Transcription
Adonai was not the original God of Israel. Hey everybody, I'm Dan mclen. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. And the majority of scholars who study the earliest periods of Israel's history are in pretty widespread agreement that the original patron deity of the people of Israel, the original God of Israel, was not Adonai. It was the aged and patriarchal high deity over the Northwest Semitic Pantheon, El. Thus the name Israel. El contends, and we have archaeological evidence of the existence of a people group referred to as Israel as early as about 1208 or 1210 BCE with the Merneptah Stele. We don't have any reference whatsoever to any deity named Adonai anywhere in ancient West Asia until over 300 years later, when we get the Mesha inscription and the Tel Dan Stele and the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II, where we have references to kings who have Yahwistic theophoric elements in their names, and we also have reference to Adonai as the patron deity of Israel.
So somewhere between the end of the 13th century BCE and somewhere in the 9th century BCE, the patron deity shifted from El to Adonai. Or, more in alignment with the scholarly consensus, Adonai was conflated with El and they were considered one and the same deity, who was then considered the patron deity over the nation of Israel. So where did Adonai come from? They're not known from any other Pantheon from anywhere in the area. But we do have a couple of inscriptions from Egypt from the 13th and the 14th centuries BCE that refer to a Shasu people group who occupied a territory that was referred to as the land of Yhw. And then, as Gladle Stop, an Egyptian version of the Hebrew aleph, and a lot of scholars think this toponym, this place name, probably lent itself to the name of a deity over a group of nomadic Shasu people who migrated into the northern hill country, maybe in the 11th or 10th centuries BCE, bringing with them their own patron deity, who then was inserted into the Northwest Semitic Pantheon on the second tier. And that deity was assigned a storm deity profile, much like the Northwest Semitic storm deity Baal. And one of the reasons scholars think this is because the earliest literary layers in the Hebrew Bible that refer to Adonai represent Adonai as a youthful warrior storm deity, precisely like Baal. And there's also a lot of competition between Adonai and Baal in the Hebrew Bible.
And so likely what happened is this group brought this deity in that at some point was conflated, probably because a king wanted to consolidate power, or because a devotee of Adonai became king and again wanted to consolidate power. And so a campaign of conflation was undertaken to identify El as Adonai. And that's what we see reflected in the Hebrew Bible. And if you'd like to learn more about these two different deities, there are a bunch of books that have been published over the last 30 years or so that go into an awful lot of detail. And the fit for this video has been my Data Over Dogma hoodie. And for those who are asking where it comes from, you can find them in the two Data Over Dogma stores that are in the link tree in my bio.