When does Yahweh first enter the religion of ancient Israel?

[kingink]

When does Yahweh first enter the religion of ancient Israel? I'm wondering what theories there are on this.
Was it as a result of some of them being in Assyria?
Was it just prior to the rearrangement of various texts into the books that became the Hebrew bible?

 

[Swammerdami]

When does Yahweh first enter the religion of ancient Israel?

The following inscription at the Temple of Soleb ("Yahweh in the Land of the Shasu") is dated to about 1400 BC. Can anyone here read hieroglyphics?

"Yahweh" was discussed in another recent thread, though that thread didn't get very far.

 

[TomC]

Hey, @kingink
I don't know enough about this to have an opinion. So I'll just say
Welcome to IIDB. Glad you joined us!
Tom

 

[steve_bank]

I don't know either but from what I read ancient Hinduism may be the oldest tradition.

The Hebrew Noah flood story appears to be adapted form Gilgamesh. You can find analyses on the net.

The Hebrews did not invent monotheism.

From an archeology show I watched there is evidence that the first Hebrews may have had both a male and female god pair, and the female half was discarded.

 

[kingink]

Hey, @kingink
I don't know enough about this to have an opinion. So I'll just say
Welcome to IIDB. Glad you joined us!
Tom

Thank you. I was on the old forum over 10 years ago and learned a lot. I still see some of the old names here.

 

[kingink]

It's a while since I looked at this. Last book I read (over 10 years ago), was "Who wrote the bible". IIRC the author proposed that genesis and other early books were compiled from other sources in the time of Josiah (?). So yahweh would have been inserted into genesis or an existing text worked into the new version.
I did here somewhere that the Assyrians had a god yohu(?) and wondered if it was picked up from there?

 

[Politesse]

When does Yahweh first enter the religion of ancient Israel? I'm wondering what theories there are on this.
Was it as a result of some of them being in Assyria?
Was it just prior to the rearrangement of various texts into the books that became the Hebrew bible?

Unknown and probably unknowable, as the tradition predates the written record in the Palestine. The earliest written record is the Amenhotep III stelae which Swammerdami has linked, and it is a dubious case. It means something more literally like "(the)Hillfolk (of) Yaho", which some take to be an unequivocal reference to the Hebrews and others do not. The oldest certain reference is more than five hundred years later, the Mesha Stele (840 BCE):

The Mesha Stele is less controversial as it most certainly references the Hebrews, whom it refers to as the "House of Omri" after the name of one of the Solomonic kings of Judah, and recounts an historical episode already known to us (albeit with a very different bias) from the Hebrew Book of Kings. But it also contains an Moabite rendition of the Tetragammatron, highlighted in the image above for your contemplative pleasure. This inidcates not only that YHWH was in wide use by then, but that there must have been no prohibition against saying the name aloud, as it is hard to imagine how Moabites and later Assyrians would even have heard about it.

By the 7th century, references and sites abound.

 

[Politesse]

I did here somewhere that the Assyrians had a god yohu(?) and wondered if it was picked up from there?

That one is a modern myth, I'm afraid. It actually stems from religious conservatism concerning a early tablet at the archaeological site at Kuntillet, where an inscription honors "YHWH and his Asherah (royal wife)". Conservative Christian classicists, embarassed by such an obvious polytheistic reference to their favored god, spread about a rumor that this was actually a reference to a similarly but not identically named Assyrian deity. That then got picked up and revived as an atheist meme de-legitimizing Yahweh himself. But there is in reality no doubt that this incription was produced by a Jewish, not Assyrian, community.

 

[kingink]

thank you @Politesse

 

[Tigers!]

I've always liked Genesis 32:28 myself

 

[Tigers!]

