Last month’s post looked at whether dozens of Bronze Age sites with stone buildings found in Israel’s Negev Desert were evidence that Semitic nomads were beginning to settle down, or were just used by the tribes for bronzemaking and eventually were abandoned with the advent of the Iron Age. It was a debate, so to speak, about whether the sites were zoned residential or industrial; the article I examined came down on the side of the latter.
That research led me to a slightly older hypothesis, published in 2021, that claims Jehovah (written YHVH in the Hebrew Bible) was originally a god of metallurgy – think Hephaestus/Vulcan in Greco-Roman mythology, or Ptah from ancient Egypt, or Mesopotamia’s Enki/Ea. Up until recently, the prevailing theory was that YHVH was a “desert god” originating in what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia.
A 40-page piece by Nissim Amzallag from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheba, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Entangled Religions published by the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, liberally uses quotes from the Hebrew Bible as well as copious references to writings of prophets such as Jeremiah, Isaiah and Zechariah. Amzallag tries to establish not only a metaphorical connection, but essentially a religious equivalency between the glowing flow of molten metal from a forge and the cascade of lava from a volcano. “In the Bible, volcanism is not only the marker of divine presence at Sinai,” he writes, but it is also a significant way that God intervenes in history. “Volcanism was regarded [as] both a theophany and a mode of divine action, through the release of hot gases, ash, pyroclasts, and flowing lava from the crater.”
As someone writing a novel about the Exodus without resorting to miracles, I subscribe wholly to Amzallag’s theory about the importance of volcanoes in the Jewish origin story: The third part of my trilogy, Sina’i, takes place on the plain of a volcano in the Land of Midian. And I have also learned a lot in the past couple of years about how crucial the copper trade was in the biblical-era Levant. I’ve incorporated that information into my story in a variety of ways — for instance, the husband of one of my two protagonists, twins who were thirteen when the plagues and the Red Sea crossing occurred, is the owner of a caravan that transports copper from Cush in Africa to Tyre in Lebanon.
But I am more skeptical about Amzallag’s belief that YHVH was a god of metallurgy in the same vein as Ptah or Enki/Ea, to limit myself to more or less contemporaneous and geographically contiguous examples. Reading Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, as opposed to the writings of the prophets which certainly came into existence many centuries later, I don’t get a sense at all that God had a special affinity for mining and refining minerals. Amzallag claims that the dearth of references to a metallurgy god in the Hebrew Bible is a clue in and of itself: “We would expect metallurgy to be of great importance in the Southern Levant in light of the copper mining activity attested in the [area around today’s city of Eilat] . . . This absence is especially unexpected because the Southern Levant is one of the few places from which metallurgy originated. It is even the site of emergence of the technique of copper production in a furnace, the homeland from where it spread across the ancient Near East,” he writes. He says that YHVH’s true nature as a god of wealth hidden in the earth was in turn hidden by the god’s emissaries.
Yeah, well, maybe. Amzallag also points out that the Hebrew Bible was codified well into the second phase of the Iron Age, a couple hundred years after copper — 9/10ths of the alloy bronze, the namesake of the Bronze Age — was no longer actively being mined and traded in the area. This would bury the idea of Jehovah as a smith deeply indeed if one only looks at the texts referring to it. Still, it just doesn’t pass the smell test for me. There’s a difference between how one earns a living and belief in the giver of life.
Speaking of how YHVH was worshiped in ancient times, I came across another article this month that deals with a much later period, but still very interesting. Most people, if they recognize the biblical names of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel at all, associate them with evil. This is because they supposedly built temples to the Canaanite god Baal instead of worshiping YHVH like they were supposed to. Archaeologists have found multiple temples on various sites that date to a time when all religious worship was supposed to be centered in Jerusalem — including in Ahab’s capital city Bethel. This would seemingly bolster the biblical account, but not all would agree that the story is that simple.
Writing in the 2025 edition of the Annual of the Japanese Biblical Institute, Filip Čapek of Charles University in Prague believes that Ahab and Jezebel’s bad rep has more to do with competition between the Kingdom of Israel — the northern, wealthier and more cosmopolitan polity — and the Kingdom of Judah to the south, where Jerusalem is located. He says that it is entirely possible that the rulers of the northern kingdom built their temples to YHVH, and were maligned much later by priests working for King Josiah of Judah (who reigned from about 640–609 BCE, and who is acknowledged as one of the most influential reformers of Jewish practice in history). “Since the whole narration [about Josiah’s reforms] in 2 Kings 23 is a later addition as a part of a rather legendarist story,” Čapek writes, its descriptions of tearing down “high places” and “demolishing” a shrine with a golden calf in Bethel that had been set up by the king of Israel are not trustworthy.
As the saying goes, history is written by the victors. The northern Kingdom of Israel had the misfortune of being a tempting target for the Assyrians, who conquered it and dispersed the upper classes throughout their empire. This population became known as the “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The southern Kingdom of Judah had the good fortune to be taken captive somewhat later by the Babylonians, who put them all together in one place, allowing them to form an émigré community. The Jews’ luck turned spectacular when Babylon was conquered by the Persian emperor Cyrus, famed for his religious tolerance, who let the educated classes of Jerusalem return to their holy land with much of what is now the Hebrew Bible in its present form, after only sixty years in exile.
Without Cyrus’s incomparably generous act, it is unlikely that either Christianity or Islam would exist as we know them today. Judaism would also surely be very much altered, if not gone for good. So Judah survived to glorify their homeland and Josiah’s monotheistic ideas about God, unlike the northern kingdom that had set golden calves in their temples. And it has been left to archaeologists to argue and theorize about what really happened more than two millennia ago.
