Yahweh Among the Gods: El, Asherah, Baal and Early Israel

Yahweh’s early history in one paragraph

Yahweh, the god of Israel and Judah, first appears in history as one god among many in the southern Levant. Some of the oldest poems in the Bible have him march out of the deserts of the south, and he was probably brought into the highlands by people with roots there. In Israel he merged with El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, took over El’s council of lesser gods and many of the storm god Baal’s images, and in some places was worshipped alongside the goddess Asherah. Kings of Israel and Judah built temples to him in more than one place, and their subjects named their children after him. The worship of Yahweh alone, and later the belief that no other god exists, came after this period (§3, §4). Majority

None of this means early Israelite religion was “pagan” in the sense the later Bible condemns, nor that the biblical account is simply wrong. It means that the religion described in the inscriptions and in the oldest layers of the Bible was more varied than the final, edited text suggests. Most of what this chapter reports comes from the biblical text read critically, from inscriptions found since the 1860s, and from the texts of ancient Ugarit, which show the Canaanite religion from which Israel’s grew. Consensus

Timeline of Yahweh’s early history and its evidence

Dates for the biblical poems are disputed and are given as the range most often proposed. Every dated inscription below was found by archaeologists or bought on the antiquities market and later traced to a site.

Where Yahweh came from: the southern hymns

The god of Israel does not start in Israel, according to several poems that most scholars consider among the oldest material in the Bible. In each of them Yahweh comes from somewhere, as a warrior on the march, and that somewhere lies to the south and southeast of Judah. Majority

• Judges 5:4–5, the Song of Deborah: “Yahweh, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the field of Edom”.^[5]
• Deuteronomy 33:2, the Blessing of Moses: “Yahweh came from Sinai, and dawned from Seir upon them; he shone forth from Mount Paran”.^[19]
• Habakkuk 3:3: “God comes from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran”.^[20]
• Psalm 68:8–9 (verses 7–8 in English Bibles) repeats the Song of Deborah’s image of the earth quaking before “the One of Sinai”.^[21]

Seir and Edom are the highlands east of the Arabah valley, in today’s southern Jordan; Teman (“the south”) is a region of Edom; Paran is the wilderness of northern Sinai and the Negev. Mount Sinai’s location is unknown, but these poems pair it with Seir and Paran, not with the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula where later Christian tradition placed it. Majority

The poems are not the only evidence. Around 800 BCE travellers at the desert way-station of Kuntillet ʿAjrud wrote blessings “by Yahweh of Teman”, using the same southern place name as Habakkuk.^[13] And the Bible itself links Moses to the south: he marries the daughter of a “priest of Midian” (Exodus 2:16–21), and in Exodus 18 that priest, Jethro, blesses Yahweh, offers sacrifice and advises Moses on how to organise the people. The Kenites, a clan associated with Midian, appear in Judges as friends of Israel.^[22] Consensus on what the texts say.

The Midianite–Kenite hypothesis. Since the nineteenth century, many scholars have combined these clues into a theory: Yahweh was first worshipped by pastoral groups of the south, such as Midianites or Kenites, and reached Israel through them, perhaps with a group that later remembered an escape from Egypt (§1).^[23]​^[24] It remains the most widely held explanation, but it has always had critics, and the debate is set out at the end of this chapter. Contested

The Shasu of Yhw

The oldest possible trace of the name is Egyptian. A temple built by Amenhotep III at Soleb in Nubia, c. 1390–1350 BCE, has a list of conquered peoples. Among the entries for the Shasu, the Egyptians’ name for the nomadic herders of the Levant, is one written tꜣ šꜣsw yhwꜣ, “the land of the Shasu, Yhw”. A copy appears again in a list of Ramesses II at Amara West.^[1]​^[25]

Egyptian writing does not record vowels, and Yhw in these lists is a place or group name. Whether it is connected with the god Yahweh is not known. Many scholars think it is: the spelling fits, and the other Shasu lands mentioned with it include Seir.^[26]​^[27] Others think the link is a coincidence of sound, or that a place name and a god’s name could share a root without one producing the other. Contested

