William Durand-Poor

Yahweh has a much more tangled, complicated, and geographically expansive origin than conventional Jewish or Christian or indeed Muslim theology would lead us to believe.

Now, you've just said a lot of stuff that you packed into two sentences, enough to sort of blow the minds of every believing monotheist for three religions.

So let's go very, very slowly through this, what you just said.

I suppose, first of all, to unpack it, what era, what dates are we talking for the very first mentions of Yahweh?

Let's do time, then place, and then look at exactly what he is originally called.

So that's in ancient Mesopotamian terms quite late in the day.

We've seen the rise and fall of Ur, we've seen the Syrians, Babylonians, all sorts of stuff going on.

Midnight century.

Just to go into, again, slightly more contentious territory, before that, before the link of Yahweh with Israel, which is that stellar from the mid-ninth century, we have other references to Yahweh in slightly different form, way to the south, and not associated with Israel.

That is contentious.

But less contentious is the fact that early references to Yahweh seem to come or point to the south, even within the Hebrew Bible.

Petra region or further deeper south?

and that he and possibly the tribes who worship him are migrating northwards into what is now Israel over time.

Is that firmer territory?

No, by your expression, not.

So what we do know is that... So they're quite down on the whole notion that there was an exodus.

This is not considered to be historical anymore by academics.

And there's definitely to-ing and fro-ing between what's now Israel and what's now Egypt.

We've done with Eric Klein a series on the Bronze Age collapse.

So our listeners know all that stuff and Garrett and all those sea peoples turning up and collapsing.