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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> Is God El, or Yahweh?

Is your name Doctor, Father, General, Mr., George, or Maursault?

People can have more than one title which is used as a name. It's the same with God, the different names denote different aspects.

I don't know if Christianity does this, but Judaism associates each name with a different attribute. For example: mercy, justice, creation, compassion, etc.

By knowing which name is used, i.e. which attribute is being expressed, you gain a whole new insight when reading the stories on what's going on.

It's a real shame that most English translations do not preserve this information.

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That works for the various epithets, but El and Yahweh seem to be conflicting proper names. i.e. is your name Robert or George?

> but El and Yahweh seem to be conflicting proper names

They don't. I'm not really sure where you get that idea from.

I read the original in Hebrew routinely and I don't get that sense at all that they conflict.

I mean just look at Exodus 6:3, were God explicitly says that he has more than one name.

Ya conflicting is maybe not the right word. Obviously within the narrative as a whole it's one god. I guess I'm trying to point out they were historically separate deities, so it's more like being called both Robert and George, rather than Dr. and Mr.

In fact, they were proper names of different deities. Unlike El, Yahweh was envisioned as a storm god in the early literature, one among many Canaanite gods and goddesses including El, Asherah and Baal. Eventually, Yahweh and El were conflated, and became chief among gods. But Yahweh/El was not the only god worshiped, not until Elijah rose to prominence. For a very long time, Yahweh/El was not the only God, just the only one that had any sympathy for the Israelites.

Yah, I read the same Wikipedia article, but if you dig into the details the actual evidence for this is so flimsy as to be almost non-existent.

There's not a lot of independent records from back then, so archeologists try to create stories from whatever they have, starting from the assumption that the religious text is wrong, and then creating a narrative from there.

If you don't use "religious text inaccurate" as your initial assumption then there's basically no evidence for this theory.

It doesn't help that they conflate Canaanites and Israelites so what one does is attributed to the other. However if you assume the Bible is correct and they are different people, with the Israelites railing against the practices of the Canaanites then the entire pantheism argument evaporates.

Wiki seems to mostly cite books by a Mark S. Smith on this topic, who seems to be a professor of Biblical Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm not sure you could characterize him as an archaeologist inventing a narrative from the starting position of "Bible wrong".

I think "El" is just the word for God, not a proper name? So it's like "Doctor" vs "George", not "Robert" vs "George".

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