0:03 In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The opening line of the Bible, the opening claim of one of the most influential texts in history. God was there at the beginning before everything, the creator of everything. But how can he be the creator if he wasn't even there first? If you too are the creator of everything, check out Pantheon, a brand inspired by myths, legends, and folklore. We ship worldwide and narrated excellent on Trust Pilot. Link in the description. [music]
0:53 You probably grew up with a version of God. Maybe you believed in him, maybe you didn't, but you know who he is. The creator of the universe, all powerful, all knowing, eternal, the father of Jesus, the God of the Bible, the Torah, the being that shaped the entire moral framework for Western civilization, one God. In 325 AD, Emperor Constantine gathered Christian bishops from across the empire in the city of Na in what is now Turkey. Their job was to define once and for all exactly what God was. The result was the Nyine Creed, a statement of belief still recited in churches across the world today. One God, maker of everything, singular, eternal, first.
1:39 That definition has shaped how billions of people understand God for 1700 years. The earlier texts, however, tell a different story. In 1928, a farmer was plowing a field on the coast of Syria when a blade caught on something beneath the soil. He stops. He digs and finds a slab of stone. He doesn't know it yet, but he has just found one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the history of religion. Archaeologists arrived the following year. What they uncovered beneath that field was an entire city, Uggerit, a Canaanite port city that thrived for centuries on the coast of what is now Syria before being destroyed around 1200
2:24 BC and swallowed by the earth. Gone so completely that nobody knew it had ever existed. They found palaces, temples, streets, and in the ruins of a building that once served as a library, thousands of clay tablets, small enough to hold in one hand. Inscribed in an alphabetic script nobody had ever seen before. Written in a language nobody had ever spoken for 3,000 years. A team of scholars deciphered it within months. What the tablets contained was the Bible's backstory. L presiding over a divine assembly from his mountain dwelling at the source of the rivers. Bal the storm god young powerful locked in eternal combat with the forces of chaos and death. Asher,
3:11 El's consort, the mother of the gods, her name carved into the tablets dozens of times. Mort, the god of death. Yam, the god of the sea. An entire divine family, an entire mythology, fully formed, 3,000 years old and unmistakably familiar to anyone who had ever opened a Bible. Before 1929, scholars knew these gods only through the Hebrew Bible's description of them, and it was not kind. The prophets raged against Baal. The priests ordered the destruction of Asher's poles. The text treated the Canaanite gods as abominations to be stamped out, forgotten, erased. After 1929, those gods could speak for
3:56 themselves. They said that the world the Hebrew Bible emerged from wasn't a world with one God. but a world full of them. A rich, complex, fully developed religious world that the Bible didn't replace so much as absorb. The arguments the prophets were having the gods they were condemning. The practices they was trying to stamp out. They were all right there in the tablets waiting to be read. The first word used for God in the Hebrew Bible is Elohim. Elohim is the plural of L. If the God of the Bible is described using the plural of a Canaanite deity's name, then the question the Bible opens with becomes
4:43 considerably more complicated. In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth. Which Elohim? And was he really first? The Hebrew Bible uses El's name constantly. El Shadai, God Almighty, the name by which God appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob according to Exodus 6. Lljon, God most high. Elam, God everlasting. These are titles that belong to the Canaanite God. First, absorbed, transferred. Then there are the names that carry L without most people ever noticing. Israel the name of the nation itself
5:29 means one who struggles with L. Mel means who is like L. Ishmael means Les Bethl means house of L. The name is embedded in the name of God's chosen people, in the names of billions of people have given to their children for 3,000 years. In the name of the archangel who stands closest to God in Christianity. This is what absorption looks like. The old god name gets transferred to the new one. His titles become the new god's titles. His attributes become the new god's attributes. L came first and his name never left.
