YHWH is not Pagan -.-

Submitted by Servant of Christ (United States), Feb 14, 2007 at 18:05

I got the following article from a website:

"Friedrich Delitzsch brought into notice three tablets, of the age of the first dynasty of Babylon, in which he read the names of Ya- a'-ve-ilu, Ya-ve-ilu, and Ya-u-um-ilu ("Yahweh is God"), and which he regarded as conclusive proof that Yahweh was known in Babylonia before 2000 B.C.; he was a god of the Semitic invaders in the second wave of migration, who were, according to Winckler and Delitzsch, of North Semitic stock (Canaanites, in the linguistic sense).

YHWH made himself known to Noah. Therefore it is reasonable to say that there would be distorted although still somewhat similar names.

We should thus have in the tablets evidence of the worship of Yahweh among the Western Semites at a time long before the rise of Israel. The reading of the names is, however, extremely uncertain, not to say improbable, and the far-reaching inferences drawn from them carry no conviction.

In a tablet attributed to the I4th century B.C. which Sellin found in the course of his excavations at Tell Ta'annuk (the Taanach of the O.T.) a name occurs which may be read Ahi-Yawi (equivalent to Hebrew Ahijah);if the reading be correct, this would show that Yahweh was worshipped in Central Palestine before the Israelite conquest."

"It is probable that Yahweh was at one time worshipped by various tribes south of Palestine, and that several places in that wide territory (Horeb, Sinai, Kadesh, &c.) were sacred to him; the oldest and most famous of these, the mountain of God, seems to have lain in Arabia, east of the Red Sea. From some of these peoples and at one of these holy places, a group of Israelite tribes adopted the religion of Yahweh, the God who, by the hand of Moses, had delivered them from Egypt.

Adopted the religion of YHWH? I thought we made it clear that the Israelites were very anti-foreigner.

The tribes of this region probably belonged to some branch of the great Arab stock, and the name Yahweh has, accordingly, been connected with the Arabic hawa, the void (between heaven and earth), "the atmosphere, or with the verb hawa, cognate with Heb. hawah,"sink, glide down" (through space); hawwa blow (wind). "He rides through the air, He blows" (Wellhausen), would be a fit name for a god of wind and storm. There is, however, no certain evidence that the Israelites in historical times had any consciousness of the primitive significance of the name."

YHWH means "I AM". As in "I am" there. It means "to be". Just finding an ancient deity with a name similar to YHWH doesn't mean anything if their meanings and character are no where similar.

May God bless You

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