What the name means

The Bible explains the name once, when Moses asks who is sending him: “I will be what I will be” (ʾehyeh ʾăšer ʾehyeh, Exodus 3:14), followed by the name YHWH.^[28] This is a play on the Hebrew verb “to be”, and many scholars think it is a later theological explanation rather than the original meaning. Frank Moore Cross proposed that the name began as part of a title of El, “he who creates (the hosts)”; others connect it with roots meaning “to blow” or “to fall”, which would suit a storm god.^[29]​^[30] None of these proposals has won general agreement. Contested

The pronunciation “Yahweh” is a scholarly reconstruction from Greek transcriptions such as Iaoue and from short forms like Yah and -yahu in personal names. In Jewish practice the name is not pronounced; readers say Adonai, “my Lord”, and Bibles translate it “the LORD”. This series uses “Yahweh” for the god of Iron Age Israel and Judah, as historians do, without any disrespect to that practice (§0).^[30] Consensus

El, the god in Israel’s name

Israel’s own name contains a god, and it is not Yahweh. Yiśrāʾēl ends in -ʾēl, “El”, the name of the high god of the Canaanite world. Names of that pattern (Ishmael, Bethel, Penuel) are common in the stories of the patriarchs, which never use names built on Yahweh. Consensus

El at Ugarit. The clay tablets of Ugarit, a port city on the Syrian coast destroyed around 1185 BCE and excavated from 1929, describe El as the aged, wise father of the gods, “Bull El”, “father of humanity” and “creator of creatures”. He presides over the assembly of the gods from his tent on a mountain at the source of the rivers. His consort is Athirat, the Ugaritic form of Asherah, and the gods are “the seventy sons of Athirat”.^[2]​^[31] Consensus

El in the Bible. Much of El’s character reappears in the God of the Bible, under El’s own names and titles:

• In Genesis 33:20 Jacob builds an altar and calls it “El, the god of Israel”.^[32]
• God appears to the patriarchs as El Shaddai, El Elyon, El Olam and El Bethel. Melchizedek, king of Salem, blesses Abram by “El Elyon, creator of heaven and earth”, a title also known from Phoenician inscriptions.^[33]
• The Priestly writer says so outright: God tells Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them.”^[34]
• El’s traits pass to Yahweh: the white-haired “Ancient of Days” of Daniel 7, the king enthroned among his council, the dwelling in a tent.^[35]

Convergence. Mark S. Smith’s influential account explains this as convergence: in early Israel, Yahweh, the warrior god of a particular people, and El, the high god of the wider Canaanite world, were separate figures who merged during the early first millennium BCE. Yahweh took El’s name as a common noun for “god”, El’s titles and El’s place at the head of the council. Later Israel then differentiated itself from Canaan by rejecting features it now saw as foreign, chiefly Baal and Asherah.^[36]​^[35] Majority

Some scholars think Yahweh was never distinct from El but began as one of El’s titles (Cross); others think the merger happened much earlier than the monarchy.^[29] All agree that by the time the biblical texts were written, Yahweh had taken El’s place. Majority

The sons of God and the divine council

The clearest trace of El’s council is a single verse whose text was changed in transmission. Deuteronomy 32:8–9, in the standard Hebrew (Masoretic) text, says the Most High divided the nations “according to the number of the sons of Israel”. A Hebrew manuscript from Qumran, 4QDeut^j, and the Greek Septuagint read instead “according to the number of the sons of God”. The Qumran reading is older than any surviving Masoretic manuscript, and most textual critics accept it as the earlier text.^[37]​^[38] Majority

With that reading, the passage describes the Most High (Elyon) dividing the world among the gods, each nation receiving its own divine patron, and Yahweh receiving Israel. Whether Elyon and Yahweh are two figures here, or the same god described in two roles, is debated, but the verse shows that an assembly of gods was taken for granted.^[35]​^[27] Contested

Psalm 82 shows the same council in session: “God stands in the assembly of El; in the midst of the gods he gives judgment.” The God of Israel accuses the other gods of failing to defend the weak, and sentences them: “I said, you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless you shall die like men.”^[39] Many scholars read the psalm as a dramatic scene of the old council being dissolved: the gods of the nations lose their immortality, and Israel’s god inherits all the nations. Majority

Later biblical writers kept the council but demoted its members. They become “the host of heaven” (1 Kings 22:19), “the sons of God” who present themselves before Yahweh (Job 1:6) and, by the time of the book of Daniel in the second century BCE, angels with names (§6).^[40]​^[41]

Baal: Yahweh’s rival and model

Baal (“lord”) was the title of Hadad, the storm god of Syria and Canaan, who brings the rain. At Ugarit he defeats Yamm, the sea, is given a palace as king of the gods, and fights Mot, death, to a standstill.^[42]​^[2]​^[43] In the Bible he is Yahweh’s great rival: Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18, and Jehu massacres Baal’s worshippers in 2 Kings 10.^[44] Consensus on the texts.