The Mesha Stele is less controversial as it most certainly references the Hebrews, whom it refers to as the "House of Omri" after the name of one of the Solomonic kings of Judah, and recounts an historical episode already known to us (albeit with a very different bias) from the Hebrew Book of Kings. But it also contains an Moabite rendition of the Tetragammatron, highlighted in the image above for your contemplative pleasure. This inidcates not only that YHWH was in wide use by then, but that there must have been no prohibition against saying the name aloud, as it is hard to imagine how Moabites and later Assyrians would even have heard about it.

By the 7th century, references and sites abound.

IIRC Omri was a king of the northern kingdom of Israel, not Judah. He was not related to the Davidic/Solomonic line at all.

 

[Politesse]

The Mesha Stele is less controversial as it most certainly references the Hebrews, whom it refers to as the "House of Omri" after the name of one of the Solomonic kings of Judah, and recounts an historical episode already known to us (albeit with a very different bias) from the Hebrew Book of Kings. But it also contains an Moabite rendition of the Tetragammatron, highlighted in the image above for your contemplative pleasure. This inidcates not only that YHWH was in wide use by then, but that there must have been no prohibition against saying the name aloud, as it is hard to imagine how Moabites and later Assyrians would even have heard about it.

By the 7th century, references and sites abound.

IIRC Omri was a king of the northern kingdom of Israel, not Judah. He was not related to the Davidic/Solomonic line at all.

Ah, too right!

 

[lpetrich]

 Tetragrammaton - "four letters" in greek - YHWH

A hieroglyphic inscription of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE) mentions a group of Shasu whom it calls "the Shasu of Yhw³" (read as: ja-h-wi or ja-h-wa).

This was during the New Kingdom of Egypt, when Egypt had an empire in the Levant, roughly Israel/Palestine and Lebanon.

Egypt withdrew from that empire during the  Late Bronze Age collapse (ca. 1200 - 1150 BCE), a time of strife and destructions of cities. At the beginning was Pharaoh Merneptah's stele carvers bragging about big victories over enemies there, including "Israel is destroyed. Its seed is no more." Toward the end was Pharaoh Ramesses III's memorializers bragging about big victories over invaders like the Peleset (Palestinians), but in the Nile Delta.

Very Baghdad Bob

The next mention is in the  Mesha Stele a.k.a. the Moabite Stone, of 840 BCE.

 Kuntillet Ajrud around 800 BCE - reference to "Yahweh and his Asherah"

It's hard to date when the YHWH-only movement first emerged, but a landmark in it is an event in the reign of  Josiah (640 - 609 BCE). He ordered the renovation of the Jerusalem Temple, and during that activity, high priest Hilkiah claimed to have found in it a "book of the law" that specified worshipping YHWH as the only god.

 

[Swammerdami]

Discussion of the earliest evidence of Jewish religion should mention two religions of Ethiopia: the  Qemant_people#Religion whose (monotheistic?) God was named Yïdära or Mïzgänä; and  Haymanot, the religion of the Beta Israel (or "Falasha") people.

IIUC the religion of Beta Israel is very similar to Jerusalem's Judaism; they even have texts of canonical Old Testament books which predate any other such texts. Some claim that gaps in their version of Judaism (e.g. absence of Hannukah from their calendar) imply separation from mainstream Judaism before the Captivity.

The Qemant's religion is described as "Pagan-Hebraic"; its relation to mainstream Judaism is vaguer than that of Beta Israel, but still undeniable.

It may seem like a long way from Canaan to Ethiopia, but the Qemant and Beta Israel people were centered near the sources of the Blue Nile and Red/Black Nile, so were readily accessed from Egypt. In this regard the Jewish temple on the Nile at Elephantine also merits mention. Some papyri discovered there predate other texts. There is MUCH controversy about this Temple: Did its occupants practice polytheism? Did its construction predate the reign of Josiah (as some claim)? And . . .

