Just one of His Titles: Hashem.
Hashem (Hebrew: השם hšm, literally "the name"; often abbreviated to ה׳ [h′]) is a title used in Judaism to refer to God. It is also a given name and surname.
Wikipedia’s entry for the True God is very much an unappreciative thing:
Yahweh[a] was an ancient Levantine deity, and national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Though no consensus exists regarding the deity's origins, scholars generally contend that Yahweh emerged as a "divine warrior" associated first with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman, and later with Canaan. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age, if not somewhat earlier.
In the oldest biblical literature, he possesses attributes typically ascribed to weather and war deities, fructifying the land and leading the heavenly army against Israel's enemies. The early Israelites were polytheistic and worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal. In later centuries, El and Yahweh became conflated and El-linked epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, and other gods and goddesses such as Baal and Asherah were absorbed into Yahwist religion.
Towards the end of the Babylonian captivity, the existence of other gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed the creator deity and sole divinity to be worshipped. During the Second Temple period, speaking the name of Yahweh in public became regarded as taboo, and Jews instead began to substitute other words, primarily adonai (אֲדֹנָי, "my Lords"). In Roman times, following the Siege of Jerusalem and destruction of its Temple, in 70 CE, the original pronunciation of the god's name was forgotten entirely.
Yahweh is also invoked in Papyrus Amherst 63, and in Jewish or Jewish-influenced Greco-Egyptian magical texts from the 1st to 5th century CE.
The god's name was written in paleo-Hebrew as 𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄 (יהוה in block script), transliterated as YHWH; modern scholarship has reached consensus to transcribe this as "Yahweh". The shortened forms "Yeho-", "Yahu-" and "Yo-" appear in personal names and in phrases such as "Hallelujah!" The sacrality of the name, as well as the Commandment against "taking the name 'in vain'", led to increasingly strict prohibitions on speaking or writing the term. Rabbinic sources suggest that, by the Second Temple period, the name of God was pronounced only once a year, by the high priest, on the Day of Atonement. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the original pronunciation of the name was forgotten entirely.
There is almost no agreement on Yahweh's origins. His name is not attested other than among the Israelites, and there is no consensus on its etymology, with ehyeh ašer ehyeh ("I Am that I Am"), the explanation presented in Exodus 3:14, appearing to be a late theological gloss invented at a time when the original meaning had been forgotten, although some scholars dispute this. Lewis connects the name to Amorite yahwi- (ia-wi), found in personal names, meaning "brings to life/causes to exist" (e.g. yahwi-dagan = "Dagon causes to exist"), commonly denoted as the semantic equivalent of the Akkadian ibašši-DN.
One scholarly theory is that he originated in a shortened form of ˀel ḏū yahwī ṣabaˀôt, "El who creates the hosts". Professor Frank Moore Cross considers this to be one of the cultic names of El. However, this phrase is nowhere attested either inside or outside the Bible, and the two gods are in any case quite dissimilar, with El being elderly and paternal and lacking Yahweh's association with the storm and battles.
Even if the above issues are resolved, Yahweh is generally agreed to have a non-causative etymology because otherwise, YHWH would be translated as YHYH. It also begs the question on why the Israelites would want to shorten the epithet. One possible reason includes the co-existence of religious modernism and conservatism being the norm in all religions.
The oldest plausible occurrence of his name is in the Egyptian demonym tꜣ šꜣsw Yhwꜣ, "The Land of the Shasu YHWA," (Egyptian: 𓇌𓉔𓍯𓄿 Yhwꜣ) in an inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1390–1352 BCE), the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia. The dominant view is therefore that Yahweh was a "divine warrior from the southern region associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman". There is considerable although not universal support for this view, but it raises the question of how Yahweh made his way to the north. An answer many scholars consider plausible is the Kenite hypothesis, which holds that traders brought Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan. This ties together various points of data, such as the absence of Yahweh from Canaan, his links with Edom and Midian in the biblical stories, and the Kenite or Midianite ties of Moses, but its major weaknesses are that the majority of Israelites were firmly rooted in Palestine, while the historical role of Moses is problematic. It follows that if the Kenite hypothesis is to be maintained, then it must be assumed that the Israelites encountered Yahweh (and the Midianites/Kenites) inside Israel and through their association with the earliest political leaders of Israel. However the earliest mention of Yahweh as the national deity of Israel is Mesha Stele, which dates to 9th century BCE, and the earliest archaeological evidence of solid contacts between the population of central highlands, Israelites, and the populations living in the arid southern margins, Kenites, comes from the 10th century BCE, and thus, Tebes (2021) suggested that the adoption of the cult of Yahweh by the northern populations, Israelites, cannot be dated before the 10th century BCE.
In the Early Iron Age, the modern consensus is that there was no distinction in language or material culture between Canaanites and Israelites. Scholars accordingly define Israelite culture as a subset of Canaanite culture. For example, the Israelite religion consisted of Canaanite gods such as El, the ruler of the pantheon, Asherah, his consort, and Baal. Yahweh is described as one of the sons of El in Deuteronomy 32:8–9, but this was removed by a later emendation to the text.
In the earliest Biblical literature, Yahweh has characteristics of a storm god typical of ancient Near Eastern myths, marching out from Edom or the Sinai desert with the heavenly host of stars and planets that make up his army to do battle with the enemies of his people Israel:
Yahweh, when you went out of Seir,
when you marched out of the field of Edom,
the earth trembled, the sky also dropped.
Yes, the clouds dropped water.
The mountains quaked at Yahweh's presence,
even Sinai at the presence of Yahweh, the God of Israel.
...
From the sky the stars fought.
From their courses, they fought against Sisera.
(Book of Judges 5:4–5, 20, WEB World English Bible, the Song of Deborah.)
From the perspective of the Kenite hypothesis, it has also been suggested that the Edomite deity Qōs might have been one and the same as Yahweh, rather than a separate deity, with its name a title of the latter. Aside from their common territorial origins, various common characteristics between the Yahwist cult and the Edomite cult of Qōs hint at a shared connection. Doeg the Edomite, for example, is depicted as having no problem in worshiping Yahweh and is shown to be at home in Jewish sanctuaries.
Unlike the chief god of the Ammonites (Milcom) and the Moabites (Chemosh), the Tanakh refrains from explicitly naming the Edomite Qōs. Some scholars have explained this notable omission by assuming that the level of similarity between Yahweh and Qōs would have made rejection of the latter difficult. Other scholars hold that Yahweh and Qōs were different deities from their origins, and suggest that the tensions between Judeans and Edomites during the Second Temple period may lie behind the omission of Qōs in the Bible.
The late Iron Age saw the emergence of nation states associated with specific national gods: Chemosh was the god of the Moabites, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qōs the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh the god of Israel. In each kingdom the king was also the head of the national religion and thus the viceroy on Earth of the national god.
Yahweh filled the role of national god in the kingdom of Israel (Samaria), which emerged in the 10th century BCE; and also in Judah, which may have emerged a century later (no "God of Judah" is mentioned anywhere in the Bible). In an inscription discovered in Ein Gedi and dated around 700 BCE, Yahweh appears described as the lord of the nations, while in other contemporary texts discovered in Khirbet Beit Lei (near Lachish) he is mentioned as the ruler of Jerusalem and probably also of Judah. During the reign of Ahab (c. 871–852 BCE), and particularly following his marriage to Jezebel, Baal may have briefly replaced Yahweh as the national god of Israel (but not Judah).
In the 9th century BCE, there are indications of rejection of Baal worship associated with the prophets Elijah and Elisha. The Yahweh-religion thus began to separate itself from its Canaanite heritage; this process continued over the period from 800 to 500 BCE with legal and prophetic condemnations of the asherim, sun worship and worship on the high places, along with practices pertaining to the dead and other aspects of the old religion. Features of Baal, El, and Asherah were absorbed into Yahweh, El (or 'el) (Hebrew: אל) became a generic term meaning "god" as opposed to the name of a specific god, and epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone.
In this atmosphere a struggle emerged between those who believed that Yahweh alone should be worshipped, and those who worshipped him within a larger group of gods; the Yahweh-alone party, the party of the prophets and Deuteronomists, ultimately triumphed, and their victory lies behind the biblical narrative of an Israel vacillating between periods of "following other gods" and periods of fidelity to Yahweh.
When they analyse everything like this in a quasi-scientific manner they do nothing but harm to those like my people who have faith in the God of their forebears, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Yeshua and this is indeed harmful and disgusting, their lack of respect is a reflection of their lack of faith and I can only echo in singing Deborah’s Song.
Wikipedia’s entry for the True God is very much an unappreciative thing:
Yahweh[a] was an ancient Levantine deity, and national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Though no consensus exists regarding the deity's origins, scholars generally contend that Yahweh emerged as a "divine warrior" associated first with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman, and later with Canaan. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age, if not somewhat earlier.
In the oldest biblical literature, he possesses attributes typically ascribed to weather and war deities, fructifying the land and leading the heavenly army against Israel's enemies. The early Israelites were polytheistic and worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal. In later centuries, El and Yahweh became conflated and El-linked epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, and other gods and goddesses such as Baal and Asherah were absorbed into Yahwist religion.
Towards the end of the Babylonian captivity, the existence of other gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed the creator deity and sole divinity to be worshipped. During the Second Temple period, speaking the name of Yahweh in public became regarded as taboo, and Jews instead began to substitute other words, primarily adonai (אֲדֹנָי, "my Lords"). In Roman times, following the Siege of Jerusalem and destruction of its Temple, in 70 CE, the original pronunciation of the god's name was forgotten entirely.
Yahweh is also invoked in Papyrus Amherst 63, and in Jewish or Jewish-influenced Greco-Egyptian magical texts from the 1st to 5th century CE.
The god's name was written in paleo-Hebrew as 𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄 (יהוה in block script), transliterated as YHWH; modern scholarship has reached consensus to transcribe this as "Yahweh". The shortened forms "Yeho-", "Yahu-" and "Yo-" appear in personal names and in phrases such as "Hallelujah!" The sacrality of the name, as well as the Commandment against "taking the name 'in vain'", led to increasingly strict prohibitions on speaking or writing the term. Rabbinic sources suggest that, by the Second Temple period, the name of God was pronounced only once a year, by the high priest, on the Day of Atonement. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the original pronunciation of the name was forgotten entirely.
There is almost no agreement on Yahweh's origins. His name is not attested other than among the Israelites, and there is no consensus on its etymology, with ehyeh ašer ehyeh ("I Am that I Am"), the explanation presented in Exodus 3:14, appearing to be a late theological gloss invented at a time when the original meaning had been forgotten, although some scholars dispute this. Lewis connects the name to Amorite yahwi- (ia-wi), found in personal names, meaning "brings to life/causes to exist" (e.g. yahwi-dagan = "Dagon causes to exist"), commonly denoted as the semantic equivalent of the Akkadian ibašši-DN.
One scholarly theory is that he originated in a shortened form of ˀel ḏū yahwī ṣabaˀôt, "El who creates the hosts". Professor Frank Moore Cross considers this to be one of the cultic names of El. However, this phrase is nowhere attested either inside or outside the Bible, and the two gods are in any case quite dissimilar, with El being elderly and paternal and lacking Yahweh's association with the storm and battles.
Even if the above issues are resolved, Yahweh is generally agreed to have a non-causative etymology because otherwise, YHWH would be translated as YHYH. It also begs the question on why the Israelites would want to shorten the epithet. One possible reason includes the co-existence of religious modernism and conservatism being the norm in all religions.
The oldest plausible occurrence of his name is in the Egyptian demonym tꜣ šꜣsw Yhwꜣ, "The Land of the Shasu YHWA," (Egyptian: 𓇌𓉔𓍯𓄿 Yhwꜣ) in an inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1390–1352 BCE), the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia. The dominant view is therefore that Yahweh was a "divine warrior from the southern region associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman". There is considerable although not universal support for this view, but it raises the question of how Yahweh made his way to the north. An answer many scholars consider plausible is the Kenite hypothesis, which holds that traders brought Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan. This ties together various points of data, such as the absence of Yahweh from Canaan, his links with Edom and Midian in the biblical stories, and the Kenite or Midianite ties of Moses, but its major weaknesses are that the majority of Israelites were firmly rooted in Palestine, while the historical role of Moses is problematic. It follows that if the Kenite hypothesis is to be maintained, then it must be assumed that the Israelites encountered Yahweh (and the Midianites/Kenites) inside Israel and through their association with the earliest political leaders of Israel. However the earliest mention of Yahweh as the national deity of Israel is Mesha Stele, which dates to 9th century BCE, and the earliest archaeological evidence of solid contacts between the population of central highlands, Israelites, and the populations living in the arid southern margins, Kenites, comes from the 10th century BCE, and thus, Tebes (2021) suggested that the adoption of the cult of Yahweh by the northern populations, Israelites, cannot be dated before the 10th century BCE.
In the Early Iron Age, the modern consensus is that there was no distinction in language or material culture between Canaanites and Israelites. Scholars accordingly define Israelite culture as a subset of Canaanite culture. For example, the Israelite religion consisted of Canaanite gods such as El, the ruler of the pantheon, Asherah, his consort, and Baal. Yahweh is described as one of the sons of El in Deuteronomy 32:8–9, but this was removed by a later emendation to the text.
In the earliest Biblical literature, Yahweh has characteristics of a storm god typical of ancient Near Eastern myths, marching out from Edom or the Sinai desert with the heavenly host of stars and planets that make up his army to do battle with the enemies of his people Israel:
Yahweh, when you went out of Seir,
when you marched out of the field of Edom,
the earth trembled, the sky also dropped.
Yes, the clouds dropped water.
The mountains quaked at Yahweh's presence,
even Sinai at the presence of Yahweh, the God of Israel.
...
From the sky the stars fought.
From their courses, they fought against Sisera.
(Book of Judges 5:4–5, 20, WEB World English Bible, the Song of Deborah.)
From the perspective of the Kenite hypothesis, it has also been suggested that the Edomite deity Qōs might have been one and the same as Yahweh, rather than a separate deity, with its name a title of the latter. Aside from their common territorial origins, various common characteristics between the Yahwist cult and the Edomite cult of Qōs hint at a shared connection. Doeg the Edomite, for example, is depicted as having no problem in worshiping Yahweh and is shown to be at home in Jewish sanctuaries.
Unlike the chief god of the Ammonites (Milcom) and the Moabites (Chemosh), the Tanakh refrains from explicitly naming the Edomite Qōs. Some scholars have explained this notable omission by assuming that the level of similarity between Yahweh and Qōs would have made rejection of the latter difficult. Other scholars hold that Yahweh and Qōs were different deities from their origins, and suggest that the tensions between Judeans and Edomites during the Second Temple period may lie behind the omission of Qōs in the Bible.
The late Iron Age saw the emergence of nation states associated with specific national gods: Chemosh was the god of the Moabites, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qōs the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh the god of Israel. In each kingdom the king was also the head of the national religion and thus the viceroy on Earth of the national god.
Yahweh filled the role of national god in the kingdom of Israel (Samaria), which emerged in the 10th century BCE; and also in Judah, which may have emerged a century later (no "God of Judah" is mentioned anywhere in the Bible). In an inscription discovered in Ein Gedi and dated around 700 BCE, Yahweh appears described as the lord of the nations, while in other contemporary texts discovered in Khirbet Beit Lei (near Lachish) he is mentioned as the ruler of Jerusalem and probably also of Judah. During the reign of Ahab (c. 871–852 BCE), and particularly following his marriage to Jezebel, Baal may have briefly replaced Yahweh as the national god of Israel (but not Judah).
In the 9th century BCE, there are indications of rejection of Baal worship associated with the prophets Elijah and Elisha. The Yahweh-religion thus began to separate itself from its Canaanite heritage; this process continued over the period from 800 to 500 BCE with legal and prophetic condemnations of the asherim, sun worship and worship on the high places, along with practices pertaining to the dead and other aspects of the old religion. Features of Baal, El, and Asherah were absorbed into Yahweh, El (or 'el) (Hebrew: אל) became a generic term meaning "god" as opposed to the name of a specific god, and epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone.
In this atmosphere a struggle emerged between those who believed that Yahweh alone should be worshipped, and those who worshipped him within a larger group of gods; the Yahweh-alone party, the party of the prophets and Deuteronomists, ultimately triumphed, and their victory lies behind the biblical narrative of an Israel vacillating between periods of "following other gods" and periods of fidelity to Yahweh.
When they analyse everything like this in a quasi-scientific manner they do nothing but harm to those like my people who have faith in the God of their forebears, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Yeshua and this is indeed harmful and disgusting, their lack of respect is a reflection of their lack of faith and I can only echo in singing Deborah’s Song.
22-25, F