Yet the Bible also describes Yahweh in Baal’s terms. Yahweh “rides on the clouds”, thunders over the waters, defeats the sea monsters Leviathan and Rahab, and is enthroned as king over the flood. Psalm 29, in which “the voice of Yahweh” thunders, breaks cedars and makes the wilderness shake, is so close to Canaanite storm-god poetry that many scholars think it was adapted from a hymn to Baal.^[45]​^[29] Majority

Baal was also a popular element in Israelite names. Saul named a son Ishbaal and Jonathan named a son Meribaal; later scribes changed both names to “-bosheth”, “shame”, in the books of Samuel. A jar inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa, c. 1000 BCE, bears the name ʾIšbaʿal.^[46] The Samaria ostraca of the early eighth century record names built on Baal alongside those built on Yahweh, roughly seven to eleven.^[14] And Hosea, in the same century, looks forward to a day when Israel will call Yahweh “my husband” and no longer “my baal”, suggesting that some Israelites used “baal” as a title of Yahweh himself.^[47] Majority

The struggle between the two gods was real, but it was not between a native Israelite god and a foreign intruder. Both were at home in the land, and for some Israelites “Baal” may have been another name for Yahweh. The prophetic campaign against Baal was part of the process by which Israel defined Yahweh against his Canaanite background (§3).^[36] Majority

Did God have a wife? Asherah

Asherah was the consort of El at Ugarit and the mother of the gods.^[2] In the Bible the word asherah refers both to a goddess and to a wooden cult object, a pole or stylised tree set up beside an altar. The Bible condemns both, which shows that both existed in the worship of Yahweh:

• “You shall not plant any tree as an asherah beside the altar of Yahweh your God” (Deuteronomy 16:21). A law forbidding the practice implies that it was practised.^[48]
• Queen Maacah makes “an abominable image for Asherah” (1 Kings 15:13), and King Manasseh sets “the carved image of Asherah” in the Temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 21:7).^[49]​^[50]
• During Josiah’s reform of 622 BCE, the king removes from the Temple “all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah and for all the host of heaven”, burns the asherah from the Temple, and destroys the houses where “women wove coverings for Asherah” (2 Kings 23:4–7).^[51]

So, by the Bible’s own account, a symbol of Asherah stood in Yahweh’s Temple in Jerusalem for long periods before the reform. Majority

The inscriptions. In 1975–76 the Israeli archaeologist Ze’ev Meshel excavated a remote way-station at Kuntillet ʿAjrud in northeastern Sinai, on the desert route between Gaza and the Gulf of Aqaba. Radiocarbon dating puts its occupation around 800 BCE. On two large storage jars, travellers had written blessings in ink: “I have blessed you by Yahweh of Samaria and by his asherah” and “by Yahweh of Teman and by his asherah”.^[12]​^[13]​^[52] A burial inscription from Khirbet el-Qom, west of Hebron, found in 1967 and dated to the second half of the eighth century BCE, reads in part: “Blessed is Uriyahu by Yahweh; from his enemies, by his asherah, he has saved him.”^[17]​^[53] Consensus on the texts.

What “his asherah” meant is the debate. The issue is grammatical: in Hebrew a pronoun suffix such as “his” is not normally attached to a personal name, so “his Asherah” as “Yahweh’s wife Asherah” is irregular. Some scholars therefore read it as Yahweh’s cult object, the sacred pole or tree that stood beside his altar and represented the goddess or her blessing.^[54]​^[55] Others, notably William Dever, argue that the distinction would not have mattered to the people who wrote these blessings, and that Asherah was worshipped as Yahweh’s consort in popular religion.^[53] Ziony Zevit proposed reading the name as Asherata, with an archaic ending, which would remove the grammatical problem.^[56] Contested

On either reading, Asherah, or a symbol bearing her name, was paired with Yahweh in blessings by people who invoked Yahweh as their god. That is not monotheism, and it is not the religion of Deuteronomy. Majority

The drawing. Beneath the Samaria blessing on jar A, partly overlapped by it, are two grotesque standing figures and a seated lyre player. From the late 1970s, beginning with Mordechai Gilula, some scholars proposed that they showed Yahweh and Asherah.^[57] Most now follow Pirhiya Beck in identifying the standing figures as the Egyptian household god Bes, a popular protective figure, and doubt that the drawing and the inscription were made together.^[58]​^[59]​^[52] Majority

The pillar figurines

The most common religious objects in eighth- to early-sixth-century Judah are small clay figurines of a woman with a pillar-shaped body, supporting her breasts with her hands. They have been found in hundreds, in houses and tombs across Judah and especially in and around Jerusalem; Raz Kletter’s 1996 catalogue listed more than 800.^[18]​^[60] Consensus

Kletter and others identified them with Asherah, as images of the goddess in household worship. In a 2014 study, Erin Darby argued that they were used in household rituals of protection and healing and need not represent any named goddess.^[60]​^[61] Either way, they show that ordinary Judahites used female images in religious practice at the same time as the prophets were writing. Contested on what they represent.

Yahweh’s temples: more than one

The Bible’s ideal is a single temple in Jerusalem. That ideal was a demand of Deuteronomy and the reform of Josiah in the late seventh century BCE (§3). Before that, archaeology and the Bible’s own stories show Yahweh being worshipped at many sanctuaries. Consensus

• Tel Moẓa, about 7 km northwest of Jerusalem: a monumental temple of the late tenth or early ninth century BCE, with an altar, a pit of ash and animal bones, and clay figurines of humans and animals. It shows a temple operating near Jerusalem, in the heart of Judah, while the Temple in Jerusalem stood.^[7]​^[62] Majority
• Arad, in the northeastern Negev: inside a royal Judahite fortress, a small shrine with a courtyard altar of earth and unhewn stones, and an inner niche with one or two standing stones (maṣṣēbôt) and two limestone altars on its steps. A letter from the fortress refers to “the house of Yahweh”.^[15]​^[63] In 2020 residue analysis found frankincense on the larger altar and cannabis on the smaller one; the shrine was in use c. 760–715 BCE.^[16] Majority
• Bethel and Dan, in the northern kingdom: according to 1 Kings 12, Jeroboam I set up golden calves there and declared, “Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” The calves were probably pedestals or symbols of Yahweh’s presence, not rival gods; the bull was El’s animal. The text is written by Judahite opponents who condemned them.^[64] Majority
• The Bull Site, an open-air hilltop shrine of the twelfth century BCE in the northern Samarian hills, produced a bronze figurine of a bull about 18 cm long.^[4]​^[65] Who was worshipped there is not known. Majority

At Arad, the shrine went out of use and was carefully buried, its altars laid on their sides. The excavators connected this with the reform of Hezekiah c. 700 BCE that 2 Kings 18:4 describes. Others date the change differently or doubt that any reform reached the fortress.^[66]​^[16] Contested

The evidence ledger for early Yahweh worship

The personal names are the strongest counterweight to the picture of a crowded pantheon. Jeffrey Tigay’s study of Hebrew inscriptions and seals found that names built on Yahweh outnumber names built on any other god by a very wide margin.^[67] Whatever other gods Israelites honoured, Yahweh was the one they named their children after. Majority

Primary sources

1. Yahweh marches from the south: Judges 5:4–5

The Song of Deborah celebrates a victory of several Israelite tribes over a Canaanite coalition. Its archaic Hebrew has led many scholars to date it among the oldest passages in the Bible, perhaps the twelfth or eleventh century BCE; others place it in the monarchy or later.^[5]​^[29]​^[70]

Hebrew: YHWH bĕṣēʾtĕkā miśśēʿîr, bĕṣaʿdĕkā miśśĕdēh ʾĕdôm, ʾereṣ rāʿāšâ, gam-šāmayim nāṭāpû, gam-ʿābîm nāṭĕpû māyim. hārîm nāzĕlû mippĕnê YHWH zeh sînay, mippĕnê YHWH ʾĕlōhê yiśrāʾēl.

“Yahweh, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the field of Edom, the earth trembled, the heavens poured, the clouds poured water. The mountains quaked before Yahweh, the One of Sinai, before Yahweh, the god of Israel.”

What it proves. In one of the oldest Israelite poems, Yahweh is a storm god who comes to his people’s aid from Edom, outside the land. Zeh sînay, “the One of Sinai”, is an old title of the kind used for gods of particular places. The poem names the tribes who fought and shames those who did not: Yahweh is the god of a tribal alliance, not yet of a kingdom. Majority

2. “Dawned from Seir”: Deuteronomy 33:2 and Habakkuk 3:3

Deuteronomy 33:2: YHWH missînay bāʾ, wĕzāraḥ miśśēʿîr lāmô, hôpîaʿ mēhar pāʾrān.

“Yahweh came from Sinai, and dawned from Seir upon them; he shone forth from Mount Paran.”^[19]

Habakkuk 3:3: ʾĕlôah mittêmān yābôʾ, wĕqādôš mēhar-pāʾrān.

“God comes from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran.”^[20]

What it proves. Two more poems, independent in wording, set Yahweh’s home in the same southern region: Sinai, Seir, Paran, Teman. Habakkuk’s poem is attached to a late-seventh-century prophet but may use older material. The repeated geography, and the inscriptions naming “Yahweh of Teman” c. 800 BCE, are why most scholars think the tradition of a southern Yahweh is old. Majority Henrik Pfeiffer has argued that all these poems are late and literary; see the debate below.^[70]

3. The Shasu of Yhw: Soleb, c. 1390–1350 BCE

In the temple of Amenhotep III at Soleb, a row of bound captives represents conquered lands, each with a name ring. One reads:

Egyptian: tꜣ šꜣsw yhwꜣ

“The land of the Shasu, Yhw.”^[1]​^[25]

What it proves. That a nomadic group or region with a name very like Yahweh’s existed in the southern Levant by the fourteenth century BCE, in a list that also includes Seir. It does not prove that anyone worshipped a god of that name then. If the name of the people and the god are linked, this is the earliest trace of Yahweh by five centuries. Contested

4. The sons of God: Deuteronomy 32:8–9

Masoretic Hebrew text: bĕhanḥēl ʿelyôn gôyim, bĕhaprîdô bĕnê ʾādām, yaṣṣēb gĕbulōt ʿammîm lĕmispar bĕnê yiśrāʾēl. kî ḥēleq YHWH ʿammô, yaʿăqōb ḥebel naḥălātô.

“When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.”

Qumran, 4QDeut^j (late Herodian, c. 50 CE): bny ʾlwhym, “the sons of God”, in place of “the sons of Israel”. Most Septuagint manuscripts have “angels of God” (angelōn theou); the oldest Greek papyrus and the critical edition read “sons of God”.^[37]​^[71]​^[38]

What it proves. The older reading describes a world divided among divine beings, each people under its own god, with Yahweh’s share being Israel. A later scribe found this theologically troubling and replaced “God” with “Israel”; the change is a textbook example of a theological correction. Whether the poem distinguishes Yahweh from the Most High, or simply describes Yahweh taking his own share, is disputed. Majority on the reading; Contested on the theology.

5. The council in session: Psalm 82

Hebrew (v. 1): ʾĕlōhîm niṣṣāb baʿădat-ʾēl, bĕqereb ʾĕlōhîm yišpōṭ.

“God stands in the assembly of El; in the midst of the gods he gives judgment.”

(vv. 6–8): “I said, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you. Nevertheless, you shall die like men, and fall like any prince.’ Arise, O God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit all the nations.”^[39]

What it proves. The psalmist assumes a council of gods, “the assembly of El”, the same phrase used of El’s council in Canaanite texts. The psalm does not deny that the other gods exist; it has Israel’s god condemn them to death for injustice. It shows the transition between a council of many gods and a single god ruling all nations. Majority

6. Yahweh and his asherah: Kuntillet ʿAjrud, c. 800 BCE

The inscriptions are written in ink in the Hebrew alphabet, with some Phoenician letter forms, on two large storage jars (pithoi).^[52]​^[72]

Pithos A: brkt ʾtkm lyhwh šmrn wlʾšrth

“I have blessed you by Yahweh of Samaria and by his asherah.”^[12]

Pithos B: brktk lyhwh tmn wlʾšrth

“I bless you by Yahweh of Teman and by his asherah.”^[13]

What it proves. Three things. First, Yahweh was worshipped in local forms named after places, “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman”, as Baal and other gods were. Second, the god of the capital of the northern kingdom was invoked together with “his asherah”. Third, the southern title “Yahweh of Teman” was in use c. 800 BCE, matching Habakkuk 3:3. Plaster fragments from the same building mention El and Baal in a poetic text about a divine appearance.^[52] Consensus on the readings; Contested on what “his asherah” refers to.

7. Saved by his asherah: Khirbet el-Qom, 8th century BCE

Cut into the wall of a tomb west of Hebron, beside an incised hand. The inscription is crudely made and several readings are uncertain.

Hebrew: ʾryhw hʿšr ktbh / brk ʾryhw lyhwh / wmṣryh lʾšrth hwšʿ lh

“Uriyahu the rich (?) wrote it. Blessed is Uriyahu by Yahweh, and from his enemies, by his asherah, he has saved him.”^[17]​^[72]

What it proves. That the pairing of Yahweh and asherah was not confined to a desert way-station with northern connections. It appears in a Judahite burial in the hills of Judah, in a man’s prayer for protection. Majority

8. Taking the vessels of Yahweh: the Mesha Stele, c. 840 BCE

A black basalt monument of King Mesha of Moab, found at Dhiban in Jordan in 1868 and now in the Louvre. Mesha says that Omri, king of Israel, had oppressed Moab, and describes how he took Israelite towns back. At Nebo:

Moabite (lines 14–18, abridged): wyʾmr ly kmš lk ʾḥz ʾt nbh ʿl yśrʾl … wʾqḥ mšm ʾ[t k]ly yhwh wʾsḥb hm lpny kmš

“And Chemosh said to me, ‘Go, take Nebo from Israel.’ … I killed all of them, seven thousand men, boys, women, girls and slave women, for I had devoted it to Ashtar-Chemosh. And I took from there the [vessel]s of Yahweh and dragged them before Chemosh.”^[10]

What it proves. This is the earliest securely dated mention of Yahweh as a god, written by an enemy. To the king of Moab, Yahweh was the national god of Israel, as Chemosh was the god of Moab, and his sanctuary objects were war trophies. The Moabite practice of “devoting” a captured town to the god by killing its inhabitants is the same ḥērem described in the book of Joshua. Consensus

9. The House of David: Tel Dan, c. 840–800 BCE

Three fragments of a basalt stele in Aramaic, found in 1993 and 1994 reused in later walls at Tel Dan in northern Israel. The king who set it up, probably Hazael of Damascus, claims to have killed two kings:

Aramaic (lines 7–9, restored): [qtlt ʾyt yhw]rm br [ʾḥʾb] mlk yśrʾl wqtl[t ʾyt ʾḥz]yhw br [yhwrm ml]k bytdwd

“[I killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab], king of Israel, and I killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram, kin]g of the House of David.”^[11]​^[73]

What it proves. The restorations of the kings’ names are conjectural, but bytdwd, “House of David”, is clearly legible. In the inscriptions of this period, “House of X” is the normal way of naming a kingdom after the founder of its dynasty: Assyrian texts call Israel the “House of Omri”. So by the mid-ninth century BCE, Judah’s ruling dynasty traced itself to a founder named David. That does not confirm the biblical account of his reign, but it makes it very likely that David was a historical person. Majority

Some scholars once argued that bytdwd, written without a word divider, could be a place name or “house of the beloved”. This view has few defenders now.^[73] A separate proposal by André Lemaire to read “House of David” in line 31 of the Mesha Stele is more disputed: in 2019 Israel Finkelstein, Nadav Naʾaman and Thomas Römer argued from new photographs that the name there is Balak; Michael Langlois in 2019, and Lemaire himself with Jean-Philippe Delorme in 2022, have defended the David reading as the most probable from new images.^[74]​^[75]​^[76]​^[77] Contested