Such a temple would be in clear violation of Deuteronomic law, which stipulates that no Jewish temple may be constructed outside of Jerusalem.... Upon first examination, this appears to contradict commonly accepted models of the development of Jewish religion and the dating of the Hebrew scriptures, which posit that monotheism and the Torah should have already been well-established by the time these papyri were written. Most scholars explain this apparent discrepancy by theorizing that the Elephantine Jews represented an isolated remnant of Jewish religious practices from earlier centuries, or that the Torah had only recently been promulgated at that time.
[Some scholars] have argued that the Elephantine papyri demonstrate that monotheism and the Torah could not have been established in Jewish culture before 400 BCE, and that the Torah was therefore likely written in the Hellenistic period, in the third or fourth centuries BC

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

When does Yahweh first enter the religion of ancient Israel? I'm wondering what theories there are on this.
Was it as a result of some of them being in Assyria?
Was it just prior to the rearrangement of various texts into the books that became the Hebrew bible?

Yahweh was a god known to the Egyptians from their neighbors. There seems to
be three mentions found on Egyptian monuments mentioning the name Yahweh.
Israel as known to Merneptah worshiped the Canaanite God El. After Merneptah's
raid on "The Nine Bows", the proto-Israelites moved to their hilltop farms. How the
Moabite Yahweh made its way to displace El, nobody knows. Early Israel left no written
material of any kind. In the Torah, the earliest mentions of God call God El. Genesis 6,
Job 1 and 2 mention the sons of God, the Canaanite El had 70 sons. El's wife Ashera
was still worshipped in Israel as late as the 7th century BCE. Baal, hated by the prophets
as an idol was a son of the Canaanite El. The change from El to Yahweh seems to have
taken place over centuries. We will probably never know exactly why and how this
all took place.

 

[Emily Lake]

I don't know either but from what I read ancient Hinduism may be the oldest tradition.

Oldest codified religion with a book, perhaps. But there's certainly evidence of burial rites being performed round about 40,000 years ago, and lots of earth goddess figures from way before Hinduism became a thing.

I suppose it depends on what you accept as being a religious tradition.

 

[lpetrich]

The Sumerian and Egyptian religions are the oldest documented ones, because Sumer and Egypt have the oldest written records. They go back a little over 5,000 years, a bit after the middle of the Holocene Epoch.

With linguistic reconstruction one can go a little bit further, like Proto-Indo-European Dyeus Päter "Father Sky" and Hausos "Dawn". But linguistic reconstruction is most reliable for very basic sorts of words, like pronouns and "name" and for small numbers, and also very generic words for natural phenomena and kinds of organisms and body parts and close relatives and the like. That makes it difficult to go beyond the mid-Holocene with this technique.

To look back further, one has to interpret artwork, and that is a can of worms that I don't want to open. That can take us back some 30,000 - 40,000 years, well into the Pleistocene Epoch.

If one wants to argue for universality of religion, one must also accept the universality of magic/sorcery, since that very similar pseudotechnology is universal in premodern societies. It is also hard to draw the line between magic and religion, a further complication. One also finds essentially universal premodern beliefs like the flatness of the Earth and the monster theory of eclipses.

 

[Emily Lake]

It is also hard to draw the line between magic and religion, a further complication.

Why draw a line in the first place? They're both fantasy.

 

[lpetrich]

It is also hard to draw the line between magic and religion, a further complication.

Why draw a line in the first place? They're both fantasy.

Yes, but there are different kinds of fantasy.

As an obvious case of difficulty in drawing that line, prayer is a form of magic called  Theurgy - making a deity / spirit / demon do one's will, whether by force or by persuasion.

The other main kind is  Thaumaturgy - miracle-working.

 

[bilby]

It is also hard to draw the line between magic and religion, a further complication.

Why draw a line in the first place? They're both fantasy.

As far as I can tell, the difference is that magic is the fantasy a handful of people have, while religion is the fantasy a large number subscribe to. There's a heirarchy of popularity: A dozen people believe in magic; several dozen up to a few hundred are a cult; More than that is a religion.