The Lost Pantheon of Yahweh - Polytheistic Roots of the Abrahamic Religions

The Abrahamic religions are the most widespread faiths in the entire world, and although they have spent much of history fighting with one another for primacy on the world stage, each of them acknowledges that they all worship the same universal god. Whether one is a Muslim Tuareg in Mali, a Bahá'í in India, a Christian in Finland, or a Jew in Argentina, all worship one deity, who goes by many names and epithets. Yet what if we were to tell you that this one god, who today is worshipped by billions of people in every continent on earth, was once merely one of many deities in the polytheistic pantheon of the ancient Near East? For over a century, scholars have been studying how the ancient peoples of what is now Israel and Palestine came to worship a single god. Along the way, fascinating discoveries have been made around the polytheistic religions out of which God, or Yahweh, arose as the singular deity of Israel and Judah. This is the history we will explore today. 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It is commonly known that the first peoples to worship the God of Abraham as their chief and only deity were the Jewish peoples of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. However, to understand the rise of monotheism in ancient Israel, we need to understand the region and era from which it emerged, that being the Bronze Age Near East of the 13th century BCE. Over three millennia in the past, the area of southern Levant that bridged Egypt and the Near East was known as Canaan. This region is where the Jews and their religion, known as Judaism, would eventually emerge. The region was inhabited by a collection of populations who spoke ancient Semitic languages, ancestrally related to today's Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew. The people of these lands, the Canaanites, were an umbrella group of related ethnic groups, many of which, such as the Moabites and the Israelites, are recorded in the Hebrew Bible. The region of Canaan was fertile and an important crossroads for commerce. As such, it was constantly being contested over by great Bronze Age empires such as Egypt and the Hittites. This combination of trade and warfare with neighboring states brought about a high degree of ethnic cross-pollination, which had a profound impact on the culture and religion of the Canaanites. Much like other Semitic populations in the ancient world, the Canaanites were polytheistic and worshipped many deities. Their pantheon featured a divine assembly of mostly human presenting deities, with control over the elements. The most comprehensive piece of surviving evidence for this pantheon comes from the Ugaritic texts from the titular port city of Ugarit. Among other things, these texts record a collection of myths and epic poems about the gods that were worshipped in at least parts of Canaan. These deities were organized into a hierarchy of importance. At the head of this pantheon lay the supreme god, El, and his wife, Asherah. Other deities mentioned included Baal, a storm deity, who later became one of the chief gods of the seafaring Phoenician peoples, who founded the city of Carthage in later centuries. Other deities with elemental powers included Shahar and Shahim, who controlled the dawn and dusk, and Shapash, goddess of the sun. All of these deities participated in various epic stories that usually were connected to weather, death and the agricultural cycle, events that were deeply important to the populations of the time. We are unsure if the pantheon described in the Ugaritic texts was the same one that the rest of Canaan followed, as significant regional variations may have existed from city to city within the wider region. However, it cannot be disputed that the ancient Canaanites had no shortage of gods. Of the many deities in the region of Canaan, two are responsible for facilitating the rise of monotheism in the region amongst the people who would become the Jews. The first is the chief god, El, already mentioned in the Ugaritic texts. His name translated to The God, and he also went by the names Elyon, or Most High. El's origins have been lost to the mists of prehistory, but it appears that he rose out of northern Canaan and southern Phoenicia. By the 18th century BCE, he was likely the chief deity all across Canaan. It was El who presided over the divine assembly of all other deities, alongside his wife, the goddess Asherah. El was also credited as a creator deity, having brought forth all of the creatures that inhabit the earth. He was said to have many divine sons, including Mot, the god of death, and dwelled in a high mountain known as Bel. Some viewers may recognize that El is not only one of the names used for god in the Hebrew bible, but also the suffix for the angels that Given this, it is evident that the ancient Canaanite god El made up one of the key components for the development of the monotheistic deity of the ancient Israelites, and consequently, all other Abrahamic religions. The second and likely most important deity for the rise of monotheism is Yahweh. Like El, the origins of Yahweh within the Canaanite pantheon is unknown, although, like Bel, it appears as if he was a deity with connections to storms and the weather. Egyptian records from the 14th century mention a tribe of raiders known as the Shasu of Yahweh, who may have been a Canaanite people who worshipped Yahweh. However, their name may not have derived from the god they worshipped, but instead have been some sort of regional ethnonym. Unlike the more northerly El, Yahweh is postulated to have come out of the southern Levant, somewhere near the Sinai or modern day Jordan. During the Bronze Age, very few depictions of Yahweh existed, unlike El, who might have appeared in statuettes of an enthroned deity with a large hat. These statues appear throughout Canaan, but they are never inscribed, so we do not know for sure that El is the god they depict. It is possible that some bowl figurines which have been found in southern Canaan are depictions of Yahweh, but archaeologists have yet to reach a consensus on whether this is the case. It was not until the coming of the Iron Age, in the 9th century BCE, that Yahweh's name began appearing in Israelite inscriptions. By this time, Yahweh had spread his influence to the north, entering