Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ken Litwak <kdlitwak AT concentric.net>]

Lloyd, to show that El and not YHWH was not Israel's first and only God,
you would have to show, IMO, at least two things.  First, that
unquestionably El was believed in first chronologically and I don't know
how you'd do that, since all the sources, even if one dates most of the
Pentateuch, as I do, to the 2nd millennium BC, assume both names for
God. Second, you'd have to show that the Israelites actually believed
these were separate deities.  To my mind, you've done neither of these.
If you add in JEDP to try to establish this, you lose me completely as I
consider JEDP nonsense from the perspective that a) there are no extant
copies of these alleged sources, b) it spite of Tigay, there is no
evidence of any culture, anywhere, doing what is hypothesized for JEDP,
and c) I view the Documentary Hypothesis in its many forms to create
more problems than it professes to solve. It requires absolute retards
for editors and audience, and, even in recent scholarship, when there is
no other basis, sources are still divided based on the name for God,
which is about the lamest thing I've ever read, second only to stories
of Elvis sightings, and is completely indefensible.  Modern Jews, at
least in my observation, and certainly Christians since the 1st century
AD, have ALWAYS used multiple names for God.  There is absolutely no
reason to think this originated with Christians, given that _the only_
Bible of the first Christians was the Scriptures of Israel.  Where would
they get this from, if not Hebrew texts?  This might not have been true
of Israel's ANE neighbors, but whether they saw El and YHWH as separate
deities is totally irrelevant to what Israel may have believed. The QL
shows no notion of these two names as belonging to different deities. 
The 2nd mill BV book, Deuteronomy*, clearly understands Israel to have
only one God.  When did they believe in El and YHWH as separate gods
before this?  Never that I can tell, and to treat Exod 3 as showing
otherwise is to misinterpret the text.   

   SO, taking each book of the Pentateuch as a literary whole, can yo
show that El and YHWH are not the same One for Israel?  I don't think
so, but you're welcome to try.  

Ken Litwak

* I realize many list members may assign Deuteronomy to the Exile or
post-exilic period.  Apart from any other considerations, however,
Deuteronomy so clearly matches 2 mill BC Hittite suzerain vassal treaty
format and is so different from first mill Assyrian treaties that I
find  it inconceivable that this text arose in the first millennium. 
Scholars who have argued for he opposite views, it seems to me, do so,
not by dealing with the data, but by making ideological claims.  That
is, tey've already dismissed a 2nd millenium Israel, or the existence of
Moses (a questionable act from an historiograpical poitn of view), so
Deuteronomy of course can't be from the 2nd mill BC.