The God of 6 Trillion Galaxies

The God of Israel is like the Gods of the Canaanites. I mean that quite literally. The word “Israel” has El at the end. It means something like, “struggles with El.” El is the name of the supreme deity in Canaanite religion.

This is from Wikipedia. It’s a great summation of El and El’s absorption into Israelite religion.

El is often described as the father of the gods and the creator of humanity. El had many epithets, including ‘Bull El,’ ‘El the King,’ and ‘Father of Mankind,’ reflecting his authority, wisdom, and paternal role. Over time, in Israelite religion, Yahweh absorbed many of El’s characteristics, gradually merging their identities through a process scholars such as Francesca Stavrakopoulou call ‘pantheon reduction.’

Baal and Asherah were also a part of Israelite religion until at least 620 BCE when Josiah, kind of Judah, centralized all worship in Jerusalem and cleared the temple in Jerusalem of “idols” (2 Kings 23). Archeological evidence confirms that the worship of Asherah and Baal was standard practice for hundreds of years after Israel

Baal was mainly a storm deity in the Canaanite pantheon, and is depicted as a divine warrior who defeats the Yam, the chaotic God of the sea. Yahweh is often depicted in similar terms in the Old Testament (Gen 1, Psalm 74, Job 26, others). There is even a showdown between these two storm Gods. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah and the prophets of Baal both call upon their God to send down fire (lightning) to consume their sacrificial offerings. Yahweh wins this battle, but worship of Baal and Asherah continues for at least another 200 years.

Asherah was a mother goddess who was associated with fertility and was considered El’s wife. Archaeological evidence from approximately 800 BCE demonstrates that Asherah eventually came to be known as the wife of Yahweh. Inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom in the 8th century B.C.E. mention “Yahweh and his Asherah.”

At an archaeological site in southern Israel called Arad, where the southern kingdom of Judah had a fort from sometime in the 10th century BCE until the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 BCE. This fort had a tiny temple within it, including an altar for animal sacrifice and a holy of holies. Outside the holy of holies there were two incense altars, and inside the holy of holies there were two standing stones, one larger than the other. These two incense altars and standing stones almost certainly represents Yahweh (no one doubts this) and his wife, Asherah.

To the reader of the Old Testament, all of this idolatry is puzzling. But to scholars of the Old Testament and the archaeology of ancient Israel, the story is fairly straightforward. Disgruntled Canaanites left the Canaanite city-states and started new communities in what is now know as the West Bank. Yes, the earliest Israelites were Canaanites who settled in the hill country of the West Bank.

We know this from archaeology. The story of the birth of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah is not one of conquest. Joshua did not fight the battle of Jericho. There was no conquest of Canaan. There was no exodus from Egypt. Those stories are myths.

Instead, some Canaanites left the city-states of Canaan around 1200 BCE, and went into the hill country to start something new, something more egalitarian. Naturally, they took their Gods (El, Baal, Asherah) with them, as well as their material culture.

These ancient settlements began in the late Bronze age (1300s BCE) and continued into Iron age I (1200-1000 bce). Estimates of the growth of these settlements is as follows: 12,000 people in the 13^th century BCE, to 55,000 by the 12^th century BCE, and 75,000 by the 11^th c. BCE.

At some point (when and how, we do not fully know), a new God was conceived, Yahweh. But the old Gods, the Gods these Canaanites had know for centuries, remained. They remained a part of Israelite worship for at least 600 years.

In the late 600s and 500s BCE, the Canaanite Gods began to disappear from Israelite religion. By the 400s BCE, only Yahweh remains, at least officially. This is known as pantheon reduction, as cited in the quote above. Aspects of El, Baal, and even Asherah, are attributed to Yahweh, and Yahweh is declared to be the only God that exists. Think of Deuteronomy 6 (Yahweh is your God, Yahweh is one), which might stem from Josiah’s reform in 620 BCE.

Once we get to Jesus in the first century CE, these developments are complete and largely forgotten. Jesus believed that the stories of exodus and conquest and idolatry were real. He, like every other Jewish person in the first century, had no way of knowing that the God of Israel was created and shaped by Canaanite religion. When the gospel writers narrate Jesus calming a storm as he does in Mark 4 (and Matthew 8 and Luke 8), they are alluding to Yahweh’s reputation as a God who controls storms. Jesus is like Yahweh.

But of course, Old Testament scholars know that Yahweh adopted these powers from Baal. Baal wasn’t rejected, not entirely. Rather, his powers became Yahweh’s powers. So when Jesus calms the storm, he is reminding us that Israelite religion is Canaanite religion repackaged. Jesus is Yahweh, and Yahweh is Baal and El and Asherah, all wrapped into one deity.

But now it’s 2026 CE. What are we to do with all of this? We know that Baal is not real. El is not real. Asherah is not real. And yes, we know that Yahweh is not real.

And this is good news, because these Gods are unworthy of our consideration. Yahweh is a cruel, capricious, and abusive God, a mass murderer many times over according to the Old Testament. I see no reason for caveats. And I will not spend another second trying to make Yahweh seem good or kind or loving. As the modern state of Israel is currently showing us, Yahweh has no problem with genocide, as long as those carrying it out are his people.

We can do so much better than the Gods we have created. Once you realize this, and every single day a new person realizes this, there is no going back to these religions. They’re too small, too petty, too cruel.

Images from the Hubble telescope and the James Webb telescope show us that there are somewhere between 6 and 20 trillion galaxies in the universe. It’s incomprehensible, incredible, wondrous.

Can we take this in, the enormity of it, and allow it to shape our vision of what the source of all of it might be? If we start from reality, admitting that universe is vast and largely unknown to us, that it is approximately 13.8 billion years old, what kind of God does that imply?

We can wonder about a God that allowed life to emerge on earth over billions of years. Imagine the patience, the ability to hold it all without making it what you want it to be, the strength inherent in letting life unfold at its own pace, in its own way.

Side note: Maybe the story of Adam and Eve has something of use to teach us. I’m skeptical, honestly. But if we’re going to live in reality, then we have to admit that it’s a myth, just like all of Genesis 1-11, and probably the rest of Genesis (and Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy and Joshua and Judges and Ruth and more) as well.

If our view of ultimate reality, of the source of everything, has nothing to say about a vast and ancient universe, about a timeline that includes the expansion of the universe, gravity, black holes, dinosaurs, evolution, Homo Erectus, Neanderthals, ice ages, it’s not worthy of consideration.

In the face of this, the biggest religion in the world, Christianity, tells me that the source of all this (at least 6 trillion galaxies) cares what I believe about a first century Jewish man’s life and death. Or worse, the source of 6 trillion galaxies needed this particular Jewish man to die a torturous death in order to accept me, love me. Or worse, the source of 6 trillion galaxies has always hated me, and you, and all of us, and we actually deserve to be hated. Or worse, the source of 6 trillion galaxies has a special place of torture waiting just for me, for you, for anyone who doesn’t believe specific things about a first century Jewish man.

To imagine that the God of 6 trillion galaxies has the patience and compassion of the worst person that you know is absurd, insulting really.

Again, this is good news. A more beautiful vision of ultimate reality, of God, awaits.