Loomis

Joel is repeating Mark S. Smith.

Mark S. Smith rawks.

Joel has a cute name.

Compare ...

It looks to me like Smith is one of those ‘academics’ that richard2 is referring to in his opening post.

Considered the same god by who? The authors?

Then why didn’t they just call him Yahweh?

The subject of Friedman’s book is Who Wrote the Bible. Not What did the Bible come to mean over time.

I think that if the authors who wrote about El thought that they were talking about Yahweh that they would have said “Yahweh� just like the authors who wrote about Yahweh did.

I think that if the guys who inserted the word “Yahweh� all over the place thought that the authors who wrote about El were talking about Yahweh, that they wouldn’t have bothered to insert the word Yahweh because it wouldn’t have been necessary. :grin:

In other words, if El was considered the same god as Yahweh then there would be no need for Yahwists to change things.

But they did.

That's just great. You are echoing Friedman.

How do you intend to prove this?

How will you show that every author who wrote about El knew who Yahweh was?

How will you show that every author who wrote about El thought that “only Yahweh is to be worshipped?�

Go tell that to the guy who wrote the Oracles of Balaam. :grin:

Go tell that to the guy who named Israel “Israel.�

rob117

They did- after Exodus 3 (in E) and Exodus 6 (in P).

Sometimes the names are used interchangably:

It's true that El and Yahweh were originally different gods- El was the head of the Canaanite pantheon and Yahweh was apparently an obscure local deity worshipped by some of the Shasu tribes of Transjordan. But only a few very early poems have preserved this difference; by and large the Bible began to be written only after the syncretism had been completed.

Loomis

Hey rob117,

Why do you suppose Mark S. Smith wants us to think “The original god of Israel was El?�

Why would he say such a crazy thing?

Do you think he needs to visit Joel’s web site? :grin:

Derec

Fiction writers often add a lot of details to make the story seem more real. Details in no way show that the author was an eyewitness.
And never mind that the numbers in the example he uses (12 and 70) are obviously symbolical.

mens_sana

Perhaps because he is certain that the inhabitants of Canaan were Canaanites — who had inherited that belief from Ugaritic ancestors. Yah is thought to have come from the South, from Midian (located in the NW part of the Arabian peninsula along the Gulf of Elath, per Frank Moore Cross, and The Archaeological Ency of the Holy Land ed. by Avraham Negev), a latecomer as far as Canaanite culture was concerned.

Loomis

Of course. Bingo. I am familiar with all that.

No problem. My question was rhetorical.

But I’m still having trouble understanding why Friedman wants his readers to think “The name of God in the Bible is Yahweh.�

It’s not exactly wrong – but it’s sort of ignorant. Don’t cha think?

I really wonder how many of the authors who wrote the original stories had ever heard of the word ‘Yahweh.’ It looks to me like many of them were writing about El or Baal (or arguably “one of the baals�).

Like you say – Yah / Yahweh was a latecomer. In many cases it looks like he is just a gloss on older stories.

Do you understand me now?

rob117

Yes, but by the 8th century, and in most places in Israel and Judah even before that, it is clear that El and Yahweh were already considered the same god. The Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions, from about 800 BC, refer to Yahweh's consort as Asherah- who was El's consort in the Canaanite world. The Mesha inscription from the 9th century hints that Yahweh was Israel's national god in the same way that Chemosh was Moab's national god- in Israel's transjordanian territories, according to the inscription, there were shrines to Yahweh, the vessels of which Mesha then carried off and gave as booty to Chemosh. It is notable that the Moabites, who were of the same Canaanite/Shasu origin as the Israelites, do not seem to have worshipped El as a separate deity by the time of Mesha, suggesting that he had been absorbed by Chemosh in Moab, just like he had been absorbed by Yahweh in Israel and Judah.

By the time the early biblical texts were written, the absorption of El into the deity of Yahweh had already been completed. The biblical stories that refer to Yahweh doing things that it sounds like El or Baal would do reflect the authors' experience with this syncretism, as it is highly unlikely that in their time El and Yahweh were still considered separate beings. Baal and Yahweh were, but the biblical authors were part of the "Yahweh-alone" movement, so it made sense to them to have Yahweh take on Baal's characteristics in order to supplant him.

FatherMithras

When you post links to answersingenesis, and "scholars" making claims utterly contrary to know history with no support, we don't have to do more then show you did that.

mens_sana

I would leave room for the possibility that there was still some distinction between the two on the popular level. After all, this is Israel's polytheistic period. And, of course, some of that syncretism comes from the "literary school" of the Deuteronomistic Historian. However, this amalgamation goes a long way toward explaining how elohim was transformed from plural to singular, and why El and Yahweh don't seem at odds in the texts.

John Kesler

This is a good point, because what the Bible represents as normative is the "official" Israelite religion. Some Israelites may have continued to worship El after he was conflated with Yahweh, and Exodus 6:2-3 is the bridge that says that El and Yahweh were the same deity all along.

Such a bridge was needed because of passages like the following which show that El was the god of the patriarchs: