Yahwism

Okay, when I left off last time, I had the nation of Israel taking shape in the Middle East Because I’m running out of time and space, and I do want to get to Saint Mike, I’m going to leave out a lot of fascinating stuff. Like, where did the Israelites come from? Was Abraham real? Did the Israelites really flee famine for Egypt? Was there really an Exodus afterwards? (Brief answer...ah, er, maybe. Maybe not.)(1)

But, skipping all that...Israel starts taking form somewhere around 1200 and 1000 BCE. At least judging from the Bible (we have few other sources), it seems to have been a tribal confederacy with some kind of limited unity in the face of external threats. Somewhere along the way, the tribes come to be ruled by “judges,” that is, “Shophet,” roughly community leaders. That’s where, of course, we get “The Book of Judges” in the Bible. I suppose, if this happened in Indigenous North America or Africa, we’d have called them “chiefs.”

Anyway, the Israelites of the time were a pastoral, farming people, pretty much indistinguishable from their “Canaanite” neighbors. They lived in the same way, spoke languages that were mutually intelligible, and had very similar cultural institutions.

That included their religion.

Statue of St. Michael in Battle at Boston College

About the photo: here’s a very dramatic statue of St. Mike in battle. This is at Boston College. I got it from Wikimedia and the attribution is as follows: BCLicious, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. The page is: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archangel_Michael_Boston_College.png and the file is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Archangel_Michael_Boston_College.png

For more on the statue, see the following article: “From the Seven Hills of Rome to Chestnut Hill: On the Trail of Boston College’s St. Michael Statue,” The Terrace, May 5, 2022, accessed April 15, 2026, https://theterracebc.com/2022/05/05/from-the-seven-hills-of-rome-to-chestnut-hill-on-the-trail-of-boston-colleges-st-michael-statue/

It *used* to be that we thought ancient Israel was very different from the rest of the Canaan in the way that they worshipped and believed. We used to think that the ancient Israelites were alien to the Middle East. We believed that because it is the picture we get from the Bible, with virtuous Israelites worshipping the One True God (Yahweh) while all about them their Canaanite neighbors gave homage to idols and false gods (maybe demons in disguise).

Except...it pretty clear now that wasn’t the case.It seems that, at least early in the game, their religion was very different from the Judaism we know, and from what we see in the Bible. Rather, they seem to have practiced “Yahwism,” which is the name modern scholars give ancient Israel’s religious practices from roughly the 12th through the 6th centuries BC. (2)

What was Yahwism? Well, it was a religion focused on Yahweh -- God, in other words -- but it wasn’t strictly monotheistic. Rather, it was henotheistic--that is, a belief system in which there is one supreme God, but that God is accompanied by a pantheon of lesser gods.

In Yahwism’s case, that meant Yahweh at the top, and then “a second tier” which included his consort (yes, God had a wife, or something like one), Asherah, who seems to have been a very popular figure. Beyond her, according to Wikipedia, there were other deities, mostly shared with other Canaanite peoples, “such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, with each having priests and prophets, and numbering royalty among their devotees.”(4)

Now, all this will change over time. Gradually, Israel and Judah will move toward monotheism. That movement will become a headlong rush following the Babylonian Captivity. But, for many years before that, Yahwism and henotheism would be the norm.

And that’s where I intend to look for...Michael.

More to come.

Footnotes:

1. All of this is incredibly complicated and nobody knows for sure what really happened. Did the Tribes of Israel ever really live, or were enslaved, in Egypt? Did they escape? Who was Moses, anyway? The name really is Egyptian. But what do we really know about the whole situation? There are a hundred thousand theories, but no clear answers. See “History of ancient Israel and Judah,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_Israel_and_Judah#Origins_of_ancient_Israel

2. Yahwism, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahwism

This gets complicated, by the way. The name of the original god of Israel was probably “El.” Somehow, though, El became identified as Yahweh.

And another mystery. No one knows where Yahweh comes from or how he got into Israeli religion. He was a god of the South, in the areas later called Edom, Midian, and northwestern Arabia. The question is how did he got from there all the way to Judah and Israel.

One elegant theory--which has been going in and out of fashion for about 100 years now -- is that Moses encountered Yahweh when he fled Egypt and married into a Midianite family -- and the Midianites were a southern family. He then met Yahweh -- “the burning bush” -- was converted, and brought his new God to the Hebrews. True? False? Well, again, who can say? Maybe that’s an issue for Faith rather Scholarship.

3. Yahwism, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahwism

4. Yahwism, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahwism

Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker

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