The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I have struggled with this in the past, as I was raised Christian and am once again part of a Christian faith (Orthodox).

I can no longer accept just have faith as an answer, because I keep coming back to square one.

How did YHWH, one of the sons of El in the Canaanite pantheon, become Creator and Ultimate God?

In Deut. 32:8, sons of God is used when it is said that YHWH was given his portion, by El Elyon (Almighty God). I have read many studies on this issue, both to prove it and disprove it. This one disputes the polytheistic view, and the citations seem sound: http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/05-deuteronomy/text/articles/heiser-deut32-bs.htm

Obviously, anyone coming from the Christian side will want to dispute that YHWH was tribal. But evidence seems to strongly point this way.

Does anyone have any resources that may be helpful?

How did YHWH, one of the sons of El in the Canaanite pantheon, become Creator and Ultimate God?
In Deut. 32:8, sons of God is used when it is said that YHWH was given his portion, by El Elyon (Almighty God). I have read many studies on this issue, both to prove it and disprove it.

I think your interpretation of that passage is correct. The site you refer to is run by an evangelical college: there's enough of my ancestors in me to distrust protestants (especially that sort) automatically

Also there are so many other pointers in the OT, even after years of Jewish editing.
1. Yahweh tells Moses "I am the God of Abraham", not "I am God the Father" and Moses asks for his name. The Israelites cross the Red Sea singing "Who is like thee, Yahweh, among the Gods?"
2. Jephthah treats Yahweh and Kemosh as equivalents. (Judges 11)
3. Ahab and Jehoshaphat consult all the prophets, only one of whom is a prophet of Yahweh.
4. The kings of Israel put up inscriptions to El, Asherah, and Yahweh.
etc.

It was a slow process, taking from the 8th to the 5th century. A good source is The origins of Biblical Monotheism, by Mark S. Smith.

The first step seems to have been equating Yahweh to Hadad (Baal). The myth of Hadad and Yam become that of Yahweh and Leviathan. Psalms were recycled: 29 has passages that come straight from old Canaanite texts. The New Year festival was transferred from Hadad to Yahweh.The Mishnah describes the libation of water from the sacred spring during the prayers for the winter rains at the Feast of Tabernacles; Lucian describes an identical ritual for Hadad at Hierapolis.

Personally I take Jesus as turning the Jews from the false elevation of Yahweh back to the true worship of God. He teaches his disciples to pray "Our Father": is Yahweh ever addressed as father? In Canaanite texts Ilu/El is Father of Mankind. On the cross, he prayed "Eli", not "Adonai". But this view is very controversial.

You may find the book When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone to be quite illuminating. In short...the usual: warfare, forced assimilation, and a priestly caste hellbent on preserving their gravy-train.

 
Honestly, a lot of the historiography in that book is kind of a disaster, with a lot of theories and guesses presented as though they were evidence-supported historical fact, but yeah, there's some interesting ideas in there.

Politics, basically. As a group or tribe gets more power, they elevate their own localized deity to universal status.  I think it's similar to how localized minor Egyptian gods would become major state gods when a new dynasty came to power, and often like in Egyptian context, the new prominent deity gets identified with the old, as Horus, Ra, and Amun overlap and blend together quite a bit. It doesn't really bother me, personally. I think it's all the same at the core.

 
The thing is though, how was YHWH able to become the only god. Few other priesthoods went so far. Those that tried failed, like Akhenaten.

The political motives must have been broadly similar, so what allowed YHWH to take over, but not Aten?

The Roman Empire, mostly?  It kind of comes down to temporal power, a lot of the time.

 
I meant in the first place. Before the Roman Empire.

I meant in the first place. Before the Roman Empire.

 
No, I mean, this is the thing: Christianity was just an offshoot sect of Judaism without the context of the Roman Empire and the Pauline conversion of Gentiles; Judaism's strict monotheism was partially codified in relationship to existing under the occupation of polytheist military powers like the Roman Empire, and was further solidified in the post-Temple period; Christianity's further identification of the God YHVH as the perfect, infinite One comes partially from interaction with the ideas of Neoplatonists again via the Empire's crossroads of Mediterranean-wide ideas; and Christianity's widespread primacy and cultural power to declare their God the One God comes about because of Constantine, and their joining up with the political and military machine of said empire.

Before the Roman Empire's involvement, it was a lot murkier.  Even the period of increasingly strict monotheism (rather than henotheism) in Judaism, post Babylonian Captivity, posited a YHVH Who made all things, but wasn't so infinite He couldn't come have a chat with a mortal human.  We have to remember, too, that the Judaism most of us interact with is modern, rabbinical Judaism, which is not the same as the Judaism of 2000 years ago; it's been developing and evolving and in conversation with other religions this whole time.  Conflating archaic Judaism and modern Judaism is a common mistake that comes from a modern Christian tendency to treat Judaism as "done," as a project and people of the past that were fulfilled and superseded by Christianity, and therefore a static relic of history.

