Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

EL

(Heb. ʾēl)

In many West Semitic languages the name of El is the same as the word for “god,” perhaps evidence that El was the pre-eminent god of older West Semitic pantheons (or possibly divinity incarnate). Although the etymology is uncertain, the word may derive from *ʾwl, “to be in front” or “to be strong,” or may be a “primitive” biradical noun, unrelated to a verbal root and meaning “chief” or “god.”

Middle and Late Bronze Age Sources

Texts from Ebla, Mari, and Amarna attest to El as a theophoric element in personal names. Accordingly, it is thought that El was a major god in Syria-Palestine. In contrast, the evidence in personal names from the Mesopotamian heartland is contested. Given the lack of evidence for El’s cult in Mesopotamia, these cases may involve either the generic term, “god,” or the personal god, but not the proper name of El.

The most extensive source about El comes from Late Bronze Age Ugarit. In the Ugaritic mythological narratives El is the divine patriarch par excellence. He is the divine progenitor, “father” to the pantheon, which is his royal family and a royal assembly over which he exercises authority. His authority is expressed in his title, “king” (mlk), the same notion which seems to underlie his epithet, “bull”; like the chief and most powerful of animals, El is chief of the deities. Asherah is El’s wife, with whom he has produced the pantheon (generically, but not all-inclusively, called “Asherah’s 70 sons”).

Both texts and iconography present El as an elderly, bearded figure, the “aged one,” “father of years” (ʾab šnm, although the meaning of the second term is debated). Anat and Asherah both affirm the eternity of El’s wisdom.

As the divine patriarch, El enjoys a range of social activities. Like the well-to-do men of Ugarit, he has a social association or club (mrzḥ), and texts depict drunken bouts and sexual activity.

El’s home is conceptualized in both terrestrial and cosmic terms. According to the Baal cycle, it is situated in the waters of the “double-deeps,” located at a mountain, the terrestrial site of which is unknown. His residence is characterized further by terms which would suggest a tent. A ritual text (KTU 1.100.3) provides a cosmic location for El’s home, placing it at a point where the upper and lower cosmic oceans meet.

El’s status vis-à-vis Baal, the head of the next generation of gods, has been a matter of debate. Some scholars have argued that Baal’s promotion to the head of the pantheon took place at El’s expense. While this view has been severely contested, the struggle for divine kingship between Baal and El’s sons is fraught with tension and intrigue. El backs the god Sea (Yamm) for divine kingship against his rival, Baal, who may have been regarded as an outsider to El’s family (cf. Baal’s title “son of Dagan”). Later in the Baal cycle, El supports the god Athtar, an astral deity and one of El’s sons, for divine kingship. Texts depicting competition among the younger gods in the divine family, overseen by the patriarch El, may reflect two forms of divinity or cult, one astral involving El and his children and the other atmospheric involving Baal. It may be suggested (with all due caution) that the sun, moon, and stars were especially associated with El in West Semitic religion.

El attends not only to his divine family, but also to the human family. In the story of Keret, El shows solicitous care for this king, appearing to him in an incubation-dream and blessing him with progeny. Just as El engendered the divine family, so too El produced the human family. His relationship to humanity is exemplified by his titles “father of humanity” (ʾb ʾadm) and “creator of creatures” (bny bnwt; cf. Gen. 14:19, 22). The mythological texts never portray El’s role as creator of the cosmos, deities, or humanity, and it would seem that this activity of his was regarded as having belonged to the distant past. Another activity posited for El is battle, based on the title “El the warrior” (ʾēl gibbôr; Isa. 9:6[MT 5]) or “Divine Warrior.”

Iron Age Sources

Outside of proper names, Heb. ʾēl occurs ca. 230 times in the Hebrew Bible. It may designate a foreign deity (Ezek. 28:2) as well as Israel’s chief deity (Num. 23:22 = 24:8). Most commonly, the word is used in conjunction with other grammatical elements (such as the definite article). It appears as a proper name of the deity in poetic books such as Psalms (Ps. 5:4[5]; 7:11[12]; 18:3, 31, 33, 48[2, 30, 32, 47] = 2 Sam. 22; Ps. 102:24[25]) and Second Isaiah (Isa. 40:18; 42:5; 45:14, 15, 20-22; 46:9). Illustrative of this usage is the shortest (and brilliantly chiastic) biblical prayer which Moses utters on Miriam’s behalf: “El, please, heal her, please” (Num. 12:13; cf. Hos. 11:12[12:1]; Mic. 7:18; LXX Prov. 30:3).

