Yahweh—God of the Hebrews

96:1.1The early Semites re­garded ev­ery­thing as be­ing in­dwelt by a spirit. There were spir­its of the an­i­mal and veg­etable worlds; an­nual spir­its, the lord of progeny; spir­its of fire, wa­ter, and air; a ver­i­ta­ble pan­theon of spir­its to be feared and wor­shiped. And the teach­ing of Mel­chiz­e­dek re­gard­ing a Uni­ver­sal Cre­ator never fully de­stroyed the be­lief in these sub­or­di­nate spir­its or na­ture gods.

96:1.2The prog­ress of the He­brews from poly­the­ism through heno­the­ism to mono­the­ism was not an un­bro­ken and con­tin­u­ous con­cep­tual de­vel­op­ment. They ex­pe­ri­enced many ret­ro­gres­sions in the evo­lu­tion of their De­ity con­cepts, while dur­ing any one epoch there ex­isted vary­ing ideas of God among dif­fer­ent groups of Semite be­liev­ers. From time to time nu­mer­ous terms were ap­plied to their con­cepts of God, and in or­der to pre­vent con­fu­sion these var­i­ous De­ity ti­tles will be de­fined as they per­tain to the evo­lu­tion of Jew­ish the­ol­ogy:

96:1.31. Yah­weh was the god of the south­ern Pales­tinian tribes, who as­so­ci­ated this con­cept of de­ity with Mount Ho­reb, the Sinai vol­cano. Yah­weh was merely one of the hun­dreds and thou­sands of na­ture gods which held the at­ten­tion and claimed the wor­ship of the Semitic tribes and peo­ples.

96:1.42. El Elyon. For cen­turies af­ter Mel­chiz­e­dek’s so­journ at Salem his doc­trine of De­ity per­sisted in var­i­ous ver­sions but was gen­er­ally con­noted by the term El Elyon, the Most High God of heaven. Many Semites, in­clud­ing the im­me­di­ate de­scen­dants of Abra­ham, at var­i­ous times wor­shiped both Yah­weh and El Elyon.

96:1.53. El Shad­dai. It is dif­fi­cult to ex­plain what El Shad­dai stood for. This idea of God was a com­pos­ite de­rived from the teach­ings of Amen­emope’s Book of Wis­dom mod­i­fied by Ikh­na­ton’s doc­trine of Aton and fur­ther in­flu­enced by Mel­chiz­e­dek’s teach­ings em­bod­ied in the con­cept of El Elyon. But as the con­cept of El Shad­dai per­me­ated the He­brew mind, it be­came thor­oughly col­ored with the Yah­weh be­liefs of the desert.

96:1.6One of the dom­i­nant ideas of the re­li­gion of this era was the Egyp­tian con­cept of di­vine Prov­i­dence, the teach­ing that ma­te­rial pros­per­ity was a re­ward for serv­ing El Shad­dai.

96:1.74. El. Amid all this con­fu­sion of ter­mi­nol­ogy and hazi­ness of con­cept, many de­vout be­liev­ers sin­cerely en­deav­ored to wor­ship all of these evolv­ing ideas of di­vin­ity, and there grew up the prac­tice of re­fer­ring to this com­pos­ite De­ity as El. And this term in­cluded still other of the Bed­ouin na­ture gods.

96:1.85. Elo­him. In Kish and Ur there long per­sisted Sume­rian-Chaldean groups who taught a three-in-one God con­cept founded on the tra­di­tions of the days of Adam and Mel­chiz­e­dek. This doc­trine was car­ried to Egypt, where this Trin­ity was wor­shiped un­der the name of Elo­him, or in the sin­gu­lar as Eloah. The philo­sophic cir­cles of Egypt and later Alexan­drian teach­ers of He­braic ex­trac­tion taught this unity of plu­ral­is­tic Gods, and many of Moses’ ad­vis­ers at the time of the ex­o­dus be­lieved in this Trin­ity. But the con­cept of the trini­tar­ian Elo­him never be­came a real part of He­brew the­ol­ogy un­til af­ter they had come un­der the po­lit­i­cal in­flu­ence of the Baby­lo­ni­ans.