10. A sanctuary in a royal fortress: Arad

The shrine at Arad was excavated by Yohanan Aharoni between 1962 and 1967 and reinterpreted by Ze’ev Herzog.^[15]​^[66] Its plan has a courtyard with an altar of earth and fieldstones, which Aharoni noted matched the five-by-five cubits prescribed in Exodus 27:1 for the altar of the tabernacle, a broad room, and a raised niche at the back with standing stones and two incense altars. An ostracon from the fortress, written c. 600 BCE, mentions “the house of Yahweh”, which may refer to the Temple in Jerusalem.^[63]

What it proves. That the kings of Judah maintained a sanctuary of Yahweh inside one of their own fortresses, with standing stones of the kind Deuteronomy later banned (“you shall not set up a standing stone, which Yahweh your God hates”, Deuteronomy 16:22).^[48] Worship outside Jerusalem was normal and royal, not a fringe deviation. Whether the two standing stones, if there were two, stood for Yahweh and a consort is speculation. Majority on the function; Speculative on the pair.

David and Solomon: what archaeology says

The Bible describes David uniting the tribes, taking Jerusalem and building an empire from the Euphrates to Egypt, and Solomon building the Temple and governing a wealthy state with fortified cities and international trade. How much of that happened is the most fiercely debated question in the archaeology of the region. It matters for this chapter because a strong early monarchy would mean an early royal cult of Yahweh centred on Jerusalem. Contested

The traditional chronology. From the 1950s, Yigael Yadin and others attributed the monumental six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer to Solomon, following 1 Kings 9:15, which names those three cities as his building projects. Pottery found with them defined the archaeology of the tenth century.^[78] Majority in the twentieth century; now disputed.

The Low Chronology. In 1996 Israel Finkelstein argued that the pottery used to date those buildings should be moved about 75–100 years later, into the ninth century. The gates and palaces would then belong to the Omride kings of northern Israel, whose power is confirmed by Assyrian and Moabite inscriptions, and tenth-century Jerusalem would be a modest highland village.^[68]​^[79] On this view David and Solomon were real, but rulers of a small chiefdom whose kingdom was later remembered through the lens of later kings. Contested

The response. Amihai Mazar proposed a “modified conventional chronology”, in which the archaeological period in question spans both the tenth and ninth centuries, so that some monumental buildings could be Solomonic and others Omride.^[69] Radiocarbon dating since the 2000s has narrowed the gap between the camps to a few decades, but not closed it. Eilat Mazar’s excavations in Jerusalem’s City of David uncovered a large stone structure that she identified as David’s palace; others date it later or doubt that it is one building.^[80]​^[81] Contested

Khirbet Qeiyafa. Between 2007 and 2013 Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor excavated a small fortified town overlooking the Elah Valley, the setting of the David and Goliath story. Radiocarbon dates on olive pits place it c. 1020–980 BCE. It had a casemate wall, two gates and no pig bones, and Garfinkel argues it was a Judahite town built by a centralised kingdom, evidence for David’s state.^[6]​^[82] Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin accept the date but argue that the town could belong to a northern Israelite or Gibeonite polity, perhaps that of Saul, rather than to Judah.^[83] Contested

The architecture problem. Erez Ben-Yosef, excavating the copper mines of Timna in the Arabah, found evidence of a complex, organised industry in the tenth century run by people who left almost no permanent buildings. He argues that archaeologists have underestimated states built by nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples, and that the absence of monumental architecture does not mean the absence of a kingdom.^[84] Contested

What can be said. A dynasty of Judah traced itself to David by c. 840 BCE. The northern kingdom of Israel, under Omri and Ahab in the ninth century, was a significant regional power: Shalmaneser III records Ahab bringing 2,000 chariots to the battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE, more than any other member of the coalition.^[9] Judah in the tenth century was smaller and poorer than the Bible’s description of Solomon’s kingdom, and most of its population lived in villages. Between those points, the evidence supports several reconstructions. Majority

What is absent from the earliest record of Yahweh

The religion of the inscriptions and the oldest biblical poems lacks much of what later Judaism and the final form of the Bible take for granted.

