Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Yeah, so that's where we're on kind of slightly firmer territory, slightly firmer ground.

So some of the earliest poetry that we have in the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Bible is the name that we give to the Old Testament, what people know as Tanakh, Christians know as the Old Testament.

The Hebrew Bible's earliest poetry refers to Yahweh as a deity, as this kind of warrior god, a god who's a fighter, who comes from the sort of arid regions of the south, so Edom.

in particular.

So again, the territory that we would associate now with Southern Jordan.

And these seem to give a sort of an origin story.

Further south than that.

But you know that very red

soil and sand and rock of Petra.

It's that same.

The word Edom is linked to the word for red, to the word for blood.

So it's that red kind of desert wilderness territory is where Yahweh is given his origins in a lot of early Hebrew Bible poetry.

So most scholars think that he has this very southern wilderness origin.

What we know is that the Hebrew Bible tells the story that Israel's origins begin as they are a loose tribal network.

various nomadic and semi-nomadic groups who go into Egypt and then find themselves coming out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan, so the Southern Levant.

Many scholars now are very iffy about the historicity of those tribal traditions.

It may be that this is something that has been retrojected back into the story at a later date.

No, this is no longer... Most academics would say perhaps something happened.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's interesting.