Out of Egypt, I am Called Yahweh

Previous articles have discussed evidence for multiple sources in the creation and flood stories. In the final version of these stories that appears in our bibles, the Bible’s editor (called the “redactor”) sometimes keeps the sources intact (as in the two separate creation tales) and other times interweaves them (as in the combined flood story). Scholars can identify the separate strands based on terminology, consistent themes, and narrative flow. One of the themes that sets one source apart from the other is when God’s name is revealed.

What’s in a Name?

According to the source known as the “Yahwist” or “J”, God revealed his name around the time of Adam’s grandson:

To Seth also a son was born, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to invoke the name of YHWH.” (Gen 4:26)

Thereafter, the J source exclusively uses the name YHWH (usually translated as “the Lord” in modern bibles) in narration. That is why this source was named the “Yahwist.” Ancient Hebrew consisted of only consonants, so we don’t know for sure exactly how it was pronounced, but scholars believe it would have been “Yah-WEH” (accent on last syllable).

Other sources – the “Elohist” (E) and “Priestly” (P) – hold that the divine name YHWH was first revealed to Moses. Before Moses, God was known to the ancestors under different names. For example, in the P account of the covenant with Abram, we read,

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, YHWH appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am El Shaddai.” (Gen 17:1)

The P source explains in this verse that Abram only knows the deity by the name El Shaddai (“God Almighty” in most English translations). But when YHWH speaks to Moses, the text reads:

God also spoke to Moses and said to him: “I am YHWH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name ‘YHWH’ I did not make myself known to them.” (Ex 6:2-3)

These verses are taken from the P version of the call of Moses (Ex 6:2-12). God’s commission to Moses to lead his people out of Egypt is a “triplet,” a story recounted in three sources: P, J, and E. The P version is isolated and intact, but the J and E versions are combined in an earlier passage (Ex 3:1-4:23). The E source predominates in this longer passage:

But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘YHWH, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ (Ex 3:13-15)

There’s a lot going on in this passage that doesn’t concern us at this point. The key thing to note is that, as in the P version, the ancestors knew the deity under different names but God first reveals his true name to Moses. Both E and P agree on this point: the name YHWH only came into use after the exodus from Egypt.

Could this be a clue that refugees from Egypt brought the worship of YHWH with them to Canaan?

Charlton Heston as Moses learns the name of God in the burning bush scene from Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 version of The Ten Commandments.

The Midianite Connection

In my last article, we saw that archaeology revealed the early Israelites were Canaanites, speaking a Canaanite dialect and practicing the Canaanite religion. In that religion, the main god was known as “El” (as in El Shaddai). Of the hundreds of city names in Canaan, many include the name El (for example, Beth-el, for “house of God”) but none include the name YHWH. Yet the worship of YHWH eventually became synonymous with Israel (etymology uncertain, perhaps means “God rules”).

How did Canaanites go from worshipping El to YHWH? Let’s go back to Exodus 3-4 and the commission of Moses. Other than Moses being told God’s true name, we also have the indication of where this occurred:

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. (Ex 3:1)

Both J and E tie Moses to Midian, even going so far to say that Moses’ father-in-law was a Midianite priest. Both also locate God’s mountain (called Sinai in J and Horeb in E) in or near Midian. It is reasonable then to look for the origins of the cult of YHWH in Midian. (Midian was located east of the Gulf of Aqaba, south of present-day Jordan, in what would now be the extreme northwest corner of Saudi Arabia.)

We also have Egyptian texts from the 14th-13th centuries BCE that mention semi-nomads called the “Shasu of yhw3” who were located in the general vicinity of Midian. Egyptologists derive the name “Shasu” from an Egyptian verb meaning “to wander.” The Egyptian hieroglyphs transliterated as “yhw3” would probably have been pronounced “Yahu” and is strangely similar to the name of Israel’s God, YHWH. It may have been a place name or it could have been their patron god.

The pieces seem to fit together. Let’s say you have a small group who escape from Egypt – perhaps captured Canaanites or Midianites who had been enslaved – and, on their way to eventually settling in the hill country of Canaan, they pass through Midian. When they finally arrive in the central hill country, they bring with them their story of deliverance from Egypt and attribute their freedom to the god they followed in Midian, who they now call Yahweh.

Certainly the Midianite connection is strong, but so are the Egyptian connections. There are Egyptian details in the story that may go back to the original story told by those who escaped Egypt. We’ll look at those in the next article.

