Yahweh
The Hebrews' 'discovery' of the god who became their maker (2nd of 7 essays on Judaism)
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
Next week: And God created Man…
THE ‘DISCOVERY’ of one god by the ancient Hebrews reformed the consciousness of humankind and was ‘perhaps the greatest turning-point in history’, in the view of the historian Paul Johnson.
‘How great,’ he wrote, ‘can be seen by considering the Egyptian worldview which the Israelites rejected.’
The belief in a single creator and arbiter of divine justice changed the way people thought, lived, willed and dreamed.
The Hebrews called their god Yahweh, the pronounced form of ‘YHWH’, the Hebrew letters for ‘god’ that were revealed to Moses in the book of Exodus.
Yahweh was more than the God, the ancient Jews believed. He was an interventionist, personal god, a divine presence in t…