Early Israelite tradition identified Yahweh with the Canaanite high god El
Early Israelite religion identified Yahweh with El, the head of the Canaanite divine council, absorbing El's divine titles (El Shaddai, El Elyon, El Olam), his cosmic role as creator and judge, and his cultic apparatus (the tent-shrine, the cherubim throne). This identification is not incidental word-choice but reflects the process by which a Northwest Semitic polity incorporated the dominant Canaanite theological framework into its emerging national religion.
This claim has the transmission verdict: descent (Yahwistic tradition descended from or was grafted onto the Canaanite El-tradition) with a convergence component (some El-attributes may have been separately convergent rather than transmitted). Per-motif the verdict is unresolved for the storm-theophany strand.
Shared divine titles: The titles El Shaddai (God of the Mountain/Almighty), El Elyon (God Most High), and El Olam (God Everlasting) appear in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis attached to the deity later identified as Yahweh (Gen. 14:18–22; 17:1; 21:33). In the Ugaritic texts, these are epithets of El, not Baal. The Hebrew Bible itself contains a passage (Exod. 6:2–3) in which the deity tells Moses: "I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them" — which etic scholarship reads as a preserved memory of a pre-Yahwistic El-cult among the patriarchs. See smith-origins-biblical-monotheism-2001, ch. 2; cross-canaanite-myth-hebrew-epic-1973, pp. 44–75.
Divine council structure: Psalm 82 depicts Yahweh presiding over an assembly of divine beings ('elohim) and condemning them — exactly the function of El as head of the divine council in the Ugaritic texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls and LXX version of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 reads "when the Most High divided the nations … he fixed the boundaries of peoples according to the number of the sons of El/God (MT: bene Yisrael — likely a secondary harmonization)," which most textual critics consider the more original reading, directly paralleling the Ugaritic motif of El distributing territories to his sons. See smith-origins-biblical-monotheism-2001, ch. 3.
Cultic apparatus: Cross documents the parallels between El's tent-shrine in the Ugaritic texts and the Israelite Tabernacle described in Exodus 25–27, including the cherubim-throne motif. The portable sacred tent, the divine footstool, and the cherubim guardians are documented Canaanite El-worship features. See cross-canaanite-myth-hebrew-epic-1973, p. 147.
Scholarly consensus range: The El-Yahweh identification is the majority position in critical Hebrew Bible scholarship (Cross, Smith, Day, Coogan, Albertz, van der Toorn). The mechanism is described variously as identification (Cross), convergence (Smith), or progressive merger (Day). All positions agree that the El-attributes are genuinely present in the Yahwistic tradition and are not late additions.
The steelman against this claim has three prongs:
1. Separate origins, later merger (Day 2000): John Day argues that El and Yahweh were originally distinct deities — El was the Canaanite high god and Yahweh was a southern storm deity (possibly Midianite/Kenite in origin). Their cults were merged when Israelite settlers who worshipped Yahweh encountered Canaanite El-worshippers in the highland settlements of Iron Age I. This means the "identification" is a post-settlement theological event, not an ancient inherited unity. Under Day's model, the shared epithets are the product of the merger, not evidence of original identity. This prong is now sourced rather than cited from memory: day-yahweh-gods-goddesses-canaan-2000 (wave 2), incl. his Deut. 32:8–9 reading of Yahweh as originally distinct from El within one pantheon.
2. Baal-Yahweh problem: Yahweh's most vivid theophanic appearances — the storm at Sinai (Exod. 19), Deborah's storm-battle (Judg. 5:4–5), the Baal-Yahweh confrontation on Carmel (1 Kgs. 18) — deploy storm-and-warrior attributes that belong in the Ugaritic corpus to Baal, not to the aged El. If Yahweh's "original" identity is with El, why does he so consistently act like Baal? Smith's resolution (Baal-attributes were selectively borrowed into Yahweh as Baal was suppressed) is coherent but adds an extra step.
3. Convergence as alternative: Many of the shared attributes (creator, judge, cosmic king) could be independently generated by any West Semitic supreme deity theology rather than requiring direct descent from the Ugaritic El specifically. The convergence verdict cannot be ruled out for individual attributes.
The claim is rated high confidence for the presence of El-identification in early Israelite tradition (the textual evidence is strong); rated medium for the mechanism (descent vs. contact-merger is genuinely disputed).
- Emic (Jewish, Christian, Islamic tradition): Yahweh/God is one, eternal, and unchanging; the use of El names in the patriarchal narratives reflects human ways of addressing God before the full disclosure of his personal name (Yahweh), not a different deity. The tradition recognizes no discontinuity between El Shaddai and Yahweh — they are the same God encountered at different moments by the same covenant family. Christian theology similarly understands the God of the patriarchs as the same God revealed in Jesus Christ. Islamic theology affirms Allah as the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus — the Arabic Allah itself derives from al-Ilah (the God), cognate with the Semitic El/Il.
- Etic (scholarly analysis): The textual and comparative evidence indicates that early Israelite religion was embedded in the Canaanite Northwest Semitic religious world. Yahweh absorbed El's theological profile through a process of identification or merger during the Iron Age formative period. This process can be traced through diachronic literary analysis of the Hebrew Bible (noting El-stratum texts vs. Yahweh-stratum texts), through comparative analysis of Ugaritic and Hebrew divine epithets and cultic features, and through inscriptional evidence (Kuntillet Ajrud) showing Yahweh's continued popular-religion context alongside Asherah. The etic reconstruction does not evaluate the truth of the emic account; it reconstructs a historical process from evidence.