# Did the Israelites invent God ? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 19, 2005, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-israelites-invent-god/300040 "2005-04-19T13:19:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2005, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-israelites-invent-god/300040/21 "2005-04-20T15:17:38Z")
We probably need to beat the Yahwist-Mazdaist Connection into the ground and come up with some coherent answers. I confess to not having a whole lot in the way of cites for this; it’s been a long time since I studied into it in any depth. First, dispose of the “God’s Consort” thing that **Scott Plaid** raises. “El” was, effectively, Central Semitic for “god” – note the lowercase. To a certain but quite real extent, the Canaanites were syncretic – your El, who lives on top of nearby inaccessible mountain and controls the thunder, is a different manifestation of my El, who lives in the clouds and sends the rain, both of whom are also their El, who is responsible for the fecundity of the flocks. Some of these Els were parts of henotheisms: the sole god of our city, the only one properly worshipped here, though we certainly won’t deny the god they worship over in your city either. Others were _dei otiosi_, the creator god who then left control of the happenings of the world to other gods; or the supreme god of a pantheon. Els who were male principles or Zeus-counterparts tended to have a consort, usually called Asherah or something very similar (Astarte and Ashtoreth are variations on the theme). With the advent of the Israelites and YHWH-worship, things changed. There was but the one god, albeit other nations worshipped other gods, who may or may not have been “real” in the conceptions of the people of the times, but who were emphatically not to be worshiped by those who followed YHWH. The monotheistic and henotheistic Els were equated to YHWH, who picked up an archaic plural form of El, Elohim, as His particular epithet. (His _name_ is YHWH; his _title_ is Elohim, God _par excellence_.) And He emphatically did not have a consort; any other gods were there at His sufferance, either subordinate deities existing at His whim, demons tempting the sinful Canaanites, or pure and simple figments of their imagination. So El Shaddai, El Berith, and the rest, portrayed in Genesis and elsewhere in Scripture as epithets for YHWH, are in origin local tutelary henotheistic deities which were assimilated into the growing conception of YHWH as sole and supreme God. Now, one peculiar phenomenon in Genesis in particular, and to a lesser extent throughout the Torah and the older stratum of Biblical literature, is that God and His messengers are conflated. God (not God-and-two-angels) visits Abraham at Mamre under the guise of three men (seen by Christians of fulfilled-prophecy or typological bents as being a type of the Trinity), and then two of those men, now termed messengers (malakim, or aggeloi, i.e., “angels”) head over to check out Sodom. But in the Mamre account they’re not termed angels; they’re 2/3 of the manifestation of God. Likewise, it’s not clear whether Jacob wrestles with God or with an angel; both explanations are implied. And in particular, in the frame story for Job and the sparse patristic accounts of the Satan, he is regarded as a sort of cosmic Ken Starr – part prosecuting attorney, part anti-sin investigative task force, and part tempter to sin, by way of testing the righteous. God is regarded as a sort of cosmic potentate, whose messengers do not speak for themselves but in His voice, with the Satan as a part of that court in that servant-of-God-but-antagonist-to-man capacity. Anything produced during or after the Exile, however, has a much more defined system. God is clearly distinct from His angels, who now come in a heirarchy, and the Satan, from being a Special Prosecutor, has moved into a role of rebel against God and supreme agent of evil. But this is precisely the imagery associated with Zoroastrian cosmology: the good god Ahura Mazda is warred against by the equal-but-lesser Angra Mainyu, both of whom have their coteries of potent angelic figures who are distinct and independent from them. In short, Judaism absorbed the dualistic metaphysics of Mazdaism and incorporated it into a stringent thoroughgoing monotheism by having YHWH served by angels, separate created beings who are His messengers, some of whom rebelled under the Satan and are bent on causing evil to happen. It’s a massive sea-change from the one-supernatural-entity-worth-mentioning YHWHism that had preceded it. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2005, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-israelites-invent-god/300040/22 "2005-04-20T16:23:13Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > It is also unclear if the God of the Hebrews was a monotheistic concept … “I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other gods before me” doesn’t exactly state that no other gods exist. Just that I am _your_ God and keep those other gods outa my face. Exactly. Technically, the ancient Israelites were henotheists rather than monotheists. ---
**Author:** ![Scott\_Plaid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/258eb7/32.png) [@Scott\_Plaid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scott_Plaid)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2005, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-israelites-invent-god/300040/23 "2005-04-20T16:55:31Z")
I agree with most of what you said, especially the part about agreeing with me on the "Satan as prosecuting attorney part. 🙂 However, I disagree with the following: > [@Polycarp](#): > > And He emphatically did not have a consort; any other gods were there at His sufferance, either subordinate deities existing at His whim, demons tempting the sinful Canaanites, or pure and simple figments of their imagination. Now, I do not recall the original hebrew, but first, there is the plural used in “Let us make man in our likeness.” (Oh, and I do recall the original hebrew was plural in that phrase) In addition here are some verses that sound like they refer to a movement of jews who put statues of the consort goddess in the temple: [http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1942&letter=A&search=Asherah](http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1942&letter=A&search=Asherah) P.S. “Something-something, phrases translated in one book as groves near the temple, and in another as idiols within the temple”, said Scott. I can not find it at [http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/readingp.htm](http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/readingp.htm), but I know it’s around here somewhere. Ah, here it is: > [@2 Kings Chapter 23](#): > > 4 And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the door, to bring forth out of the temple of the LORD all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried the ashes of them unto Beth-el. In this verse, it is unclear wheather Baal is Ashterah’s companion, or if she is the companion of the Hebrew El. That, many other verses forbidden goddess worship, and archeological records lead many to conclude that early Hebrew worship Yahweh as a god married to a goddess, and that the records of her is that of one form of worship kicking out another. For more one the subject, I see some books at [amazon.com](http://amazon.com). Too many to list really. Here’s one. [Did God Have A Wife?: Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0802828523/ref=pd_sim_b_1/104-4487524-6496705?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance) ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2005, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-israelites-invent-god/300040/24 "2005-04-20T17:05:17Z")
The striking feature of the ancient peoples of Judah and Israel was probably not so much that they were monotheistic, but that they had this _Book_. The folks who carved the Venus of Willendorf may have been monotheists for all we know, but they didn’t leave a text behind to testify to that if they were. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-israelites-invent-god/300040.md?page=1)