No, I mean, this is the thing: Christianity was just an offshoot sect of Judaism without the context of the Roman Empire and the Pauline conversion of Gentiles; Judaism's strict monotheism was partially codified in relationship to existing under the occupation of polytheist military powers like the Roman Empire, and was further solidified in the post-Temple period; Christianity's further identification of the God YHVH as the perfect, infinite One comes partially from interaction with the ideas of Neoplatonists again via the Empire's crossroads of Mediterranean-wide ideas; and Christianity's widespread primacy and cultural power to declare their God the One God comes about because of Constantine, and their joining up with the political and military machine of said empire.

Before the Roman Empire's involvement, it was a lot murkier.  Even the period of increasingly strict monotheism (rather than henotheism) in Judaism, post Babylonian Captivity, posited a YHVH Who made all things, but wasn't so infinite He couldn't come have a chat with a mortal human.  We have to remember, too, that the Judaism most of us interact with is modern, rabbinical Judaism, which is not the same as the Judaism of 2000 years ago; it's been developing and evolving and in conversation with other religions this whole time.  Conflating archaic Judaism and modern Judaism is a common mistake that comes from a modern Christian tendency to treat Judaism as "done," as a project and people of the past that were fulfilled and superseded by Christianity, and therefore a static relic of history.

 
I'm not sure if you understood my question. I was not asking about the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Nor was I discussing the differences or similarities between modern and ancient Judaism. Nor did I suggest that Judaism was 'done' or anything of the sort. What I was interested in was understanding the shift in ancient (pre-Roman) Jewish thinking that moved them religiously from polytheism towards monotheism in the first place, when many other religions have not followed this pattern.

I'm not sure if you understood my question. I was not asking about the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Nor was I discussing the differences or similarities between modern and ancient Judaism. Nor did I suggest that Judaism was 'done' or anything of the sort. What I was interested in was understanding the shift in ancient (pre-Roman) Jewish thinking that moved them religiously from polytheism towards monotheism in the first place, when many other religions have not followed this pattern.

 
Ah!  Yes, I was responding to a different understanding of your question, some, though also saying that that shift toward strict monotheism wasn't all the way baked before interaction with the Romans.
A lot of the scholarly theories about the Jewish shift from henotheism toward monotheism--because before it's henotheistic, maybe the people who would eventually be what we'd call Jews were polytheistic, but you can't really call them Jews and it's not clear who and what they were that far back--really are about adversarial interaction with polytheist neighbors.

You see some of this in the triumphal aspects of the older portions of Jewish scripture, like the Canticle of Miriam in what we now call the book Exodus, where YHVH triumphs over the Gods of Egypt in a way that makes it explicit that this is a real God beating other real Gods.  You see it, too, in both places the Commandments (ten or otherwise) show up--a distinction between "don't worship false Gods" and "don't worship other (real) Gods, or at least not before Me" where it's clear the mindset is one where only one God is to be worshipped, but other peoples have their other Gods, and those are real too.

(Some of this may also be related to some scholarly theories that suggest that "Hebrews" weren't really an identifiable people before Judaism, that they were essentially a diverse confederation of people who escaped slavery in Egypt or liberated their territories from Egyptian control, since there's almost no written Egyptian record of enslaving a particular ethnic group or taking in a huge slave population or of a people called "Hebrew," and "almost no written Egyptian record" is a really rare thing.  So the whole group of people who became Jews may have primarily formed as an identity based on "we escaped from the control of these powerful polytheists, and were rescued by this one particular God who decided to adopt us as a nation," and then developed into a more cohesive, distinct identity over time.)

Part of the big shift--and I know I've posted about this in other conversations--comes from the Babylonian Captivity.  Roughly, the Jews who were in Babylon had to police the borders of their identities much more while in diaspora, and in reaction against polytheistic conquerors, and formed a much more...sharply-defined-apart? community identity.  They had to fight to hold onto who they were and learned to see themselves as very different from their oppressors, who worshiped other Gods.  When they returned home to Canaan, they were horrified to discover that the Jews who had been able to stay had adapted differently--among other things by integrating and adopting some of the religious practices of their neighbors, like doing honor to Asherah and Ba'al Hadad. So there was a push, in part motivated by the pain of being conquered and taken away from home, to sharpen the lines between "us" and "them" that resulted in the purging of honoring Gods other than YHVH from Jewish practice, which made messes especially in a lot of familis where there was intermarriage.  And a lot of what we now recognize as the Hebrew Bible was codified in that aftermath period, and by the people invested in the purging.  (Consider the story of Abraham smashing the (Mesopotamian) idols of false Gods before heading to Canaan to worship El Shaddai.)

As to when the increasingly strict ban on worshiping other Gods became the notion of other Gods being false--when that sort of changed over--there's not a lot of good hard information on it.  It may have just been a natural progression from refusing to honor other Gods to refusing those Gods the honor of being considered real.  Some of it happened after the occupation recorded in the Hanukkah story, where the Temple was defiled and the followers of the Maccabees rebelled against being required to worship foreign Gods, and after their rebellion they were the ones restoring the Temple and its rites.  Some of it happened with the Roman occupation.  It's hard to pinpoint it as a moment.

Is that...more along the lines of what you were asking about, or am I aiming in the wrong direction again?