According to many scholars, El’s cult did not exist in Israel except as part of his identification with Yahweh. This question depends on whether Yahweh was a title of El or secondarily identified with El. Besides the grammatical questions raised against this view, the oldest biblical traditions describe Yahweh as a storm-god from the Negeb and the Arabah, especially Edom, Teman, Paran, and Kuntillet ʿAjrud/µorvat Teman (0940.9560; cf. Judg. 5; Hab. 3). These facts militate against an identification of Yahweh as originally a title of El.

Some evidence points to old Israelite traditions of El which do not involve Yahweh. Most importantly, the name of Israel does not contain the divine element of Yahweh, but rather El’s name. This suggests that El was the original chief god of the group named Israel. West Semitic El lies behind the god of the patriarchs in Gen. 33:20; 46:3 (and possibly elsewhere). The Priestly theological treatment of Israel’s early religious history in Exod. 6:2-3 identifies the old god El Shaddai with Yahweh, a means to gloss over the obvious difficulty that El and not Yahweh was the god of the patriarchs. Furthermore, Gen. 49:24-25 presents a series of El epithets separate from the mention of Yahweh in v. 18. At least some of these texts point to an old stage in Israelite traditions or locations where El was Israel’s chief deity apart from Yahweh. It would stand to reason that El and not Yahweh was the god who accompanied the Israelites from Egypt (Num. 23:22 = 24:8; cf. El’s title, “bull”).

Two biblical passages suggest an accommodation of Yahweh to an Israelite pantheon headed by El. According to the LXX and one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Deut. 32:8 regards Yahweh as one of El’s sons, here called Elyon; according to v. 9, Israel was the nation which Yahweh received. The passage presupposes that El was the head of this pantheon and Yahweh was but one of its many members. Ps. 82 describes a heavenly courtroom in which Yahweh takes his stand as plaintiff. Such scenes assume another divinity as the judge, a common role for El in the Ugaritic texts (cf. the label given the heavenly council in Ps. 82:1, ʿăḏaṯ-ʾēl, “the gathering of El”; Yahweh’s reference to the other deities in v. 6 as “the sons of Elyon,” a title of El).

The cultural process lying behind this accommodation of Yahweh can be understood better by noting the religious language and imagery associated with specific sanctuaries. 1 Sam. 1–3 describes the divine appearance to Samuel in incubation-dreams at the sanctuary at Shiloh, the divine gift of a child to Hannah, and the El name of Elkanah (suggesting an El worshipper?), all of which would cohere with the view that El was the original god at Shiloh (Judg. 18:31; cf. 17:5). The tent tradition associated with Shiloh (Ps. 78:60; Josh. 18:1; 1 Sam. 2:22) comports with Ugaritic descriptions of El’s abode as a tent. It is probably no accident that Ps. 78 repeatedly uses El names and epithets in its discussion of Shiloh. Furthermore, it is arguable from the cult of Shiloh and the Egyptian names in the Shilohite lineage (Moses, Phinehas, Hopni, Merari) that the god of Moses and the levitical priesthood at Shiloh was El.

Traditions concerning the sanctuary of Shechem likewise illustrate the cultural process lying behind the inclusion of Yahweh at old cultic sites of El. At Shechem the local god was El-berith, “El of the covenant” (Judg. 9:46; cf. 8:33; 9:4). In the patriarchal narratives, the god of Shechem (ʾēl) is called ʾĕlōhê yiśrāʾēl, “the god of Israel,” and is presumed to be Yahweh. In this case, a process of reinterpretation appears to be at work. In the early history of Israel, when the cult of Shechem became Yahwistic, it inherited and continued the El traditions of that site. As a result, Yahweh received the title ʾēl bĕrîṯ, the old title of El.

As these accounts suggest, at various points and under different circumstances Israelite religious centers based in the central highlands identified Yahweh, the god of the southern region, with their local main god, El. In identifying Yahweh secondarily with El, the priesthood at cultic sites of El, such as Shiloh, Shechem, and Jerusalem, melded the religious lore of Yahweh with the indigenous traditions about El. It is for this reason that the Hebrew Bible so rarely distinguishes between El and Yahweh or offers polemics against El. In Israel El’s characteristics and epithets joined the repertoire of descriptions of Yahweh. Like El in the Ugaritic texts, Yahweh is described as an aged, patriarchal god (e.g., Ps. 102:27[28]; Job 36:26; Isa. 40:28; cf. Dan. 6:26; 2 Esdr. 8:20), seated on a throne in the assembly of divine beings (1 Kgs. 22:19; Isa. 6:1-8; cf. Ps. 82:1; 89:5-8; Isa. 14:13; Jer. 23:18, 22). Later biblical texts continued the notion of aged Yahweh enthroned before the heavenly hosts (Dan. 7:9-14, 22, the “ancient of days” and “the Most High”; cf. Rev. 7).

