A Brief History of God (YHWH)
This is the big one. Let's fearlessly look at where the "God of the Bible" came from and what that means for those of us who were taught to love, worship, trust and fear that God.
A Brief History of God
First, A Note From Joe About Deconstruction
Before we dive into a very big topic today, let me say something for those of you who are new around here.
I see deconstruction as fundamentally a history project.
We are not aiming to deconstruct your life or your soul—though that may happen, because learning is powerful.
It all starts with deconstructing ideas.
Asking where those ideas came from. Taking them apart (deconstructing them) to see how they ever found their way to us in the first place. And whether the evolution of the ideas we received—often as little children—holds up to historical scrutiny.
And even more importantly: do those ideas serve us?
Are they making us better humans?
From time to time, I do a “Brief History” article that dives deeper into one topic.
The goal of these pieces is to trace an idea from its earliest conception (as best as we can tell) all the way to modern evangelicalism—where many of us first encountered it.
It’s not a holistic history.
It’s a history of the terms and ideas that came to us as the product of modern evangelical Christianity.
Deconstruction tends to have a flow, though.
It usually starts as an intellectual exercise—learning—that leads to a psychological process often experienced as fear, grief, anger, or confusion. This is hard but normal.
That season is usually followed by a time of sitting with the reality of your new knowledge, alongside the things you still believe or want to believe.
Eventually, old beliefs will either change or be reaffirmed.
The final stage is called reorder or reconstruction—you begin to align your life with these new or clarified beliefs.
For major topics like the one today—maybe the biggest one of all—that entire process can take years, decades, or even a lifetime. That’s okay. There is no rush.
Today, we’re tackling the big one: A Brief History of God.
Where did this “God of the Bible,” YHWH, really come from?
And how did that God evolve into the one we learned about in Sunday school?
I teach from the top of my current intelligence. I am fallible. I still have a lot to learn. You may disagree with me or the scholars I’ve read. That’s fine.
The general process around here is simple:
I show you what I’ve learned while studying these things through 20 years of relative silence. You do with it what you will. And always value honest questions as sacred to the process.
My conclusions are grounded in the data I believe to be true. Others disagree with me. But at least in showing you what I have come to, you have a starting place—to see how these ideas can be looked at in a new way by someone who has carefully and methodically studied them over decades.
Oh—and one more thing.
It’s a great irony, but the “Brief History” articles are always the longest ones I write. Sorry for the bait and switch.
Think of this more like a chapter in a book, and it won’t feel quite so long.
So, lets do this.
A Brief History of God: The Canaanite Roots
Before Israel existed as a people, the land was home to Canaanite religion—a sprawling pantheon of gods and goddesses including:
El – The high god, father of the divine council.
Asherah – The mother goddess, consort of El.
Baal – The storm god who brought rain and fertility.
If you’ve noticed that the Bible sometimes calls God El or Elohim, that’s because these names weren’t invented by Israel. They were borrowed. El was the older high god of the region.
Over time, Israel’s stories and worship gradually merged El’s authority into YHWH, who was originally a more localized warrior deity associated with Edom or the deserts of Midian.
Scholars like Mark S. Smith and Dan McClellan have shown that the earliest references to YHWH don’t depict him as the universal creator—but as a specific god among many.
YHWH and “His Asherah”
One of the most surprising discoveries about early Israelite religion is that YHWH didn’t always stand alone.
Archaeologists excavating an 8th-century BCE site called Kuntillet Ajrud found inscriptions blessing worshippers “by YHWH of Samaria and his Asherah.” Similar inscriptions from Khirbet el-Qom confirm that many Israelites understood Asherah—the Canaanite mother goddess—as a divine consort or feminine counterpart to YHWH.
This wasn’t some fringe practice. The Hebrew Bible is full of polemics against it because it was widespread:
2 Kings 21:7 – King Manasseh installs an Asherah pole inside the Temple.
2 Kings 23 – Josiah’s reforms tear down and burn these symbols.
Jeremiah 7:18 – Families bake cakes for the “Queen of Heaven.”
Over centuries, as Israel’s faith evolved toward monotheism, Asherah was rebranded as idolatry and largely edited out. What started as a divine partnership was retold as a story of heresy and betrayal.
YHWH, the Canaanite Pantheon, and Borrowed Hymns
If you trace YHWH’s story back far enough, you find he didn’t just absorb El’s role as high god.
He also stepped into Baal’s storm imagery and poetry.
Psalm 29 is the clearest example.
