Is Yahweh the Same as El?

¶ Is Yahweh the Same as El?

Short answer. Not at first, and then completely. El was the high god of the wider Canaanite world, the aged father of the gods known from the tablets of Ugarit, and he is the god in Israel's own name: Yisra-el, not Yisra-yah. Yahweh enters the record separately, first as a name attached to a people in Egyptian lists of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, and in the Bible's oldest poems as a warrior who marches up from the south, from Seir, Teman, Paran and Sinai. Somewhere in Israel's early centuries the two were identified as one god, and the Bible says so in plain words: “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3). One verse of Deuteronomy, in its older wording, still shows the join.

Tier note: that El is the Canaanite high god, that Israel's name is built on El, and that the Bible itself equates El and Yahweh (Exodus 6:2-3, Genesis 33:20) is bedrock, readable in the primary texts. That Yahweh's earliest associations lie south of Israel is strong and widely held, though one 2020 monograph argues the key Egyptian evidence has been over-read. How and when the two were merged is reconstruction, and the page marks it as such.

¶ Two names, two profiles

Begin with El, because he is the better documented of the two. The tablets from Ugarit, a coastal city north of Israel destroyed around 1185 BCE, preserve a whole mythology in a language closely related to Hebrew. In it El is the head of the pantheon: “Bull El”, “the father of years”, “creator of creatures”, “the kindly one, El the compassionate”. He is old, bearded and seated. He lives in a tent at “the source of the two rivers”, presides over the assembly of the gods, and grants or withholds permission when the younger storm god Baal wants a palace. He is not a warrior. He is the one the warriors report to.

Now Yahweh, in the oldest poetry the Hebrew Bible preserves. “Yahweh, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the land of Edom, the earth trembled” (Judges 5:4). “Yahweh came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon us; he shone forth from Mount Paran” (Deuteronomy 33:2). “God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran” (Habakkuk 3:3). “Yahweh is a man of war” (Exodus 15:3). This is a storm-and-battle god whose home ground is the desert south and south-east of Judah, and who comes up from there to fight.

Set side by side, the profiles do not match. One is an old king in a tent at the head of a council; the other is a young fighter arriving from the wilderness. That mismatch is the whole question in miniature.

¶ The name of Israel is an El name

The strongest single piece of evidence is hiding in plain sight. The people are called Yisra-el. The theophoric element, the god's name folded into the people's name, is El, not Yahweh. Genesis 32:28 offers a folk etymology, “you have striven with God”, and whatever the verb means, the god in the name is El. The same is true of the oldest sanctuaries and figures: Beth-el, “house of El”; Penu-el, “face of El”; Ishma-el; Samu-el. When Jacob builds an altar at Shechem he names it “El, the God of Israel” (Genesis 33:20).

The ancestral stories are full of El under local titles. El Shaddai (Genesis 17:1); El Elyon, “God Most High, creator of heaven and earth”, in the mouth of Melchizedek at Salem (Genesis 14:18-22); El Olam, “the everlasting God”, at Beersheba (Genesis 21:33); El Roi at a well (Genesis 16:13); El Bethel (Genesis 35:7). Albrecht Alt argued in 1929 that these began as distinct local cults; later scholarship has mostly read them as titles of the one high god El worshipped at different shrines. Either way, the ancestors' god is El.

Outside the Torah the pattern holds wherever the poetry is old. Balaam, a non-Israelite seer, blesses Israel in the name of El, Elyon and Shaddai in the same breath as Yahweh (Numbers 23:8, 23:19, 23:22, 24:4, 24:16). The Book of Job, set in a non-Israelite world, prefers El, Eloah and Shaddai throughout and keeps the name Yahweh almost entirely to its frame. The Merneptah stele, an Egyptian victory inscription from about 1208 BCE, already knows a people called Israel in Canaan. The name they carried was El's.

One caution, because it is the standard objection and it is fair. El is also the ordinary Hebrew noun for “god”, so not every el in the Bible is the Canaanite high god by name. The cases above are not ordinary nouns: a people's name, an altar's name, a run of titles with the definite shape of a personal god. That is what makes them evidence.

¶ Where Yahweh comes from

Yahweh's tracks outside the Bible begin in Egypt. Temple lists at Soleb in Nubia, carved under Amenhotep III (about 1390 to 1352 BCE), and again at Amarah West under Ramesses II a century later, name the “land of the Shasu of Yhw” alongside the “land of the Shasu of Seir”. The Shasu were tent-dwelling pastoralists of the southern steppe: Edom, the Negev and beyond. This is the earliest appearance of the name anywhere, and it sits exactly where the old poems put Yahweh's home ground.

