The genius of the being who pretended to be god [circa 1200 B.C.-1000 B.C.]

Copyright 2021, InterAmerica, Inc.

At some point in the Bronze Age, generally considered to be 3100 B.C. to the Iron Age 500 B.C. (approximately), around 1200 B.C. I’m suggesting, when exalted beings of various kinds were acknowledged to be extant (scholars tell us), an entity separated himself as god: Yahweh, or El Shaddai, El Berith, and other epithets.

(I’ll offer more on the many names of Yahweh upcoming, but for now I want to make a point – my main point I think – for this paper/insertion here.)

In the midst of some kind of worship of these exalted or venerated beings – which scholars generally treat as actual entities, with human characteristics or being (see below) – one took it upon himself to declare that he was god, the only god, with no other gods “before him.” [Exodus 20:2 and Deuteronomy 5:6]

The problem, for me, is that there is no etymological source for the word “god” – none.

How did this Yahweh come up with the word “god” or the idea itself?

The attribution of god to describe the many personages so designated came at a later date but even that is not known; that is, no one knows how the idea or word for god came into usage or meaning.

And as for the cult of Yahweh or Yahwism, the editors Jürgen van Oorschot and Markus Witte of The Origins of Yahwism [Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, 2019] write:

 “The present volume cannot deliver a clear and indisputable answer to the question of the historical beginning and origin of the worship of YHWH. The findings of the history of religion are too fragmentary, and the capacity of literary and reception historical analyses and extra-biblical sources are too limited, to designate historically the time and place where YHWH worship begins. [Introduction, XI]

But there is, indeed, ample evidence and scholarship that provides the place and time when the entity Yahweh declares he is god, and proceeds to act out, what humans in the Middle East area where Yahweh operates come to think are, divine or superhuman acts.

“Yahweh is neither the high god who initiated the who arrangement, nor one of the ‘sons of Bull’ … He is a rogue god, operating in the desert, outside the regular orbit of divine intervention. From here, he goes on to lead the people into the arable land, thus encroaching upon his better-known peers … He proves to be  different kind of god altogether – so different, in fact, that he can effectively make the claim: ‘I, Even I, am he; there is no god besides me’ (verse 39). YHWH started out as an outsider in the world of the gods, but he ends up robbing all the others of their raison d’être.” [A Note on the Text of Deuteronomy xxxii 8, Jan Joosten, Brill, Vetus Testamentum, 2007, 548-555]  

RR