshiping in the Jerusalem temple. We worship a God of mystery, yet a God who is closer than our very breath. Their solution is that Yahweh hadn't "let" the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem; he had ordered them. Salem Media Group. If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One? The Universal God: How the God of Israel Became a God for All. He remains constant through it all. Jesus says things like, "Before Abraham was, I am." And, "I and the Father are one," and,. All of this is conjecture. In Hebrew the name of God is represented by the Tetragrammaton ("four letters") (Yod Heh Vav Heh), transliterated into Roman script Y H W H; yehvh, yeh-ho-vaw'; H3068 From H1961; (the) self-Existent or eternal; Jehovah, Jewish national name of God: - KJV: Jehovah, Compare H3050, H3069. Elohim or YHWH God? (2 Kings, chapter 2). After the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, the name was not pronounced. Thats the most high speaking to the Elohim or its council of children who are in turn gods themselves. .css-11kxzt3-Strong{font-weight:var(--font-weight-medium);}How did a desert war god originally worshiped by ancient Israels southern neighbors become the God worshiped today in churches, mosques and synagogues across the globe? How Yahweh Became God: The War God Thesis - Discourses on Minerva A balanced mind is the mind of Christ. I hear you. This translation, called the Septuagint (SEP-too-a-jint) was created by and for Hellenistic Jews who lived throughout the Greco-Roman world. I am not a better follower of Jesus after reading this post, I simply have been handed a tainted way of looking at the Scriptures. For many Christians, the language of the fourth-century creeds is no longer a literal reality but rather is accepted (or tolerated) as a poetic metaphor only. The rest of us need quite a lot to go right in order to keep existing! That simple fact can be a little offensive to our human nature that part of us that wants to be significant; to be needed. In early Mesopotamian thought, the earth was portrayed as a flat disk floating in a vast ocean. Ive been doing similar word studies in Hebrew and Greek recently and have drawn different conclusions. If MBS had not dismissed the traditional view of Deuteronomy so forcefully, it might have noticed that it is entirely realistic to believe that a Moses who lived and led as Deuteronomy describes struggled with these challenges. hebrew - Why is YHWH, the name of the God, replaced by a title, "the Yahweh, name for the God of the Israelites, representing the biblical pronunciation of "YHWH," the Hebrew name revealed to Moses in the book of Exodus. No it is best that you dont do it in His name when that is not why you are doing it, No, youre awesome. And when Moses made a covenant with Yahweh at Mt. The first two of the Ten Commandments recognize the ongoing problem of integrating other religious traditions into the developing Hebrew story. (John 6:31-51) Based on nothing more than this inference, this concept of Jesus descent from heaven was embodied in the fourth-century Nicene Creed. He was also known as the primary god in an assembly of gods that gathered on Mount Zaphon. In fact, he chooses to build his very kingdom among believers: "One day the Pharisees asked Jesus, 'When will the Kingdom of God come?' Jesus replied, 'The Kingdom of God cant be detected by visible signs. In Ps poem of creation, found in the first chapter of Genesis, we meet a God who operates on a cosmic scale and creates the universe with the spoken word. His theory is not exactly widely accepted, but has recently been gaining traction. The early monotheism of the Hebrew people did not claim that there was only one God; rather it claimed that their God was superior to all the others. A later writer, concerned with priestly duties and laws, was labeled P. He favored the term Elohim. Yahweh is a God of the Canaanite pantheon, one of many. I am not convinced by Professor Sterns examples for monotheism among the early Israelites. But one of these names stands alone, and that name is Yahweh. Verse (Click for Chapter) New International Version The LORD became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. It is interesting to note that one of the chief consorts of El was the Semitic mother goddess Asherah (sometimes called Elat, the feminine form of El). The Hebrew phrase translated I am who I am is ehyeh asher ehyeh (eh-YEH a-SHER eh-YEH). For instance, J tells us later in Genesis that Yahweh, disgusted with the direction his creation had taken, destroyed most earthly creatures in a massive genocidal and speciecidal flood. Yahweh represents the left brain. Over 2 million titles. They are a team ! The author talks in the first 6 verses aboutElohim(another name for God) and his relationship with the material world. Yahweh refers to "the self-existent, eternal God" the name God revealed to Moses: And God said to Moses, I AM WHO I AM. 2 developed a theory mighty das a hundred different versions of this theory. Later Hebrew history shows a natural division among the tribes, evidenced in the split into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah after the reign of Solomon. This episode explore the early history of Yahweh and the rise of Yahweh henotheism/monolatry and primitive monotheism. 