It’s a vivid storm hymn:
The voice of YHWH is over the waters; the God of glory thunders…
The voice of YHWH breaks the cedars of Lebanon…
The voice of YHWH shakes the wilderness of Kadesh…
At first glance, it looks like pure Israelite worship. But the details tell a different story:
The storm-god imagery—thundering, splitting trees, flashing fire—matches Canaanite hymns to Baal almost word for word.
The geography points north:
Lebanon and Mount Hermon (Sirion) were Baal’s sacred territory.
Kadesh was likely a Syrian site far from early Israelite centers.
Scholars like Frank Moore Cross and Mark S. Smith have argued that Psalm 29 is essentially a Baal hymn with YHWH’s name swapped in.
This doesn’t mean the Israelites were faking their faith. It means religions grow out of what came before, reworking old songs to honor a new god. It’s evolution, not plagiarism.
From Polytheism to Monotheism
Most people think Israel was always monotheistic.
This appears to not be the case.
Here’s how the evolution actually looked:
Polytheism: Many gods exist and are worshipped.
Monolatry: Many gods exist, but we worship only one.
Monotheism: Only one god exists.
The early Israelites were monolatrous. You see it in verses like:
“Who among the gods is like you, YHWH?” (Exodus 15)
“You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20)
These statements don’t deny other gods—they just demand exclusive loyalty to YHWH.
Sometimes, you catch glimpses of this older worldview when God seems to speak in the plural:
“Let us make humankind in our image…” (Genesis 1:26)
“The man has become like one of us…” (Genesis 3:22)
“Come, let us go down and confuse their language…” (Genesis 11:7)
You may have heard this was the Trinity. But nearly all Hebrew Bible scholars agree: this isn’t about three persons of one God—it’s God addressing the divine council.
It helps to remember that the concept of the Trinity didn’t exist when these texts were written.
The doctrine—one God in three co-equal, co-eternal persons—was only formally defined about 800 years after the writing of Genesis, in the creeds and theological debates of the early church.
This is a very human thing we all do: we look back through time and assume our current ideas were always obvious. Historians call this presentism—reading the present into the past.
So when modern readers see God saying “let us,” it feels natural to imagine he’s speaking to the Son and the Spirit. But the earliest writers and audiences would have had no framework at all for that interpretation.
They understood these lines as God speaking to other divine beings—the heavenly assembly.
The Divine Council
In the ancient Near East, gods didn’t rule alone. They presided over heavenly assemblies of lesser divine beings.
The Hebrew Bible preserves clear traces of this idea:
Psalm 82:
God stands in the divine assembly; among the gods he renders judgment.
I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; but you shall die like mortals…”
This isn’t about human rulers—it’s a courtroom of divine beings who failed to uphold justice.
Psalm 89:
For who in the skies can be compared to YHWH? Who among the sons of God is like YHWH?
A God feared in the council of the holy ones.
In Job 1–2, the “sons of God” present themselves before YHWH, and the satan—a sort of prosecutor, not the later Devil—challenges God about Job’s motives.
In 1 Kings 22, the prophet Micaiah sees YHWH enthroned with “all the host of heaven” around him. One spirit volunteers to deceive the king’s prophets.
Over time, as Israel’s faith evolved, these beings were reimagined as angels rather than gods. But in the earliest layers, the Bible’s authors still pictured a divine council.
The Exile and Reinvention
In 586 BCE, Babylon destroyed Jerusalem. The Temple was gone. The Davidic monarchy ended.
For centuries before this, Israel’s faith had centered on a national god—a god tied to a promised land, a royal dynasty, and a holy temple. YHWH was powerful, but still thought of in many ways like other ancient gods: he had a territory, he had a chosen people, and he would fight for them if they were faithful.
The Exile changed everything.
Suddenly, Israel had to reckon with questions they’d never faced:
Had YHWH been defeated by Marduk, the god of Babylon?
Was he only a local deity after all?
Was the covenant broken forever?
In this crisis, prophets and scribes began to reinterpret YHWH on a cosmic scale.
Instead of just being Israel’s tribal god, he became the sole creator of heaven and earth.
Defeat wasn’t because he was weak—it was because he was sovereign over all nations and was using Babylon as an instrument of discipline.
Worship no longer depended on sacrifice at a central temple; it could be practiced in prayer, study, and observance anywhere.
These ideas weren’t invented out of thin air, but in exile they solidified into something new.
What had been monolatry—many gods exist, but we worship one—became the seeds of full monotheism.
This moment is so important that if you’re new here (and a lot of you are—more than 400 new subscribers this month alone), it’s worth saying clearly:
Any time you trace an idea from early Hebrew thought to modern faith, the Babylonian Captivity is always a critical turning point.
