Where God
got his names

Three thousand years ago, the land we now call Israel, Lebanon and coastal Syria was Canaan. The people of Canaan did not have one god. They had a family of gods — a pantheon.

We know their names because of an accident. In 1928, a farmer in Syria hit a stone with his plough. Under it was the lost city of Ugarit, and inside the city was a library of clay tablets. The tablets, written before 1200 BCE, tell the stories of the gods of Canaan.

At the top sat El. His name simply means "god". He was old, wise and kind — the father of gods and people. His wife was Asherah, the mother goddess, "mother of the seventy gods". Their children did the active work. The most famous child was Baal, the storm god. His name means "Lord". He brought the rain, so he brought the harvest. Every year he fought the sea, and death, and won.

Click the names below to meet the family.

Old gods do not always die. Sometimes they hide inside words.

In Hebrew, el means "god" — and it was also the personal name of the old father god. So when you see El at the start or end of a Hebrew name, you are often looking at him. Isra-el means "he struggles with El". Beth-el means "house of El". The angels Micha-el and Gabri-el carry his name too.

The everyday Hebrew word for God in the Bible, Elohim, is also built from El. Its shape is plural — like "gods" — and on the Ugarit tablets the same word meant the whole family of gods, "the children of El". In the Bible it usually takes a singular verb and means the one God. The old family word stayed; its meaning changed.

Later, a second divine name — Yah, the short form of Yahweh — began hiding inside names as well. Try the machine below. Click a name and see who is inside it.

Here is the strange thing. The god of the Bible — Yahweh — is not in the family at Ugarit. The tablets never name him. He came from somewhere else.

The oldest trace of his name is not in the Bible. It is in Egypt. A temple list from about 1400 BCE names "the Shasu of Yhw" — desert wanderers who lived in the dry lands south of Canaan, near Edom and Midian. The name of their land, or their god, sounds like Yahweh.

The Bible itself remembers the south. Its oldest songs say Yahweh "marches up from Edom" and comes "from Sinai", with the earth shaking and rain falling. In the story of Moses, Yahweh first speaks from a burning bush in Midian — the same southern desert.

So many scholars tell this story: Yahweh began as a storm-and-war god of the southern desert. Traders and herders carried him north into Canaan. There, the people of the hills — the first Israelites — made him their own.

So Canaan's hills now had two chief gods: old El, and the newcomer Yahweh. What happened next is the birth of Western religion. Israel decided they were the same god.

The Bible itself says it. In Exodus, God tells Moses: "I appeared to Abraham as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I was not known to them." The old family stories used El's names; the new faith used Yahweh's. This verse glues them together: same god, two names.

One early poem still shows the seam. In Deuteronomy 32, in the oldest copies — the Dead Sea Scrolls and the old Greek Bible — Elyon ("the Highest", a title of El) divides the world's peoples among his divine sons, and Yahweh receives Israel as his share. Two gods, father and son. Later Hebrew copies quietly changed "sons of God" to "sons of Israel", and the seam disappeared.

Yahweh also took Baal's job. In the Psalms he "rides on the clouds" — Baal's exact title at Ugarit. He fights the sea monster Leviathan — at Ugarit, Baal fights the sea serpent Lotan, the same name in an older form. The storm god's thunder moved into Yahweh's hands.

Monotheism did not fall from the sky in one piece. It was built — name by name, title by title, job by job.

The Bible tells us Israel worshipped one God. Archaeology tells us ordinary people took centuries to agree.

In the 1970s, diggers found a desert rest-stop called Kuntillet Ajrud, from about 800 BCE. On big storage jars, travellers wrote blessings — and the blessings say: "I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah." The old mother goddess, El's wife, standing beside Yahweh like a queen beside a king.

The Bible agrees, in its angry way. It says an Asherah statue stood inside Yahweh's own temple in Jerusalem for years. It says Queen Jezebel brought hundreds of prophets of Baal to court, and the prophet Elijah — "my El is Yah"! — fought them on a mountain. Around 620 BCE, King Josiah dragged the Asherah out of the temple, burned it, and closed the old altars.

Prophets preached against Baal for three hundred years. You only preach that long against something people are actually doing. The old family of gods died slowly, one funeral at a time.

The most important name in Western religion is four Hebrew letters: YHWH. And for two thousand years, almost nobody has said it.

In early Israel, the name was ordinary. People said it in greetings and wrote it in letters. The silver good-luck scrolls in the picture below, from about 600 BCE, carry it — the oldest words of the Bible on any object we have.

Then the silence grew. The commandment said: do not misuse the name. To be safe, people stopped using it at all. By about 200 BCE, only the High Priest said the name, once a year, inside the temple in Jerusalem. In 70 CE the Romans burned the temple, and the sound of the name went out like a candle. The letters stayed; the vowels were forgotten.

When Jews read the Bible aloud, they see YHWH and say Adonai — "my Lord". In everyday talk, even that is too holy, so they say HaShem — simply, "the Name".

Centuries later, this careful system produced a famous mistake. Medieval Hebrew Bibles wrote the letters of YHWH with the vowel marks of Adonai, as a reminder: say Adonai here. Christian readers did not know the code. Around 1520 they read letters and vowels together, as one word — and got "Jehovah". In 1530, William Tyndale printed it in the first English Exodus. The word spread across the world. It is a reading mistake, about five hundred years old.

Around 250 BCE, Jews in Egypt began translating the Bible into Greek. They faced a problem: what do you do with a name nobody says?

Their answer shaped everything after. Since readers already said "my Lord" for YHWH, most Greek copies wrote Kyrios — "Lord". For Elohim they wrote Theos — "God". A few very early copies did something braver: they wrote the name itself, in Greek letters, as ΙΑΩ ("Iao") — you can see one in the picture below. But "Lord" won.

The choice had giant consequences. The first Christians wrote in Greek, and they gave the title Kyrios to Jesus. "Jesus Christ is Lord" uses exactly the word that stood in place of YHWH. In one Greek word, the God of Israel and a man from Galilee were joined. Around 400 CE, Jerome's Latin Bible followed the same path: Dominus for the name, Deus for God.

Then the Bible moved north, into lands with other gods. Around 350 CE, bishop Wulfila translated it for the Goths. For Theos he did not import a Hebrew or Greek word. He used his own people's old word for divine beings: guþ. English translators later did the same. Their word — from a pagan root meaning perhaps "the one called upon", or "the one who receives offerings" — is God.

So the English sentence "the LORD God" contains no Hebrew name at all. It is a chain of careful replacements, two thousand years long. Walk through the chain below.

This page has its own vocabulary, and every word is doing real work. These are the terms used above, with what each one means.

Listen & Repeat reads each word and then waits for you to say it back. Speaking drill turns on the microphone and checks whether the words came out clearly. On each card, say it reads the word, and tell me more opens a fuller explanation and a sentence to try.