Caitlin Montgomery Hubler

YHWH, the traditional God of Judaism, has a name so holy that for millennia worshippers have dared not even to speak it. Special rituals surrounded the word both written and spoken. When Jewish scribes translated their Scriptures, the divine name would not be transcribed but would be replaced by the equivalent of “LORD.” The divine name was considered so holy as to be literally unpronounceable. To this day, in many religious circles it is considered highly offensive to speak the name of YHWH. While this current state of affairs is often taken as assurance of the inherent bond between YHWH and Israelite religion, recent scholarship has called this assumption into question. Various lines of evidence seem to point to the fact Israel once shared in the polytheism of its Ancient Near Eastern neighbors.¹

Undoubtedly, there are portions of the Hebrew Bible that affirm a monotheistic understanding of God. Isaiah 45:18 proclaims, “I am the Lord, and there is no other.” In Deuteronomy 6:4, in the context of teaching the Israelites new commandments, Moses speaks, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” In these and other passages, YHWH is taken to be one and only divine being, certainly the only one worthy of worship. Yet there are other sections of the Bible that seem to offer a quite different portrait of Israelite theology. For example, later on in Deuteronomy, Moses sings of El Elyon, chief god in the Canaanite divine pantheon, giving underling god YHWH the people of Israel over which to rule.² The Psalmist records a scene of YHWH sitting in a divine council among other gods.³ Multiple texts mention both YHWH and El but as separate figures.⁴ In general, these passages specifically affirming monotheism are typically dated later in Israel’s history, while the passages that seem to affirm polytheism have been dated earlier.⁵

Thus, in order to accurately trace the development of Israelite religion over time, we must recognize the diverse historical and theological contexts in which the various authors of the Hebrew Bible wrote. There are varying theologies in the Hebrew Bible affixed to different time periods in Israel’s history. It is through examination of such theologies and the historical circumstances in which they arose that we might begin to reconstruct the development of the religion over time. Because the Israelites were a relatively numerically insignificant people group in the Ancient Near East constantly being dominated by larger and more powerful nations, there were certain ideas about religion and divinity in the Ancient Near East that could not have helped but bleed into Israelite ideas about God. This is simply the milieu out of which Israel emerged. For instance, the idea of a divine pantheon permeated the Ancient Near Eastern religious landscape. The most powerful god in the pantheon was El: supreme god of Canaanite religion.⁶ El was conceived of as the father and chief of the divine pantheon. At least one scholar has suggested one stage in early Israelite theology, perhaps around the time of the exodus, included El as head of the pantheon directing YHWH, his warrior god based off of texts like the aforementioned Deuteronomy 32:8-9.⁷

But disparate biblical passages are not the only access the modern historian has to ancient Israelite piety. Almost all ancient Semitic names are theophoric: they convey information about the god worshipped by the bearer of that name. Often, these names are composed of a subject with a divine element (a form of YHWH or ‘ēl, for example) and a predicate (a verb denoting the god’s action). Scholars have thus been able to avail themselves of both biblical and epigraphic names in order to reconstruct the piety of ancient peoples. When carefully interpreted, theophoric names can be an important piece in a larger puzzle reconstructing ancient religion.

Perhaps the most significant ‘ēl name mentioned in the Bible is that of Israel itself. Though YHWH is the god traditionally associated with the people Israel, a closer look at the name’s meaning reveals a more complicated picture. The divine element present in “Israel” is ‘ēl, not YHWH. Though the etymology of the word is contentious, possible meanings include “May El Combat” and “El is just.”⁸ For this reason, combined with the aforementioned biblical passages that appear to refer to El as a deity distinct from YHWH, Mark Smith maintains the original God of Israel was, in fact, El.⁹ There would have been nothing preventing the adoption of a Yahwistic name, such as “yisra-yahweh,” or “yisra-yah.”¹⁰ In the absence of this, then, it is reasonable to assume Israel initially perceived El as head of the divine pantheon, and only later came to recognize YHWH as the one true God.