The next witnesses are ninth and eighth century. The Mesha stele (about 840 BCE) has the king of Moab boasting that he took “the vessels of Yahweh” from the Israelite town of Nebo and dragged them before his own god Chemosh. Inscriptions on storage jars at Kuntillet Ajrud, a caravan station in the Sinai from around 800 BCE, invoke “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman”, each “and his asherah”. Teman is Edomite country again. By this point Yahweh is Israel's national god with regional cults, and he is paired with something, a goddess or a cult object, whose name is that of El's consort at Ugarit.

The Bible gives the southern link a story. Moses meets Yahweh in the wilderness while living with Jethro, a priest of Midian (Exodus 3), and it is Jethro who later offers the sacrifice and eats the meal with Israel's elders (Exodus 18). Since the nineteenth century this has been read as a memory that Yahweh was first worshipped by Midianites or Kenites and adopted by Israel. That is the Midianite hypothesis, the majority reconstruction for a long time. It is not the only one.

Daniel Fleming's Yahweh before Israel (2020) argues that the Egyptian entry names a people rather than a god, and that the god took his name from a group who became part of Israel, which would make the wilderness cult a later story rather than the origin. Frank Moore Cross argued in 1973 that Yahweh began as a title of El himself, something like “El who brings the hosts into being”, so that there was never a second god to merge; most of the field has not followed him, but the proposal is still cited. The southern setting is strong. The mechanism is not settled.

¶ The seam in the text

The Bible does not hide the identification. It states it. In Exodus 6:2-3, in the Priestly strand, God tells Moses: “I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them”. Read plainly, that is a text explaining why the ancestors called their god by one name and the nation by another. The older strand in Exodus 3 does the same job with an etymology, “I am who I am”, tying the new name to the verb “to be”.

One verse shows the join before it was smoothed. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 in the traditional Hebrew text reads: “When the Most High (Elyon) gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. But Yahweh's portion is his people; Jacob is his allotted share”. “Sons of Israel” makes no sense here, since Israel does not yet exist in the story. The Greek Septuagint reads “angels of God”, and a Hebrew fragment from Qumran, 4QDeut^j, reads “sons of God” (bene elohim). The older text says that Elyon divided the nations among the members of the divine council, and that Yahweh's share was Jacob.

On its face that is a scene in which Elyon presides and Yahweh receives an allotment: the shape of El's council at Ugarit, with Yahweh as one of its members. Later readers took Elyon and Yahweh as two names for one God, and the Masoretic “sons of Israel” removed the council altogether. Psalm 82 keeps the same furniture: “God stands in the council of El; among the gods he judges”, and the gods are told they are “sons of Elyon” (Psalm 82:1, 6). Whether the poets already meant one god by both names, or the text records an older stage in which they were two, is exactly the disputed point. What is not disputed is that the council is El's, and that Yahweh is standing in it.

Mark S. Smith calls the process convergence: Yahweh, the incoming warrior, absorbed El's profile, the aged king, the compassionate father, the creator, the head of the council, the dweller in a tent (which the tabernacle tradition remembers). Then a second process, differentiation, pushed the other gods out, and the council became angels. The God of the later Bible is El's character under Yahweh's name.

¶ What this does and does not mean

It does not mean the Bible was caught out. The identification of El and Yahweh is not a modern discovery sprung on the text; the text performs it, in Exodus 6, in Genesis 33, in the ancestral titles. What modern scholarship adds is the outside evidence, Ugarit, Soleb, Mesha, Kuntillet Ajrud, that lets us see the two names as two histories before they became one.

It does mean that monotheism in Israel was arrived at, not assumed. The oldest layer knows a high god with a council and a warrior who joins it. The claim that there is one God and no other is a conclusion the tradition reached, argued for and eventually enforced, and one verse of Deuteronomy carries the scar of the editing. That is the pattern this whole library keeps finding: a costume laid over something older, and the older thing still visible at the seams. See What is the divine council in the Bible? for the council itself and The Seam in the Text for the method.

It also sets the clock for the Persian question this wing is mostly about. The El and Yahweh merger is Iron Age, complete by the eighth century at the latest. The Persian layer, Satan as an adversary, resurrection, a last judgement, is Second Temple, half a millennium later. Different substrate, different century, and the two should not be run together. The Persian material is graded at Did Zoroastrianism influence Judaism?.

