Book summary “The early history of God”: summary

Introduction

You often inherit traditional views about the origins of biblical religion that assume an early, pure monotheism. Historical and archaeological evidence complicates this picture by showing that the religion of ancient Israel developed out of a broader West Semitic and Canaanite milieu. You face the challenge of reconciling scriptural texts with material finds that reveal a complex polytheistic background.

The religion of ancient Israel emerged not from an early pure monotheism, but through the convergence of Canaanite deities into Yahweh and their later prophetic differentiation.

Mark S. Smith traces this evolution by examining archaeological data, comparative ancient Near Eastern texts, and biblical sources. You will explore how early Israelite culture absorbed elements of El, Baal, and Asherah before centralizing worship around Yahweh. The text follows a chronological path from early convergence to late exilic monotheism.

You can begin by asking several core questions:

• How did Israelite religion relate to its Canaanite environment?
• What role did deities like El and Baal play in the formation of Yahwism?
• When and how did Israel shift from polytheistic convergence to exclusive monotheism?

1. Methodological Foundations and Current Research

You investigate the historical development of Israel's understanding of deity rather than a comprehensive history of Israelite religion. Mark S. Smith focuses specifically on how the conception of God in western traditions took shape during the earliest stages. You explore how Yahweh emerged from the broader ancient Near Eastern pantheon and how other deities were incorporated into, differentiated from, or conflicted with Yahweh.

Reconstructing early Israelite religion requires integrating textual vestiges, iconographic artifacts, and sociological models of family religion.

Recent Research on Deities

Iconographic artifacts have emerged alongside texts and archaeology as a primary source of data for studying ancient Israelite religion. Studies of ancient Near Eastern imagery and Israelite aniconism have elevated visual representations to a major category of evidence, helping scholars interpret religious practices and symbols in their broader cultural contexts.

T. N. D. Mettinger published his book on aniconism in 1995. The English translation of Keel and Uehlinger followed in 1998.

Anthropological and sociological models, particularly those focusing on family structures, have transformed the study of Israelite social and religious life. You draw on Emile Durkheim and Max Weber to emphasize domestic structures, gender roles, and social location over monolithic constructs of religion, distinguishing between family or popular religion and official or state religion.

K. van der Toorn published a study on family life stages in 1994 and a book on family religion in 1996.

Theoretical Challenges

Writing a precise history of early Israelite religion is severely limited by the fragmentary and heavily refracted nature of textual vestiges. Biblical texts incorporate older mythic images that have undergone long redactional histories, offering only partial glimpses of earlier religious realities and making premonarchic developments largely inferential.

Ancient Israelite textual production relied heavily on scribal practices that combined literacy, orality, interpretation, and memorization. A comprehensive history of religion requires understanding the models of textual composition, memorization, and cultural memory that shaped biblical works like the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History during the monarchic and exilic periods.

Crozier Hezser and Mary Carruthers demonstrated the vital role of memory and memorization in Jewish literacy and medieval culture. Epigraphic finds like the Lachish letters attest to similar practices. Prophetic accounts suggest reading and writing models starting with Isaiah in the eighth century B.C.E., followed by a prophetic orientation with Jeremiah and Second Isaiah in the sixth century B.C.E.

2. Israel's Canaanite Heritage and El

Early Israelite material culture and divine nomenclature were continuous with West Semitic Canaanite traditions, featuring the assimilation of the high god El into Yahweh.

Israel's Canaanite Heritage

You can trace early Israelite culture directly from West Semitic Canaanite roots. Iron I highland settlements share architectural elements and ceramic traditions with coastal sites.

Cooking pots and storage jars at Giloh represent a pottery tradition continuous with the Late Bronze Age. Specialized Hebrew sacrificial terms and cultic personnel titles have exact semantic equivalents in Ugaritic and Phoenician.

The Merneptah stele dates to the fifth year of the pharaoh's reign around 1208 B.C. The Egyptian inscription celebrating pharaonic power lists Canaan with the land determinative. Israel is written with the determinative for people, marking an early differentiation of Israel from its Canaanite forebears.

Yahweh and El

The original chief god of the group named Israel was El. His identity and epithets were subsequently merged with Yahweh. The name Israel contains the El element rather than Yahweh.

Exodus 6:2-3 explicitly identifies El Shadday with Yahweh. This reflects the integration of Canaanite patriarchal traditions into Yahwism.

Early traditions like Deuteronomy 32:8-9 depict Yahweh as a southern warrior-god who was separate from El ('elyôn) before being assimilated into the highland pantheon. This process eventually caused El and Yahweh to be fully identified without leaving biblical polemics against El.

3. Yahweh, Baal, and Asherah in Early Israel

The early monarchic period incorporated storm imagery and cultic symbols from Baal and Asherah before later reforms rejected them.

