A more fundamental question is whether the name Yahweh
originated among the Israelites or was adopted by them from
some other people and speech.[1] The biblical author of the history
of the sacred institutions (P) expressly declares that the
name Yahweh was unknown to the patriarchs (Exod. vi. 3), and
the much older Israelite historian (E) records the first revelation
of the name to Moses (Exod. iii. 13–15), apparently following a
tradition according to which the Israelites had not been worshippers
of Yahweh before the time of Moses, or, as he conceived
it, had not worshipped the god of their fathers under that name.
The revelation of the name to Moses was made at a mountain
sacred to Yahweh (the mountain of God) far to the south of
Palestine, in a region where the forefathers of the Israelites had
never roamed, and in the territory of other tribes; and long after
the settlement in Canaan this region continued to be regarded as
the abode of Yahweh (Judg. v. 4; Deut. xxxiii. 2 sqq.; 1 Kings xix.
8 sqq. &c.). Moses is closely connected with the tribes in the vicinity
of the holy mountain; according to one account, he married a
daughter of the priest of Midian (Exod. ii. 16 sqq.; iii. 1); to this
mountain he led the Israelites after their deliverance from
Egypt; there his father-in-law met him, and extolling Yahweh
as “greater than all the gods,” offered (in his capacity as priest
of the place?) sacrifices, at which the chief men of the Israelites
were his guests; there the religion of Yahweh was revealed
through Moses, and the Israelites pledged themselves to serve
God according to its prescriptions. It appears, therefore, that
in the tradition followed by the Israelite historian the tribes
within whose pasture lands the mountain of God stood were
worshippers of Yahweh before the time of Moses; and the surmise
that the name Yahweh belongs to their speech, rather than to
that of Israel, has considerable probability. One of these tribes
was Midian, in whose land the mountain of God lay. The
Kenites also, with whom another tradition connects Moses,
seem to have been worshippers of Yahweh. It is probable that
Yahweh was at one time worshipped by various tribes south of
Palestine, and that several places in that wide territory (Horeb,
Sinai, Kadesh, &c.) were sacred to him; the oldest and most
famous of these, the mountain of God, seems to have lain in
Arabia, east of the Red Sea. From some of these peoples and
at one of these holy places, a group of Israelite tribes adopted the
religion of Yahweh, the God who, by the hand of Moses, had
delivered them from Egypt.[2]
The tribes of this region probably belonged to some branch of the great Arab stock, and the name Yahweh has, accordingly, been connected with the Arabic hawā, “the void” (between heaven and earth), “the atmosphere,” or with the verb hawā, cognate with Heb. hāwāh, “sink, glide down” (through space); hawwā “blow” (wind). “He rides through the air, He blows” (Wellhausen), would be a fit name for a god of wind and storm. There is, however, no certain evidence that the Israelites in historical times had any consciousness of the primitive significance of the name.
The attempts to connect the name Yahweh with that of an Indo-European deity (Jehovah-Jove, &c.), or to derive it from Egyptian or Chinese, may be passed over. But one theory which has had considerable currency requires notice, namely, that Yahweh, or Yahu, Yaho,[3] is the name of a god worshipped throughout the whole, or a great part, of the area occupied by the Western Semites. In its earlier form this opinion rested chiefly on certain misinterpreted testimonies in Greek authors about a god Ἰάω, and was conclusively refuted by Baudissin; recent adherents of the theory build more largely on the occurrence in various parts of this territory of proper names of persons and places which they explain as compounds of Yahu or Yah.[4] The explanation is in most cases simply an assumption of the point at issue; some of the names have been misread; others are undoubtedly the names of Jews. There remain, however, some cases in which it is highly probable that names of non-Israelites are really compounded with Yahweh. The most conspicuous of these is the king of Hamath who in the inscriptions of Sargon (722–705 B.C.) is called Yaubi’di and Ilubi’di (compare Jehoiakim-Eliakim). Azriyau of Jaudi, also, in inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser (745–728 B.C.), who was formerly supposed to be Azariah (Uzziah) of Judah, is probably a king of the country in northern Syria known to us from the Zenjirli inscriptions as Ja’di.