Indeed, non-Yahwistic names abound throughout the Hebrew Bible as well as in contemporaneous epigraphic data. The most abundant non-Yahwistic divine element is, as might be expected from Israel’s name, ‘ēl. However, ‘ēl names occur significantly more liberally during certain portions of Israel’s history, particularly prior to the time of David. Even within the biblical corpus, one is able to observe a shift around the time of David from predominantly ‘ēl names to YHWH names.¹¹ This shift appears to be concurrent with the phenomenon of pantheon reduction in Israel.¹² One is able to observe a general tendency within the Hebrew Bible wherein the worship of the whole pantheon of gods commonplace in the Ancient Near East dwindled down further and further until YHWH was the only acceptable recipient of Israelite worship.¹³ Dennis Pardee has located this major religious shift throughout the second half of the Iron Age.¹⁴

All of this is complicated by the fact much later in Israel’s history, after the exile, ‘ēl is clearly meant as the generic term for “god.” Independent scholar Ryan Thomas makes the point “there can be little doubt based on its prevalence in post-exilic Hebrew names that the theophoric ‘ēl was used as a designation for the national deity YHWH.”¹⁵ Scholars thus run into problems when making straightforward inferences about ancient Israelite piety solely based off the divine element ‘ēl in personal names. Thomas continues, stating “the meaning of the term ‘ēl is often ambiguous in personal names, since it can be used as a proper name, an appellative, or a reference to the personal god, ‘my god.’”¹⁶

Thus, at some point in the development of Israelite religion, the semantics of ‘ēl in personal names shifted. While it once referred to the Canaanite god El, father and chief of the divine pantheon, it eventually came to be used as a generic term for “god.” The question of precisely when, why, and how the semantics of ‘ēl shifted is of great interest for biblical scholars looking to reconstruct ancient Israelite religious history. For purposes of this paper, I wish to focus on the “when” question. What is the semantic meaning of the divine element ‘ēl in theophoric names at the time of the late Iron Age? Does ‘ēl refer to the high Canaanite god El, or does it function as a generic term for “god” such that, for the Israelites, it is essentially interchangeable with YHWH? Throughout this paper, I will argue theophoric personal ‘ēl names at the time of the late Iron Age are evidence of lingering fluid notions of divinity within Israel on a familial level.

Only fairly recently in biblical scholarship has it been considered ‘ēl in personal names may not be a title for YHWH. Jeaneane Fowler simply assumes in her 1988 study the both divine elements are semantically equivalent.¹⁷ Jeffrey Tigay has argued for the same in 1986.¹⁸ However, new research in the field of onomastics by Ryan Thomas does not allow for such a facile identification of these divine elements. My hope is through my presentation and interpretation of his research, what has up until this point been a comfortable consensus view within biblical scholarship will be problematized.

In the Ancient Near East, each theophoric name contains both a divine element, typically as subject, followed by a predicate. For example, the biblical name Abijah (‘abiyah) contains the YHWH divine element and means “YHWH is my father.” Scholars have long been in the practice of putting together collections of theophoric names in order to make comparisons between YHWH and other Ancient Near Eastern deities in the conception of ancient Israelite worshippers.

Recently, Ryan Thomas has combined the work of several earlier scholars to create a composite database of late Iron Age Hebrew personal names.¹⁹ Importantly, both biblical and epigraphic data are thus included in this set. Thomas points out methodological problems associated with the sole use of biblical names to reconstruct ancient Israelite religion. Uncertainty about the dating of particular texts as well as the possibility of later redaction present issues with a straightforward interpretation of personal names in biblical texts. Thomas reminds us, “In all likelihood, the names stem from disparate time periods and reflect different stages in the development of a mono-YHWHistic sensibility.”²⁰ Another strength of Thomas’s collection is its exclusion of possibly inauthentic archaeological material.²¹

When Thomas compared the predicates of the personal names, he found half of all the names occur with predicates attested with either theophoric element (YHWH or ‘ēl). That is to say at least half of the time, YHWH and ‘ēl are essentially interchangeable in terms of the actions they perform or the descriptions afforded to them. Given this evidence alone, he says, “We could reasonably assume that YHWH was the regular proper name of the chief Israelite deity during the monarchic period and later, while El was an additional title reflecting the deity’s historical development from or conflation with Canaanite El.”²²

While he acknowledges this evidence may be interpreted as an interchangeability of YHWH and El, thereby upholding the consensus view, a closer look at the data complicates this conclusion. More important than the similarities between the predicative elements are the differences. As it turns out, though half of the YHWH and ‘ēl personal names occur with predicates attested in both, this occurs with a relatively small number of predicates. The actual number of predicates able to be used with either YHWH or ‘ēl is rather low, at 21%. Many (58%) of the predicates are attested only with the YHWH theophoric, but few (20%) are attested only with an ‘ēl theophoric.²³ Because of the fact 78% of the individual predicates are exclusive to either YHWH or ‘ēl, Thomas sees reason to believe their onomastic profiles were distinct to the extent they may have still been conceived of as separate deities.²⁴

