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.” The gilded statue of El himself, from Megiddo, 1400-1200 BCE. “The first tutelary deity they were worshipping was El, otherwise their name would have been Israyahu.” In other words, the name 'Israel' is probably older than the veneration of Yhwh by this group called Israel, Römer says. 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.

“Israel” is a theophoric name going back at least 3200 years, which includes and invokes the name of a protective deity. The first clue that the ancient Israelites worshipped gods other than the deity known as Yhwh lies in their very name. 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.” Still, he notes, “you can have memories of a distant past, sometimes in a very confusing way or in a very oriented way. They reflect the ideas, the ideologies of their authors and of course of the historical context in which they were written,” Römer explains. “Biblical texts are not direct historical sources. However, the redactors of the Bible were evidently working off older traditions, Römer says. 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. When exactly the Jewish holy text reached its final form is unknown. The main source for investigating the history of God is, of course, the Bible itself. The stained glass window in Winchester Cathedral, showing the tetragrammaton - the mysterious name of God, transliterated as YHWH Oddworldly, Wikimedia Commons

Römer, who held a series of conferences at Tel Aviv University last month, spoke to Haaretz about the subject.

In fact, monotheism is a relatively recent concept, even amongst the People of the Book.ĭecades of research into the birth and evolution of the Yhwh cult are summarized in “ The Invention of God,” a recent book by Thomas Römer, a world-renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne. Modern biblical scholarship and archaeological discoveries in and around Israel show that the ancient Israelites did not always believe in a single, universal god. The existence of a proper name for God is the first indication that the history of Yhwh and his worship by the Jews is a lot more complicated than many realize.

History of yhwh