Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet we accept them.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Patriarchs 1.1

The Patriarchal narratives are ideology not history.
Professor P Kyle McCarter Jr

Canaanites, Hebrews or Israelites?
The Patriarchal Tradition
Yehouah or El?

Abstract

Hebrew is synonymous with Israelite and Jew, so these people have three names. Odd? “Hebrew” means the Israelites who escape from Egypt, but was the name of the people of Abram in use hundreds of years before the Exodus, even in biblical chronology. Mesopotamia is Greek for “between the rivers”, the northern part of modern Iraq, from the point of narrowing between the rivers to their source. It is the Syrian plain where the cities of Urfa and Harran are situated. Mesopotamia is the biblical Aram-naharaim, Aram of the rivers, the region between the Euphrates and the river Khabur. It is the country of origin of the family of Abraham. When Abram is called “the Hebrew” in Genesis, the Septuagint has “Perates”, meaning “Euphrates”. The translators of the Septuagint knew “Hebrew” was to do with crossing the river Euphrates.

Canaanites, Hebrews or Israelites?

Few scholars today can honestly see any sign of a conquest of Canaan by an external people. Some argue that the Israelites conquered Canaan from within by a rebellion. A group of people cannot emerge within a larger common group and then have an ethnic identity different from the rest. The claim can be made but it could not be true. Why then should a group of natives make such a claim? All of their contemporaries would have known it was false. The claim could only have been made for some reason at a much later date, when no one could dispute it.

And as long ago as 1878, Julius Wellhausen said that the Pentateuch gives us “no historical knowledge of the patriarchs, but only of the time the stories of them emerged…” This time was after the conquests of the Persian kings when Cyrus and his successors decided to set up Palestine as a loyal buffer state against Egypt. The reason was the instrument the shahs used to achieve their objective—by transporting into Palestine people loyal to the God of Heaven, the Persian universal god. Certainly the narratives written in the fifth century doubtless used names and themes familiar to the indigenous people of Palestine, and changes were made later as successive generations of Persian administrators were sent to carry out the policy. Further changes were made by the Maccabees after their war of independence.

But a central theme was always that the Jews were people that had come into Canaan from outside with a refined god, and had had to combat native religions, and tendencies to go native, ever after. The original Jews indeed came from the banks of the Euphrates, not in 2000 BC, but in the fifth century BC.

The Patriarchal Tradition

The Abraham myth could not have been purely invented, but had to be based on an extant tradition. The people who really could have had such a tradition could not have been from the south of the Levant. They had to be from the north of it and Syria. Why then should northern myths appear in the south other than that northerners were deported to the south? They then wrote a myth based on an extant tradition using old gods as ethnic markers of themselves, and their actual experience of moving from the Euphrates to Judah.

Isaac had no proper mythology associated with himself and seems to have been introduced largely as a warning not to sacrifice children. The two patriarchs remaining are Abraham and Jacob. When it came to writing a history, the Deuteronomists found that no Judah was mentioned in Persian archives, but Israel and Samaria were. They overcame the problem by identifying Jacob quite artificially with Israel. So, Jacob became the founder of Israel under his new name, and, through being the father of twelve other founders, he founded Judah too. This scheme implies that Judah emerged from Israel, and not an equal, or even the same, as Judaism subsequently taught. The history of the two countries shows that Judah succeeded Israel and was hardly ever contemporary with it.

Abraham seems to have been a northern god, and possibly envisaged by the Persian administration, influenced by the early colonists, as the founder god of the people of Abarnahara, who would be called Hebrews. Rivalries between the colonists and the locals showed this to have been impossible. It was imposing a god on the Canaanites, and it was easier to restore a local god than to impose a new one. The colonists had to make their god El, and persuade the locals that they had been worshipping him wrongly. Even that, though, did not work because a large number of locals preferred Yehouah not El as the accessible god, and ultimately Yehouah was the choice. It suggests that the first century of colonial settlement of Yehud was chaotic, and it was only really sorted out after the Egyptian rebellion of the middle of the fifth century—probably with local support—with the arrival of the Persian minister Nehemiah, and, to consecrate the changes, the Persian minister, Ezra. That is when the bible began to be written.

The stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are unparallelled in their time and are equalled only by the stories in Herodotus about particular people like Gigas, Croesus and Tamiris. At the supposed time of Abraham, around 2000 BC, even great nations like Sumer and Agade did not record such elaborate stories about their founding heroes as prose sagas. What they did was to write poems about Sargon and Naram-Suen (Naram-Sin), usually not long ones. The epic of the mythical hero, Gilgamesh, is a long poem, but few would see it as a model for the Abraham stories.

Herodotus, however, wrote about the history of the Persians, who had not long before conquered Babylon and so had acquired her empire whoich covered all the lands travelled by Abraham including Judah, yet had nothing to say about any of the biblical characters, even though such ancient and extraordinary stories were even then a thousand years old. The straightforward explanation is that these stories were written after Herodotus wrote, and they used his accounts as a model.

