There were other early intimations of divine singularity. Zoroastrians worshipped Ahura Mazda. Vedic thinkers gestured toward a transcendental oneness. But today’s most influential vision of monotheism—the God of Abraham—descends from another ancient figure: the early Israelite deity YHWH. Exactly how devotees pronounced this god’s name is impossible to know. It may have been “Yah,” or “Yaho,” or “Yahu.” Greco-Roman scholars called him Yahweh, and the convention stuck.
Before he was God, Yahweh was a subordinate figure in a polytheistic drama headed by El, the white-bearded king of the gods. El was worshipped throughout the ancient Levant, and, together with his consort Asherah, he presided over an assembly of deities who included the storm god, Baal; the sea god, Yam; and the ruler of the underworld, Mot. Traces of this early polytheism are still preserved in the Hebrew Bible. The Eighty-second Psalm declares, “God has taken his place in the divine assembly; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.”
El, not Yahweh, was probably the original patron deity of the people called Israel. This is suggested throughout the Bible, as in Genesis 33:20: “There he set up an altar and called it El Elohe Israel,” meaning El, the God of Israel. “El” also lingers in personal names such as Samuel and Daniel, and, most conspicuously, in the name Israel itself, yisra-El.
Yahweh was a god of weather and war, bursting with thunder and rain clouds and associated with a mountainous wilderness beyond the Dead Sea. Around the turn of the first millennium B.C.E., he displaced El as Israel’s heavenly head. Exactly why remains debated, though the shift may have been tied to the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the need for a more explicitly militarized theology—an opening well suited to a warrior figure like Yahweh. Even after his ascent, however, the Israelite world view appears to have remained polytheistic. Yahweh continued to exist alongside other gods, demanding only that his people give him priority, a practice known as monolatry. In the First Commandment, for example, he does not deny the existence of other deities; he merely insists that none be placed “before me.”
Followers of the Abrahamic religions are supposed to treat God as immaterial and incorporeal, yet these early Yahweh worshippers imagined him as fully embodied. Drawing on textual and archeological evidence, including depictions of related Near Eastern gods, Stavrakopoulou reconstructs Yahweh as she thinks his followers conceived him. He was immense. He likely had dense forearms, bulging biceps, and glistening red skin. His penis, if it resembled El’s, was long and circumcised. His countenance shimmered between El’s aged authority and the youthful ferocity of a thunderer. His ears were probably pierced.
When the Assyrians conquered Israel, in 722 B.C.E., and the Babylonians devastated Judah, in 588 B.C.E., they also destroyed Yahweh’s temples, possibly including statues of Yahweh himself. It was around this time that the familiar contours of Abrahamic monotheism began to coalesce. An idea gained ground that gods other than Yahweh did not truly exist, or else were inferior beings, qualitatively different from him. New Biblical texts, including Deuteronomy and large portions of Isaiah, were composed. Older passages were revised. Insistent formulas proliferated: “There is no other”; “There is none besides.”
The sheer volume of these claims, and the constant polemic against rival gods, suggests that not everyone was persuaded. Biblical authors and redactors were adamant about Yahweh’s exclusive divinity, but a substantial contingent of believers evidently required convincing. As Jewish identity crystallized during and after the Babylonian exile, polytheism remained an enduring temptation.
These currents of the first millennium B.C.E. eventually shaped the theologies of the three major Abrahamic faiths—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—and informed a family of related monotheisms, including Yazidism, Druzism, and the religion into which I was born, Sikhism. Searching for a single key to monotheism across such varied traditions, however, is like trying to identify a facial feature shared by members of a large family. Resemblances appear in clusters, but no trait clearly belongs to everyone. Practitioners themselves have long recognized that “oneness” is not a single, uncontested idea: traditions differ over how far you can speak of distinction within the divine without ceasing to speak of one God at all. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity has been an especially durable flash point. A passage from the Jerusalem Talmud, written around the fifth century C.E., records a rabbi explaining to sectarians—Christians, apparently—that God was not three but one. A century or so later, the Quran was less patient: “Those who say that God is the third of three are unbelievers.”