It would not be at all surprising if, in the great movements of populations and shifting of ascendancy which lie beyond our historical horizon, the worship of Yahweh should have been established in regions remote from those which it occupied in historical times; but nothing which we now know warrants the opinion that his worship was ever general among the Western Semites.
Many attempts have been made to trace the West Semitic Yahu back to Babylonia. Thus Delitzsch formerly derived the name from an Akkadian god, I or Ia; or from the Semitic nominative ending, Yau;[27] but this deity has since disappeared from the pantheon of Assyriologists. The combination of Yah with Ea, one of the great Babylonian gods, seems to have a peculiar fascination for amateurs, by whom it is periodically “discovered.” Scholars are now agreed that, so far as Yahu or Yah occurs in Babylonian texts, it is as the name of a foreign god.
Assuming that Yahweh was primitively a nature god, scholars in the 19th century discussed the question over what sphere of nature he originally presided. According to some he was the god of consuming fire; others saw in him the bright sky, or the heaven; still others recognized in him a storm god, a theory with which the derivation of the name from Heb. hāwāh or Arab. hawā well accords. The association of Yahweh with storm and fire is frequent in the Old Testament; the thunder is the voice of Yahweh, the lightning his arrows, the rainbow his bow. The revelation at Sinai is amid the awe-inspiring phenomena of tempest. Yahweh leads Israel through the desert in a pillar of cloud and fire; he kindles Elijah’s altar by lightning, and translates the prophet in a chariot of fire. See also Judg. v. 4 seq.; Deut. xxxiii. 1; Ps. xviii. 7-15; Hab. iii. 3-6. The cherub upon which he rides when he flies on the wings of the wind (Ps. xviii. 10) is not improbably an ancient mythological personification of the storm cloud, the genius of tempest (cf. Ps. civ. 3). In Ezekiel the throne of Yahweh is borne up on Cherubim, the noise of whose wings is like thunder. Though we may recognize in this poetical imagery the survival of ancient and, if we please, mythical notions, we should err if we inferred that Yahweh was originally a departmental god, presiding specifically over meteorological phenomena, and that this conception of him persisted among the Israelites till very late times. Rather, as the god—or the chief god—of a region and a people, the most sublime and impressive phenomena, the control of the mightiest forces of nature are attributed to him. As the God of Israel Yahweh becomes its leader and champion in war; he is a warrior, mighty in battle; but he is not a god of war in the specific sense.
In the inquiry concerning the nature of Yahweh the name Yahweh Sebaoth (E.V., The Lord of Hosts) has had an important place. The hosts have by some been interpreted of the armies of Israel (see 1 Sam. xvii. 45, and note the association of the name in the Books of Samuel, where it first appears, with the ark, or with war); by others, of the heavenly hosts, the stars conceived as living beings, later, perhaps, the angels as the court of Yahweh and the instruments of his will in nature and history (Ps. lxxxix.); or of the forces of the world in general which do his bidding, cf. the common Greek renderings, Κύριος τῶν δυνάμεων and Κ. παντοκράτωρ, (Universal Ruler). It is likely that the name was differently understood in different periods and circles; but in the prophets the hosts are clearly superhuman powers. In many passages the name seems to be only a more solemn substitute for the simple Yahweh, and as such it has probably often been inserted by scribes. Finally, Sebaoth came to be treated as a proper name (cf. Ps. lxxx. 5, 8, 20), and as such is very common in magical texts.
Literature.—Reland, Decas exercitationum philologicarum de vera pronuntiatione nominis Jehova, 1707; Reinke, “Philologisch-historische Abhandlung über den Gottesnamen Jehova,” in Beiträge zur Erklärung des Alten Testaments, III. (1855); Baudissin, “Der Ursprung des Gottesnamens Ἰάω,” in Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte, I. (1876), 179-254; Driver, “Recent Theories on the Origin and Nature of the Tetragrammaton,” in Studia Biblica, I. (1885), 1-20; Deissmann, “Griechische Transkriptionen des Tetragrammaton,” in Bibelstudien (1895), 1-20; Blau, Das altjüdische Zauberwesen, 1898. See also [Hebrew Religion].
(G. F. Mo.)
[1] This form, Yahweh, as the correct one, is generally used in the separate articles throughout this work.
[2] See Josephus, Ant. ii. 12, 4; Philo, Vita Mosis, iii. 11 (ii. §114, ed. Cohn and Wendland); ib. iii. 27 (ii. §206). The Palestinian authorities more correctly interpreted Lev. xxiv. 15 seq., not of the mere utterance of the name, but of the use of the name of God in blaspheming God.
[3] Siphrê, Num. §§ 39, 43; M. Sotah, iii. 7; Sotah, 38a. The tradition that the utterance of the name in the daily benedictions ceased with the death of Simeon the Just, two centuries or more before the Christian era, perhaps arose from a misunderstanding of Menaḥoth, 109b; in any case it cannot stand against the testimony of older and more authoritative texts.