Yahweh and Elohim: The Yahweh Myth

This is part 9 of a multi-part series.

With all this talk about Yahweh and other gods, and even an angel or two thrown in, I’m sure some of you are sort of wondering just what is the point of this whole endeavor. Isn’t this all just mythology? These Elohim weren’t real beings, were they? Aren’t these just stories? Yes, the story of Yahweh is mythology, but I submit these stories are of deep importance. To be quite frank, I think that the skeptics, rationalists, atheists, and scientists who dismiss these ancient stories as untrue are making a serious error. These myths really matter, and denying them is like denying a part of yourself.

Just what were the intentions of the authors of these stories when they were written? This is, perhaps, the most pivotal question we need to ask ourselves when deciding what to make of them. Possible answers to this question fall into two broad categories. First, that the authors were doing their best to record events as they actually happened. Second, that the stories arose from the imaginations of the authors. Either Yahweh and the Elohim are imaginatively added in to more or less factual accounts of events, or the stories are entirely made up. Let’s take a look at both of the possibilities in turn.

Literal Myth

In a literalist take on the stories of the Old Testament, these Elohim were real creatures who lived on the Earth with us, and interacted with us in various ways. These accounts are taken at face value. Two major caveats to taking these stories literally must be made. First, we are cognizant of the fact that the stories had multiple authors over many generations, and every one of these authors had their own perspectives and agenda that affect the way the stories are told. While we posit that the primary motive of these authors is to give an accurate account of actual events, we recognize that the authors, being human, will guide the account to better reflect their biases and beliefs.

The first few stories of Genesis – roughly up through the Tower of Babel – seem much older than the others, and were probably smoothed out and edited by many more hands and mouths. They likely had a longer oral traditional, in which stories may well be more subject to change than written accounts. The whole business of interpreting the texts within the context of how they were written, and how they came down to us, is called literary criticism. It is an essential, and relatively modern, tool for making sense of ancient texts. Some people forego this process, and prefer to take the text both literally and without this literary context. This doesn’t seem a very effective approach if your purpose is to get at the actual truth of the matter.

The second major concession we must make is to acknowledge the fact that the events that occurred in these accounts might be, to some degree, beyond the understanding of the people telling the stories. They may end up with a much different narrative than the one a modern human would come up with. To illustrate my point, let’s suppose that in these ancient times, there was a being here on Earth with a vehicle that flies high over the surface of the planet, and leaves in its wake a large plume of exhaust. It is equipped with some kind of laser-like weapon, that shoots down upon the surface, destroying city walls and sending buildings up in flames. Their account might involve this being riding on a cloud, throwing lightning bolts down upon the surface of the Earth. So when we read accounts of, say, Yahweh raining fire down upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, we must take into account that the authors are doing their best to interpret events that they don’t fully understand.

Just how plausible is it that the stories of the Old Testament are literal accounts, keeping these two caveats in mind? For one thing, it is the most natural explanation for these presence of these stories. The purpose was to create a record of the history of the people of Israel, and their interactions with Yahweh. Given that the Israelites had a strongly felt national identity, it is easy to see how they would want to have an accurate accounting of their history. The things these people went through were both amazing and traumatizing, and both of these factors are also motivations for creating a reliable historical account.

So far, I’ve read through Samuel in the Old Testament. Large portions of the Pentateuch (Torah) are dedicated to enshrining Jewish law. There is an extended section on precisely how the Tabernacle is to be constructed, repeated nearly verbatim for your reading pleasure. The first few chapters of Genesis have their own quality to them. Most of the rest of it – from Genesis chapter 12 where Abram is introduced, through the end of Samuel – reads to me like an historical account of Abraham and his descendants. One major exception is in Numbers 22, which has a folktale-like story involving a talking ass.

One potential objection to the plausibility of literal myth is that it is unscientific: Divine beings simply don’t exist. There are two problems here. First, just because science doesn’t have an explanation for something, does not make it false. Second, a literal reading of these stories does not require that these Elohim are divine beings. For all we know, these are just humans with some advanced technologies that the Israelites didn’t fully understand. Of course, many people claim they are space aliens. Maybe they are, let’s say, composed of energy, without physical form. Is this something that science proves to be impossible? Of course not.

Another potential objection is that there are none of these godlike agents around now, so how could there have been then? Of course, most of us find ourselves, from time to time, very uncomfortable with certain kinds of change. We might just not want to believe that there were strange beings living here on Earth just a few millennia back that aren’t here now. But there are many possibly explanations for why they would no longer be here. They may have just left. Maybe they decided that humans were getting too dangerous, or that life on the surface of Earth was getting too dangerous for them for other reasons. And they may have just died off. Personally, I don’t yet have a working theory on when or why the Elohim left. Maybe by the time I finish the Old Testament, I’ll have some more developed thoughts on this.

For what it’s worth, I find the literal myth interpretation of the Old Testament to be the most satisfying. Certain stories, such as the story of Job, and first creation story in Genesis chapter 1 and 2:1-4, read more like imaginative story-telling. But for the most part, this sacred text seems like an earnest attempt at a truthful and accurate account. It hardly needs justifying that if this is so, then the importance of these stories – in terms of both who we are and what kind of world we live in – are of critical importance. But even if these stories are made up, they are still important to modern lives.

