When did we decide that El, Yahweh, and Jehovah were all the same deity?

Question

A date might be a lot to ask for, but maybe a century? And a reason?

Answer 1

Yahweh and Jehovah are both just different ways of transliterating יְהֹוָה into English. Martin Luther is the one supposedly responsible for the actual J at the front.

El, on the other hand, is nothing more than the Semitic word for 'god'. Just as Baal is the Semitic word for 'lord'. You naturally get some confusion with other deities because EVERYONE tends to refer to their dieties as 'gods' or 'lords', and if they speak that language then those are the words they're going to use.

So you can see that we were never talking about three entities here. Always just the one.

Answer 2

El was the name used by the Northern tribes of Israel. YHWH was used by the Judahites. When the Northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE, their refugees came to Judah and found differences between their scriptures and the Judahites. This began a long campaign to consolidate the scriptures so no one would feel left out. It also explains why some stories are repeated (Abraham & Sarah's deception of foreign officials, Moses striking the rock for water), and some details are contraditory (how many of which animals on the ark, how many days it rained). The Names El and YHWH were largely interchangeable to describe the God of the Hebrews, although El came to be known as a generic name and YHWH the specific.

Jehovah was an error made by Christians who had newly discovered the Hebrew scriptures in the 16th Century CE. They were unaware of the proscription against pronouncing the divine name and tried to do so, not realizing that the vowels had been replaced with the ones for "Adonai" ("Lord"), the permissible substitute. The result, "Yahovah", was a nonsense word but by the time they found out, it was already in print, so it stuck.

Answer 3

El was the chief Canaanite god, the plural for god being Elohim. the sea people invaded and destroyed the cities of Canaan in 1200 BC. Yahweh seems to have been the god of the Midianites and moses was married to a midianite. archaeological evidence seems to point to the fact that Hebrews were in fact just the rural Canaanite population who retreated to the highlands when the sea people destroyed the cities of the Canaanites. it would seem that the Canaanite El became fused with the midianite Yahweh. as there is no linguistic evidence that any substantial part of the Hebrew population were ever slaves in Egypt. it would seem that some Canaanite refugees were pushed south into the lands of the Midianites and were later reunited with their fellows in the highlands some time around 1200 BC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh#Cultus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit#Ugarit_religion
boy, will i get some stick for this even though it's all referenced.

Answer 4

KJV Bible 1611 published. at 303 years is 1914 after Christ in Roman Empire #6, now at WW1, bible is an excepted tanslation by law of man and God.
Where in the earth or world is the christian nation among 1000 religions?
Jehovah is Jehovah and Jesus is Jesus and what will man do with the word of truth for the next 150 years, CAN MAN LEARN THE WORD OF TRUTH?

Answer 5

It has always been the same EL or "god". Throughout the Bible he will insist that he is the same God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. God simply chose to reveal different charactersistics of himself with different people in different times. These names are simple descriptive titles of the same God.

The Hebrews as far as their history that we know, have always been a monothesitic group.

Answer 6

All 3 I think are mentioned in the Bible, in my Bible anyway....it does make mention that Yahweh is Father God's real name...Jehovah is also God's name I think if you look in any Bible you will come across these 3 names and it does say, not that I can quote now...that they are the same deity....OK..Good luck...

Answer 7

We didn't . Jehovah,Yahweh are the polytheistic names for the Jewish names of their God. El the Hebrew name for god-EL...this root are "god"(Pagan or false gods)"God"(the true god of Israel) from web www.Hebrew4christians.com/NAMES_of_g-d/EL/el. HTML.
Moses created the monotheistic religion saying God told him its real name was Yahweh
This may be one of the ways the Catholic Church came up with the trinity?

Answer 8

Actually, we didnt decide anything! The bible calls God by those names on different occasions, depending on the context.

Answer 9

the day we decided that there's only one God.

Answer 10

A rose by any other name.....