96:1.96. Sundry names. The Semites dis­liked to speak the name of their De­ity, and they there­fore re­sorted to nu­mer­ous ap­pel­la­tions from time to time, such as: The Spirit of God, The Lord, The An­gel of the Lord, The Al­mighty, The Holy One, The Most High, Adonai, The An­cient of Days, The Lord God of Is­rael, The Cre­ator of Heaven and Earth, Kyrios, Jah, The Lord of Hosts, and The Fa­ther in Heaven.

96:1.10Je­ho­vah is a term which in re­cent times has been em­ployed to des­ig­nate the com­pleted con­cept of Yah­weh which fi­nally evolved in the long He­brew ex­pe­ri­ence. But the name Je­ho­vah did not come into use un­til fif­teen hun­dred years af­ter the times of Je­sus.

96:1.11Up to about 2000 B.C., Mount Sinai was in­ter­mit­tently ac­tive as a vol­cano, oc­ca­sional erup­tions oc­cur­ring as late as the time of the so­journ of the Is­raelites in this re­gion. The fire and smoke, to­gether with the thun­der­ous det­o­na­tions as­so­ci­ated with the erup­tions of this vol­canic moun­tain, all im­pressed and awed the Bed­ou­ins of the sur­round­ing re­gions and caused them greatly to fear Yah­weh. This spirit of Mount Ho­reb later be­came the god of the He­brew Semites, and they even­tu­ally be­lieved him to be su­preme over all other gods.

96:1.12The Ca­naan­ites had long revered Yah­weh, and al­though many of the Ken­ites be­lieved more or less in El Elyon, the super­god of the Salem re­li­gion, a ma­jor­ity of the Ca­naan­ites held loosely to the wor­ship of the old tribal de­i­ties. They were hardly will­ing to aban­don their na­tional de­i­ties in fa­vor of an in­ter­na­tional, not to say an in­ter­plan­e­tary, God. They were not uni­ver­sal-de­ity minded, and there­fore these tribes con­tin­ued to wor­ship their tribal de­i­ties, in­clud­ing Yah­weh and the sil­ver and golden calves which sym­bol­ized the Bed­ouin herders’ con­cept of the spirit of the Sinai vol­cano.

96:1.13The Syr­i­ans, while wor­ship­ing their gods, also be­lieved in Yah­weh of the He­brews, for their proph­ets said to the Syr­ian king: “Their gods are gods of the hills; there­fore they were stronger than we; but let us fight against them on the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they.”

96:1.14As man ad­vances in cul­ture, the lesser gods are sub­or­di­nated to a su­preme de­ity; the great Jove per­sists only as an ex­cla­ma­tion. The mono­the­ists keep their sub­or­di­nate gods as spir­its, demons, fates, Nereids, fairies, brown­ies, dwarfs, ban­shees, and the evil eye. The He­brews passed through heno­the­ism and long be­lieved in the ex­is­tence of gods other than Yah­weh, but they in­creas­ingly held that these for­eign de­i­ties were sub­or­di­nate to Yah­weh. They con­ceded the ac­tu­al­ity of Chemosh, god of the Amor­ites, but main­tained that he was sub­or­di­nate to Yah­weh.

96:1.15The idea of Yah­weh has un­der­gone the most ex­ten­sive de­vel­op­ment of all the mor­tal the­o­ries of God. Its pro­gres­sive evo­lu­tion can only be com­pared with the meta­mor­pho­sis of the Bud­dha con­cept in Asia, which in the end led to the con­cept of the Uni­ver­sal Ab­so­lute even as the Yah­weh con­cept fi­nally led to the idea of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther. But as a mat­ter of his­toric fact, it should be un­der­stood that, while the Jews thus changed their views of De­ity from the tribal god of Mount Ho­reb to the lov­ing and mer­ci­ful Cre­ator Fa­ther of later times, they did not change his name; they con­tin­ued all the way along to call this evolv­ing con­cept of De­ity, Yah­weh.