In fact, some predicates exclusive to YHWH and ‘ēl are found in multiple instances, increasing the likelihood these are part of distinctive onomastic profiles.²⁵ Thus, there are predicates occurring abundantly with ‘yah that have no equivalent in ‘ēl, and vice versa. To make things more interesting, predicates unique to each name can be grouped into particular categories, allowing us to make generalizations about the conception of each deity’s character. For example, the predicates of YHWH names tend to be more closely associated with the following characteristics: strong and powerful, warrior-like, protective, and triumphant, immanent, beautiful, engaged in the birth process, acting as a witness and intercessor, with a need to advance his claims of lordship.²⁶ In many ways, these predicates cohere with the image of YHWH as “warrior god who intervenes in favor of his people.”²⁷ Predicates attested only with El names, on the other hand, emphasize general beneficence, transcendence and firmness, judgeship and authority, force behind the birth process, and his identity as a covenant partner.²⁸ Likewise, this picture of El fits quite nicely with what we know of El as the powerful father of the divine pantheon: the elderly bearded figure who sits enthroned among the divine council.²⁹

One seemingly important difference between YHWH and El deals with the kinship terminology specific to each. Throughout the Ancient Near East, kinship terms are used alongside divine elements in personal names as “divine epithets or appellatives.”³⁰ Certain epithets, such as “paternal uncle” and “father-in-law,” are seen abundantly with ‘ēl but never with YHWH. In contrast, “brother” is attested at least 28 times with YHWH but never with ‘ēl.³¹ YHWH is, emphatically, “the divine brother,” in contrast to El whose profile is more “parental and ancestral.”³²

Based off of these unique emphases, Thomas summarizes what he takes to be the overall difference between YHWH and El: “YHWH is implied to be more of an active, young, interventionist, and warrior deity, whose lordship must be asserted, whereas El is more transcendent, abstract, and secure in his authoritative position.”³³ Thomas’s ultimate conclusion on this is we should consider the possibility YHWH and ‘ēl were actually just still separate deities throughout the monarchic period for both Israel and Judah.

There may also be distinctions made between YHWH and El in other late Iron Age epigraphic data. Kuntillet ‘Ajrud has revealed various inscriptions wherein El is praised. While it has generally been taken for granted that, in these cases, El is to be identified with YHWH, Mark Smith has pointed out this is not necessarily the case. It is equally possible El still referred to the high Canaanite god who is the father of the pantheon.³⁴

The divine elements present in Israelite personal names are clearly of religious significance, but the question remains as to what level of religious significance they occupy. We must recall there are different levels of religion in the Ancient Near East: familial, local, and national. It is not necessarily the case all three of these will cohere, though neither is it necessary they will be incompatible.³⁵ Albertz and Schmitt point to the curious absence of any official Israelite tradition in personal names. There are no references to those specific elements of the Hebrew narrative one might expect if one’s name was intended to express the official national religion: elements such as exodus, conquest, kingship, Sinai, Zion, or Bethel.³⁶ “The primary traditions of official Israelite state and temple religion are thus almost entirely absent from both biblical and epigraphic names.” Nor do official cultic activities make appearances in the predicates.³⁷ It is merely the divine element itself, whether YHWH or ‘ēl, that shows up in personal names.

This absence does not suggest a lack of familiarity or disagreement on the part of everyday Israelites with the official religious traditions of their polity. Though familial religion is distinct from state religion, this difference does not necessarily mean there is a conflict between them.³⁸ It merely reinforces the separation of religious spheres of influence present in most Ancient Near Eastern societies more generally. Albertz uses the term “internal religious pluralism” to describe this phenomenon, which may be more helpful than “syncretism” in describing the ways in which social stratification can create divisions between family and state religion.³⁹ As Dennis Pardee comments, “We may conclude that the proper names inform us of a different and broader pantheon in the popular religion perceivable in the proper names, as compared with the official religion of the Bible and of most of the extra-biblical inscriptions….”⁴⁰ It is thus safe to conclude the religious experiences that resulted in names for children were “almost entirely independent of the official state and temple religion.”⁴¹

Rather than relying on the events of their polity’s collective past, Israelite families contained their own reservoirs of religious experience from which to draw when naming a child. Names were often influenced by the religious experiences of mothers during events surrounding the birth of a child. After giving birth, mothers were mandated to spend a given period of time separated from their families as a “cryptic reflection of the intimate encounter with the divine that has happened during birth.”⁴² It was during this time the mother would come up with a name for the child, often influenced by the religious experiences they had during their period of confinement after the birth. During the joyful reuniting of the mother and new baby with the rest of the family, there was a feast during which the father would have the chance to accept or reject the name chosen by the mother.

