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El And Yahweh Research Paper

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El And Yahweh Research Paper
The amount of deities that were worshiped in ancient Israel is unclear itself, but there are a specific few major gods to focus on for the understanding of the books of first and second Kings. The worship of gods other than El or Yahweh was specifically mentioned as a sin as described by the famous ten commandments in Exodus chapter 20 and later in the book discovered by Josiah in 2 Kings chapter 22. The main deities they worshiped to consider are El, Yahweh, Baal, and Asherah. A common difficulty is understanding the difference between El and Yahweh. El is simply a way to refer to the God that is mentioned in the Pentateuch by many names, especially in Genesis, such as “El Shaddai” (God of the mountain), “El Elyon” (God most high), or “El …show more content…
The life of an Israelite revolved around the laws of the Pentateuch, whether they observed them well or not. Again, the Old Testament is oriented towards this world and was to provide scripture for worshipers of Yahweh and the descendants of Abraham. Today, it serves mainly as a historical account and reference of major figures and wisdom oriented texts for Christianity, but it was the only scripture that ancient Israel had to base understanding on and that was not including most of the Old Testament. Perhaps, not even the whole Pentateuch according to the missing book of the law that changed the nation under King Josiah. This concept is really important to reiterate as one of the main questions this analysis comes down to is what the relationship between God’s punishment and Israel’s knowledge of the law is? There are a lot of things to consider with this question in mind such as the character and human aspects of the Israeli people or the amount and in what ways God interacts with his chosen people. Even concepts such as literacy and exploration should be taken into account when understanding how and what was recognized as law in ancient

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