into the religions of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, near the modern city of Jerusalem. By the 9th century BCE, the region of Canaan was still a largely polytheistic land. But the rise of monotheism was on the horizon, and it is here we will begin our study on how the god of Abraham took form. However, it should be noted that the study of the origins of monotheism in the Near East is difficult, due to the lack of scholarly consensus on the matter and the paucity of archaeological evidence. Moreover, the Hebrew Bible, which is by far the most comprehensive text which chronicles the history of the ancient Levant, is very contradictory if one looks at it from a historical and not a theological perspective. This is because it was composed over many generations by people who lived centuries after the god of Abraham had replaced the ancient polytheistic faiths of the Hebrew people, and were attempting to reinterpret folk Having said all of that, it can be stated with confidence that by the 9th century BCE, the region of Canaan was home to various kingdoms such as Moab, Edom and the Jewish Kingdom of Israel. These kingdoms were still polytheistic and had similar pantheons, but each appears to have elevated a chief god above all the others. For instance, the Edomites had a chief deity named Quos, whom the scholars believe to have been the same deity as Yahweh, due to their shared storm attributes. In the north, the cult of Baal appears to have been growing more popular, a historical development reflected in the Hebrew Bible, which depicts Baal as an evil, demonic entity. Throughout the first half of the first millennium CE, Yahweh began increasing in importance in the Kingdom of Israel, but we are not sure how this occurred. The development of Yahweh's cult took elements of that of El, whose dominance had already been established in Canaan. The reasons for Yahweh's growing prevalence among Israelites and Judeans are unclear, but there are a few suggestions put forward by scholars. Some have suggested that the Israelites, wishing to centralize their state, took inspiration from the Egyptians, who often connected their kings to chief deities to legitimize their absolute control over the state. Others postulate that the Canaanites adopted the practice of elevating chief gods from the Assyrians, who had a similar practice. Despite this slow prevalence of Yahweh, the Israelites of the 9th to 7th century BCE were still polytheists. Remnants of statuettes and other forms of material culture from this era show that polytheism was still very much the norm, although Yahweh was undoubtedly on the rise and poised to eclipse the other gods of the Canaanite pantheon. By the 9th century BCE, the Kingdom of Israel had begun to split up due to dynastic and tribal conflicts. In the Hebrew Bible, this split is attributed to the refusal of two Jewish tribes to accept King Solomon's son, Rehoboam, as king. However, we are unsure of how historical this claim is. What we do know is that the Southern Kingdom of Judah had seceded from the Northern Kingdom of Israel, resulting in two distinct Jewish states. The 7th century BCE onwards marked the growing pains of monotheism in the form of what scholars call monolatry, a form of worship in which people acknowledged that other gods may exist, but chose to exalt only one. By this time, El had been fully assimilated into Yahweh and both had been assigned to a heavenly realm. The rest of the divine council had also begun to be assimilated into subservient beings or sons of El. For instance, a deity linked to Venus had become a predecessor to the Abrahamic Devil. At this stage, this Ha-Satan was part of the court of Yahweh and merely tested the faith of Jews as opposed to trying to cause them to turn away from God. Asherah had also become the wife of Yahweh by this time, a sign of the merging of the Northern El cults and the Southern Yahweh cults and their mythologies in the Israelite and Judaic imaginations. The cult of Baal was most likely still prominent in the north, compelling the followers of Yahweh to theologically counter it due to its political threat. Some scholars postulate that some of the storm elements of Yahweh that do not appear in the Bronze Age, as well as some motifs in the Hebrew Bible, were in fact taken from Baal. Examples of these include the iconic biblical flood myth or the presence of a large sea monster known as Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, while Baal is not as core as El or Yahweh in the development of monotheism, some of his characteristics did end up impacting the Abrahamic God. An important milestone in the Hosea, who reigned from 640 to 609 BCE. During his reign, Hosea and a collection of ritual specialists attempted to centralize the Yahweh cult and give him a national character as the chief deity of the Kingdom of Judah. These priestly elites, known as the Deuteronomists, organized a centralized cult, rejecting other deities or regional centers for Yahweh himself, in favor of one temple, also known as the First Temple, in the holy city of Jerusalem. This was a national project of royal unification and had brought the beginnings of monolatry in Judah. This approach continued until 597 BCE, when the city of Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonian Empire and the elites of the Kingdom of Judah were carried off into exile in Babylon, a development which would alter Israelite religion forever. The Babylonian exile brought with it major shifts in the religious landscape of the Land of Israel, due to the cultural mixing that occurred between Babylonians, Persians and Jews. This period of exile brought about great change for the cult of Yahweh, with different factions of the Israelite diaspora taking on different approaches to adapting their increasingly monotheistic religion to their new circumstances. For instance, many Israelite mercenaries went to Egypt, where they set up the Temple of Elephantine Island. There, Yahweh was worshipped alongside other deities, like his daughter named Anat. This discovery suggests that many Israelites during this period did not necessarily follow the prescriptions of a royal agenda, pushing Yahweh as a supreme deity. The exiles in Babylon, however, took a different approach to monolatry. Many of these elites claimed that Yahweh had allowed the conquest of Judah to happen because the