Thus, a very robust set of rituals surrounding pregnancy and birth abound in ancient Israel. Indeed, the event of childbirth was an incredibly important time in an Israelite woman’s life, believed to be a supernatural intervention of God.⁴³ As a result, childbirth held incredibly significant events in the life of the entire family. This is substantiated by the large number of personal names that directly refer to the event of childbirth: a remarkable 25.9% of total ancient Israelite personal names contain some reference to birth within their predicates.⁴⁴ The largest subgroup of these names is composed from the verb natan “to give,” such as ‘ēlnatan “‘ēl has given [the child]” and Netanyahu “YHWH has given [the child].”⁴⁵

Thus, it is most reasonable to assume it is the religious piety of the family, especially the mother, that provides the impetus for the inclusion or exclusion of either the YHWH or ‘ēl divine element. The fact there exists such a robust onomasticon for ‘ēl, one able to be distinguished from YHWH, begs the question of interpretation. While it is theoretically possible this incongruence in onomastic profiles is merely an accident of historical discovery, and archeologists may one day unearth more epigraphic data to suggest YHWH and El were indeed conceived of more similarly, it is not likely this “incremental aggregation will dramatically alter the basic picture provided by the biblical record as well as the accumulation of inscriptional material over the last century.”⁴⁶ At any rate, we must reconstruct history with the tools available to us today and be willing to revise them should contradictory evidence come to light.

A deeper understanding of the unique ways in which Ancient Near Easterners conceived of divinity in general is helpful in interpreting these results. I wholeheartedly agree with Thomas there are clearly distinct onomastic profiles associated with YHWH and El. However, I want to challenge the idea distinct onomastic profiles automatically necessitate two ontologically distinct gods. While this is a fairly typical assumption for those of us steeped in Western civilization to make, it is problematic when applied to Ancient Near Eastern religion. Benjamin Sommer helpfully elucidates: “For Ancient Near Eastern religions, gods could have multiple bodies and fluid selves. Greek religion assumed a basic resemblance between mortals and immortals in this respect, whereas Ancient Near Eastern religions posited a radical contrast between them.”⁴⁷ Thus, worship of two differently named gods ought not be blindly taken as an expression of polytheism. In fact, Ancient Near Eastern ideas about gods are better described along a spectrum of fluidity vs. nonfluidity than one of polytheism vs. monotheism.⁴⁸

Sommer points to two sorts of divine fluidity present in the Ancient Near East, the first of which is called “fragmentation.”⁴⁹ Examples exist of multiple gods with a single name who “somehow are and are not the same deity.”⁵⁰ In this sense, one might find different “iterations” of the same god at specific locales. This sort of divine fluidity is found among gods of the same name. A possible allusion to this concept is found in the epigraphic evidence at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, which mentions “YHWH of Teman.”⁵¹ This may have been what the Deuteronomist was targeting in the Shma.⁵²

However, for purposes of conflation of ‘ēl with YHWH, I am more interested in the second sort of fluidity Sommer outlines, involving “the overlap of identity between gods who are usually discrete selves.”⁵³ He continues by describing several Akkadian texts that “describe one god as an aspect of another god,” and others that “refer to two gods as a single god even though the same texts also refer to each of these gods individually.”⁵⁴ Even with gods of two different names, this occurs. One prominent example of this concept of fluidity is found in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish. At one point in this poem, Anu, Ea, and Enlil, the three high gods of Mesopotamia, are all equated with young Marduk.⁵⁵ However, perhaps a more instructive example for our purposes is found in this late-second-millennium hymn to the god Marduk:

Sommer suggests an “incipient monotheism”⁵⁷ in this hymn: while it makes reference to gods other than Marduk, it reveals its writers have begun to conceive of the personalities of these other gods as extensions of Marduk rather than ontologically distinct beings. Given the rampant cultural diffusion in the Ancient Near East, it is thus reasonable to suppose even in their pre-exilic references to ‘ēl, ancient Israelites did not conceive of El as ontologically distinct from YHWH but as a manifestation of a particular grouping of YHWH’s qualities.⁵⁸

Therefore, it is possible in drawing upon the older figure of El in the naming of their children, Israelites of the late Iron Age were actually making a statement about YHWH: mapping onto him characteristics that had, up until that point, been associated only with El. The ancient Israelites were no strangers to the fact El originally referred to the high Canaanite father of the divine pantheon. This would have been a deliberate move that would have expanded rather than constricted the repertoire of YHWH.