Friedrich Delitzsch brought into notice three tablets, of the age of the first dynasty of Babylon, in which he read the names of Ya-a’-ve-ilu, Ya-ve-ilu, and Ya-ū-um-ilu (“Yahweh is God”), and which he regarded as conclusive proof that Yahweh was known in Babylonia before 2000 B.C.; he was a god of the Semitic invaders in the second wave of migration, who were, according to Winckler and Delitzsch, of North Semitic stock (Canaanites, in the linguistic sense).[5] We should thus have in the tablets evidence of the worship of Yahweh among the Western Semites at a time long before the rise of Israel. The reading of the names is, however, extremely uncertain, not to say improbable, and the far-reaching inferences drawn from them carry no conviction. In a tablet attributed to the 14th century B.C. which Sellin found in the course of his excavations at Tell Taʽannuk (the Taanach of the O.T.) a name occurs which may be read Ahi-Yawi (equivalent to Hebrew Ahijah);[6] if the reading be correct, this would show that Yahweh was worshipped in Central Palestine before the Israelite conquest. The reading is, however, only one of several possibilities. The fact that the full form Yahweh appears, whereas in Hebrew proper names only the shorter Yahu and Yah occur, weighs somewhat against the interpretation, as it does against Delitzsch’s reading of his tablets.
It would not be at all surprising if, in the great movements of populations and shifting of ascendancy which lie beyond our historical horizon, the worship of Yahweh should have been established in regions remote from those which it occupied in historical times; but nothing which we now know warrants the opinion that his worship was ever general among the Western Semites.
Many attempts have been made to trace the West Semitic Yahu back to Babylonia. Thus Delitzsch formerly derived the name from an Akkadian god, I or Ia; or from the Semitic nominative ending, Yau;[7] but this deity has since disappeared from the pantheon of Assyriologists. The combination of Yah with Ea, one of the great Babylonian gods, seems to have a peculiar fascination for amateurs, by whom it is periodically “discovered.” Scholars are now agreed that, so far as Yahu or Yah occurs in Babylonian texts, it is as the name of a foreign god.
Assuming that Yahweh was primitively a nature god, scholars in the 19th century discussed the question over what sphere of nature he originally presided. According to some he was the god of consuming fire; others saw in him the bright sky, or the heaven; still others recognized in him a storm god, a theory with which the derivation of the name from Heb. hāwāh or Arab. hawā well accords. The association of Yahweh with storm and fire is frequent in the Old Testament; the thunder is the voice of Yahweh, the lightning his arrows, the rainbow his bow. The revelation at Sinai is amid the awe-inspiring phenomena of tempest. Yahweh leads Israel through the desert in a pillar of cloud and fire; he kindles Elijah’s altar by lightning, and translates the prophet in a chariot of fire. See also Judg. v. 4 seq.;
- ↑ See Hebrew Religion.
- ↑ The divergent Judaean tradition, according to which the forefathers had worshipped Yahweh from time immemorial, may indicate that Judah and the kindred clans had in fact been worshippers of Yahweh before the time of Moses.
- ↑ The form Yahu, or Yaho, occurs not only in composition, but by itself; see Aramaic Papyri discovered at Assuan, B 4, 6, 11; E 14; J 6. This is doubtless the original of Ἰάω, frequently found in Greek authors and in magical texts as the name of the God of the Jews.
- ↑ See a collection and critical estimate of this evidence by Zimmern, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, 465 sqq.
- ↑ Babel und Bibel, 1902. The enormous, and for the most part ephemeral, literature provoked by Delitzsch’s lecture cannot be cited here.
- ↑ Denkschriften d. Wien. Akad., L. iv. p. 115 seq. (1904).
- ↑ Wo lag das Paradies? (1881), pp. 158–166.
