Yahweh's character is known by his actions. The Jahwist picture of Yahweh begins with the creation of human beings and the early history of mankind in general Genesis The Jahwist contributions in this material do not intend to present an exhaustive history, but rather certain episodes with particular importance to later generations. These episodes explain human mortality, the need to work for a living, the existence of many languages, rivalry among brothers, and man's attempt to break through God's limits.
The family is often in view in theological contexts, and the sequence of sin-punishment-mercy appears several times. The Jahwist picture of a theology of history continues with the call of Abraham and the subsequent history of Israel and their ancestors.
The Jahwist presents the nation of Israel as Yahweh's own people, which he brought into being, protected, and settled in the land of Canaan, in fulfillment of promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Jahwist source presents a history of Israel that also illustrates themes of sin-punishment-grace, but more especially one that portrays Yahweh as a powerful deliverer and provider of his people's needs. Faith in Yahweh alone is the primary virtue. Use of the generic word for deity, Elohim , rather than the more personal name, Yahweh, prior to Exodus 3, and descriptions of Yahweh of a more impersonal nature for example, speaking through dreams, prophets, and angels rather than personal appearances are attributed to the Elohist source.
The theology of the Elohist focuses on four key elements: 1 prophetic leadership 2 the fear of God 3 covenant, and 4 the theology of history. Prophetic leadership is emphasized by building the narrative on four key ancestors Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses who are presented as prophets who receive revelations from God in visions and dreams. According to M.
Since Israel and Judah had failed to follow that law, their histories had ended in complete destruction in accordance with the divine judgment envisaged by Deuteronomy. According to G. The Deuteronomist reported repeated instances of Yahweh's word at work in describing previously reported oracles of Yahweh's prophets being precisely fulfilled in events described later. On the one hand, destruction of Israel and Judah was portrayed as according to the prophetic pronouncement of doom in retaliation for disobedience.
On the other hand, the final destruction was restrained by Yahweh's promise to David found in Nathan's oracle in 2 Samuel 7 and reiterated throughout Kings. Wolff describes the purpose of the Deuteronomist in the pattern of apostasy, punishment, repentance, and deliverance common in the Deuteronomistic History.
In the primeval period Genesis , the Priestly source uses the title Elohim as the general name for God. El Shaddai is the first special name for God and it is revealed to the patriarchs and reserved for that era.
Yahweh is the personal name for God that is revealed to Moses and never set in the mouth of any speaker by the Priestly source prior to Moses. Humanity is created in God's image or as God's image implying dominion over the whole earth. The Priestly source portrays Yahweh as a God who is interested in ritual. The covenant of circumcision, the dietary laws, and the emphasis on making a tabernacle according to a divinely revealed plan are all ascribed to the Priestly source.
The Priestly source depicts a formal structure in terms of space, time, and social structure. The spatial center of the universe is the sanctuary which is first modeled in the tabernacle and later in the temple modeled after the pattern revealed to Moses. It is at this specific location that Yahweh wanted to make himself present to his people. The name is generally linked to a form of the Semitic word-stem HWY, conveying the idea of "being".
Semitic word-stems are groups of consonants around which vowels are arranged to form nouns and verbs. The verb "to be" plus the name of El , the chief god in the pantheon, could give rise to the forms yahweh-el "He is El", "He shows himself as El" or the reverse, El-yawheh El who shows himself - the latter, but not the former, is found occasionally in the bible.
Say to the Israelites , 'I Am has sent me to you'. Historians of the ancient near east offer viewpoints that describe worship of Yahweh as originating in pre-Israelite peoples of the Levant and evolving gradually from polytheism to monolatry to monotheism rather than the traditional view that worship of Yahweh was monotheistic from its beginning with the revelation to Moses at the burning bush.
One hypothesis presented in on the PBS science show Nova suggests that a group of originally Canaanite slaves led by Moses out of Egypt probably acquired the deity Yahweh from the Shasu people of Midian. The documentary points out that the Bible itself mentions that Moses first encounteed Yahweh as a burning bush in Midian. The transition from the traditional religions practiced at the family level to the state religion of Yahwism is described as a gradual process with the authorities active on two fronts: they endowed the state religion with temples, a clergy, a national charter myth, and they sought to curb the traditional religions opposed to Yahweh worship by integration of some and suppression of other aspects of the traditional religions practiced at the local and family levels.
Both the archaeological evidence and the Biblical texts document tensions between groups comfortable with the worship of Yahweh alongside of local deities such as Asherah and Baal and those insistent on worship of Yahweh alone during the monarchal period.
For example, a tenth century BCE cult stand from Taanach a town in Northern Israel, near Megiddo has unambiguous polytheistic implications. The stand has four levels, or registers. On the bottom register, or level four, there is a female figure with hands resting upon the heads of lions standing on either side.
The female figure can be interpreted as a goddess, either Asherah, Astarte, or Anat. The third register has two winged sphinx type figures with a vacant space between them. The second level contains a sacred tree flanked on both sides by ibexes standing on their hind legs. The top register shows a quadruped either a bovine or a horse with a sun disk above it. It is unclear whether Taanach was under Israelite or Canaanite control when the stand was produced, and interpretations vary.
The solar disk above the quadruped is representative of either the sun god or the sky. Dever, [] and Judith Hadley [] continue to interpret the inscription in a way that it refers to Asherah as an Israelite goddess and consort of Yahweh. William G. Miller has broadly grouped the worship of Yahweh in ancient Israel into three broad categories: orthodox, heterodox, and syncretistic.
