Yahweh

Yahweh

Yahweh was the national god of ancient Israel and Judah. His origins reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age. In the oldest biblical literature, he is a storm-and-warrior deity who leads the heavenly army against Israel's enemies; at that time the Israelites worshipped him alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal; 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 the Yahwist religion.Towards the end of the Babylonian captivity, the very existence of foreign gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator of the cosmos and the one true God of all the world. During the Second Temple period, speaking the name of Yahweh in public became regarded as taboo; Jews began to substitute the divine name with the word adonai (אֲדֹנָי‬‎), meaning "My Lords" but used as a singular like "Elohim", and after the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE the original pronunciation was forgotten. Outside of early Judaism, Yahweh was frequently invoked in Greco-Roman magical texts from the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE under the names Iao, Adonai, Sabaoth, and Eloai.

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