Who is Yahweh? The origins of the monotheistic deity. p1
I am choosing to split this into two parts because of the length. Part two will consist of theories as to who Yahweh was before being Yahweh. Given the attributes assigned, the shift from a name to another name suggests that Yahweh was originally something else completely.
Yahweh is the Abrahamic deity central to the theology of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Christians call him God or Jehovah. Islam calls him Allah. Yahweh's origins are in the ancient Levant, and took the later stronghold in in ancient Judah and Israel, but worship of the deity goes back to the late bronze age and early iron age.
It seems that Yahweh also had another name earlier in his existence.. Shaddai, or El Shaddai meant “God of the Mountains/Wilderness” which was a local deity of the Zion and Sinai areas. Apparently at some point people decided to change the meaning of El to “Almighty” and Shadad to “strong”. Original hebrew shows only one dalet- שד and not two. Greek translators translated the word to “Sufficient One” and not “Almighty” probably because they did not know what it meant, or that it was replacing the mountainous origin. Shaddai itself comes from a semitic root of “shadu” meaning mountain. Shaday means wilderness. It's quite possible that El Shaddai is the earliest root of Yahwism. Both gods are in the same area, and we find the earliest known inscriptions mentioning Yahweh as the god of the Shashu tribe. The Shashu people were semitic nomads who lived in the Sinai region. El Shaddai appears to be a loan word from the language of the ancient Israelites of the Iron Age. There exists a Ugaritic inscription from the 13th century BCE that translated says “El Shadai is hunting” or “God (of the) Wilderness/mountains is hunting”. An almost identical epithet for Amurru also exists, in the Babylonian area. Bel Shaddai. Lord of the Mountain. (Courtesy of Brill/Urecht University.
Yahweh as a name is composed of four hebrew consonants, YHWH and the translations of the name are often understood to mean various things. Some of the meanings include: He that is, He who makes that which has been made, I am, He brings the hosts into existance. According to the ancient rabbi Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) Yahweh “denotes absolute existence” in the world. Originally, the name of this “supreme deity” was considered too holy to be spoken, hence the use of the consonants being used to remind Yahweh worshippers to use “adonai” in place of the deity's name. This was a common practice thoughout the near east where epithets were used in referencing this deity. All the details were applied to Yahweh after he became the god of Judaism.
In some of the oldest biblical texts, Yahweh is given attributes that were typically given to storm gods and war gods. These texts also claim that Yahweh lead heavenly armies against the real enemies of the ancient Israelites. Most scholars believe that before Yahweh became the monotheistic god he is known as, that polytheistic worship was used in much of the ancient Levant region, making the chances of Yahweh originally being part of a pantheon of deities high. It is clear that ancient Yahwism developed into Judaism and Samaritanism and shifted from the deity being the more revered deity of a polytheistic pantheon, to the monotheistic deity we know today. Yahweh is also invoked in a historical dialect of Aramaic in ancient Egypt, in the Amherst 63 Papyrus.
Philip J. King, a Roman Catholic priest, archaeologist and historian places the history of Yahweh into the following periods of history. Late Bronze Age from 1550-1200BCE, Iron Age 1200-586BCE, Neo-Babylonian period from 586-539BCE and the Persian period from 539-332BCE. Lawrence Stager, an An American academic and archaeologist who specialized specifically in Syro-Palestinian AND biblical archaeology also places Yahweh in these time periods. Most other academics used the “First Temple” period in 957-586BCE, the exile period from 586-539BCE, and the “Second Temple” period from 515-70BCE.
Some of the other Levantine and early Israelite deities were: El, Astarte (or Asherah), and Baal. It's possible that the oldest god in the ancient pantheon was El. In fact, the word Israel translates to “he who strives with El” The hebrew bible confirms the ancient Israelites worshipping other gods. Theology wants everyone to believe that ancient Israel constantly backslid from a promise or covenant they made with Yahweh at Sinai. The behavior of these ancient people is not of a moment of forgetfulness (numerous times) to a covenant they made. Rather, they behaved exactly like other cultures of the time. They had gods and goddesses and prayed to whichever one tended to be more favored in the area, or prayed to whichever deity was the most likely to help them in their time of need.
It is most likely that the origin of Yahweh was in ancient Edom, but some scholars believe the cult of Yahweh took hold in the northern Irsrael kingdom, though biblical records show that worship made less headway in the north in comparison with the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah. Keep in mind that the biblical records is the book of Kings, and was largely written by the southern kingdom, of which Judah and the kingdom of Israel were rivals at the time. The capital of Jerusalem in Judah was also the site of Yahweh's temple and served as the headquarters of the priesthood. It isn't exactly clear when Yahwists decided they wanted to eliminate the deities competing with Yahweh and their respective priesthoods, but for much of the history of Judah, the priests of Yahweh tried their hardest to get their kings to rid all traces of the other deities in their kingdom. It seems that the success of these priests were only in intermittent traces. King Hezekiah took away the “high places” where the pantheon was worshipped; his son Manasseh put them back and set up altars to the other deities in the temple of Yahweh. In 622, Josiah, the grandson of Manasseh worked to wipe out any traces of the other deities his grandfather had encouraged to the point of taking vessels made for Ba'al and Ashera out of the temple and burning them. He tore down numerous pillars and poles dedicated to other deities throughout Judah and killed their priests. Josiah even smashed altars to Ashtoreth and other gods that had supposedly stood on the hills around Jerusalem since King Solomon's days, according to the book of Kings.
Josiah's reforms actually mark a high point in the Yahweh cult's domination of the kingdom, but the reforms did not last. According to the lore in the hebrew bible, Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt slew Josiah in battle in 609BCE, placing Josiah's son Jehoahaz in place, and within three months, Necho deposed Jehoahaz and replaced him with another man named Jehoiakim. This replacement reigned for eleven years and during that time, he “did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord, as all his fathers had done” (2 Kings). In more simple terminology, from the period after Josiah down tot he Babylonian captivity, the Yahweh cult tolerated some other cults within the larger framework of the majority cult.
The Babylonian captivity was the punishment of Judah's rebellions against their vassalage. Babylonia and Egypt apparently took turns being a vassal state of each due to it being between both kingdoms. In 597BCE, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia beseiged Jerusalem and took most of the elite out of the city, sentencing them to exile. He also apparently took most of the Yahwist priests and exiled them before installing a new king to be lord of this vassal state. Eleven years later, this king named Zedekiah tried to switch his allegiance to Egypt and the vassal state had enough. Nebuchadnezzar apparently came back, and burnt the temple of Yahweh to the ground as well as Jerusalem, killed Zedekiah's sons in front of him, gouged out Zedekiah's eyes, and then exiled him and the few elite he spared to exile. It seems at this point during the exile period that the cult of Yahweh was finally able to exert the final push to solidify Yahweh from just a polytheistic deity to a Monolatry deity, for they suggest that it was Yahweh that ordered the Babylonians to come in and bring all of this ruin to the Israelites.