Yahweh: The Old Testament Hebrew god
The Old Testament Hebrew god Yahweh, or Yahveh, depending on how you want to spell it,* is portrayed in the illustration above. This coin** of the fourth century B. C., minted during the period that the Jews were ruled by the last of the Persian kings, was recovered from Gaza in Southern Philista. Note the wings on the chariot that the Hebrew god of the Old Testament is riding. The Hebrew idea of wings (of the wind) or an arc light flashing through the air is explained at http://ancientskyscraper.com/118901.html. Also notice that the bird in Yahweh's hand, which, like the Egyptian bird on the sacred ark below, symbolizes an electric carbon arc light, a searchlight, like the one that was mounted on the ancient Hebrew Ark or Arc of the Covenant. This is also explained at the underlined website address above.
An animated illustration of an ancient Egyptian ark with a searchlight, from Mariette's 1875 work on Denderah
The consonants "YWH" are located behind the bird. The Hebrews never bothered to write down their vowels in antiquity so how the holy Jewish name, which Jews and Christians so reverently worship as GOD today, was actually spelled is merely speculation, especially since the Hebrew (or Phoenician) language died out several hundred years before Christ's arrival. This is strongly evidenced by the ancient Hebrew priests' use of Aramaic in their fifth-century-BC correspondence discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, at the ruins of an ancient Hebrew temple at Elephantine,*** on an island in the Nile river of Egypt.
One of the letters written in Aramaic from the Jews of a temple at Elephantine to the authorities in Jerusalem in 407 B.C.
In The Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments, Oxford professor of Assyriology A. H. Sayce maintained: 'Even the most devoted adherents of the supreme God of Israel sometimes admitted that he was but supreme among other gods, and David himself, the friend of seers and prophets, complains that he had been driven out of 'the inheritance of Yahveh' and told to go and 'serve other gods' (1 Sam. xxvi. 19)."
In The Religious Teachings of the Old Testament, Albert C. Knudson, a professor in the Boston University School of Theology, also pointed out:
"The sole godhead of Yahweh was a truth that was only gradually attained. The different steps in this development may be distinguished with a fair degree of clearness. We begin with the Mosaic age. It was to Moses, as we have seen, that the establishment of Yahweh-worship was due. Previous to his time the Israelites seem to have been polytheists. On one of the cuneiform tablets discovered by Winckler at Boghazkj and belonging to the pre-Mosaic age we read of 'the gods' of the Habiri or Hebrews, and in Josh. 24.2, 14f. and Ezek. 20.7f., 24 we are told that both in Mesopotamia and Egypt the Israelites worshipped other gods. The very name 'Yahweh' also points in the same direction. The manifest purpose of such a name was to distinguish the god of Israel from other gods. If the Hebrews had not believed in the existence of other deities, there would have been no need of giving a personal name to the Divine Being through whom they were delivered from Egypt. He would have been to them simply God."
* The ancient Hebrews did not bother to write down the vowels of their language. Since their language died out and was forgotten hundreds of years before Christ came, the way modern scholars spell their words is a matter of conjecture. The vowel points commonly displayed by the ancient Hebrew consonants today, which are supposed to show how the words were spelled or pronounced in antiquity, were invented by some devious Dark Age rabbis, so they are hardly credible. Click http://einhornpress.com/hebrew.aspx for information on the ancient Hebrew language. ** It seems like engraving and minting coins would be a violation of the second of Moses's Ten Commandments, but this ancient Hebrew law was ignored in antiquity, and also in modern times. The Second Commandment. set forth in Exodus 20:4, commands: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water below." But apparently the Jews think that doesn't count for much when it comes to money!
*** The building of this temple seems to violate Deuteronomy's law against more altars than one. Apparently the Hebrew builders at Elephantine were not aware of it. This strongly suggests that Moses did not write the book of Deuteronomy, as so many Jews and Christians believe, but that it was indeed written many centuries after him, later than the fifth century B. C.
This page was last modified on Thursday, August 19, 2010