Was “Yahweh” actually the personal name of the God of Israel? And how do we explain that the world-destroying flood of Genesis 6-9 (the story of Noah) comes in so many other versions from antiquity written long before the book of Genesis appeared?
I have been doing a thread on interesting features of the Hebrew Bible from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press). Here I address the two issues of God’s name and the flood, both of them accounts found in the second book of the Pentateuch, Exodus.
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BOX 4.1 THE PERSONAL NAME OF GOD
God is called by many names in the Bible, including Lord, God, Lord God, God Almighty, God the King, and Lord God of Hosts. But there is one term used for God that appears to have been thought of by ancient Israelites as his actual, personal name. In English, this is often given as Yahweh, based on the Hebrew word YHWH. Ancient Hebrew did not have vowels, only consonants, and so we do not actually know how the word was pronounced, although “Yahweh” is a good guess. Because this special name of God consists of four letters, it is sometimes referred to as the tetragrammaton (literally, “the four letters”).
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Adon and Adonai is interesting because it was -never- used for the immaterial idea of God in the cuneiform times, it’s used *only* for a king, including *God-kings*.
Imo the name of the Tetragrammaton phonetically might be Yahuha Lahmu.
(Variants: maybe Yahoha Lahmu (if you’re using the Akkadian u-to-o shift, maybe Yehuhe Lahmu if you’re acknowledging the a-to-e shift, or maybe you can even unpack further to Hayyasinhalahmu or Easinhalamu. idk.)
Deuteronomy gives you the three *regions* of god: the Sinai, Seir and Paran.
Sinai – Sin
East Semetic
(Lunar god of pastoralists in Abraham’s Harran. Imo equivalent to Hyksos deity Yah, imo bc the -ai refers to Ea in the 28th day of Sin in the Babylonian hemerologies.)
Seir – Lahmu “The Hairy One”
West Semetic
( Servant deity to Ea in Ur)
Paran = Ha the desert god (later, also the Lord of of Foreign Lands)
Egyptian, Midianite
Titulary deities for the three-kingdom coalition of Judah, Israel and Edom when they’re doing their desert campaign
Oh and LHM could stack the Ugarit Elohim also, the divine council, because in Genesis the parts where the Mesopotamian Divine Council speaks seems to map as LHM.
So, nationalism is a kind of fictive kinship — it’s literally uniting different, smaller groups under one umbrella.
And the earliest records were kept in *cuneiform*. So, once they break the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform in the Antiquarian Revival of Uruk, beginning the 4th C BCE, it’s a slow roll out to the least developed areas.
Jesus is showing he KNOWS. He KNOWS HaShem. He knows how national monotheism goes, like with Zooroastrianism (2 deities) or Atenism (two deities).
There’s lots of ways he shows that he knows, but sn easy example is him using Sumero-Akkadian phrases in their correct *contexts*:
“fishers” oh of men, haha. Hello, Dimuzi.
“shepherd” of *men*. Hello, Doeg the Edomite!
Bible says Doeg is the “chief herder”, Talmud says that’s a euphemism for being a herder of *scholars*.