Imaginative Myth

Perhaps a more prevalent understanding of these stories is that they are imaginative myth. They are either entirely works of the imagination, or imaginative elements are layered upon stories of actual events. Take for example, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps some extraordinary natural event, such as a volcanic eruption or a meteor shower, caused fiery objects to fall from the sky, completely destroying a handful of cities and their surrounding regions. The authors of the story then attribute these events to the wrath of a god, who has become angry with the people of this region for some vague reason. They might be seen as trying to provide an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable destruction of these cities. In this case, the addition of a wrathful god to this story extends it beyond just being a historical account. It now includes an metaphorical account of the fear and anguish felt by the survivors.

With Sodom and Gomorrah, there is a clear motivation for the authors to add in these extra supernatural elements: To provide an explanation for an event that they otherwise don’t understand. In other cases, the motivation to add in supernatural elements is not so clear. Take, for example, the Ark of the Covenant. Yahweh gave Moses instructions for the construction of this wooden chest, overlaid with gold inside and out, containing the two tablets on which the ten commandments were originally written. It could be used to speak with Yahweh directly. It had a special temple, called the Tabernacle, that was movable, so that they could bring the Ark with them to battle. By some unexplained means, the Ark brought the Israelites victory in many battles. It dried up the Jordan River, allowing the massive Israeli army to conveniently cross over. It was carried around the city of Jericho six times, and on the seventh day, the walls of the city fell down with the blowing of trumpets.

Only trained priests were allowed to approach the Ark, wearing a special apron called an ephod. Many people, including Aaron’s two eldest sons, were consumed in fire when mishandling it. It was captured in battle at one point by the Philistines, but was eventually returned to the Israelites because, wherever they brought the Ark, the people nearby were afflicted with tumors.

If the supernatural elements of the story of the Ark are from the imaginations of the authors, what motivations would they have had to come up with these elements? A means to speak directly with Yahweh; a potent weapon of war; drying up rivers; mishandlers consumed in flames, or afflicted with tumors. Perhaps this is all symbolic of the sacred agreement between Yahweh and the Israelites that they follow his commandments? Some aspects of this story, perhaps. But overall, this seems like a bit of a stretch. It is also a completely separate motivation than we settled on for the Sodom and Gomorrah story, so the thesis that the supernatural elements of these stories are made up is becoming increasingly ad-hoc.

In Exodus, Yahweh leads them through the desert with a pillar of smoke by day, and a pillar of fire by night. Upon the construction of the Tabernacle, this pillar settles over the resting place of the Ark. What impetus leads a creative writer to come up with this tale?

Why create a story where Yahweh first asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son, and then later send a messenger to tell him it was only a test? Is this someone working through the angst and guilt of their ancestors having participated in the barbaric process?

Why does Yahweh require, along with livestock, thirty-two female virgins from booty of war? Perhaps these women and children are actually going to the Israelite priests, and they wish to conceal this fact by saying they were for Yahweh himself?

The argument that all the supernatural elements of these stories, including all the verbal interactions with Yahweh, are works of creative fiction, is not entirely implausible, but seems rather tenuous to me. But even if we grant that these stories are imaginative myth, they were still taken as truth by the people of Israel at the time, and by people of Abrahamic religions for many centuries to come. This is important because the truth of our ancestors is inherited by us, even if we like to suppose we think differently now.

Mythical Truth

We need to keep in mind that the brains of human beings of the time of the Old Testament were wired very differently than the modern human brain. Brain structure is very pliant, and can evolve at a much faster rate than genetic evolution. This is a difficult idea to grasp, but it’s worth investing some consideration. I was first exposed to this idea when reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, many years ago. There was a lot in that book that I found dubious, but at the same time, it opened my mind up to challenging new ideas.

The people living in these ancient city-states were immersed in a mythological mindset. Their reality was formed in a fundamentally different way than ours. In a certain sense, it does not matter whether Yahweh stories are literally true or not. That was the reality for the people of the time.

Whether or not Yahweh was simply an anthropomorphization of the cruelty and barbarism of the time, the crushing trauma laid upon the people of Israel by Yahweh was real. Let’s suppose that the Old Testament is simply a collection of stories we used to tell each other. Real or not, the people of Israel believed them! They believed Yahweh was real, and was ordering them around, and that if they somehow messed up in Yahweh’s eyes, they risked grievous harm. This wasn’t some abstraction for them. It was part of their direct experience. It was also a deeply traumatic experience, as we have seen.

And it is a trauma we still haven’t released yet. Consider one last time the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Purportedly, Yahweh sent two cities and the surrounding lands up into flames because he didn’t like their behavior. The people who lived there died horrible deaths. Some of the surrounding people probably had some direct experience with the devastation, and shared horror stories with their neighbors. And all the people believed that if Yahweh didn’t like the way they were behaving, he could just as well do this to them. This trauma and fear was burned into their psyche. But have we ever let it go? Billions of us still give homage to this wrathful god! And for millions of atheists out there, this trauma was still present in their childhoods or in their family history, only one or two generations back.