A Day in the Life

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of The Beatles. “A Day in the Life” from their Sgt. Pepper album is a quintessential Lennon-McCartney song. Beginning with John Lennon's dark musings (“I read the news today, oh boy”) about a man who “blew his mind out in a car” and watching a war movie, we transition to an upbeat Paul McCartney ditty about the life of a bloke who “woke up, got out of bed” and started daydreaming on a bus, only to return to Lennon counting “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” Lennon and McCartney wrote two separate songs, but merged them into one with some chaotic orchestration patching the seams. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We see a similar process at work in much of the Bible where strands of multiple sources are edited together to form a unified whole. No better is that demonstrated than in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis.

The very first chapter of Genesis has the familiar six-day creation story. Throughout the chapter, appears the formulaic “And God said…” followed by some command (“let there be light”, “let the waters be gathered together”, and so on), words indicating the fulfillment of the command (“it was so”), and an assessment (“God saw that it was good”). In Gen 2:3. God blessed the seventh day because that is when he rested (shabat, in Hebrew, the basis of the noun sabbath). The main point of the story is an explanation of why we should rest on the Sabbath. A secondary point is a polemic against rival religions by showing that God is the creator of objects like light, astral bodies, and animals that were regarded as divine beings in other cultures.




"Creation of Sun and Moon" on the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo

Gen 2:4 begins the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. At first it appears to be a recapitulation with specificity of events occurring on the sixth day of creation, but Gen 2.5 points out that at this point there was “no plant of the field” because there were no humans to till the ground. So the Lord God formed “the human” (ha’adam) from “the ground” (ha’adamah) and, only then, “made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (v. 9). Not wanting his creature to be alone, the Lord God formed out of the ground animals and birds (v. 19), but they were not suitable companions for the human, so the Lord God finally made a woman from the side of the human (v. 22). Indeed, the second creation story reaches its peak when the woman is brought to the human and he recognizes “bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh”. The point of this story seems to be that human beings are not meant to be alone but in community and the core of community is the special relationship between men and women.

Gen 2 is an entirely different creation story from Gen 1. The order of events in Gen 1 are plants-animals-humans (male and female). The order of events in Gen 2 are human (male)-plants-animals-human (female). In Gen 1, God orders something created and it is done. In Gen 2, the Lord God “formed” humans and animals out of the ground. Even the words for the deity are different. In Gen 1, the deity is referred to as “God” (elohim) but in Gen 2, the deity is called the Lord God (YHWH elohim).

In most English translations, “Lord” sounds like an honorific title (for example, “Lord Byron”), but it is actually the deity’s personal name, Yahweh (written in Hebrew using only the consonants YHWH). Jews do not utter the deity’s personal name, so in synagogue readings, they will say “my Lord” (adonay) wherever YHWH appears in the text. English translators followed this tradition, and put “Lord” is small caps to indicate that YHWH is being translated. Elohim is the common noun used to refer to a deity. The combination YHWH elohim only appears in Gen 2-3 (except for Exodus 9:30 where it may be a scribal mistake).

So what we have here are two creation tales that were joined together at some point. In the first, we have a heaven-centered viewpoint with Elohim, the universal deity, creating by divine fiat. In the second, we have a much more human-centered viewpoint with YHWH, the personal name of Israel’s deity, forming humans and animals from the ground the way a potter fashions earthern vessels. When the two stories were placed together, the redactor added the common noun Elohim after personal name YHWH in Gen 2-3, possibly to make the transition less jarring or to subtly indicate that the personal deity of Israel is the same universal deity of creation.

Continuing to read through the remaining chapters in Genesis and the other books of the Pentateuch, we will continue to notice the jump from Elohim to YHWH and back again. Using different names for the deity is one of the clues that we are dealing with different traditions or sources. Other clues are names (Israel vs. Jacob, Sinai vs. Horeb), distinctive vocabulary, or favored themes (rituals, laws, dates and numbers). Much like a detective identifying four different individuals at the scene of the crime from the clues they left behind, biblical scholars have identified at least four different traditions that were combined to make up the first five books of the Bible. This theory of composition is usually referred to as the documentary hypothesis.

There are some detractors of the documentary hypothesis. Some are fundamentalists who believe that the first five books were written by Moses because Jesus said it was (e.g., Luke 24:44). Others are critical scripture scholars who think supporters of the documentary hypothesis have developed an overly-complicated theory or doubt that individual traditions can be separated into individual continuous sources. Whether an editor combined completely separate sources or just fragments of various traditions together, there does seem to be overwhelming evidence that we are dealing with multiple sources and not just a single work by one author. Just like with “A Day in the Life”, the end result is a harmonious composition, but the individual components come from separate artists...and sometimes the seams show.