Miller acknowledges that one man's orthodoxy is another man's heterodoxy and that orthodoxy was not a fixed and unchanging reality in the religion of ancient Israel. Miller describes orthodox Yahwism as expecting exclusive worship of Yahweh. Yahweh was understood as the sole divine power ultimately effective in the world even if there was resistance or encroachment of other gods.
Orthodox worship of Yahweh did not employ a physical representation of the deity. The powers of blessing health, wealth, continuity, fertility and salvation forgiveness, victory, deliverance from oppression and threat resided fully in Yahweh. It is Jethro who indirectly leads Moses to his first meeting with Yahweh at the burning bush. Now, according to Bible, the Midianites were descendants of Midian, another son of Abraham, which again supports the idea of the existence of an extended family of Yahwistic peoples.
Amzallag seems to be the first to stress the metallurgical side of this hypothesis and link Yahweh specifically to the rites and cults of ancient miners and smelters. These people, identifiable as the biblical Kenites, would have been held in high regard and seen as being close to the divine because they possessed knowledge about the secret and mysterious process of copper smelting, Amzallag says.
Or maybe the god of storms. We have no direct proof that the metallurgical god, worshipped at the Edomite sanctuary in Timna from the 12th to the 10th century B. There are skeptics. He thinks they are more indicative of a god of storms and fertility, similar to the Canaanite god Baal. Iron trumps bronze. That may have had to do with the rise of the Iron Age, Amzallag says. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, two relatively rare elements. Iron is much easier to find and just needs to be combined with another common element, carbon, to produce one of the strongest metals known to man: steel.
By the 9th century B. In the Iron Age, Mediterranean metal workers lost their elite status and were simply seen as skilled craftsmen rather than quasi-priests or magicians. In parallel, their gods either lost their importance in the local pantheon and were forgotten, or were transformed, acquiring different attributes and characteristics, Amzallag says. For one thing, Allah is a distant, remote being who reveals his will but not himself. It is impossible to know him in a personal way. In his absolute oneness there is unity but not trinity, and because of this lack of relationship, love is not emphasized.
Indeed, for the Muslim, Allah cannot have any associates. When we look at Yahweh, however, who is the God of the Bible, we see a different kind of deity.
The Jews realized that Jesus was referring to himself as God and took up stones to stone him for what they believed was blasphemy. This link between Jesus in the New Testament and the burning bush in the Old Testament demonstrates the unity of the one God manifested to both the Jews and the Christians.
This cannot be said of the Muslim God because Muslims reject the deity of Jesus and therefore reject much of what the New Testament says about Jesus. We also find that the Bible portrays Yahweh in contrast to Allah. For example, Allah is considered to be too holy to have personal relationships with man, but Yahweh is often described as a loving God interested in our personal struggles.
Yahweh is also depicted as unchanging and One who assures the salvation of the faithful. At the height of its power in the late s, the Miami-based Nation of Yahweh had satellite temples around the country and a lucrative business empire of apartment complexes, hotels, stores and fleets of Greyhound buses and Rolls Royce cars, all painted stark white.
And while the Nation's wealth and strength dwindled following the imprisonment of its founder, it was apparent from the conspicuously affluent turnout at his funeral that current Nation members are neither penniless nor scarce.
Indeed, in recent years the Nation has put on several lavish conferences in Canada. It has expanded anew in both Canada and Texas, and followers are appearing regularly in South Florida, too.
And it has grown increasingly apocalyptic in tone as it predicts the end of white dominion, a development that has observers worried, given the Nation's violent past.
The mood inside the ballroom this May was joyful. The corpse of Yahweh ben Yahweh translation: "God, son of God" lay out in the open as his disciples stood elbow to elbow. The occasion marked the first legal contact between Yahweh and his followers in some 15 years, since the terms of his parole strictly prohibited him from reconnecting with his congregation in any way.
But anger was also in the air. Funeral orators unleashed vengeful polemics against an unspecified enemy. Nation of Yahweh members believe that the death of Yahweh ben Yahweh was foretold in Holy Scriptures and is a sign that the time is upon the Earth when the godly remnants of the black race will displace the accursed white race — along with blacks "infected" with white blood — and rule the earth.
As one funeral speaker put it: "The wicked powers and principalities sitting in high places knew that the power of Yahweh ben Yahweh is the beginning of the end of their 6,year rule of wicked dominion! Ending 'The Devil's Rulership' Although Nation of Yahweh members no longer openly condemn "white devils," there's little confusion among Nation members concerning the identity of those "wicked powers" or what the "end of their 6,year rule" means.
As Nation of Yahweh elder Job Israel, who went to prison with Yahweh ben Yahweh, explained in the parking lot outside the funeral: "God is black. The opposite of God is evil. The opposite of black is white. So what do you think white is? Later, in a telephone interview with the Intelligence Report , Israel expanded on his point: "God created the white man to punish us for being disobedient to God.
The original devil was black. But when Cain killed Abel, [God] cursed him to be white. Yahweh [God] gave him [the white man] a hedge of protection and gave him 6, years to rule.
The devil's rulership is up. Nation of Yahweh theology borrows liberally from the Nation of Islam NOI , a much better known black separatist group of which Yahweh was briefly a member in the s. Copying another lesson verbatim from Muhammad, Yahweh also taught his followers that an English pirate named John Hawkins delivered the very first enslaved Africans to the New World in on a ship named Jesus.
Though wildly inaccurate, this lesson continues to set the agenda for Nation of Yahweh members.
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