• Monotheism. No text of this period says that no other god exists. The question being argued over is which gods Israel should worship, not whether they exist. Consensus
• A single sanctuary. Yahweh is worshipped at Moẓa, Arad, Bethel, Dan and other sites, as well as in Jerusalem. Consensus
• A ban on images. Bull images, standing stones, figurines and an asherah in the Temple are all attested. Whether Yahweh himself was ever represented by a statue is debated (see below). Majority
• A written Torah. There is no evidence for a written law book with the authority Deuteronomy later claims; the earliest Hebrew inscriptions of any length are from the ninth and eighth centuries (§0). Majority
• The patriarchs as one family. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not mentioned outside the Bible, and Abraham is barely mentioned in the prophets before the exile. The combined genealogy is probably later. Majority
• Satan, angels with names, resurrection and the Messiah as end-time saviour. All appear later, in the Persian and Hellenistic periods (§5, §6). Consensus
• “Jews” and “Judaism”. The kingdom of Judah exists; “Judaism” as a religion of a dispersed people bound by Torah does not (§5, §7). Consensus

Debates about Yahweh and early Israel

Where did Yahweh come from?

Most scholars accept some form of the southern origin, with Fleming’s argument that the god’s people were part of Israel’s ancestry as an important refinement.^[27] The traditional account and the southern hypothesis share more than might be expected: both place Yahweh’s first revelation in the southern wilderness, outside Canaan, and connect it with Moses and Midian. Contested

Was Israel monotheistic from the start?

The strongest case for an early monotheism was made by Yehezkel Kaufmann in the mid-twentieth century. He argued that Israelite religion was fundamentally different from its neighbours’ from the beginning, that the biblical writers did not even understand how polytheism worked, and that the Bible’s condemnations of idolatry targeted a marginal practice. Tigay’s onomastic evidence gives his position some support: if Israelites had worshipped many gods widely, more of their names would show it.^[85]​^[67]

The majority view now is that monotheism developed in stages: from the worship of Yahweh alongside other gods, through the demand to worship Yahweh alone (monolatry), to the claim that no other god exists, first made clearly in the sixth century BCE (§4). The evidence for this is the material in this chapter: the El names, the council of gods, the Asherah blessings and the figurines. The biblical writers themselves present Israel’s history as a long struggle against other gods. Majority

Was Asherah Yahweh’s wife?

The case for: Asherah was El’s consort, Yahweh took El’s place, and inscriptions pair “Yahweh and his asherah”; ordinary people would not have distinguished a goddess from her symbol.^[53]​^[56] The case against: Hebrew grammar makes “his Asherah” as a personal name unlikely; the word more probably names the cult object beside Yahweh’s altar, which represented blessing or fertility within Yahweh’s own cult.^[54]​^[55] Judith Hadley’s influential view combines both: Asherah was once a goddess worshipped alongside Yahweh, and over time she faded into the cult symbol that bore her name.^[55] Contested

Was there a statue of Yahweh?

Tryggve Mettinger argued that Israel’s aniconism was old: Yahweh was represented by standing stones or by an empty space, such as the throne above the cherubim in the Jerusalem Temple, and never by a human-shaped statue.^[86] Others, including Christoph Uehlinger, think the Jerusalem Temple may have held an anthropomorphic image of Yahweh before the reforms, as temples of other gods did, and that the ban on images was introduced later.^[87] No such statue has been found, and the evidence is indirect on both sides. Contested

Were David and Solomon real?

Contested

Further reading

• Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2nd ed., Eerdmans, 2002) — the standard account of convergence and differentiation.
• Theodore J. Lewis, The Origin and Character of God (Oxford, 2020) — the fullest recent survey of texts, inscriptions and images.
• Daniel E. Fleming, Yahweh before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name (Cambridge, 2021).
• Thomas Römer, The Invention of God (Harvard, 2015) — readable, from Yahweh’s southern origins to monotheism.
• William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Eerdmans, 2005).
• Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah (Cambridge, 2000).
• Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Fortress, 1998).
• Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (Free Press, 2001), with Amihai Mazar’s replies, for the David and Solomon debate.
• Shmuel Aḥituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Carta, 2008) — the inscriptions in this chapter with translations.