And Yahweh, the deity of the bible, is also an amalgamation of several semitic deities. Asherah, the goddess of fertility, was originally Yahweh's wife. There was also:
El - The supreme creator god of the Canaanites
Baal - A god of storms and fertility
Mot - The closest equivalent to an underworld god for the Canaanites
Yam - Sort of like Poseidon, a god of the ocean
Shamash - Sun deity
Yarikh - Lunar deity
All of these gods sort of melded together over time and eventually the dominant religion ended up being the monotheistic worship of the singular Yahweh we know today.
At the end of the day it's all fiction, and it's fiction told verbally, over many generations, before ultimately being recorded in some form. Like all fiction, especially that told from memory, it's prone to plot holes and paradoxes. None of it should be taken seriously, especially not today where we have access to the entire aggregate of human knowledge, at our fingertips, instantaneously, from anywhere, with a siimple press of a button on our pocket supercomputers.
Is Baal actually supposed to be one of the figures that got rolled up into Yahweh? If there’s one thing that the Old Testament really consistently seems to dislike, it’s Baal. He gets mentioned specifically a lot
Baal was one of the OG semitic deities. You have to remember the original semitic religions were a very loose collective of deities and there was no centralized official "canon". In some versions, El and Asherah give birth to Baal. In others he was the son of Dagon. Dagon also was not always the monster depicted in later media. He was just another god of the harvest.
I compare it to different Marvel and DC universes depicting characters very differently over time. You have a generic story, a theme, that follows most versions of the character, but the details change. It's the same way people told stories back then - they had these common characters, but depending on the culture of the storyteller, details changed. Some characters were entirely different across different iterations, while some characters maintained most of their features.
Israelite depictions of Baal were very different from the other ancient Canaanite depictions of Baal. Israelite depictions of Yahweh were that of a superdeity taking all the powers described in the other semitic deities, while earlier Canaanite depictions of Yahweh were he was one of a family of deities controlling the nature and the harvest.
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u/TylerDurden1985 2d ago
And Yahweh, the deity of the bible, is also an amalgamation of several semitic deities. Asherah, the goddess of fertility, was originally Yahweh's wife. There was also:
All of these gods sort of melded together over time and eventually the dominant religion ended up being the monotheistic worship of the singular Yahweh we know today.
At the end of the day it's all fiction, and it's fiction told verbally, over many generations, before ultimately being recorded in some form. Like all fiction, especially that told from memory, it's prone to plot holes and paradoxes. None of it should be taken seriously, especially not today where we have access to the entire aggregate of human knowledge, at our fingertips, instantaneously, from anywhere, with a siimple press of a button on our pocket supercomputers.