6:17 There's a specific name for a god that runs through the Old Testament over 6,000 times. Yahweh. At the burning bush, God introduces himself to Moses by this name. And he says something the text is never fully explained. He tells Moses that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never knew this name. that he presented to them differently, which means that Yahweh had it before. Moses encountered the burning bush while living in Midian, a desert region southeast of Canaan. He had been there for 40 years, tending the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro, a priest of Midian. The revelation came in foreign territory at the mountain of God, a mountain the Bible places so far outside
7:04 Israel's borders that scholars have spent centuries arguing about where it actually was. Then there's the inscription in the 14th century BC, centuries before Moses, before the Exodus, an Egyptian pharaoh named Amenoteep III had his scribes record a list of peoples and places in the southern desert, among them a group of nomads. The text calls them the Shau of Yahweh. Whether Yahweh was the name of a place, a people, or a god has been debated, but many scholars believe this is the earliest known reference to the deity that would later become the God of Israel. If they are right, the oldest known reference to the name billions of people associate with God wasn't written by a prophet or found in a sacred text.
7:49 It was written by a pharaoh about desert nomas in a list. The Bible preserves attention. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shadai. But by my name Yahweh, I did not make myself known to them. Two names, two traditions. a god who presented himself differently to different generations and left the scene visible in his own text. L came from Canaan. Yahweh came from the desert. Somewhere between the patriarchs and Moses, they became one God. The Bible preserved both stories and
8:34 never quite explained how. Bal is significant to this story because the Israelites kept going back to him. The prophets raged. The priests issued warnings. God punished them repeatedly. And they went back again and again and again. The Hebrew Bible mentions Baal over 90 times. Almost every mention is the same story. The Israelites have abandoned Yahweh for Baal or they're being commanded to stop or they're being punished for not stopping. The competition between these two gods runs through the Old Testament like a wound that keeps reopening. Bal was the storm god, the god of rain and thunder and fertility. In a farming society entirely dependent on rainfall, he was the god who decided whether you
9:20 your crops grew or failed, whether your children ate or starved. The ugaratic texts show him locked in eternal combat with mod, the god of death, dying each year as the dry season arrived and rising again when the rains returned. His worshippers felt that cycle in their fields every year. The prophet Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a direct contest. It hadn't rained in three years. Three years of drought in a land whose god was supposedly more powerful than the rain god. The challenge was designed to answer the question the people were already asking privately. Which of these gods actually controls the weather? 450 prophets of Baal on one side, Elijah
10:07 on the other. They built two altars, prepared two sacrifices. The prophets of Baal called on their gods to send fire. They prayed from morning until noon. They danced. They slashed themselves with swords until blood flowed. Nothing happened. At noon, Elijah began to mock them. "Cry aloud," he said. "Surely he is a god. Perhaps he is meditating or he has wandered away or he is on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened. Then Elijah called on Yahweh. Fire came down from heaven and consumed the sacrifice. The people fell on their faces. The 450 prophets of Baal were
10:54 taken down to the valley and slaughtered. Mount Carmel is presented in the Bible as the moment Yahweh won. But the fact that the contest had to happen at all tells us everything about what the competition actually looked like on the ground. If the Israelites had simply accepted Yahweh as the only God, Elijah would never have needed to stand on that mountain. A God who needs to prove himself isn't the only God. He's the winning God. Those are different things. And for much of Israel's history, the difference between them was genuinely unclear. The God of the Bible had a wife. It's an uncomfortable thought for many
11:40 people. It was uncomfortable for the editors of the Hebrew Bible, too, which is probably why they tried hard to remove her. Her name was Asher. In the Ugaratic texts, she was El's consort, the mother of the gods, ancient and powerful, a name carved into the tablets dozens of times. When the Israelites encountered the Canaanite world, they encountered her and many of them never let her go. The references in the Hebrew Bible are almost always hostile. Commands to cut down her sacred poles, destroy her images, remove her from high places. The same priests who raged against Bal raged against Asher. And the same people who kept returning to Baal kept returning to her. Her sacred poles stood beside Israelite
12:27 altars across the land. One stood next to Yahweh's altar at Bethl. Another stood in Samaria, the capital city. And then there is the location that stops scholars in their tracks. Solomon's temple in Jerusalem, the most sacred building in the entire Israelite world. King Manasseh placed Asher's carved image inside the temple. It stood there in the house of Yahweh until King Josiah finally removed it in the 7th century BC. And then there's the inscription found in a desert site called Countet Audi, a blessing jar from the 8th century BC. The text reads, "I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asher.