Yahweh and Baal

Later tradents writing from a monarchical perspective projected ninth-century religious struggles back into the era of the Judges. Textual clues like the reference to the exile of the northern kingdom in Judges 18:30 point to an eighth-century or later editorial framing.

The story of Gideon in Judges 6 functions as a paradigmatic narrative where his original name, Jerubbaal, was reinterpreted negatively as an anti-Baal name, changing it eventually to Jerubbeshet in 2 Samuel 21:21.

Proper names containing the element baal in early Israelite families indicate that the title was initially acceptable and possibly used as an epithet for Yahweh without implying hostility to the national cult. Figures like Saul's family members bore names with baal elements, such as Eshbaal and Meribbaal, alongside clearly Yahwistic names like Jonathan. This suggests that baal was not initially perceived as a foreign god inimical to Yahweh in early royal circles.

Saul's uncle was named Baal, and the proper name bĕ‘alyāh means Yah is lord, showing the blending or acceptable use of the terminology.

Early Israelite poetry systematically conflated the distinct traditional imagery of Canaanite deities El and Baal and applied both sets of attributes directly to Yahweh. Passages like Deuteronomy 33:26-27 and Psalm 18:14-16 combine storm-warrior language characteristic of Baal with ancient descriptors and titles such as elyon and elohê qedem reflecting El.

Psalm 18 depicts Yahweh riding through the storm and scattering enemies with hail and fire while simultaneously referencing the channels of the sea associated with El's cosmic waters.

The ninth-century political promotion of Phoenician Baal by King Ahab and Queen Jezebel transformed Baal into a perceived security threat to the cult of Yahweh. Jezebel, daughter of the Tyre king Ittobaal, actively sponsored the cult of Baal by building a temple in Samaria and funding prophets, provoking an intense ideological and political reaction from prophetic figures like Elijah.

Elijah's contest on Mount Carmel and his denunciations targeted this state-sponsored elevation of the Phoenician storm-god rather than an indigenous rustic practice.

Yahweh and Asherah

The asherah was a widespread wooden symbol integrated into mainstream Israelite religion rather than a marginal foreign cult item.

Archaeological, biblical, and legal evidence demonstrates that wooden asherah poles were erected beside altars in both northern and southern kingdoms, in local high places, and inside the official royal temples of Samaria and Jerusalem. Opposition to the symbol originated primarily within the Deuteronomistic tradition rather than among early prophets.

2 Kings 23:6-7 records King Josiah dragging the asherah out of the Jerusalem temple, where it had been housed alongside Yahwistic worship.

Inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd and Khirbet el-Qôm explicitly link Yahweh with an asherah symbol in official Judean contexts. Inscriptions dated around 800-700 BCE containing formulas blessing people "by Yahweh... and his asherah" have sparked intense debate. While grammatical arguments regarding pronominal suffixes suggest it refers to Yahweh's ritual symbol or sacred tree rather than the personal name of the goddess as a direct consort, it confirms that the asherah functioned as part of Yahweh's official symbolic repertoire in Israel and Judah.

The inscriptions discovered at Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd in the eastern Sinai invoke blessings from Yahweh of Teiman and his asherah.

4. Imagery of Baal, Asherah, and the Sun

Israelite religion adapted divine warrior combat, tree symbolism, and solar language into Yahwistic worship while gradually purifying anthropomorphism.

Imagery of Baal and Yahweh

F. M. Cross identified a four-part Gattung for the divine warrior: the march, the convulsing of nature, the assumption of kingship, and the voice of thunder. Biblical texts attribute these exact meteorological and martial patterns to Yahweh, such as moving across the steppes or riding on storm chariots, while modifying the sanctuary origin to southern locations like Sinai or Edom. You find this underlying unity of Yahweh as storm-god and divine warrior in Psalm 18 (= 2 Sam. 22):6-19.

Psalm 18 and Habakkuk 3 describe Yahweh marching out from Edom or Paran and riding upon storm clouds and horses in a manner structurally identical to Canaanite descriptions of Baal. 1 Kings 19 portrays the meteorological progression of the storm with human imagery.

Both Yahweh and Baal are depicted as defeating primordial chaos forces such as Yamm, River, Leviathan, Mot, and seven-headed dragons. In Israelite tradition, these cosmic enemies were frequently historicized and used as political symbols for hostile human empires like Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Psalm 89:10 mentions Rahab and the divine victory over cosmic waters.

Psalm 74:13-14 and Isaiah 27:1 depict Yahweh crushing multi-headed sea monsters and Leviathan, mirroring the defeat of sea adversaries in the Ugaritic Baal cycle.