After exile, YHWH was no longer only imagined as the most powerful among many gods.
He was on the clear path to being redefined as the only God there is.
Jesus and the Evolution of God
When Jesus emerges, he steps into a tradition that had already moved a long way from its tribal roots. By his time, YHWH was understood by the Jews as the one true God, creator of heaven and earth.
But Jesus does something that reshapes the idea of God again.
He doesn’t primarily describe God as a distant sovereign or even as Israel’s national protector. He calls God “Father.”
This wasn’t an abstract theological label. It was a relational metaphor—one that reframed the entire story of what it meant to belong to God.
When he teaches his followers to pray “Our Father,” he’s offering an identity that’s more familial than tribal.
God isn’t just the God of our ancestors or our nation.
God is the one who sees you, knows you, claims you as a child.
Jesus also applies the title Son of God to himself—language that in Hebrew scripture could describe kings, but in his context took on a deeper, more intimate meaning.
For his earliest followers, this combination—God as Father, Jesus as Son—was a way of understanding the divine that felt both familiar and radically new.
And it set the stage for a much bigger question the early church would spend centuries trying to answer:
If Jesus is the Son of God, what does that mean for how we understand the oneness of YHWH?
Paul and the Universal God
It was a big step for YHWH to be reimagined as the only God during the Babylonian exile.
But in the early Christian movement, something even more remarkable happens.
The God who had once only been worshipped by Israel became the God proclaimed to everyone, everywhere.
Paul is the architect of this transformation.
Before Paul, the Jesus movement was mostly a Jewish sect. Jesus was understood as Israel’s Messiah, fulfilling the covenant promises to Abraham and David.
Paul takes this message and universalizes it.
In his letters, you can see the shift unfolding in real time:
YHWH becomes the God not just of Israel but of all nations.
Jesus becomes not only Messiah but Lord of the cosmos, seated at the right hand of God.
The cross is recast as an event with cosmic significance—defeating powers and principalities, reconciling all creation.
And perhaps most importantly, Paul insists that Gentiles don’t have to become Jews to be welcomed in. Circumcision, food laws, ethnic boundaries—these markers fall away.
For the first time, belonging to this God isn’t about ancestry or tribal identity.
It’s about allegiance to Jesus.
By the end of the first century, the God who had once only thundered over Canaan had become the God of Greeks and Romans, slaves and citizens, men and women alike.
And Paul’s vision—Jesus as Son, King, and cosmic Lord—became the foundation the early church would build on.
From Movement to Empire
After Paul, the movement kept growing.
Communities sprouted up across the Mediterranean—house churches in cities like Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, Alexandria.
They carried Paul’s vision forward:
One God, one Lord, one faith—open to anyone.
But as the Jesus movement spread, so did the questions:
Who exactly is Jesus if God is one?
How does the Spirit fit in?
Are we still worshipping YHWH, or something else entirely?
For a while, the answers were fluid. Different communities held different understandings.
But by the fourth century, everything changed again.
The small movement that began among Galilean peasants became the official religion of Rome.
Christianity, once a faith of outsiders and dissenters, was now the faith of emperors and armies.
And the Canaanite tribal war deity who had been transformed by Jesus and Paul into a loving Father—no longer bound by tribe or nation—was turned once more into a god of war, now armed with the full power of the most powerful empire to ever exist—Rome.
Those early questions about Jesus’ nature, once debated in letters and sermons, were turned into creeds. Councils met to decide what was orthodox and what was heresy.
The doctrine of the Trinity—one God in three persons—was formalized in these creeds, finally giving shape to ideas that had been emerging for centuries.
A concept unimaginable to the earliest Israelites—and still difficult to conceive today.
From Cosmic King to Judge of Every Heart
As Christianity spread across the empire, another transformation unfolded.
The God who once judged nations—who toppled kingdoms and raised up empires—was reimagined as the judge of every individual heart.
In the Hebrew scriptures, judgment was mostly collective:
Israel or Judah would be punished or restored.
Babylon or Assyria would rise and fall.
The covenant was made with a people, not just a person.
But as Christian theology developed, the focus shifted:
Sin became not only disobedience to the law, but an inherited condition.
The idea of original sin—that all humanity carried the guilt of Adam—took hold, especially in the writings of Augustine.
The stakes became eternal: every soul stood alone before God.
The God of Israel—who once demanded loyalty and sacrifice from his chosen nation—became a God who required belief and repentance from every individual.