Of the people of the ancient Near East, the ones who were particularly fond of stories of eponymous fathers of nations were the Greeks and the Jews. The same applied to the fondness for the genealogies that accompanied the founding father stories, used to prove nobility of stock, true ethnicity, or even descent from a god. Giovanni Garbini does not see this curiosity as coincidental.

The earliest Greek genealogy was that of Acusilaus in the sixth century BC followed by Hecataios of Miletus, and Pherecydes, about the time of Herodotus. The intermediary, assuming there was no direct contact, must have been the Persians. The Persians occupied the intellectual cities of the Greeks in Asia Minor, and employed myriads of Greeks in all ranks and capacities. Greeks employed at the Persian court must have been familiar with Herodotus, who must have been the fashion of his day, by the end of the fifth century, and the Persian ministries must have been able to write a bogus history of the Jewish colonists based on the model of Herodotus. Moreover, it does not seem at all unlikely that some of the Persian colonists deported to Yehud were Greeks, particularly around 400 BC when Xenophon’s mercenary army hired by the rebel, Cyrus the Younger, was defeated by Artaxerxes II, and had to fight a long retreat. Captured Greeks might have been sent to the new temple State of Yehud.

Yehouah or El?

The Israelites had been wont to call their deity El Shadday before they knew the name Yahweh.
Exodus 6:3

Some think that El worship will have fused easily with Yahwism.
B S J Isserlin, The Israelites

As long ago as the beginning of the twentieth century, H Gunkel, H Greissman and K Gallig showed that the three patriarchs, Abram, Isaac and Jacob, were associated with different places, respectively Judah, Edom and Israel, each associated with a different shrine and population. The altar set up by Abram at Shechem suggests that this was the site of the original shrine of the “returners”.

Jacob is not a Hebrew verb, though it is taken to mean “Yehouah or El Rewards”, but in Arabic its cognate means “to protest”. Jacob is described as grappling with God at the Jabbok river (Gen 32:24-29) or at Bethel (Gen 35:10) and was renamed Israel, an allegorical reference to the struggle between Yehouah worshippers and El worshippers in which Yehouah replaces El as the Almighty (El Shaddai) or the Highest (El Elyon). It is mentioned in Hosea 12:2-3. Jacob is a dialect form of Yehouah (“c”=“h”, “b”=“v”=“w”).

The story explains why Jacob was blessed by God and became Israel. The change of name explains why a country that worshipped Yehouah was called Israel, a name that refers to El as their god, though, conceivably, it is a relic of an early setback for the Yehouah faction before they ultimately succeeded. The original story of the return was centred on Israel as an appropriate name for all the followers of the god El. Actually, it is only a slightly altered aetiological explanation of the custom of swearing a bond by grasping the testicles, the origin of words like “testify” and “testament”. To touch the “hollow of his thigh” was to touch his testicles, a biblical euphemism (Gen 24:9).

Many of the Patriarchs seem to have worshipped El rather than Yehouah, though at different shrines—el-Betel (Gen 31:13; 35:7), el-Olam and el-Roi (Gen 21:33) and el-Elyon (Gen 14:13). El-Shaddai, el-Berith and baal-Berith also appear. Some Biblicists claim that such signs that Abraham and his descendants worshipped gods other than Yehouah shows antiquity. They take it that the worship of El, the Canaanite high god as discovered at Ugarit in fourteenth century tablets puts the Patriarchs back at least that far. Once again Biblicist arguments turn out to be special pleading. The early “returners” aimed to set up a religion based on El or Elyon as the God of Heaven, because that is what he was to the Canaanites, and these people deported from elsewhere in the Persian empire into Palestine will obviopusly have worshipped other gods different from Yehouah before they were resettled in Palestine. El was worshipped in Canaan for centuries, so long that El came simply to mean God. The Jacob stories seem to tell of the conversion of El worshippers at the sanctuaries of Penuel, Bethel and Shechem.

Yehouah was identified with El, the supreme god of the Canaanite pantheon… In many Semitic languages, the word “El” is both the name of a specific deity and the generic name for “god”.
G Garbini

Yaubidi, who appears in the Assyrian annals, also is recorded as Ilubidi. It suggests that “yau” and “ilu” might have been synonyms, both meaning God. Garbini highlights an inscription at Kirbet Beit Lei which read “yh yhwh”, a mysterious phrase that turns up in Isaiah (12:2, 26:4) and translated “Lord Yehouah”. More likely is that the final “heh” in “Yehouah” could be a possessive pronominal suffix rendering it as “Our Yehou”. If Yehou meant Lord, as Yehouah is mainly translated, then it means “Our Lord”! If there were some other referent present, then it would refer to them, whoever it was. So, “Yehouah Elohim” would refer “Yehou” to “Elohim” and the meaning is literally “Their Yehou the Gods”, or “Yehou of the Gods”. If “Yehou” means “Lord” then it is “Lord of the Gods”, and Yehou is identified with El! Then, “yh yhwh” would mean “Yah Our Lord”, perhaps “the Lord Our Lord”.