Where the field disagrees, in one paragraph. The reading of “his asherah” as a consort is contested; a recent proposal takes the word as a goddess's name without the pronoun, and others as a cult object. Fleming's reading of the Shasu list is a minority position against the Midianite hypothesis. Whether Deuteronomy 32:8-9 describes two gods or one god under two names is argued both ways by serious scholars. This page reports the majority reconstruction and names the dissent, which is the most a sourced summary can honestly do.

¶ Common questions

¶ Is El a different god from Yahweh?

In origin, on the evidence, yes: El is the high god of the Ugaritic texts and the god in Israel's own name, while Yahweh first appears as a name attached to southern pastoralists and, in the oldest biblical poems, as a warrior from Seir and Sinai. In the Bible as we have it, no: Exodus 6:3 identifies them explicitly, and the ancestral titles El Shaddai, El Elyon and El Olam are all read as names of Yahweh. The distinction is between two histories and one finished identity.

¶ What does Elohim mean, and why is it plural?

Elohim is the plural of eloah, “god”, and Hebrew uses it both for “gods” (with plural verbs) and for Israel's God (with singular verbs), a usage grammarians describe as a plural of majesty or abstraction. It is a common noun before it is a name, which is why Psalm 82 can say that Elohim judges among the elohim. It is not by itself evidence of the Trinity, and it is not by itself evidence of polytheism.

¶ Was Yahweh originally a Canaanite god?

Probably not, which is the interesting part. El and Baal are Canaanite and known at Ugarit; Yahweh is absent from the Ugaritic pantheon lists. His earliest tracks run south, to the Shasu of the Egyptian lists and to Seir, Teman and Paran in the old poems. The majority view is that Yahweh entered the Canaanite highlands from the south and merged with El there. Daniel Fleming (2020) disputes the mechanism, not the importance of the southern setting.

¶ Did Yahweh have a wife?

Inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom (eighth century BCE) bless people by “Yahweh and his asherah”. Asherah is El's consort at Ugarit, and the Bible itself records an asherah standing in the Jerusalem temple until Josiah removed it (2 Kings 23:6). Whether the inscriptions mean the goddess, a wooden cult object or, on one recent reading, a divine name without a possessive at all, is disputed. That Israelite religion once had room for her is not.

¶ What does the name Yahweh mean?

Exodus 3:14 ties it to the verb “to be”: “I am who I am”, or “I will be what I will be”. Scholars divide on the grammar. Read as a simple form it means “he is”; read as a causative, the view of Albright and Cross, it means “he causes to be”, which would suit an old creator title. The four consonants YHWH are certain; the vowels, and therefore the exact form, are reconstructed. “Jehovah” is a late hybrid of those consonants with the vowels of a different word.

¶ Does Deuteronomy 32:8 say Yahweh was one of the sons of God?

In its older wording it can be read that way, and some scholars do read it that way: Elyon divides the nations among the sons of God, and Yahweh's portion is Jacob. Others hold that the poet already meant one God by both names and was describing him allotting the nations to lesser divine beings while keeping Israel. The textual point is not in doubt: the Qumran fragment and the Septuagint show “sons of God”, and the Masoretic “sons of Israel” is a later change. The interpretive point is open, and this page says so.

¶ Sources

Ugaritic texts (KTU 1.1-1.6, the Baal Cycle; KTU 1.23), in Mark S. Smith and Wayne T. Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle (1994, 2009) and N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit (2nd ed., 2002). Genesis 14:18-22; 16:13; 17:1; 21:33; 32:28; 33:20; 35:7; Exodus 3:13-15; 6:2-3; 15:3; 18; Numbers 23-24; Deuteronomy 32:8-9 (Masoretic Text, Septuagint, and 4QDeut^j in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIV); Deuteronomy 33:2; Judges 5:4-5; Habakkuk 3:3; Psalm 82; 2 Kings 23:6. Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God (2nd ed., 2002) and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001); Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973), the chapter “Yahweh and El”; Albrecht Alt, “The God of the Fathers” (1929; English 1966); Daniel E. Fleming, Yahweh before Israel (2020); Ze'ev Meshel, Kuntillet ʿAjrud (2012); Michael S. Heiser, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God”, Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001); the Soleb and Amarah West lists (Grdseloff 1947; Astour 1979); the Mesha stele, line 18. CC BY 4.0.

The volume behind this page: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21879071

¶ Related

More from the sourced library:

• What is the divine council in the Bible?
• Who are the sons of God in Genesis 6?
• What Is the Two Powers in Heaven Heresy?
• What Does Satan Mean in Hebrew?
• The Seam in the Text
• Did Zoroastrianism influence Judaism?