How the God of Israel Was Born

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How the God of Israel Was Born

For centuries, the story of monotheism has been told as a sudden, finished revelation. But Near Eastern archaeology and the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible point to a far more complex story: the exhausting political and cultural process by which two rival deities, the priesthood of Egypt and the rites of desert nomads merged into a single faith.

By Andrea Fontana<br>23 July 2026<br>24 min read

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The ruins of the Egyptian temple of Soleb in Sudan (14th century BCE), built under Pharaoh Amenhotep III. It is in this sanctuary that the oldest known hieroglyphic inscription bearing the proper name of YHWH was found (ta shasu ya-h-wa).<br>Photo: Clemens Schmillen (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0

In the traditional narrative and in the collective imagination, Judaism is born all at once, in the thunder of Mount Sinai: one God, one Law, a chosen people breaking with the polytheism of neighbouring nations. But the story written in stone and hidden in the folds of the Hebrew Bible's manuscripts (the Tanakh, attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, 3rd century BCE, and in the medieval Hebrew codices of Aleppo and Leningrad) suggests a far more complex history. The original Hebrew text is not a monolith written by a single hand contemporary with the events, but an imposing stratification of independent sources, often openly at odds with one another1.

Modern historical-critical scholarship in particular (following an influential academic reconstruction championed by scholars such as Frank Moore Cross, Mark S. Smith and Thomas Römer) has isolated two major theological and geographical strands: a northern tradition (rooted in the territories of Canaan and tied to the Canaanite culture of Ugarit) and a southern tradition (originating in the Arabian desert and the nomadic tribes). The Judaism we know is the end result of the gradual convergence, smoothing and editorial harmonisation of these two worlds.

1. The North of El: the supreme god, father of the gods

Reading a Bible translation today, the text seems to speak everywhere of a generic "God" or "the Lord". This, however, is a linguistic illusion produced by later confessional versions, which flattened and standardised under abstract categories the distinct proper names and epithets of the oldest Hebrew codices2.

In texts and traditions attributed to the Northern Kingdom (Israel, or Ephraim), attestations of the deity show a clear predominance of titles and epithets referring to El , rendered in precise epithets such as El Shaddai (El of the Mountains, or the Almighty), El Elyon (El the Most High), or in the majestic plural Elohim3. Archaeological excavations conducted since 1929 at the coastal city of Ugarit (in Syria) unearthed a library of cuneiform tablets from the 2nd millennium BCE that describe the Canaanite pantheon in precise detail4.

At Ugarit, El is the supreme, celestial deity: an old, wise and transcendent god, flanked by his consort Asherah (Athirat). El does not intervene directly in human affairs; he delegates the running of the earthly world to his sons, led by the storm god Baal . Under him preside exactly 70 lesser deities, the bn 'il (the "sons of El"), each assigned to protect one of the 70 nations of the then-known world4.

The Hebrew Bible preserves a trace of this divine council in Deuteronomy 32:8-95. In the medieval Masoretic Text, it reads that Elyon divided the nations «according to the number of the sons of Israel». But the Hebrew manuscript from Qumran, 4QDeutj (dating to the 2nd century BCE), and the ancient Greek Septuagint (3rd-2nd century BCE) preserve the older reading: Elyon fixed the borders «according to the number of the sons of Elohim » (benê 'elōhîm), adding that the portion assigned to YHWH was the people of Jacob, suggesting that YHWH was originally conceived not as the supreme god, but as a deity subordinate to El, who had assigned him a single people.

The imprint of this primordial cult is carved into the very name of the people: Isra-El ("El strives" or "May El rule"), not Isra-Yah. Likewise, the names of the patriarchs, prophets and angels tied to the Northern, more archaic tradition end in -el (Samuel, Ezekiel, Gabriel, Michael, Joel, Daniel), testifying to an era when El was the supreme deity of Canaanite territory.

2. The South of YHWH: the god of the desert

The second tradition has its roots in the South. In the Hebrew texts of the South, the god carries the proper, tetragrammatic name YHWH . YHWH is not born in the urban palaces of Canaan, but among the arid highlands and nomadic tribes of Midian, Edom, Seir and the Sinai desert6. Even Egyptian historical sources confirm this: reliefs at the temple of Soleb (dating to Amenhotep III, 14th century BCE) and at Amarah West bear hieroglyphs mentioning the geography of the nomadic Shasu: ta shasu ya-h-wa, meaning "the land of the Shasu...