It is really remarkably obvious, but suggests that El was called “Our Lord”, just as the Judaeo-Christian god is, but that it was used for El for so long that people began to think that “Our Lord” in the form “Yehouah” was the name of God, and even another god, different from El! So, the rivalry of Yehouah and El might stretch way back into second millennium Syria, but merely as a preference for the name or the title.

Each Canaanite city or nation had their own Baal, usually given to mean “Lord”, a local son of El assigned to the people as their representative in the heavenly court. Deuteronomy 32 depicts the history of Israel as beginning with Yehouah assigned to Jacob-Israel by the Most High in the assembly of “the sons of El”—not “the sons of Israel”, a desperate later effort to avoid embarrassment:

When Elyon divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set up the bounds of the peoples, according to the number of the sons of Israel (El). For Yehouah’s portion is His people. Jacob is the lot of His inheritance.
Dt 32:8-9

Or, “For Our Lord’s portion is His people”. All nations had a son of El to represent them. Yehouah, Our Lord, is clearly denoted as a lesser god than El, yet later he is the only god! For the Jews, He is “Our Lord”, their Lord and God, but so too each god of each people would be “Our Lord” to them. So, an alternative explanation is that “Yehouah Elohim” was the title of each nation’s representative god in the council of El, and so too was the title of the Jewish god, whose name was too secret to be known, and has actually been lost. The title has become the name. The son of El who stood for the Jewish nation challenged for the supremacy of the father, and then there must have been rival factions since otherwise one or the other would have become supreme. In this outlook, Baal (Ba'al) seems not to have meant “Lord” at all, but meant “son of El”, “ba'” equating with the Aramaic “bar”.

The Persian colonists in Yehud settled the name of God in favour of Yehouah, perhaps after an early preference for El. The Persians initially sent “returners” to worship El, that they took to be the local high god, but later they switched to the title, Yehouah, as the preferred local usage. Both were acceptable names of Canaanite gods, but the aim was to change them into the image of Ahuramazda. This, much more convincincingly, explains the biblical data than a childlike faith in the myths themselves when, under test, they leak like sieves.

Jacob also finally appears (Gen 48:22) as a warrior with a sword and bow conquering the Amorites (Canaanites), seemingly a euphemism for El worshippers. The Assyrians used the word Amurru for the people of the Levant—it meant “Westerners”. For Assyrians, it meant the same as the Hebrews, the people of Eber-nari. The bible uses the name for the natives of Canaan—as a synonym for Canaanites.

It seems the Persian administrators decided, quite early, it would be easier to persuade the people of the hill country to accept Yehouah rather than El as the God of Heaven. Most Palestinians evidently were happier to compromize over the popular Baal called Yehouah than the remote high god called El. Thus it is that Yehouah is a son of El but nevertheless is the absolute God of Heaven! The appropriate name for a country where people worshipped Yehouah was Yehud (Judah). The condemnation of Israel’s apostasy, divine chastisement but the assurance of relief, and the punishment of Israel’s enemies reminds us of Judges 3:7-12:6, and the general purpose of the Deuteronomic Historian. Deuteronomy 32:8f is the first stage of the change of presidency of the divine court from El to Yehouah.

J Tigay has studied the theophoric names on inscribed seals and noted that the overwhelming majority honour Yehouah, none honour the goddesses, Astarte and Asherah, and though Baal does appear, since it is a title (Lord), it could have meant Yehouah anyway, though, in Canaan generally, Baal was Hadad. Even so only 47 per cent of Israelite names included Yehouah. Seven per cent had El, and the remaining 46 per cent alluded to other gods or qualities. These were supposed to have been monotheistic people, but Yehouah was simply their preferred god, not their exclusive one. Equally, Canaanites elsewhere, for whom Yehouah was an appreciated god of the heavenly council, named their children after Yehouah.

The analysis revolves around proper dating of the seals, and, since Palestinian dating is a pig’s ear, that seems unlikely. One could argue a different hypothesis. If the use of Yehouah was made exclusive in the Persian period, then the analysis suggest the majority of these seals would be from that time. The name of any king never appears explicitly on these seals—though king’s names appear—perhaps because Yehud had no king. Yehud was set up by the Persians as a theocracy, and the real king was the shah of Persia.

The J and E traditions detectable, particularly in Genesis, were the result of conflicts between the advocates of each of the two main names of the Canaanite god of Palestine, Yehouah and El. Each faction cast the justification myths for the new religion in terms of their preferred god using the myths of Mesopotamia they had been brought up with, and doubtless they were recited at the different shrines mentioned in the stories. Later the traditions were combined with the name of God accepted as Yehouah. Whether the word El was still retained in part for political reasons or whether it was re-introduced when the scriptures had to be reassembled from fragments is not clear.

Thomas L Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (BZAW, 133; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974).

John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale, 1975).

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Last uploaded: 27 May, 2008.