The Davidic and northern monarchies adopted divine warrior and storm imagery to legitimize their political rule and divine patronage. Just as Mesopotamian and Canaanite kings mirrored the victory of their storm-gods over cosmic waters to assert earthly dominance, the Davidic monarchy applied divine titles and victory over Sea and River to the king. A Mari letter featuring the storm-god Adad gifting weapons to king Zimri-Lim illustrates this ancient Near Eastern mechanism of royal legitimation.

2 Samuel 5:20 describes David comparing his victory over the Philistines to a bursting flood in a possible play on storm imagery.

Psalm 89:26 depicts Yahweh extending power to the Davidic monarch by stating he will set his hand on Sea and River, directly borrowing Baal's mythic titles.

The Assimilation of Asherah Imagery and Solar Language

The physical asherah symbol was widely used in early Yahwistic worship, but the evidence that it represented the goddess Asherah as Yahweh's consort during the monarchy is extremely weak. While inscriptional and biblical data confirm the presence of the cultic asherah pole or tree, most biblical passages cited to prove the existence of the goddess Asherah in Israel either stem from polemics against Astarte, use generic plurals, or refer strictly to the symbol itself rather than a separate deity. Over time, the physical symbol outlived the cult of the goddess and was integrated into Yahwism before later facing severe prophetic condemnation.

1 Kings 18:19 mentions prophets of Asherah tied to Jezebel, but Asherah is not attested in coastal Phoenicia during the Iron Age, making this reference a likely historical retrojection or a polemic substituting Asherah for Astarte.

The female personification of Wisdom in Proverbs and other postexilic texts literary preserves the maternal and life-giving imagery previously associated with the asherah. Scholars note that the female figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 acts as a literary counterpart or transformation of the indigenous cult of the asherah. Proverbs 3:18 explicitly calls Wisdom a tree of life, utilizing poetic chiasm and paronomasia with the root *’šr to evoke the well-being and life symbolized by the ancient asherah.

Proverbs 3:18 states that Wisdom is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her, mirroring the life-giving attributes of the ancient sacred tree symbol.

Solar language and imagery were applied to Yahweh primarily as expressions of divine luminescent presence and royal ideology under the influence of the southern monarchy. The Bible occasionally uses solar metaphors, such as describing Yahweh as a sun and shield or using the verb *zrh for rising, reflecting broader ancient Near Eastern patterns where national patron gods were associated with the sun. This solarized Yahwism reinforced both divine suzerainty and the aura of the human Judean king, though it was later condemned by prophetic critics in Ezekiel and Kings as idolatrous.

Psalm 84:12 describes Yahweh as a sun and a shield in the context of a pilgrim longing to experience the divine presence in the Jerusalem temple.

5. Cultic Practices, the Dead, and Child Sacrifice

Widespread popular practices such as high places, mortuary customs, and urban mlk sacrifices persisted until prophetic and legal centralizations eliminated them.

Cultic Symbols and Sites

High places, pillars, and altars functioned for clan and local religion throughout the periods of the Judges and the monarchy with full royal and priestly support. Only in the later phases of the Judean monarchy did prophetic and legal traditions sweep away these traditional sites and items as part of a centralized religious purge.

1 Kings 3:4-5 records that King Solomon went to the high place at Gibeon to sacrifice, where Yahweh appeared to him in a dream.

You find that early Yahwistic worship relied heavily on local sanctuaries and physical symbols rather than a single central temple. Traditional items in these spaces included:

• bāmôt;
• massēbōtām;
• hammānîm.

Practices Associated with the Dead and the mlk Sacrifice

Practices associated with the dead in ancient Israel, such as mourning, feeding the dead, and necromancy, were part of the shared Canaanite heritage and flourished across all societal strata prior to the seventh century B.C. While official legal and prophetic codes eventually condemned these customs, early Israelites widely engaged in funerary mourning, feeding the deceased, invoking them for divine information, and erecting commemorative steles without initial legal or prophetic criticism.

King Saul consulting the dead Samuel through a female medium in 1 Samuel 28, and Absalom erecting a funerary stele in his own memory because he had no son to invoke his name.

Condemnation of necromancy in pre-exilic Israel arose because it directly competed with prophecy as a legitimate method for securing otherworldly information. Negative criticisms of necromancy only appeared around the middle of the eighth century B.C. in the writings of Isaiah and the Holiness Code, driven by the desire of prophetic tradents to eliminate rival channels of divine inquiry.

The mlk sacrifice involved child sacrifice performed primarily during moments of national crisis, such as urban sieges, as an urban and royal ritual designed to enlist divine aid.

