Who Is the Jewish God, and What Does He Desire?
Whence came the LORD of suffering, real estate, foreskins, and gold?
One four letter word lurks at the center of Abrahamic belief, and it is called the Tetragrammaton. The Tetragrammaton is said to be the proper name of the god of Israel; the god of the Hebrew covenants. This makes the Tetragrammaton the foundation not only of Judaism but of Christianity and Islam as well. The Tetragrammaton is usually rendered in English as YHWH or Yahweh. This is the name or title of the Jewish god. And a lot of people think YHWH is God. But what does YHWH actually mean, and where does it come from?
The first book of Genesis does not contain YHWH at all; YHWH first appears in Genesis 2. In the first book of Genesis, the Hebrew text refers to the creator as Elohim, which the Greek Septuagint translates as Theos, meaning God. But Elohim does not actually mean God; it is a plural noun, and would be better translated as Gods. It was the Gods, according to Genesis 1, who made male and female humans in their image. But in Genesis 1:29, Elohim suddenly develops a first person singular voice, and by Genesis 2:4, YHWH has conjoined his name with Elohim and assumed their identity and authority. This evidence of Jewish redaction in the book of Genesis apparently gave rise to Gnosticism, which posited that YHWH was actually a devil in conflict with the created universe.
The Jewish religion as we know it has always glossed this over this confusion, from its origin in the Greek Septuagint to its contemporary English iterations. In the Septuagint, “Elohim” is translated as “God” while “YHWH Elohim” is translated as “LORD God”, “YHWH” as “LORD”, and “Adonai” as “Lord”. In Exodus 3:14, YHWH tells Moses that his name means “I Am that I Am”. But this is considered by scholars to be a folk etymology. Furthermore, by the third century BC, the Jews would not or could not pronounce the Tetragrammaton. The Mishnah later forbid its pronunciation. Kabala holds it as a mystery. Why is the name of the Jewish “G-d” so dang occult?
The Gnostic distaste for YHWH is not hard to comprehend. The Jewish G-d exists to explain why women must suffer in childbirth and submit to men, while men must toil ceaselessly in the fields until they become dust. The Jewish G-d exists to explain why a nice bit of real estate just downstream from paradise belongs to the seed of Abraham, who may exploit the native Canaanites as they please. It also exists to condemn homosexuality; but when the original sin is taking a beautiful fruit from a beautiful tree in the middle of a garden that Elohim made for your dominion, one starts to recognize that YHWH is actually the sinful one.
Consider: first Elohim make humanity in their image, which is to say, GODLIKE, then YHWH Elohim punishes humanity for becoming Godlike by gaining the knowledge of good and evil. In the beginning, all week long, Elohim are making this and that and the other thing, and recognizing it as GOOD, but then YHWH doesn’t want the very special animals made in the Gods’ own image to be able to recognize goodness?
YHWH is schizophrenic sadist trash! When Noah makes landfall, the first thing he does is grill up the extra pairs of animals that God ordered him to ship, so that the mouthwatering scent of the holocaust makes YHWH promise to never kill off 99.9% of humans and animals ever again. Later, when a prosperous race of humanity, made in Elohim’s image, distinguish themselves from animals by building a magnificent tower towards the heavens, YHWH smashes the tower and confuses and scatters the humans. This is the ugliest mythology on Earth! YHWH is actually the enemy of the creator Gods and their created beings.
As another example, Genesis 2:18 claims that YHWH fashioned the first woman by removing one of Adam’s ribs. But Genesis 1:27 already told us that Elohim made both male and female in the image of the Gods, and YHWH had nothing to do with it! YHWH is a liar from the beginning.
YHWH punishes humanity for gaining the knowledge of good and evil because YHWH is evil. This is why Adam and Eve immediately tried to hide their genitals from his gaze. The original sin does not belong to humanity – it belongs to YHWH. I am going to break off this reading of Genesis before we get into all the multiplication of Semitic seed and stuff; suffice to say that the book is not an actual history of creation, nor is it an organic mythology; instead is asserting a political claim to the land of Canaan (i.e. Israel). Genesis says that the post diluvian people of Canaan must serve the new Semitic nation that will take its place. YHWH predicts 400 years of slavery for the Semites. He then articulates a new covenant, in which Abraham’s seed will be the “blessing” of all nations, in the same way that they are a “blessing” to Canaan. The only catch is that you have to surrender your foreskin.
Who is YHWH anyway? He doesn’t appear to have any ancestors or cousins. The first letter of his name is the Hebrew Yod which means Jew. Furthermore YH is used in the Bible as a short form of YHWH. And there are a litany of Hebrew names which begin with YH to signify YHWH. For example, Yashua, which is the name Joshua or Jesus, means “YHWH saves”. Likewise, Joseph means “YHWH will increase”.
One possible etymology of the Tetragrammaton is suggested by the NAS concordance, which says YHWH derives from Yah Havah, with Havah meaning “to become”. In this case YHWH would literally mean “Jew Begetter.” Barbara Walker also makes an argument on the basis of the word Havah, which she calls “the pre-Hebraic word for Eve”. In this case YHWH would literally mean “Jew Mother”. The final H in YHWH, like the E in EVE, is silent, meaning YHWH should be pronounced as “Yahwe” or simply “Yow”.
