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El is the hebrew word for god. (See also Elohim.)
El was a sky god in Canaanite mythology, whose rain
fertilized the earth, making agriculture possible. In a country dependent on rain, his role (and cult) were crucial, and he
rapidly emerged as the chief deity in the Canaanite pantheon. El was the father of Baal in
Ugaritic texts of the second millennium BCE. He was apparently adopted by the Israelite
scribes, who lived in the southern hill district of the region and conflated with Yahweh. In much of the Torah, especially in the later writings, the name
"El" (or in its plural, Elohim) is interchangeable with Yahweh. Scholars identify the former with the divine attribute
of justice and the latter with the attribute of punishment.
In the Ugaritic texts, Elohim is the name for the divine sons of El. In Ugaritic texts, the sons (and
daughters) of El work together as one in a collective divine assembly. In the book of Genesis the plural noun Elohim is
found coupled with a singular verb, so biblical scholars have euphemized the plural as an abstraction meaning "divine majesty,"
although there is little precedent context for such an interpretation.
In the Genesis creation account (Genesis 1-2) , the word Elohim is used in reference to creation. Of course, biblical scholars resist making any equivalences between
Canaanite myths and the Jewish Torah, but if they did, a literal rendition of the first verse in Genesis might be: In the
beginning, when the Els made the heavens and the earth...
Combining the new knowledge from Ugarit with the Dead Sea
scrolls yields a new rendering of Deuteronomy 32:8-9: When El Most High gave to the races their patrimony, when he
divided the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the nations according to the number of the Sons of El. Yahweh's portion is his
people, Jacob his allotted patrimony. Thus, each of the world's seventy races is given its own patron god, or "Son of El," a
title in Ugarit common for the high spiritual gods assembled on Mount Tsephon. This differs from the later Masoretic texts, upon
which the Authorized Version was based, which emend the end of verse 8 to "sons of Israel." The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls
help establish the earlier role of Ugaritic El as the god who oversaw the creation of mankind. It also sheds new light on how
Yahweh calls out his people: he had to choose his people from among the races already allotted to the seventy divine Sons of
El.
The discovery at Ugarit also revealed the names of other gods, which are identified with the divine names in the Torah and the
Psalms. This suggests an original monistic
polytheism in the earliest biblical texts that was only lately superseded by monadic
monotheism.
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