13 Facts About Yahweh

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.

Yahweh is invoked in Amherst Papyrus 63, and in Jewish or Jewish-influenced Greco-Egyptian magical texts from the 1st to 5th century CE.

Biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross has proposed that Yahweh derives from a potential epiphet of El: du yahwi saba?ot, "he who creates the hosts", perhaps the epiphet of El as patron deity of a Midianite league.

The current consensus is therefore that Yahweh was a "divine warrior from the southern region associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman".

Yahweh filled the role of national god in the kingdom of Israel, which emerged in the 10th century BCE; and in Judah, which emerged probably a century later .

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In 9th century, the Yahweh-religion began to separate itself from its Canaanite heritage, with the rejection of Baal worship .

Centre of Yahweh's worship lay in three great annual festivals coinciding with major events in rural life: Passover with the birthing of lambs, Shavuot with the cereal harvest, and Sukkot with the fruit harvest.

Yahweh-worship was famously aniconic, meaning that the god was not depicted by a statue or other image.

The early supporters of this faction are widely regarded as being monolatrists rather than true monotheists; they did not believe Yahweh was the only god in existence, but instead believed he was the only god the people of Israel should worship.

Finally, in the national crisis of the exile, the followers of Yahweh went a step further and outright denied that the other deities aside from Yahweh even existed, thus marking the transition from monolatrism to true monotheism.

The notion that Yahweh is "to be venerated as the creator-god of all the earth" is first elaborated by the Second Isaiah, a 6th-century exilic work, though the case for the theological doctrine again rests on Yahweh's power over other gods rather than independent monotheistic reasoning.

Yahweh is frequently invoked in Graeco-Roman magical texts dating from the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE, most notably in the Greek Magical Papyri, under the names Iao, Adonai, Sabaoth, and Eloai.

The frequent occurrence of Yahweh's name was likely due to Greek and Roman folk magicians seeking to make their spells more powerful through the invocation of a prestigious foreign deity.