If you ask a believer today where God came from, they’ll probably tell you he’s eternal. Always was, always will be. That’s the theological answer. But if you ask a historian or an archaeologist how did God become God, you get a much messier, much more fascinating story involving ancient desert storms, bronze-age metallurgy, and a slow-motion religious revolution that took over a thousand years to finish.
It didn't happen overnight.
The figure we now know as the capital-G "God"—the solitary creator of the universe—started as something much smaller. Long before the Bible was a book, the deity known as Yahweh was likely a minor regional god. He wasn't the "only" god back then. Far from it. He had a family, a specific geography, and even a wife, depending on which archaeological site you’re digging in.
The Storm God of the Southern Deserts
Most scholars, like Mark S. Smith or Francesca Stavrakopoulou, point toward the "Midianite Hypothesis" when trying to figure out where this deity first appeared. Long before he was associated with Jerusalem, Yahweh seems to have been a god of the southern wilderness—places like Edom, Midian, and the Sinai Peninsula.
Ancient Egyptian topographical lists from the 14th century BCE actually mention the "Shasu of Yhw." The Shasu were nomads. They moved through the rugged terrain of the Levant. To them, this deity wasn't a distant, abstract cosmic mind. He was a warrior. He was a storm god. He was the one who brought the rain that kept their livestock alive and the thunder that heralded his presence in battle.
It’s a wild thought.
The God of modern monotheism essentially grew out of a rugged, localized power. He was one of many. In the early days, the people who would become the Israelites were polytheistic. They worshipped a pantheon led by a high god named El. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s baked into the language: Isra-el, Beth-el, Dani-el. El was the patriarch, the kind, elderly father-figure of the gods. Yahweh was likely one of his sons, a subordinate deity assigned to a specific tribe or patch of land.
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How Did God Become God by Absorbing Everyone Else?
This is where the history gets really interesting. Over several centuries, the character of Yahweh began to change. He started "eating" the attributes of other gods.
Think of it like a corporate merger, but for the divine.
First, he merged with El. The "Father" god and the "Warrior" god became one entity. This allowed Yahweh to inherit El’s status as the creator and the head of the divine council. Then, he took on the traits of Baal, the Canaanite storm god. In the Psalms, you can still see the "DNA" of Baal worship. When the Bible describes God riding on the clouds or making the mountains tremble with his voice, it’s using imagery that was originally written for Baal.
But there was a problem: what about the Goddess?
In 1975, archaeologists at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai desert found pottery fragments with inscriptions that shocked the religious world. The text mentioned "Yahweh and his Asherah." Asherah was a major Canaanite goddess. For a long time, it seems, the answer to how did God become God involved him having a female consort. Monotheism wasn't a sudden discovery; it was a violent, political pruning.
The biblical "prophets" spent centuries screaming at people to stop putting Asherah poles in the temple. They weren't fighting against "outsiders" as much as they were fighting against their own people's long-standing traditions. They wanted a single, masculine, exclusive power.
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The Babylonian Crisis and the Birth of "Only"
If the Jews had stayed a powerful, independent kingdom, they might have remained henotheistic—the belief that many gods exist, but you only worship one.
Then came 586 BCE.
The Babylonians swept in, burned Jerusalem to the ground, and dragged the elites into exile. This was a theological "do or die" moment. Usually, in the Ancient Near East, if your city was conquered, it meant your god was a loser. Your god had been beaten by the enemy's god (in this case, Marduk).
But the priests and scribes in Babylon did something brilliant and unprecedented. They didn't admit defeat. Instead, they reimagined the very nature of divinity. They argued that Yahweh wasn't defeated by Babylon; he used Babylon to punish Israel.
This shifted God from being a "National God" to a "Universal God."
If God can control the Babylonians—even if they don't worship him—then he must be the god of everyone. He must be the only one who actually exists. The other gods weren't just rivals anymore; they were reimagined as useless pieces of wood and stone. This is when the "I am the Lord, and there is no other" rhetoric really takes hold.
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From Warrior to Abstract Spirit
As the centuries rolled on, God became more and more distant. In the earliest parts of the Bible, God walks in gardens, eats meat with Abraham, and gets angry like a human. He has a body.
By the time we get to the Hellenistic period (after Alexander the Great), Greek philosophy starts to rub off on Jewish thought. God becomes the "Unmoved Mover." He becomes an abstract, perfect, unchanging spirit. This is the version of God that eventually paved the way for Christianity and Islam.
Honestly, the transition is staggering. We went from a local storm-spirit in a tent to a cosmic consciousness that transcends time and space.
Moving Toward a Deeper Understanding
Understanding the historical evolution of the divine doesn't necessarily have to break your faith, but it does change the lens. If you’re looking to dive deeper into this, there are a few things you should actually look at:
- Read the Ugaritic Texts: These are ancient Canaanite writings discovered in the 1920s. They show the "blueprints" for many biblical stories and help you see the world Yahweh emerged from.
- Study the Persian Influence: Look into Zoroastrianism. It’s likely where the concepts of a cosmic battle between good and evil, and the idea of "the Devil," filtered into the story of God.
- Look at the Hebrew grammar: In the Book of Genesis, the word for God is often Elohim. This is a plural noun. Sometimes it’s used with singular verbs, and sometimes it’s not. It’s a linguistic fossil of a time when the "gods" were a "they" before they were a "he."
The process of how did God become God is ultimately a story of human survival and adaptation. It shows how people redefined their concept of the ultimate power to make sense of a world that was often cruel, chaotic, and unpredictable. Whether you see this as a human invention or a gradual revelation of a higher truth, the history is written in the soil and the old stones of the Levant.
If you want to grasp the full picture, stop looking at God as a static character and start seeing him as a shifting reflection of the people who worshipped him. You’ll find that the "One God" has a very crowded, very diverse family tree.
To truly understand this evolution, start by reading "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong or "God: An Anatomy" by Francesca Stavrakopoulou. These aren't just dry textbooks; they are the maps to a world where the divine was as wild and untamed as the desert wind.