Human ways of thinking have evolved from mythicalism through rationalism to present-day post-modernism. This advancement is similar to the evolutionary advancement of the reptilian brain into the mammalian brain into the human brain. As we know, mammals evolved from lizards, and humans beyond the typical mammal, and at each stage, the creatures got more intelligent. The lizard brain is mostly focused on instinctual, survival-based instincts, such as preying, fleeing, and establishing territory. The mammalian brain goes farther, and we develop emotions such as fear and love. But the mammalian brain did not discard the reptilian brain and start from scratch. Rather, it grew up from the reptilian brain, and around it. It integrated with it. Similarly, humans evolved to have complex thought processes such as language and abstract thought. Once again, the human brain did not discard the mammalian brain. Rather, it grew up from the mammalian brain, and around it. It integrated with it.

This process of brain development is similar to the process of development of human thinking through mythological, rationalistic, and post-modern paradigms in that the new structure does not supersede or replace the old structure. It is layered on top of the old structure.

At first, we told stories that we call myths. These myths hold deep truths, and are useful tools for our cultural development. Later, we learned to develop more historical methods of story telling. We recorded events that actually happened, and took pains to ensure that things that didn’t actually happen, didn’t make it into our histories. When we adopted this method of telling stories, we did not discard mythology and start from scratch. Instead, our historical accounts grew up from the myths, and around them. In the very least, we need to integrate these myths into our understanding of the world, or our histories lose their foundations. These myths have a deep purpose that histories can’t provide us, in the same way that the mammal relies on the remnants of the reptilian mind to control its heart rate or breathing.

So in a certain sense, denying our mythological past would be analogous to denying the reptilian brain. We do this at our own peril, of course, because the reptilian brain keeps our hearts beating and keeps us breathing. Just because something is mythological and ahistorical, doesn’t make it untrue. In some sense, a myth has a greater claim to truth than a history, not simply because it has withstood the test of time, but because it is primordial. It digs deep into the collective human psyche.

Holographic Myth

While my main point has already been made, I’m going to take this discussion one step further, and consider the concept of the holographic universe, that I first encountered many years ago in a book by that name by Michael Talbot. If you find this discussion a bit fanciful for your liking, that’s fine. I have already done my best to establish the importance of these myths, and this is what I hope you take away more than anything else: These myths represent a deep, fundamental trauma that humanity went through, and we are still coming to terms with it.

In the view of the holographic universe, our thoughts and beliefs take a part in directly forming our reality. Talbot presents an example of a scientific experiment that attempted to locate where memories resided in the brain; specifically, the spatial representation of the world we live in. They trained rats to run a maze, then cut out different portions of the rats’ brains, to see if they maintained the memory of the layout of the maze. They discovered that there is no portion of a rat’s brain that they could out that would make them forget the maze. So where does the memory of the maze live? The answer is that our mental model of the physical world does not exist in our brains, but is actually directly projected onto the physical reality itself.

Many people with a scientific mindset will find this view hard to swallow. That’s understandable, and perfectly fine. But something in the traditional scientific view on these matters is unsatisfying. Consider the standard model for understanding vision. The light particles bounce of the thing we are looking at, hit our eyes, and are processed into neural signals that are used by the brain to create an image of the thing we are looking at. There is no outwardly directed energy from the eyes or mind of the observer, so it would seem illogical that the subject of observation would know they were being observed if they, for instance, had their back to the observer. However, both mundane human experience and scientific studies show that we do notice when someone is staring at the back of our heads. Rupert Sheldrake has coordinated a wide range of research on this phenomenon, which you can peruse here.

The idea that our mental model of the world is directly overlaid onto physical reality itself is a pretty powerful. It allows our beliefs – whether based in a rational reality or not – to directly shape our world. In other words, the difference between a world where Yahweh is real, and a world where Yahweh is imagined, is to some degree a false distinction. This is a hard thing for our post-modern minds to wrap themselves around. And part of the reason for this is that the godless, magic-free world that many of us believe in, is also projected directly onto our physical reality.

Afterword

I was originally planning a chapter before this one exploring what all of this Yahweh and Elohim business might mean to a Christian. I came up with three topics I wanted to cover, and, sketching them out, I realized that each was an essay on its own. And as each of these topics developed, they strayed farther and farther from the subject of this series. So I decided to leave them out, and write them up as free-standing essays some time in the future.

The main thing for a Christian – really probably anyone of Abrahamic belief or heritage – to take away from this is that the God we worship is not the same as the god Yahweh. Our God is good, true, loving, formless, and all-encompassing. Yahweh is, or was, well, none of these things. Some argue that God is the same as Yahweh, and that Yahweh has just grown up a lot since then. Jordan Peterson makes an argument along these lines in his book 12 Rules for Life. I don’t think this is terribly unreasonable, but it does feel implausible to me. How does a god with numerous fleshly attributes become formless and all-encompassing? The point is, we have a good, loving God, even while there are gods, angels, devils, and what-have-you, roaming about our cosmos. And thank goodness we are not under Yahweh’s yoke any more. I don’t know where he went, but good riddance.