They don’t teach you this in Sunday School. Is there one God in the Bible? Is it even one unified theology? Most scholars would say no. There seems to be at least 4 distinct ‘God’s’ of the Bible. #biblestories #deconstructingchristanity #exchristian #mythology

The Bible doesn't have one God. It has at least four. This is something that scholars call the documentary hypothesis. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. The first version of God in the Bible is Elohim. Now this word in Hebrew is actually plural, literally meaning gods. An Elohim is the God of Genesis 1, the cosmic, transcendent deity who creates the universe in six days by speaking. This didn't an abstract. Doesn't have human emotions, doesn't walk around. Scholars call the author who wrote the Elohim stories, the e-sourced. Written around 850, BCE, probably in the northern kingdom of Israel. The second God of the Bible, Yahweh. Then you flip to Genesis 2 and suddenly there's a completely different creation story with a completely different God. This one is called Yahweh, which is the personal name of God, the one that's translated as Lord and all caps in your Bible. And Yahweh is weird by comparison. You see him walking in the cool of the day, in the garden of Eden. He doesn't know where Adam is hiding. He later regrets creating humans in Genesis 6. He gets angry, he gets jealous. Now scholars call this the j-sourced, written around 950 BCE in the southern kingdom of Judah. An author, different theology, but in the same Bible. Then there's a third cluster. El Shade, El Elyon, El Roy. These appear mostly in the patriarchal narratives. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here's something interesting about that. Scholars and archaeologists now believe that El was a completely different deity. The chief God of the Canaanite pantheon, Israel's neighbors. When Abraham's people were still semi-nomadic, they may have worshipped El before Yahweh traditions took over. Deuteronomy 32, 8-9, were in the oldest manuscripts. El Elyon divides his nations amongst his sons. And Yahweh gets Israel as his portion. That implies that they were two separate gods at some point. Now most Bibles have cleaned that up. And then there's the fourth version. Priestly God, or the pea source. Written during or after the Babylonian exile, around 550 to 450 BCE. This is the God of ritual, purity laws, sacrificial systems, the God of Leviticus. He's concerned with order, holiness, and correct worship, because the priests writing this were trying to preserve Jewish identity and exile. This God is majestic, untouchable, and very concerned with whether or not you're eating shellfish. So what happened? Scholars believe that these four-source traditions, J-E-D-N-P, were woven together by editors, probably around 400 BCE, into the Torah that we now have today. The seams are still visible if you know how to look. That's why you get two creation stories, two flood timelines that contradict each other, and a God who seems to shift his personality, despite supposedly being immutable. The Bible is a library, with multiple communities, multiple traditions, in one compiled text. Despite popular belief, it is not a single book with a single author, not even a single unified theology. It's a conversation between communities across centuries about who God is.