As one of many deities in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Levant, Yahweh was originally a god rooted within a polytheistic world – and remained comfortably so for much of his early career. Beneath him were ranked a younger generation of gods, each charged with a particular portfolio in the management of the universe – from storms, seas, sunlight and starlight, to fertility, birth, warfare and death. He was understood to be the gentle father of the gods, enjoying a comfortable semi-retirement from the day-to-day running of the cosmos, accompanied by his consort, the mother goddess Athirat. Between them, they had ‘seventy sons’ – a collective term for the frontline deities. These included Ugarit’s special patron, the powerful storm-god Baal, and his sister Anat, a fearsome warrior, as well the boisterous sea-god Yam and the underworld king of death, Mot, each of whom dwelt in his own domain located at the very edge of the divine realm.

Ugarit’s pantheon was typical of Levantine religions in the late second and early first millennium BCE, when early forms of Yahweh worship emerged. Here, Yahweh appears as just one among El’s many divine children (Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 48–9; Innocent Himbaza, ‘Dt 32,8, une correction tardive des scribes: Essai d’interprétation et de datation’, in Biblica 83(4), 2002, pp. 527– 48). Other ancient pieces of poetry in the Hebrew Bible tell us something of Yahweh’s early career. They too employ mythic motifs that run against the theological preferences of later biblical writers and editors, suggesting that they reflect older traditions about the earliest history of the biblical God.

As a god of such a place, Yahweh might have been akin to a group of disruptive deities known in the southern Levant as the Shadday gods – a name identifying them as deities of the ‘steppe’ or ‘wilderness’.

Yahweh would gradually come to usurp his father El by supplanting him as the head of the pantheon. As a storm god, Yahweh was naturally a god of warfare, equipped with weapons of thunder, lightning and rain clouds, and it was Yahweh’s personal patronage the kings of Israel and Judah claimed. And as the patron deity of these kings, so Yahweh became the tutelary god of their small kingdoms, and the deity increasingly promoted at the ancient temples and sanctuaries within their bounds, whose economic and ritual heft further enabled and enhanced the performance of royal power (Herbert Niehr, ‘The Rise of YHWH in Judahite and Israelite Religion: Methodological and ReligioHistorical Aspects’, in Diana Edelman (ed.), The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995), pp. 45–72; Seth L. Sanders, ‘When the Personal Became Political: An Onomastic Perspective on the Rise of Yahwism’, in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 4(1), 2015, pp. 78–105; Omer Sergi, ‘State Formation, Religion and “Collective Identity” in the Southern Levant’, in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 4(1), 2015, pp. 56–77). Instead, a different theological strategy was employed: in a spectacularly transparent attempt at spin-doctoring, some writers sought to downplay Yahweh’s apparent supplanting of his mythic father by insisting that Yahweh was El all along: ‘I am Yahweh’, the deity says to Moses, in Exodus. ‘I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shadday, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them’.

A number of other deities, who likely played their part in the polytheistic governance of the cosmos, were worshipped alongside him, with the most prominent among them being Yahweh’s wife, the goddess Asherah. Indeed, her name betrays something of her former life: ‘Asherah’ is the Hebrew version of ‘Athirat’, the name of the mother of the gods at Ugarit – and El’s consort. It would appear that, in supplanting his mythological father, Yahweh also took his wife.

As patron deity and divine warrior of his peoples, Yahweh had seemingly failed to protect them. It would prompt a profound theological and cultural shift among certain priestly and scribal groups, some of them in exile, whose work would begin to shape the central traditions reflected in the Hebrew Bible, and eventually craft a new image of their god – the deity who would become the God of the Bible. Readers of the Bible might be surprised by this brief historical overview of Yahweh’s early career. After all, the ancient editorial voices dominating the biblical portrayal of the past insist on a competing, alternative story, in which it is claimed that, from the beginning, God was only ever a solitary, unchanging deity, devoid of divine colleagues; a universal being in exclusive command of the cosmos, its course and its creatures. But this story is a product of a later theological worldview – and its narrative of religious history is unreliable. The texts that form the Bible were never intended to be a coherent account of the past, and they do not agree on either the central features or the smaller details of the religious landscape they present. Just as an atlas can only offer a constructed version of the world, compiled from a selection of political, cultural and social preferences (the changing names and borders of nations; disused quarries and railway lines) and frozen moments in time (the shifting shapes of coastlines, ice caps, forests and deserts), so too the Bible comprises a diverse collection of material, crafted and reworked over time with the force and flux of competing ideologies.