(no subject)
Reading the OT makes me feel like a Marcionite or an atheist. In my head, I've compiled all I've read from, supposedly reputable sources, and this is what's clanging around in my noggin':
YHWH is clearly a Semitic desert god of war and El, Elohim, El Shaddai, El Elyon, Eloah etc. are all names for a Canaanite mountain deity. (These names, of course, also mean simply "God" and are cognate with the Arabic "Allah" and thus the Semitic roots of El probably go right back into the earliest history of the Semitic peoples.) They were merged together at some point in Israelite history, probably right after the downfall of the Canaanite city states. When the disenfranchised Canaanites abandoned the great city states and began the project of building the more egalitarian Israelite society, they were joined by Canaanite slaves who had escaped from Egypt and on their travels back to Canaan, those slaves had stopped by the land of the Midianites and picked up their god, YHW. YHWH and El were merged, as often happens in ancient pagan cults, and he was worshiped as the chief deity of early Israelite settlements, a king deity of a council of other deities, other elohim. Overtime, probably after the Israelite settlements had coalesced into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, a minority group of Israelites, probably the elite aristocracy or priestly class began a spiritual civil-war for the hearts of their kinsmen; they pushed monotheism. By the time of the post-Exilic return to Israel, these monotheists were the majority and they doctored, edited and compiled the documents containing the stories of their tribal ancestors and in doing so, they projected their own monotheistic views to these earliest tribal chieftains. These were handed down throughout the centuries, down to the age of the coming of Alexander the Great.
Amidst the centuries of Hellenic influence of Alexandrian conquest of the Promised Land, the Jews were exposed to the philosophical monotheism of late Greek antiquity. The hellenised Jews that engaged in philosophy attempted to reconcile the loft Platonic, transcendent deity who contains within himself all perfections with their contemporary version of YHWH.
YHWH is clearly a Semitic desert god of war and El, Elohim, El Shaddai, El Elyon, Eloah etc. are all names for a Canaanite mountain deity. (These names, of course, also mean simply "God" and are cognate with the Arabic "Allah" and thus the Semitic roots of El probably go right back into the earliest history of the Semitic peoples.) They were merged together at some point in Israelite history, probably right after the downfall of the Canaanite city states. When the disenfranchised Canaanites abandoned the great city states and began the project of building the more egalitarian Israelite society, they were joined by Canaanite slaves who had escaped from Egypt and on their travels back to Canaan, those slaves had stopped by the land of the Midianites and picked up their god, YHW. YHWH and El were merged, as often happens in ancient pagan cults, and he was worshiped as the chief deity of early Israelite settlements, a king deity of a council of other deities, other elohim. Overtime, probably after the Israelite settlements had coalesced into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, a minority group of Israelites, probably the elite aristocracy or priestly class began a spiritual civil-war for the hearts of their kinsmen; they pushed monotheism. By the time of the post-Exilic return to Israel, these monotheists were the majority and they doctored, edited and compiled the documents containing the stories of their tribal ancestors and in doing so, they projected their own monotheistic views to these earliest tribal chieftains. These were handed down throughout the centuries, down to the age of the coming of Alexander the Great.
Amidst the centuries of Hellenic influence of Alexandrian conquest of the Promised Land, the Jews were exposed to the philosophical monotheism of late Greek antiquity. The hellenised Jews that engaged in philosophy attempted to reconcile the loft Platonic, transcendent deity who contains within himself all perfections with their contemporary version of YHWH.