Essays on Divine Names
The divine names in the Torah are not interchangeable epithets. El, Elohim, YHWH, YHWH Tzvaot, El Shaddai - each carries a distinct prehistory, and in the work of scholars like Frank Moore Cross and Mark S. Smith, those histories lead back into a Bronze Age Canaanite world where Yahweh was one deity among a structured pantheon, absorbing the storm-rider qualities of Baal and the father-creator qualities of El before the great differentiation of the exilic period.
The essays here sit at the edge of that tension: what critical scholarship has recovered about Israel’s religious world, and what remains alive in devotional reading of the same texts. They are offered not to dissolve the theology but to deepen it - because, as Cross observed, even the Tabernacle’s architecture echoes the tent of El.