978-0802877635 Day Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan 978-0826468307 Stavrakopoulou God: An Anatomy 978-1509867356 Lewis The Origin and Character of God 978-0197687543 Zevit The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches 978-0826463395, An interactive map showing sites, archeological findings and articles about the biblical period. God is not a servant. In other words, in American English my name is Jenniffer, in French its Guenivre . Abraham means Father of a great multitude.. And Moses knew that. Meditate. These peoples gradually merged into a single culture where their religious ideas and traditions were blended. I do have to point out that what you are stating here is not necessarily monotheistic. I wondered from the start if this was the mark of the beast . Many scholars view the language of the poem as archaic, and Jeffrey Tigay dates it to the 12th11th centuries B.C.E2 It reaches a climax in verse 39, which reads: See, now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me.3 I deal death and I give life, I wound and I heal, and there is no one who can deliver from my hand. Here we find the clearest statement of monotheism yet, denying the existence of other gods. How Yahweh Got Changed To Jehovah . You who read such garbage flee to the safety of scholars and pastors whose teaching upholds the absolute authority of Scripture. The name Yahweh (yah-WEH) occurs more than 6,800 times in the Old Testament. There is simply too much of him to know fully in one lifetime! Sheol is sometimes compared to Hades, the gloomy twilight afterlife of Greek mythology where people continued their existence as shadows., In the Hebrew Bible, we find several instances of travel between the realms of heaven above and earth below. He is the Jehovah/ YHWH /Yahweh described in Exodus 3. Judaisms path was from many gods down to two, Yahweh and Asherah, then the male priests of the former were able to marginalize the latter to enforce a male dominated society. Smith The Early History of God 978-0802839725 Smith The Origins of Biblical Monotheism 978-0195167689 Cross Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic 978-0674091764 Dever Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah 978-0884142188 Dever Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? Ancient civilizations believed that there were two primary bodies of water, one in the sky and one on the earth, and that something structurala dome or firmamentwas necessary to keep the water of the heavens (which fell as rain) separated from the waters of the earth (rivers, lakes and seas). Yahweh plants a garden, forms animals from the earth, and creates a woman from the mans rib. Let US make mankind in OUR image. The Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter, and the Norse Odin were all powerful male Gods who were pictured in human form. My whole life is my light. Ehyeh asher ehyeh is the name that the god of the burning bush gives to Moses. My first piece of evidence comes from Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea, which scholars generally agree is very early, perhaps dating to the very end of the second millennium B.C.E.1 The Song of the Sea is the song that Moses and the Israelites, followed by Mosess sister Miriam, sang after the crossing of the Reed Sea. He will always measure up. Experiencing Gods will and turning out to be more similar to Christ occurs through perpetual cooperation and correspondence with Him. Combine a one-year tablet and print subscription to BAR with membership in the BAS Library to start your journey into the ancient past today! In John the word was with God. That should be our daily goal to move one step closer to knowing the God who is. Elohim called the dry land Earth and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. There is no third option where we can have a slightly different version of him. In fact, monotheism is a relatively recent concept, even amongst the People of the Book. And the exodus never happened. Starting in the second chapter of Genesis, J writes that Yahweh shaped a male human being from the clay of the earth and breathed life into his nostrils. (Genesis 28:11-19) The story of Moses recounts that he climbed a tall mountain to approach God who had descended from the heavenly dwelling place in a cloud. In the Old Testament of the Bible, Yahweh is the one God of the Israelites. Well done. The Tetragrammaton (/ttrrmtn/) or Tetragram (from Greek , meaning " [consisting of] four letters") is the four-letter Hebrew word (transliterated as YHWH), the name of the national god of Israel. It is all speculation and sophistry. What Does It Mean to Be "Spiritually Blind"? Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. In late spring, 1349 B.C., the chariot of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten drew up in an open space before a dazzling white inscription on a cliff face overlooking the Nile. Is Jesus Yahweh? Is Jesus Jehovah? | GotQuestions.org A full understanding of the biblical narrative requires a link between the fissure in the integrated deity of the Garden (employing both names) which takes place in parallel with the expulsion of HaAdam and Eve from Eden. Distribution and use of this material are governed by So is everything Im doing pointless because I dont do it in gods name? As the Israelite culture became more settled over time and a national identity was formed, Yahweh took on additional rolesenvisioned as a lawgiver, ruler, and judge over the people. What are these beings made of? Yahweh took on the role of the high god, superior to competing gods within the land of Israel and to the gods of surrounding nations. Thus, ancient poetry describing God as Elohim = all the powers does not demonstrate a leaning toward polytheism. While youre alysis clearly is rigorous (congratulations), I feel that there are some alternative interpretations of the evidence given. Yahweh is a paradox, one we will never reach the end of when it comes to our understanding of him. On the eighth day he went back to work as there was trouble in Paradise. Moses never existed. Although the gospel of John does not actually say it, some interpreters of his writing suggest when John has Jesus refer to himself as the bread of life, he inferred that Jesus came down from heaven, as did manna in the desert to the early Hebrews. (Acts 1:6-12) At some point in the future, the church claims that Jesus will return by once again descending from the heavens. (Genesis, chapters 7 and 8). Your the only one that makes sense out of this lot. Then Moses said to God, If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name? what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, Say this to the people of Israel: I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, Say this to the people of Israel: The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.- Exodus 3:13-15.