The Yahweh-religion thus began to separate itself from its Canaanite heritage; this process continued over the period from 800 to 500 BCE with legal and prophetic condemnations of the asherim, sun worship and worship on the high places, along with practices pertaining to the dead and other aspects of the old religion. The High Priest of Israel was permitted to speak the name once in the Temple during the Day of Atonement, but at no other time and in no other place. Towards the end of the Second Temple period, speaking the name of Yahweh in public became regarded as taboo. During the Hellenistic period, the scriptures were translated into Greek by the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora. In these texts, he is often mentioned alongside traditional Graeco-Roman deities and Egyptian deities. Horus is a complicated deity, appearing in many different forms and his mythology is one of the most extensive of all Egyptian deities.

And then there are avatars, humans believed to be incarnations of deities. Hartshorne then places this dynamic world of events in God, by taking a page from Ramanuja’s book and saying that all of it-this “totality of individuals as a physical or spatial whole is God’s body, the Soul of which is God” (Hartshorne 1984: 94, quoted in Meister 2017: section 5, italics added)-a move which cements his view as a panentheism, since the world is literally in God, but God, as Soul of the world, goes beyond the world. The centre of Yahweh’s worship lay in three great annual festivals coinciding with major events in rural life: Passover with the birthing of lambs, Shavuot with the cereal harvest, and Sukkot with the fruit harvest. Lord, we call your name great! In spite of the cycle that always sends it back to yin, it is fitting to call the Dao “life life” because it always waxes to life again; the life force is irrepressible, no matter how many times it temporarily dies. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. It’s like one huge village! “I’ve heard a lot about Facebook, but it seems a waste of time,” says Michael, 15, one of Daniel’s four sons, over fresh tomato soup.

The archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Ouriel and Jewish cultural heroes such as Abraham, Jacob, and Moses are also invoked frequently. In the 9th century BCE, there are indications of rejection of Baal worship associated with the prophets Elijah and Elisha. The earliest known portrayals of Yahweh as the principal deity to whom “one owed the powers of blessing the land” appear in the teachings of the prophet Elijah in the 9th century BCE. Finally, in the national crisis of the Babylonian exile, the followers of Yahweh went a step further and outright denied that the other deities aside from Yahweh even existed, thus marking the transition from monolatrism to true monotheism. Although the specific process by which the Israelites adopted monotheism is unknown, the transition was a gradual one and was not totally accomplished during the First Temple period. Chemosh was the god of the Moabites, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qōs the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh the god of the Israelites. Other scholars hold that Yahweh and Qōs were different deities from their origins, and suggest that the tensions between Judeans and Edomites during the Second Temple period may lie behind the omission of Qōs in the Bible.

Some scholars have explained this notable omission by assuming that the level of similarity between Yahweh and Qōs would have made rejection of the latter difficult. Unlike the chief god of the Ammonites (Milcom) and the Moabites (Chemosh), the Tanakh refrains from explicitly naming the Edomite Qōs. In each kingdom the king was also the head of the national religion and thus the viceroy on Earth of the national god. The festivals thus celebrated Yahweh’s salvation of Israel and Israel’s status as his holy people, although the earlier agricultural meaning was not entirely lost. Holy Ghost dwelling in humans since the teaching was inconsistent with the manuscript source’s wording about the Holy Ghost and underwent various revisions and modifications before finalization. A coin issued by Pompey to celebrate his successful conquest of Judaea showed a kneeling, bearded figure grasping a branch (a common Roman symbol of submission) subtitled BACCHIVS IVDAEVS, which may be translated as either “The Jewish Bacchus” or “Bacchus the Judaean”.