And as this idea took root, the question of judgment demanded a corresponding consequence.
If God was now the judge of souls, what happened to those he rejected?
Over time, the doctrine of eternal torment in hell took shape.
While ideas about Sheol, Gehenna, and judgment had been present in Jewish thought, the fully developed image of hell as a place of endless conscious punishment was a later innovation—a way to describe where the universal God of Christianity would send those who refused allegiance.
This was the final transformation:
From a regional war god, to a cosmic king, to the intimate judge of every person’s fate.
From Reformation to Revival
The story didn’t stop with Rome.
For more than a thousand years, YHWH—as reimagined by the creeds—remained the God of Western Christendom.
A God enthroned in heaven.
A God who judged every soul.
A God whose church claimed exclusive authority to mediate salvation.
But this image began to fracture.
In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation shattered the medieval consensus. Reformers challenged the authority of the Pope and re-centered faith on scripture and individual conscience.
Yet in many ways, the vision of God remained the same:
Still the all-powerful sovereign.
Still the judge of nations and hearts.
Still the God who demanded right belief to avoid eternal punishment.
Centuries later, waves of revival and evangelical awakenings swept across Europe and America.
Preachers thundered about sin and salvation.
Personal conversion became the mark of true faith.
Hell was preached with renewed intensity—sometimes in more vivid detail than ever before.
The tribal war god of ancient Canaan was still there, under layers of theology and tradition:
A God who loved, but also demanded allegiance.
A God whose judgment was personal, total, and eternal.
The DNA of YHWH
It’s easy to wonder how a faith built on the teachings of Jesus could ever become entangled with empire.
But if you look closely, it’s actually not so surprising.
Deep in the DNA of YHWH is tribalism, war, conquest, and ultimately survival.
This God began as the protector of a small people surrounded by enemies. A God who demanded loyalty and sacrifice. A God who would go to war for his chosen ones.
At the same time, deep in the DNA of YHWH is grace, compassion, and forgiveness.
Even in the Torah, you can see glimpses of a God yearning to be more just, more merciful, more loving. Compared to the gods of other nations, YHWH was often a step forward—calling his people to care for the stranger and the poor, to do justice, to love kindness.
Jesus tapped into that part of the story. He pushed it further—teaching that God was not just a sovereign but a Father. That love was the ultimate law. That forgiveness was stronger than vengeance.
And when you merge the DNA of Jesus with the DNA of YHWH, you get a very mixed inheritance:
Judgment and grace.
Fear and love.
Empire-building and martyrdom.
A God who conquers by the sword—and a God who dies on a cross.
It’s no wonder Christianity today can feel almost bipolar.
That tension is woven into the DNA of the God who birthed it.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Deep breaths. :)
Just because the God you first met may have evolved from older ideas doesn’t mean your experiences were invalid or not spiritual.
Learning these truths won’t necessarily make your faith any less real. It could actually make it deeper.
But there is often a time of fear, confusion, and anger when you start asking these big questions for the first time.
Learning is hard. It breaks down the assumptions that gave us stability and a sense of control.
But it also opens doors to what is truer and deeper.
Some of you will take this journey and end up with no faith in the divine. That’s okay. If that’s you, by the time you get there, it will feel right and true to who you are.
Many of you—like me—will simply redefine who God is and what that means to you.
Ultimately, we are like preschoolers trying to understand calculus. We can barely count to ten.
If there is a God, God knows that.
And if that God is good, then your questions are no more threatening to God than a toddler asking you what number comes after ten.
Any God who is threatened by that is certainly not the Father God of Jesus.
This is such a needed deep dive, Joe. The way you traced the evolution of YHWH—from tribal war god to cosmic Father, and eventually to imperial judge—connects so many dots that never quite made sense in Sunday school. It’s sobering to see how much of what we were taught as “eternal truth” is actually layered human storytelling shaped by power, fear, and survival.
But what I appreciate most is your invitation to hold all of it—judgment and grace, evolution and rupture, love and trauma—with honesty. Deconstruction isn’t destruction. It’s remembering that our questions aren’t a threat to God. If anything, they’re how we inch closer to what’s real.
Thank you for helping us do that with both courage and compassion.
The journey you take us on with each new deep dive never seems surprizing, but still always revealing. I understand polytheism, monolantry and monotheism and their significance in shaping the religious world as a whole. I even accept each of them, if someone's understanding of the spiritual realm fits into one of these three categories. Personally, I would like to land in monolantry. Holding space for someone who believes in more than one God, but I ultimately choose to follow one. (And that One might just have a divine councel to preside over.)