In The Christ Conspiracy, Acharya S (DM Murdoch) explores other possible etymological connections to YHWH. She says the word IAO or YAO is a primordial name for God, a tri syllabic onomatopoeia like the AUM of the Hindus. She also suggests that the Egyptian god Ra held the title of HUHI “the eternal” which the “Hebrews” reversed into IHUH. It was from a Greek rendering of the Tetragrammaton as IAO that the Gnostics derived their name for the demiurge; Ialdabaoth. But if IAO is truly a pre-Hebraic name for God, it does not necessarily mean that YHWH shares any attributes with IAO. It would have only been necessary for YHWH to steal his name, in the same way he stole the identity of Elohim.
There is also the Latin God Jove who has practically the same name. Crucially, Jove or Jupiter only becomes the highest God after killing his father, the original king, Saturn. This Latin mythology is a rip off of the Greek mythology of Zeus and Cronos. Recall from Genesis 1 that creation took place in six days and a sabbath was observed on the seventh. Seven is the number of Saturn and Saturday is its day. Is it possible that the original Elohim are representative of Saturn’s reign, while YHWH is representative of Jupiter or Zeus, the usurper of creation?
Archaic Latin actually popularized Jove, who later became Jupiter, after the publication of the Septuagint. So “Jove” must be etymologically descended from “YHWH” and not vice versa. Yet it appears the book of Genesis has borrowed the prominent theme of Greek mythology. “Jupiter” is said to derive from “Dyaus Pater” (sky father) in the Proto Indo European language. Have we gone from Dyaus to Yao to Yahweh to Jove and back again? Should the Jews observe their sabbath on Thor’s Day?
Unfortunately for the Jews, any claim to the primacy of their creation myth is contradicted by archaeology. The proto Hebrew language, which is written in a Phoenician script, first appears in the archaeological record in the 10th century BCE. I believe it is a misnomer to call this language paleo Hebrew, since the Hebrews weren’t invented by the Jews until at least 400 years later. And indeed, early Israeli language inscriptions do not attest to Biblical events. Furthermore, the word “Hebrew” is not used in the Bible to describe any language. Instead, the “Hebrew” language is only referred to as “the language of the Judeans”. Thus it seems the Jews were the appropriators of a language that was not actually Hebrew at all.
The Biblical Hebrews simply didn’t exist; if they did they should have left an earlier record, since Moses is said to have lived 1300 years before Christ. Furthermore, the Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible (which is also partly written in Aramaic) has only been known to us since about 1000 CE (2300 years after Moses) and all its antecedents are completely unknown. The only Jewish Bible that influenced ancient history was written in Greek. Origen was the first person to compare Greek and Hebrew versions of the scripture, but even this was 500 years after the publication of Septuagint. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls post date the Septuagint. Is there any evidence that the Jewish scriptures existed in the Hebrew language before 250 BC? Or did the Jews quite simply invent Hebraism? Did they take the phonetic name of a supreme God, write it in a new script, and claim that the first letter of God’s name meant Jew?
The earliest alleged usage of the word YHWH is found on the Mesha stele which is dated to 840 BC. Although the text could be a post biblical forgery, we will consider it. The stele refers to a battle in Israel which killed 7000 men, after which the vessels of YHWH were taken for the God of the conquering nation. There is no biblical context here or any evidence of Hebrew culture. Israel was undoubtedly real, and it utilized a Phoenician script known as proto Hebrew. So their name for God was YHWH. This is the name that was plagiarized by the Jewish authors of the Bible to justify their occupation of Israel. Three critical things happened in the third century BCE: the Jewish Bible was first published, the name YHWH ceased to be pronounceable to the claimants of Jerusalem, and the Israeli language transformed from a Phoenician script into a totally different square script. What could explain all three?
Although the Hebrews are fictional, there were a Canaanite people called Habiru who existed in roughly the same time period that Moses is said to have lived. According to the Amarna letters, the Habiru were a group of outcasts, hill people, and mercenaries who ended up conquering the lavish Canaanite city states that they surrounded. They were the hired labor of the Pharaoh of Egypt, named Akhenaten, who was the inventor of monotheism and a fierce iconoclast. Akhenaten paid the Habiru to build monuments and fight for him, before they ended up conquering Canaan.
Things didn’t turn out quite so rosily for Akhenaten, who was ultimately rejected by Egyptian society, killed or forced to flee, his Atenist monuments defaced and his new theology overturned, his funeral treasury dumped on his wife and his kid. His kid was named King Tut, and his brother was named Thutmoses. Did I mention he had wide hips and big titties? Truth is stranger than fiction.
There is a reason mainstream academia denies the obvious corollary between the Habiru and the Hebrew. Because although at first glance it lends credence to the historicity of the Bible, upon closer examination it refutes its central theses: that the Hebrew were an ethnically or racially unified people, that they were enslaved in Egypt, that they were descended from a guy who had lifetime property rights to Canaan. It also reveals the true character of the inventor of monotheism: he was an inbred Pharaoh who used child slaves to build monuments to his ego. It reveals that the Jewish Bible is less even mythology than plagiarism and propaganda. It was not born in a desert; it was born in a world library.
As for YHWH, I don’t think he is a representative of anything besides worldly greed. He is not a god at all. He is a lie. He is also the architect of Zion, which represents the future fulfillment of his every desire. The only value of his name is in its enunciation, which the Jews refuse to practice.