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By Root 1137 0

or great, he has no right to exercise any discretion of this kind. When he finds God called Adonai, he has no business to call him Jehovah or Elohim.... The fact that Abraham worshipped several gods, who were, in reality, the same as those of the Persians, namely, the creator, preserver, and the destroyer, has been long asserted, and the assertion has been very unpalatable both to Jews and many Christians; and to obviate or disguise what they could not account for, they have had recourse, in numerous instances, to the mistranslation of the original . . .a

The Biblical Writers

Although many people still believe that the Bible is a monolithic product of the Almighty Himself, infallibly recorded by the authors purported, the reality is that "Moses" did not write the Pentateuch, or first five books, and that the other OT texts are, like those of the NT, pseudepigraphical, i.e., not written by those in whose names they appear. Also like the NT, over the centuries the various texts of the OT were "redacted" many times, which is a polite way of saying they were interpolated, mutilated and forged. As Wheless says of the Old Testament:

It may be stated with assurance that not one of them bears the name of its true author; that every one of them is a composite work of many hands "interpolating" the most anachronistic and contradictory matters into the original writings, and often reciting as accomplished facts things which occurred many centuries after the time of the supposed writer ... 5

The Pentateuch, for example, had at least four authors or schools of writers. Even though they are of different authors, these separate segments, some of which were written centuries apart, were interwoven in a confusing yet clever manner. The oldest section of these books is called "E," for "Elohist," so-named because the writer mostly uses the word "Elohim" for "God," although it should be rendered "Gods." The next section is the "Yahwist/Jahwist" or "J" account wherein God is called "Yahweh," designated by the tetragrammaton YHWH. The major portion of the Pentateuch was created by "P," for Priestly, who refers to God mostly as Elohim and less often as Yahweh. The next discernible influence is "D," the Deuteronomist, who apparently cobbled together J and E, along with the laws of Deuteronomy, then wrote the "history" books that follow, including Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. The Deuteronomist is fanatically Yahwist and writes his "histories" of the kings from a biased perspective, judging their reigns based on whether or not they had "done right in the sight of Yahweh." Finally, someone or a school called by scholars the Redactor ("R"), possibly the author of "Ezra," pulled together the various works during or after the "Babylonian captivity" (586-538 BCE).

These various texts and their authors represent different schools of thoughts and influences, as well as competing priesthoods, explaining why the harried folk of the Levant were constantly falling out of favor with their God(s). The Elohist's stories are often silly and nonsensical, when taken literally, because they actually represent the mythologies of a variety of cultures from Canaan/Phoenicia to Egypt, Persia and India. The Yahwist, who portrays some of the same anthropomorphic myths as E, is, of course, very concerned with the Jealous God, Yahweh, as opposed to the various Elohim. P dispenses with the tall tales and portrays his Elohim, now a unified entity, as very cosmic and impersonal, rather than walking about in the Garden of Eden, for example. D and R are, of course, Yahwistic.

As stated, in order to represent the polytheistic Hebrews as monotheists the biblical writers mutilated texts and reinterpreted history, while the translators used the trick of rendering these many gods and goddesses as the singular "God," "Lord," or "LORD." For example, the word YHWH, transliterated as Jehovah, appears over 6,700 times in each of the Darby and Young's Literal (YLT) translations, while it is used only four times in the King James Version (KJV) and not once