El and Yahweh exhibit a similar disposition towards humanity. Like El, Yahweh is a father (Deut. 32:6; Isa. 63:16; 64:8; Jer. 3:14, 19; 31:9; Mal. 1:6, 2:10; cf. Exod. 4:22; Hos. 11:1), with a compassionate disposition (“merciful and gracious god”; Exod. 34:6; Neh. 9:17; Ps. 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2). Like El, Yahweh is the progenitor of humanity (cf. Deut. 32:6-7). Both El and Yahweh appear to humans in dream-visions and function as their divine patron. Like El, Yahweh is a healing god (Gen. 20:17; Num. 12:13; 2 Kgs. 20:5, 8; Ps. 107:20). The description of Yahweh’s dwelling-place as a “tent” (e.g., Ps. 15:1; 27:6), called in the Pentateuchal traditions the “tent of meeting” (Exod. 33:7-11; Num. 12:5, 10; Deut. 31:14, 15), recalls the tent of El. Furthermore, the cosmic waters of El’s dwelling is a theme evoked in descriptions of Yahweh’s abode in Jerusalem (Ps. 87; Isa. 33:20-22; Ezek. 47:1-12; Joel 3:18[4:18]; Zech. 14:8).

It is unknown whether some distinction between El and Yahweh in Israel extends to epigraphic evidence. It is not necessary to interpret ʾl in the Kuntillet ʿAjrud inscriptions as “God” and assume an identification with Yahweh. Israelite inscriptions include 557 names with Yahweh as the divine element, 77 names with *ʾl, a handful with the divine component *bʿl, and none referring to the goddesses ʿAnat or Asherah. The element *ʾl in proper names may represent a title for Yahweh, but it is possible that this identification should not be assumed in all instances.

El’s cult in the Levant outside of Israel is a matter of dispute. Phoenician data are quite sparse and far-flung (e.g., Karatepe, a neo-Punic inscription, a Hellenistic inscription from Umm el-ʿAwamid, Philo of Byblos). Ezek. 28 describes the home of Tyrian El in terms similar to Ugaritic descriptions of El’s abode, and the wisdom ascribed to Tyrian El also recalls El in the Ugaritic texts. Furthermore, Phoenician Bethel has been understood as a hypostasis of El, which would represent further Phoenician evidence for the cult of El in the Iron II period. This view is debated. Finally, Phoenician and Punic Baal Hamon may be a title of El. If correct, the cult of El was very widespread.

Aramaic evidence from the 8th century is more sparse but less equivocal. Panammuwa, king of Samal, mentions El in a list of deities, and the Sefire inscription is a treaty text with a list of divine witnesses including El.

Like the Phoenician evidence, the Transjordanian material for the cult of El has been debated vigorously. Ammonite personal names attest to the element ʾl, but it is unclear whether El is the referent. The divine element ʾl likewise dominates the theophoric elements in the Edomite onomastica. A 1st-millennium Transjordanian cult of El might be suggested by the Deir ʿAlla inscriptions. Some of the older poetic material in Num. 22–24 attests to El’s cult in a Transjordanian setting. Like the Deir ʿAlla inscriptions, Num. 22–24 presents a Transjordanian seer whose prophecy comes from El, a role attested for this god in the Ugaritic texts. In sum, while dynastic cults of the 1st-millennium Levant had patron deities other than El, the admittedly sparse and sometimes ambiguous evidence indicates El’s cult in the Levant during the 1st millennium.

Bibliography. F. M. Cross, “ēl,” TDOT 1:242-61; Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 3-75; W. Herrmann, “El,” DDD (Leiden, 1995), 274-80; B. A. Levine, “The Balaam Inscription from Deir ʿAlla: Historical Aspects,” in Biblical Archaeology Today (Jerusalem, 1985), 326-39; C. E. L’Heureux, Rank Among the Canaanite Gods. HSM 21 (Missoula, 1979); P. D. Miller, Jr., “El the Warrior,” HTR 60 (1967): 411-31; U. Oldenburg, The Conflict between El and Baʿal in Canaanite Thought (Leiden, 1969); M. H. Pope, El in the Ugaritic Texts. VTSup 2 (Leiden, 1955).

Mark S. Smith

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

EL

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)