it is clear that the ancient Hebrews/Israelites and Judeans believed in their God, Yahweh. This is not very surprising or interesting. It would be interesting if there were evidence that the God of the ancient Hebrews was an actual being acting in history. However, there is no reason to believe Yahweh existed anywhere other than in the minds of human beings. It is quite certain that Yahweh is no more real than the other gods of the ancient Near East, such as Marduk, Baal or Moloch, for example. Yahweh is not even the original God of Israel. The original God of Israel was El, not Yahweh, as is clear in the patriarchal narratives: the name Isra- el means “El rules,” not “Yahweh rules”— that would be Isra- yahu.

Studies in religious history have shown that YHWH is a manifestation of a weather god who came to Palestine from the south. Originally he belonged to the type of storm and war gods such as Baal, Anath, Hadad, Resheph and Chemosh. Many early Israelites understood Yahweh as another name for Baal. He was worshipped in Canaanite shrines. The names Baal and Yahweh and even Hadad were interchangeable. For example, the Ugaritic chief deity was Baal, a storm god. The language and style with which Baal is depicted are quite similar to the depiction of Yahweh in Psalm 29, for example. The earliest poetry about Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible depicts him as a storm god. This is the prevailing theory among scholars specializing in the religions of the ancient Near East.

"In fact, the images of Yahweh as the master of the storm, the “Cloud Rider” (Ps. 68:4; Isa. 19:1), and the transcendent creator God (Isa. 40:28) were probably borrowed from or influenced by Ugaritic or Canaanite literature and their depictions of the gods El and Baal. "⁵ Victor Matthews: Hebrew Prophets and Their Social World, 9.

It appears that El’s consort, Asherah, was inherited by Yahweh when El and Yahweh were merged. The existence of a Mrs. God, so unseemly to Jewish and Christian orthodoxy, has become widely, though not universally, accepted.

The biblical patriarchs worshipped various localized manifestations of the Canaanite God El but the biblical authors interpret these names as names of the Israelite God, Yahweh. In the belief system of the ancient Israelites, Yahweh evolved from a rather limited, whimsical, tribal war god—a subordinate in the Canaanite pantheon—to the unitary, supreme, moralizing deity during the course of several centuries. Originally, Yahweh was not a specialist in all areas of godhood. When the Israelites settled in Canaan, they turned to the Baal cult for such matters. The elaboration of the ideas of Yahweh as the guarantor of fertility and personal good fortune, as the head of a pantheon, as the creator of the world, and as the judge of the world unfolded gradually during or after the Babylonian exile.