Jewish people lacked a strong faith in one god. One element of Babylonian religion that appealed to Jews was the idea of universal royal gods, deities who were linked to kings and were cosmologically supreme over other supernatural beings. As a result, Yahwehism probably became more entrenched amongst the communities in Babylon, both cementing their own identity against Babylon, while paradoxically having their religion shaped by influence from their captors. It is here that perhaps the greatest innovator in the history of early Judaism appears in the form of the prophet Isaiah, a Babylonian exile. Isaiah was the first prophet who pushed a clearly monotheistic agenda. His approach was to utilize the patriotic, anti-Babylonian sentiment among these exile communities to promote the idea that Yahweh was the only deity in existence. Studies of the texts of Isaiah have revealed that the prophet explicitly states that other deities and their idols are not historical or metaphysical beings, but merely exist as deviations from the true face of Yahweh. The result was the first explicitly monotheistic religious text in the history of the Israelites. It is likely that Isaiah's ideas spread rapidly amongst the Israelite exiles in Babylon, whose hopes of returning home would soon be realized through the most unlikely statesman in Abrahamic history. In 539 BCE, the coming of the Persian Empire and Osiris the Great would bring one more religious shift amongst the Israelites. After conquering Babylon, Osiris permitted the Israelites to return to their homeland. The Israelites were forever grateful to the Persian Shah and Shah, calling him a Messiah in the Hebrew Bible. It is at this point that we can begin to speak of Judaism as a religion, because it was around the time of Persian rule in the Levant that the monotheist version of Yahweh became dominant in Jewish ideological circles. In 518 BCE, the Second Temple was constructed in Jerusalem and followed this cult based on a strong cadre of priests. As the new political order settled down, this priestly class became the epicenter of major pilgrimage festivals, such as the festival of Passover. By this time, Yahweh was the sole god of the Hebrews. Forged from the historical dialectic between El, Yahweh, the elements of Baal absorbed in the Kingdom of Judah, the various Israelite kingdoms and the various empires surrounding them. By this time, the divine assembly of polytheistic Canaanite gods had evolved into Yahweh's army of angels, and the devil became an expelled adversary as opposed to a court attorney in the throne of God. These theological shifts may stem from the contact of the Jews and the Persians, the latter of whom practiced the faith of Zoroastrianism. The religion of Zoroastrianism today focuses on one single god, Ahura Mazda, and his enemy, the god Ahriman. It is evident that Zoroastrianism impacted Judaism in the 6th century BCE, but we are unsure to what extent. One definite impact that we can trace to Zoroastrianism is the idea of the Messiah, based on the Seyochant figure in Zoroastrian texts, who is meant to defeat evil in the name of Ahura Mazda. The various Jewish prophets of the post- exile period fall in this strand, and would set the foundations of future faiths like Christianity and Islam. By the 4th century BCE, Yahweh was the sole god of the Hebrews, having fully dislodged all other gods. Before long, his worship would spread far beyond the land of Israel and the Levant. Both the Jews and their monotheistic religion were influenced by Hellenistic cultures with the coming of Alexander the Great. Hellenic ideas like those of Plato and his world of transcendent forms impacted Jewish religion, and eventually birthed a new strand of Judaism that followed a messianic figure named Jesus Christ. Within the natal Christian faith, Yahweh's role shifted from a single god who had a covenant with the Jews, to one who had sent his son to be the Messiah for the whole of humanity. This version of God became a trinity of three persons united as one, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. By the 4th century CE, Christianity became favoured by the Roman Empire and consequently spread all over the Mediterranean. To the south, Jewish and Christian sects influenced the Semitic Arabians to produce the religion of Islam in the 7th century CE. This faith saw God through the idea of Oneness, or Tawheed, and emphasised prophets and the law to build one singular empire. Islam spread all over the Middle East and North Africa, bringing this interpretation of God to millions more throughout the world. These three religions, as well as smaller sects like the 19th century Baha'i faith, all stemmed from the 5th century BCE development that established Yahweh as the single existing God. Today, the different Abrahamic faiths all see Yahweh differently, but all agree that he is the only deity in existence. Through a truly fascinating historical process, Yahweh, or El, came to be the single God worshipped by the ancient Jews. As a result of the merging of Yahweh the Storm God with El the Patriarch God, and taking some elements from Baal, the Abrahamic God ended up coming out on top. This process took royal centralisation, influences from external civilisations like Babylon and Persia, and many other social factors. From there, various other religions developed worshipping him, from Christianity, to Islam, to the Baha'i faith, to Rastafarianism. By the beginning of the Common Era, the Abrahamic God had left behind his previous Canaanite pantheon and propelled himself onto the global stage, becoming worshipped in all four corners of the world. This incredible historical event has changed our world in profound ways, ways easily visible when one enters a synagogue, a church, or a mosque. More videos on the history of world religion are on the way, so make sure you're subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see them. Please consider liking, subscribing, commenting and sharing, it helps immensely. Our Patrons and YouTube members can watch more than 200 exclusive videos. Join their ranks via the link in the description, or by pressing the join button under the video. To watch these weekly videos, learn about our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our private Discord, and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we'll catch you on the next one.