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Asha / Shared knowledge

religion · Shared topic · Revision 0

Is Yahweh the Same as El?

Is Yahweh the Same as El?

Starting explanation, not independently reviewed

The current answer

The one and the many, and the verse where the Bible sews two gods into one.

What remains uncertain

This starting summary presents the original essay’s position. It has not received independent topic review. Its citations have been imported, not checked. Competing explanations and important objections may still be missing.

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Claims & evidence

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El was the high god of the wider Canaanite world, the aged father of the gods known from the tablets of Ugarit, and he is the god in Israel's own name: Yisra-el, not Yisra-yah.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God; Ugaritic texts

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The tablets from Ugarit, a coastal city north of Israel destroyed around 1185 BCE, preserve a whole mythology in a language closely related to Hebrew.

Imported citation, not independently checked: KTU 1.1-1.6; N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit

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Albrecht Alt argued in 1929 that these began as distinct local cults; later scholarship has mostly read them as titles of the one high god El worshipped at different shrines.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Albrecht Alt, patriarchal religion (1929)

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Balaam, a non-Israelite seer, blesses Israel in the name of El, Elyon and Shaddai in the same breath as Yahweh (Numbers 23:8, 23:19, 23:22, 24:4, 24:16).

Imported citation, not independently checked: Numbers 23:8, 19, 22; 24:4, 16

The strongest objections

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No objection has been independently reviewed yet. This is a gap to investigate, not evidence that the answer is settled.

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