Note: This post is meant to be read after reading part 1 of this series, where I lay some groundwork and introduce some important concepts.
Yesterday's post explored the language in the Bible regarding the Most High God - the head of the pantheon of gods, El Elyon. Today I am going to explore some concepts that are all related - El, Elohim, and the bene elohim.
El
Scholars believe that the original Hebrew deity was El - a name which eventually became a generic word for "god". And in Genesis 33:20 we are told that when Jacob arrived in the city of Shechem, which is in Canaan, "he erected an altar and called it El-Elohe-Israel [which means "God, the god of Israel" or "El, the god of Israel"] ." And this shows corroborating evidence that what we call "Israelites" are originally descended from Canaanites - because here, Jacob is in a Canaanite city erecting an alter that references a Canaanite god, but claiming it as the god of Israel.
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| A statue of El from Ugarit |
Archaeology has discovered evidence that a people group known as "Israel" occupied the land of Canaan as early as 1208BCE, in the form of an inscription on the Merneptah Stele. And there is no archaeological evidence of the existence of YHWH as an Israelite deity until about 300 years later, when we find inscriptions on the Mesha Stele, the Tel Dan Stele, and the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, which reference Kings that have forms of "YHWH" in their names, as well as some mention of YHWH as the god of Israel.
But it is important to note that the very name Israel - meaning "strives with El" or "El strives" or even "El rules" - is a name containing the name of this Canaanite deity. And so scholars believe that El-worship by the Hebrew people predates YHWH worship.
El was originally a Canaanite god, but there are forms of the name "El" in Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Akkadian. He was viewed as the father of the gods, the creator of humanity, and the head of the pantheon - much like El Elyon in later Hebrew literature.
El eventually starts to become conflated with YHWH in Biblical literature - and this is part of the development I mentioned in part 1 of this series where the Hebrew polytheism starts to become monolatrism (belief in many gods but worshiping only one) and eventually henotheism (almost the same thing as monolatrism, but believing that the god you worship is the supreme deity).
Elohim and the Bene Elohim
As I mentioned before, "El" becomes a generic word for "god". But later on, "elohim", which is a plural-form word, becomes a word that is not only used for "gods", but is also generically used to speak of "God" - even as a name. Elohim is the way the entire chapter of Genesis 1 refers to God, which you can see if you switch over to the "Names of God" translation of the Bible. And this is one of the reasons scholars believe that Genesis 1 through Genesis 2 verse 4a was written after Genesis 2:4b-25, as the tendency for the priestly class to discard anthropomorphism and use more abstract language about God is a development that is observed in later writings. Whereas Genesis 2:4b-25 has YHWH Elohim (literally: YHWH God) getting down in the dirt and forming man like a potter, and planting the garden of Eden like a farmer, Genesis 1 has Elohim creating through divine decree, like a king or emperor.
And as I mentioned in the last post, we sometimes see Elohim being used to talk about gods, plural. One example I gave was Psalm 82:1, which talks about the Most High (Elyon) ruling over the divine council of elohim (gods). But there are also references to the bene elohim - the sons of God. And this shows evidence of a theology that involves a divine hierarchy of greater and lesser gods.
One interesting reference to the bene elohim is in the beginning of Genesis chapter 6 - Genesis 6:1-4:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God [bene elohim] saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord [YHWH] said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God [bene elohim] went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
Here we see an interesting picture of lesser gods impregnating human women - which might feel similar to Greek mythology. And, also similar to Greek mythology, the resulting spawn of these acts were giants, and were great warriors.
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| A depiction of the Nephilim |
Another passage of note regarding the bene elohim is found in Job 1:6-12. In this passage, we find that an unnamed deity which is referred to by the title of ha satan (literally: the accuser, and this is the way to refer to a prosecuting attorney or a state prosecutor, like a district attorney) enters the courtroom of God among the bene elohim. Note how in verse 6, he simply waltzes into the courtroom - he doesn't sneak in or beat up any guards to do so:
One day the bene elohim came to present themselves before the Lord, and ha satan [literally: the accuser] also came among them.
The verse implies that this ha satan - which again, is not a name, indicating that this unnamed deity is no more than a plot device - was among the sons of god - the bene elohim - and was therefore another one of them.
And I have argued at great length that, much like the way the ideas regarding God changed and developed over time, the ideas regarding ha satan also developed over time. In one part of a series of posts I wrote about Satan, I argue that Job was written during Persian captivity, and that this depiction of ha satan is answering and arguing with the dualism of Zoroastrianism, which believed in dualing gods: Ahura Mazda (the good deity) and Angra Mainyu (the bad deity). In Zoroastrianism, this was an effort to take blame for suffering off of the good deity and place it on the bad deity, but rather than affirm this, Job does not allow the reader this luxury, as ha satan has to request permission of YHWH to inflict suffering, and then seems to disappear from the story and become absent when YHWH is answering Job regarding his suffering.
And if you'd like to read some more summarized versions of that series of posts on Satan, I wrote some shorter posts about the development of the ideas of Satan and Demons in the following posts:
Most modern, popular Christian ideas about Satan are not Biblical, part 1
Most modern, popular Christian ideas about Satan are not Biblical, part 2
A discussion on the language of demons
Symbolism and Metaphor in Revelation (wherein I demonstrate that Satan is shown by the author to be the personality of the Roman empire)
I'm going to stop here, and in the next post, we're going to talk about a feminine deity in the Bible.
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