Daniel E. Fleming - Yahweh before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name

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First published 2021

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ISBN 978-1-108-83507-7 Hardback

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for Mark Stratton Smith, my friend,

without whom my scholarly life would not be the same

and life generally far duller

My students and I have a running joke about speculation. I am against it, I say. New ideas, new possibilities, are essential, and uncertainty is unavoidable. We must learn to describe precisely what we propose, the evidence and arguments for it, along with the gaps and soft spots in the resulting interpretation. Speculation launches into unfounded guesswork, refusing the rigors of proof and disproof. This is not the same as identification of novel explanations, measured carefully against failed alternatives.

For all my determination to eschew speculation, the accusing word hangs over scholarly work as a plague waiting to infest it. When I took on Yahweh, the special god of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel, I entered a realm where ancient history and contemporary religion meet in a cacophony of convictions and conclusions. I offer my own, and their interest to me lies in their novelty, the hope that I have pushed down paths that will prove productive even to those with differing solutions. At every point in the discussion that follows, I will be elaborating what I perceive as a new framework for understanding the earliest evidence for Yahweh, even as I build on the work of others and try not to underplay the uncertainties.

I mean the last in specific terms. My acceptance of the notion that Yhw of the Shasu people in old Egyptian evidence reflects the same name as the famous god is widely shared but capable of valid doubt. My treatment of the opening hymn in the Song of Deborah (Judges 5) as a later elaboration began as an effort at caution, to avoid reading the name Israel as original to all the peoples of the battle account (vv. 1223) when the pattern of appearance suggested otherwise. Yet others make the equation without hesitation. These two interpretive choices are essential to the history I reconstruct here, and they are debatable from the start.

Yet I am determined to avoid speculation, and I hope that my interpretations and discussion are thought-provoking and as often as possible persuasive, worth the read, and worth having written. I begin my offering with this acknowledgment of what such an effort involves. My first higher education was in the natural sciences (geology), and I still carry with me the ideals of scientific pursuit. Progress is made by the construction of interpretations that are capable of testing and susceptible to improvement or disproof. There is no fixed destination, because reality always presents new questions with every conceptual advance. For all that readers may prefer certainties to probabilities, and solutions with alternatives may look like speculation, historical reconstruction always inhabits such conceptual space, the more so when peering at obscure first appearances. Possibilities and probabilities are what we have, and they warrant weighing. Through this work I will construct my argument with as much nuance and precision as I can muster, taking account of degrees of certainty along with what appear secure landmarks. It is my hope that readers will find my caution appropriate to the material and measured carefully, even where their own may lead them differently.

My ruminations on Yahweh before Israel build on generations of insightful study, and so far as they contribute to future work, they will themselves be corrected and improved. This is as it should be. These questions take us back to the hazy horizon of the evidence, where the available facts are well known and the issue is how to situate them in the expanse of what we do not know properly. With what follows I propose to rearrange these facts, convinced that the arrangement is new and interesting, plausible and yet tentative, calling for the reflection of others. It is this reflection to which you are invited.