References in biblical polemics and Punic, Phoenician, and Egyptian war reliefs indicate that child sacrifice was practiced by Moabites, Phoenicians, and Judeans under royal auspices, often associated with high places or specific precincts like the Carthaginian tophet. Egyptian war reliefs depicting the siege of Ashkelon under Merneptah and Ramses II's campaign at Dapur show child sacrifices performed with a brazier in the presence of chief priests. Punic archaeological evidence reveals extensive practices, including sites featuring:

• 5000-6000 square meters as the estimated size of the Punic child sacrifice precinct at Carthage during the fourth and third centuries;
• 20000 as the estimated number of urns at the Carthaginian precinct for the fourth and third centuries;
• 62.5 percent as the percentage of human-only infant burials in a seventh- and sixth-century sample of eighty Carthaginian urns;
• 88 percent as the percentage of human-only infant burials in a fourth-century sample of fifty Carthaginian urns.

6. From Convergence to Monotheism

The historical progression from early convergence and monarchic syncretism culminated in explicit exilic monotheism through the work of prophetic movements.

Historical Perspective on Monotheism

Scholarly models positing an early period of pure mosaic Yahwism later polluted by Canaanite idolatry are historically inverted. Many features viewed as secondary pollution actually belonged to Israel's earliest Canaanite heritage. The purest forms of differentiation and monolatry only blossomed during the late monarchy and exile.

You can see this contrast in the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah. These movements stood against widespread temple idolatry documented in Ezekiel 8-11. The monarchy acted as a primary institutional engine for both conserving ancient Canaanite traditions and driving the centralization of national worship under Yahweh. By binding the king and the state to Yahweh through formal covenantal theology and centralizing cultic worship in Jerusalem, the monarchy fostered both the assimilation of foreign and Canaanite motifs and the eventual rise of monolatry.

King David utilized the language of Baal for Yahweh. Ahab promoted Baal worship to strengthen political ties with Tyre. True explicit monotheism—the absolute assertion that other deities are completely nonexistent—did not emerge until the exilic period through figures like Second Isaiah. The radical social upheaval and loss of national sovereignty during the Babylonian Exile caused a complete redefinition of Yahweh from a national empire-god to the sole universal Godhead of the entire cosmos. Second Isaiah explicitly proclaimed that Yahweh is the only deity in the cosmos and mocked lifeless idols.

Processes of Divine Portraiture

The development of Israelite monotheism involved both the polemical rejection of foreign deities and the positive integration of their attributes into Yahweh. Convergence did not follow a single pattern. While direct polemic was directed against Baal, the asherah, and solar worship, it often served a positive function by transferring these deities' beneficial characteristics to Yahweh without accepting their separate reality.

Polemic took forms such as criticism of cultic items in 2 Kings 21:7 and 23:4. Negative descriptions of priests bowing to the sun appear in Ezekiel 8:16. Distinctive Canaanite divine roles involving sexuality and death were conspicuously omitted from the biblical portrayal of Yahweh. Unlike Ugaritic deities such as El, Baal, Anat, or the sun-goddess, who engaged in divine sex, died, and returned to life, Yahweh was portrayed as sexless and entirely removed from the realm of death and impurity.

Ugaritic texts depict El as a drunken carouser in KTU 1.114 and Baal as a dying god in KTU 1.5 V-1.6 V. This imagery was entirely rejected for Yahweh.

10 Key Ideas

1. The religion of ancient Israel emerged not from an early pure monotheism, but through the convergence of Canaanite deities into Yahweh and their later prophetic differentiation.
2. Early Israelite material culture and divine nomenclature were continuous with West Semitic Canaanite traditions, featuring the assimilation of the high god El into Yahweh.
3. The early monarchic period incorporated storm imagery and cultic symbols from Baal and Asherah before later reforms rejected them.
4. Israelite religion adapted divine warrior combat, tree symbolism, and solar language into Yahwistic worship while gradually purifying anthropomorphism.
5. The asherah was a widespread wooden symbol integrated into mainstream Israelite religion rather than a marginal foreign cult item.
6. Widespread popular practices such as high places, mortuary customs, and urban mlk sacrifices persisted until prophetic and legal centralizations eliminated them.
7. The mlk sacrifice involved child sacrifice performed primarily during moments of national crisis, such as urban sieges, as an urban and royal ritual designed to enlist divine aid.
8. The historical progression from early convergence and monarchic syncretism culminated in explicit exilic monotheism through the work of prophetic movements.
9. Scholarly models positing an early period of pure mosaic Yahwism later polluted by Canaanite idolatry are historically inverted, as these features belonged to Israel's earliest Canaanite heritage.
10. The radical social upheaval and loss of national sovereignty during the Babylonian Exile caused a complete redefinition of Yahweh from a national empire-god to the sole universal Godhead of the entire cosmos.