Jagella wrote:
...Adonai was not known a YHWH prior to Moshe'. Avrahham, Yitzchak and Yocav new him as Eloheim. It was only at Moshe's insistence that He refer to Himself as YHWH, the eternal present.
You should cite your source for what you're claiming here. If it's derived from the Hebrew Bible, then we still have no evidence for Yahweh as originating among any people but the Jews or maybe some other people the Jews were in contact with.
My point is that when Moshe' asks Adonai, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?�(Ex. 3:13), why would Moshe' ask that, if YHWH was already part of the oral tradition? However, it is interesting that, in this weeks reading, we see Adonai using the term YHWH in the declarative, when He tells Yacov, “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying." This is the only case that I know of where Adonai refers to Himself as YHWH, prior to Ex. 3. There are several other times it is used in a way other than the declarative. However, if Moshe', or someone after him, compiled Genesis, the name could have been inserted as the perspective of the narrator.
The answer to this problem is that Israel was part of the Covenant with Adonai. The Prophets record many cases where the nations were judged over time. However, such judgments were not based on the Covenant with Israel. Many make much of Israel being the "chosen people". However they fail to note that that are chosen to live according to a higher standard.
How does any of this relate to the problem of Yahweh being a violent god who is said to have forced the Hebrews to worship him only? If he did not tolerate rejection from the Jews, then it makes little sense to say he tolerated rejection from anybody else. So the argument that other cultures knew about Yahweh only to reject and forget about him is illogical and inconsistent with what the Hebrew Bible says about Yahweh.
It relates in that did not know Him as YHWH. Their concepts of the creator deity may have been given other names. Also, Adonai did tolerate rejection. That tolerance may have been shorter for Israel. However, Israel had a covenant with Adonai and the nations did not.
I think any people rejecting a real Yahweh is very unlikely because they would have feared the consequences.
Unless they had convinced themselves of alternate realities, like rational humanism, scientific empiricism, atheistic mysticism, etc.
Now how could they convince themselves that they could have any other point of view when they had an angry and violent Yahweh in their faces ready to strike them dead for wanting to believe in something better?
You're presuming that they had Adonai in their faces. There are cases, in the Scriptures, where Adonai does reveal Himself to the nations. However, even in the case of Israel, judgment is not always swift.
They may very well know Adonai under some other name and have a different covenant.
Would you hazard any guesses for gods Yahweh was masquerading as? Zeus, perhaps?
It is not that Adonai is masquerading, but that no name is sufficient to properly identify Adonai. I personally do not know of another plausible covenant. However, I am not going to state that there definitely is no other.
Zeus may very well have been modeled, by the people who settled along the Adriatic, after an understanding of the same creator deity that revealed Himself to Moshe' as YHWH. Of course, that modeling would have been a pantheistic version, more similar to those of Babylon or Egypt. That said, Jordan Peterson makes a strong psychological argument for the idea of a singular creator deity being established by the comparing of tribal deities, rather than the tribal deities being derived from the singular creator deity. It may be a combination of both, repeated many times, as tribes become absorbed by empires, which in turn eventually fall back into tribalism.
