Yahweh

The oldest evidence for the name does not come from Israel but from Egypt: two place-name lists of the fourteenth century BCE, in the temples of Soleb and Amara West, mention 'the land of the Shasu of Yhw', a group of southern nomads. The most archaic Hebrew poetry points the same way and brings Yahweh in from outside Canaan: from Sinai and Seir (Judges 5:4), from Teman and Mount Paran (Deuteronomy 33:2, Habakkuk 3:3), that is, from the southern desert and the region of Edom. In those texts he is described with the features of a storm god: the earth shakes, the heavens drip, the mountains melt at his passing. Israel later assimilated him to the supreme god of the Canaanite pantheon, El, to the point that Exodus 6:2-3 explains the change of name by saying the patriarchs had known him as El Shaddai. A clear trace of that stratum survives in Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where Elyon apportions the nations and Israel falls to Yahweh as his share.

The name is written with four consonants, YHWH, which is why it is called the Tetragrammaton. It appears some six thousand eight hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, more than any other divine term. The episode that explains it is the bush that burns without being consumed: when Moses asks what name he should give, the answer in Exodus 3:14 is 'Ehyeh asher ehyeh', a phrase built on the verb to be, usually rendered 'I am who I am', which conceals as much as it reveals. In time it ceased to be said aloud, and in public reading it was replaced by Adonai, 'my Lord', or simply by ha-Shem, 'the Name'. When medieval copyists added vowel signs to the consonantal text, they wrote the vowels of Adonai over YHWH to remind the reader what to say instead. Read as if they belonged to the name itself, those signs produced in the sixteenth century the form 'Jehovah', which still circulates: it is not an ancient reading but the result of mixing two words. The reconstruction 'Yahweh' is a modern hypothesis based on late Greek transcriptions, and no critical edition treats it as certain.

The theophanies follow a constant pattern: Yahweh lets himself be heard and felt, but not seen. At Sinai he descends amid smoke, fire and thunder, and the whole mountain shakes while the people must keep their distance (Exodus 19). He leads the departure from Egypt as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night (Exodus 13:21). And when Moses asks to see his glory, the answer in Exodus 33:20 is blunt: no one can see his face and live, so he is allowed only to see him from behind. That reserve is the root of the second commandment and of the ban on making images of him, which Judaism and Islam keep to this day. The counterpoint is in 1 Kings 19: Elijah expects to find him in the wind that splits the rocks, in the earthquake and in the fire, and he is in none of the three; he comes afterwards, in a thin whisper. The text thus uses the features of the storm god only to set itself apart from them.

The clash with Baal is not a combat between gods but a contest for a people's worship. Its central scene is Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), where Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to have their god light an altar: they cry out for hours and nothing happens; the fire falls on Yahweh's side. What the story means to establish is not that one god defeated another in battle, but whom Israel should follow. The sea-monster motif is a different matter, and the two should not be confused. In the poems of Ugarit the one who strikes down Lotan, the twisting seven-headed serpent, is Baal with his sister Anat. The Hebrew Bible tells the same thing with the Hebrew name of the same monster, Leviathan, and with Yahweh as victor: he breaks its heads in Psalm 74:14, he will run it through at the end of days in Isaiah 27:1, and the book of Job describes it at length in chapter 41. The correspondence between the two accounts is among the most cited proofs that Israel wrote its theology in the poetic vocabulary of its neighbours. That the Canaanite gods ended up turned into demons is a much later step, belonging to Second Temple Judaism and to Christianity, not something the Hebrew Bible narrates.