In the last post I briefly discussed the two main deities at Ugarit: El and Baal. El was the high sovereign, while Baal was the king of the gods, the vizier or co-regent of El. I mentioned four items about El, Baal, and Israel’s God Yahweh: (1) in the Hebrew Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is referred to as El; (2) Yahweh is identified with El; (3) Yahweh is also identified with Baal; and (4) divine figures other than Yahweh — but which are also equated with Yahweh — are also identified with Baal.
I’ll hit the first two of these in this post.
El, the God of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
The original God of Israel was El, and this can be deduced by a number of means, and I list a few here:
1. The name “Israel” has “El” in it (IsraEL). That is, Israel is a proper name that honors El, not Yahweh.
2. El is described in Ugaritic material as an ancient deity with grey hair and beard. Scholars have noted the strong parallels between this description and the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7.
3. Isaiah 14:13-14 refers to the Shining One, son of the Dawn (translated “Lucifer” in some English translations) vaunting himself above “the stars of El” to make himself “like the Most High (Ê¿elyon).” The stars of El, as we saw in an earlier post, are members of the divine council, and so this passage speaks of El as the enthroned lord of the council.
4. Ezek 28:2 has the divine council (the cosmic mountain-garden of Eden) located at “the seat of El.”
5. Gen 49:24-25 describes the God of Israel with several El descriptions known from non-biblical texts. One of these is El-Shaddai, which is important in the next section.
6. Verses like Gen 33:20 read literally in Hebrew, “El, the God of Israel” (ʾeÌ„l ʾĕloÌ„heÌ‚ yisÌrāʾeÌ„l).
7. Phrases like “God Most High” (e.g., Gen 14:18-22) are literally in Hebrew “El, Most High” (ʾeÌ„l Ê¿elyoÌ‚n).
8. Verses like Gen 35:1, 3 have God commanding Jacob to build and altar to El (Hebrew, ʾēl).
Yahweh, the God of the Patriarchs = El
El and Yahweh are fused or identified with each other in several ways in the OT:
1. Exodus 6:3 explicitly states that God was known to the patriarchs as El Shaddai and only later (in the days of Moses) as Yahweh.
2. Yahweh is explicitly called El:
a. Exod 15:2 - “The LORD is my strength . . . this is my God (El)…
b. Isaiah 5:16 - “The LORD of hosts is exalted . . . the holy God (El) shows himself holy…
c. Psalm 31:6 - “O LORD, faithful God (El)…”
3. Yahweh is also described with familiar El descriptions, like the aged God (Psa 90:2; Psa 102:27; Job 36:26) enthroned over the divine council (1 Kings 22:19; Psa 29:1-2; Psa 89:5-6)
4. In heterodox Yahweh worship of the biblical period, Yahweh was thought to have a wife - Asherah - who was El’s wife at Ugarit.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Good stuff! I want more!
June 13th, 2008 at 6:47 am
The question I’m left with is who originated some of these concepts like the cloud-rider, council, and co-regent. The picture I get is that the Israelites used the “embrace, extend, extinguish” model to adopt and merge the cultures of the surrounding areas with their own, a practice that continues on throughout history (the title Pontifex Maximus, Christmas, Easter, mitres coming perhaps from priests of Dagon, etc).
If that’s the case, how do we as Christians deal with the suggestion that some of our dogmatic beliefs like the co-regent personage of God were originally just concepts assimilated from other systems and that our God is just a balled-up version of Baal, Yam, Mot, Hadad, and whoever else.
I prefer to strip away the traditions and try to focus on the core of things but it seems now that peeling back these layers leads to empty nothingness. This troubles me greatly.
June 14th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Matt: Good question. It would be a mistake to assume that Israel “only” got their ideas via other cultures. That would mean we have to assume (1) that Israel (pretty much alone) was too dumb or backward to come up with their own articulation of anything; and (2) that the idea that God could give revelation to Israel is incoherent or out of bounds. I don’t make either assumption, though there are many scholars who adopt them both.
My view is that, if we take the OT at face value for its theological-historical perspective, we see that the OT assumes and asserts that, at the beginning, humanity had the knowledge of the true God, and that this was lost. This knowledge was lost after Eden, and after the flood when things essentially are cast as starting over again. The Babel event is critical (I assume you were one of my former newsletter subscribers, so recall the sections on Babel). The “Deuteronomy 32 divine council worldview” has the nations in rebellion against the one true God (the implication is that they still had some knowledge of him). In response, God disinherits the nations and puts them under lesser elohim. This is the OT rationale for where the pagan pantheons come from. From that point on, I’d suggest that every nation began to practice and articulate their own “theology” of how the the gods did things, who/what they were, what the hierarchy was like, what the relationship between a supreme God and the other gods was like (the One to the many - and most ANE polytheistic systems did have a high god and so had thoughts on this). Israel’s theology is quite different in important places (the uniqueness of Yahweh is one such place - an uncreated, pre-existent being). In other ANE systems there were other gods (”the olden gods”) who created the high gods - usually the olden gods were identified with the elements of creation. They really had no equivalent idea to an uncreated Creator. So, there is a mix of “original” Israelite thinking and other elements. Were those other elements “borrowings”? Could be. But they might also be deliberate theological departures to make a polemic theological point. I tend to think that Israelite religion is an amalgam, but I also accept the God of Israel as the true God, and so I believe there was providential oversight that went into Israel’s own expression of the “the One and the many” (at least the orthodox Israelite view of Yahweh worship).