13:16 his usher, a possessive. The scholars who found it stopped and read it again. Similar texts were found at other sites across the region, all of them pairing Yahweh and Asher, as if they belong together. It's debated what his Asher means precisely. Some argue it refers to a cultic object rather than the goddess itself or herself. Others argue that it's evidence that ordinary Israelites understood Yahweh and Asher as a pair. What it confirms beyond debate is that the pairing of these two names was widespread, documented, and completely incompatible with the idea of a god who was always singular, always first. The god who was supposed to have no equal had a wife.
14:05 The text tried to remove her. They couldn't quite finish the job. And the evidence of her presence is still there, carved into pottery, embedded into the walls of the temple, preserved in the very text that tried to erase her. For most of our history, there was no such thing as one god. Every civilization that ever existed built its world around gods. The Egyptians had over 2,000. The Mesopotamians had hundreds. The Greeks, the Romans, the Kelts, the Norse, the Hindus, each a vast ecosystem of divine beings. Each one covering some aspect of the world human beings needed to understand and survive. Gods of the harvest and gods of the sea, gods of war and gods of childbirth, gods of the sun and gods of the underworld, gods that died and rose again. Gods that competed
14:53 with each other, loved each other, betrayed each other, gods that needed to be fed and placated or bargained with. This wasn't primitive thinking. It was precise. A god of the harvest because the harvest was unpredictable and you needed somewhere to direct your fear and gratitude. A god of the sea because the sea was dangerous and you needed something to bargain with before you sailed. A god of childbirth because childbirth killed people and you needed to believe something was listening. The divine mapped directly onto human vulnerability. Many gods for many problems. Each one an acknowledgment that the world was complex and that no single power could explain or control all of it. And then one tradition made a different claim.
15:39 One God, singular, eternal, creator of everything, a divine being of infinite scope, governing every harvest, every storm, every birth, every death. Not many powers for many problems. One power behind all of it. That claim stood apart from everything around it. It raised a question that polytheism never had to answer. If many gods govern the world, suffering makes sense. The gods compete. They neglect their duties. They punish and reward according to their own interests. But if one all powerful god governs everything, why does everything go wrong? Why do harvests fail and seas swallow? sailors
16:24 and mothers die in childbirth. You could argue that the problem of evil only exists because of monotheism. It's a question that one god creates and many gods dissolve. The thousands of god that came before him aren't widely worshiped anymore. Their temples are ruins. Their priests are gone. Their texts survived only because they've been dug up from out of the ground. But they were real to the people who believed in them. As real as anything has ever been to anyone. And they were there first. In 312 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. That single
17:09 decision set in motion a transformation that would reshape the religious landscape of the world. Within a century, the faith of a small displaced people built around the claim that their god was the only god became the official religion of the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Rome's roads carried it everywhere. Rome's armies enforced it, Rome's administrators organized it, and everywhere it went, the gods that had been worshiped for thousands of years before it faced the same fate. Reclassification. Their sites were repurposed. Temples were torn down or converted into churches. Their new festivals absorbed into the new calendar. Their attributes transferred to the new god or to his saints. The gods who couldn't be absorbed were
17:56 demonized. Their name survived, but their nature was inverted. What had been divine became demonic. What had been worshiped became something to be feared. Bal became Bazib, Lord of the Flies, one of the names for the devil himself. The divine council became angels stripped of their divinity, reduced to servants and messengers. The same beings, different titles, subordinate to the one god they had once sat alongside as equals. And the thousands of others, the gods of Egypt Mesopotamia Greece Rome every civilization that had ever built a temple or offered a sacrifice became idols, demons. Error. The natural human
18:42 impulse to reach for the divine expressed across every culture that ever existed was reframed as a sin. The world didn't lose its gods. It just changed what it was allowed to call them. The god most people know today is presented as the first, the creator. But look at what we found. A name borrowed from a Canaanite father god who presided over a divine family. A history that begins in a desert among nomads, recorded by an Egyptian pharaoh. A wife whose image stood inside his own temple until a reforming king tore it down. A world so full of gods that the claim there was only one required centuries of
19:29 absorption, demonization, and erasia to make it stick. The God most people know today is presented as the first, the creator. He is not the first. He's the last
