Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Judaism and Christianity and Islam share many scriptural traditions.

And one of the scriptural traditions they share is this notion that God, or Yahweh as he's known within Jewish cultures and traditions, that God was essentially always a solitary deity.

There were no other gods.

that should be worshipped.

They were false gods, if there were any other gods that were around.

And this was a universal deity, a universal deity in the sense that this was a god who had a universal reach and a universal control.

This was a god who plucked Abraham out of Mesopotamia, so what we now know as modern-day Iraq, and said, right, I'm going to give you this homeland for your descendants, off you go, and it's called Canaan.

So Canaan is the label in biblical texts that's given to the region we know as the Southern Levant.

So in other words, what's now modern day Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, etc.

So this is a universal solitary creator God, a male God, interestingly.

But that kind of notion of God is a relatively late development within Yahweh worship

of the Iron Age.

So the earlier form of Yahweh, the original form of Yahweh, was quite different.

He was one of a number of deities.

He was a warrior god.

He had a consort, the goddess Asherah.

And he was a god who was gradually, slowly prioritised as a political patron over several centuries by particular ruling groups within the communities that we know as ancient Israel.

Yeah.

So in terms of the earliest uncontested reference to Yahweh, we're basically talking early Iron Age.

So we're talking around the 9th to the 8th centuries BCE.