This is reasonable partly because it is precisely the move the biblical authors would eventually fully make in explaining Israel’s prior worship of El. The qualities that once belonged to El are mapped onto YHWH in new ways that reinforce the new understanding of YHWH’s transcendence and lordship over all. For example, the Psalmist equates YHWH with Elyon, an epithet hitherto used only of El.⁵⁹ When Israel adopted YHWH as its chief god rather than El, it did not break whole cloth from previous worship traditions. Instead, as Smith states, “At a variety of sites, Yahweh was incorporated into the older figure El, who belonged to Israel’s original West Semitic religious heritage.”⁶⁰ The title ‘ēl berit, “El of the covenant,” became a signifier for YHWH.⁶¹ When YHWH first reveals his name in Exodus 3, he does so while implying Israel’s ancestors had worshipped him under a different name.⁶²

To make this statement is emphatically not to suggest YHWH and El were essentially interchangeable in the minds of ancient Israelites at the time of the late Iron Age. Again, there does not appear to be firm evidence denoting this phenomenon until after the exile. What I am instead proposing is an intermediate step between the Israelite familial worship of El as a fluid deity and the worship of YHWH as a non-fluid deity: one in which specific states of being and activities traditionally attributed to El are beginning to be thought of as expressions of YHWH’s power. Just as Adad is called the expression of Marduk’s might, so perhaps El had begun to be conceived of as the expression of YHWH’s transcendence.

There is precedent for such a fluid understanding of divinity within ancient Israel as well. Pardee comments:

Moreover, besides the name of the state deity Yahweh, there were several other acceptable divine names which could have been preferred names in one family or clan; these may even have been perceived as separate deities or hypostates — a situation comparable in some ways to the Christian trinity, which theologians have explained to acolytes as consisting of a three-fold expression of one (or the like), but which a significant number of Christians go on understanding simply as three.⁶³

These words are rich with meaning, particularly as we seek to conceive of possible relationships between ancient Israelite worship and Christian theology. Though non-fluid understandings of the divine appear to be quite foreign to many of our contemporary western and Christian notions of divinity, there may be less of this distance than is typically supposed. The concept of the Trinity, that God is somehow both three-in-one and one-in-three, has become central to Christian identity. In Trinitarian theology, it is said each person both is God and yet is not identical to the other persons. To the post-Enlightenment western rationalist, this seems to be an insurmountable illogical denial of the logical property of commutative identity. However, this understanding of divine possibility may have fit especially well in the mind of an ancient Israelite.

One God with multiple personalities, each carrying out a distinct function, can be seen as a parallel to non-fluid ancient Israelite understandings of YHWH and El. It is beyond the scope of this paper to speculate as to whether these ancient notions of non-fluidity played any sort of causal historical role in the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. All the same, we are able to look back on such notions and see definitive parallels in contemporary understandings of a Christian God who is, in some sense, fluid. That such echoes of fluidity persist in Christian theology helpfully collapses some of the distance between the late Iron Age Israelite worship and contemporary religious practice.

The process of pantheon reduction by which YHWH assumed his place as non-fluid Lord of the whole universe was a complex, centuries-long process in Israel. Studying this process, however, is more than mere intellectual gymnastics, and is of value to the Christian theologian. For some, the fact YHWH achieved his place in Israelite history through a slow, meandering process is a threat to YHWH’s power. However, there are other theological angles from which to view this historical development. When Ancient Israelites began to transfer worship to YHWH previously offered to El, they were making a statement that reflected their evolving knowledge of God that preserved the glorious process of an evolving awareness of the totality of God’s power. YHWH is not only the immanent advocate and brother, but is also the transcendent, immensely powerful Father, enjoying power over all of creation. That God is revealed incrementally to God’s people in ways they are able to perceive is a timeless principle of Christian theology, one we would do well to remember still today.

Endnotes