Chris Heard over at Higgaion has a good post on the deities El and Yahweh and the question of when they may have merged. I think the most important point to Chris’s article is his statement that the two may have merged at different times in Israel and Judah. I think we would need to nuance it even more than that and recognize that they merged for different biblical authors at different times. Even if Hosea brought the two together, this does not mean that all subsequent biblical authors would have necessarily accepted his point.
For the non-specialists who are not familiar with this area of study, I would point you to Mark S. Smith’s excellent book The Early History of God, now available in a paperback edition. A more recent book dealing with the origins of the worship of Yahweh is Steve Cook’s The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism.
On November 8th, 2006 at 4:17 am
There is a nice, lengthy review article of Smith’s book in a recent volume of Maarav that would be worth checking out.