(Mara's Game)

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For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many but for you; we are a sufficient audience for each other

This is a clearing house for pictorial findings, musical rambling, and (very) occasional original content (e.g. mysterious sonnets)

For all inquiries, ask here or at alexander.raban at gmail

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01/08/2012 16:24:35

This misconceives what “El” really meant in ancient mesopotamian religion; it was a word for god not a specific god, and it was applied to numerous entities by numerous persons (as noted below), but that’s because it was not (by itself) a name, but a word. For an analogy, when a Christian says God they mean one entity, when a Pagan says god, he means another (or others, for example when Romans said God (singular) without explanation or context they often meant Jupiter or Mars). El was similar in that every tribe had it’s El, or a version of a neighboring El.

One illustration of the proliferation of El’s is that most biblical or quasi-biblical angelic names end in El. There is a strong suggestion that many of the angels represented a domestication (or cooption) of neighboring El’s into the Hebrew theology that (at some point) admitted only of a single El (that being El Shaddai).

However, on an interesting sidenote, the Old Testament God is called by an odd dozen different names in the Old Testament (Yahweh and El Shaddai being but two): the assumption that all of those names refer to a single God (or referred to a single god at the time of composition) requires quite a bit of faith considering the extremely heterogenous nature of the authorship of the book. So the Old Testament can be read as a sort of travelogue of the winnowing down of the Hebrew pantheon to a single god, with neighboring gods being sometimes rejected outright (as was the case with Baal or Ba’el), quietly subordinated to Yahweh (as with Gabri’el or Rapha’el), or subsumed into Yahweh’s identity (as with the “name of god” Elohim Tzaboath, who may have once been a separate god (or gods, as Elohim is grammatically plural))

bythegods:

El, or El Shaddai

The supreme deity of the ancient Canaanites, El was big man on the Levant-campus back in the day. El was the father of Ba’al, who would eventually become more popular than his dad throughout the Middle-East, and husband of Asherah (a semitic mother goddess).

In many depictions, El wore the same bull horns as did Ba’al, though we often see him portrayed in the fancy hats of an ancient Mesopotamian king. The power of fancy hats was one worth flaunting, after all. Though his main priority was sitting in a throne, enjoying being the boss, he was accredited with being a patron deity of fertility, thunder, mountains, deserts, oceans, and war. A real Renaissance-god.

Now, even though Ba’al was the god of storm and sky (a position usually held by a chief deity) his papa was #1, at least in the inception of the Pantheon. El’s full title was El Shaddai, which loosely translates (we’re pretty sure, anyway) to God of the Mountain. The Mesopotamian Holy Mountain was a big deal, and a fitting place for a king of the Gods to dwell, one might think. El was too popular for his own good, though. Or, for our good, at least; he’s brought up in so many places in so many different forms, it’s difficult to pin down what exactly he was to whom.

The most popular reference to El would be in the Hebrew Torah, where El Shaddai is the God of Abraham, and is synonymous with Yahweh. Does this mean that Abraham was originally a practitioner of the Canaanite faith? Quite possible! But either way, it seems the Hebrews adopted the title of the supreme deity in Canaan and used it as a feather in Yahweh’s cap. Ol’ El has also drawn comparisons to the Babylonian Ea (Enki) and Poseidon, if you can believe it.

Whoever you are, El, you’re almost definitely a badass.