The Conflicting Worldviews
Talmidaism uses “Yahwism” normatively to mean the system of ethics, values and beliefs given by YHVH, through holy men and women, prophets and sages, that together produce a monotheistic faith in a holy God, YHVH. Yahwism is the faith and ethical system that derives from YHVH as its Divine source. Yahwism is therefore taken to refer to the purest form and core foundational basis of ethical monotheism. Karaite Judaism shares a very similar view to this.
“Yahwism” is also used as a synonym for the faith of the Patriarchs, and of the Israelite religion as given by YHVH at Mt Horeb. This stance becomes vitally important when looking at post-Exilic beliefs that have entered the Israelite religion, but which were originally foreign to it. These beliefs (such as belief in hell, Satan, fallen angels, apocalypse, etc), are viewed as non-Yahwist beliefs which were heavily influenced by the worldview of religions such as Zoroastrianism.
Non-religious Academics have a completely different take on what the term “Yahwism” means: Yahwism is basically any form of religion practised by Israelites, even if those Israelites worshipped other gods, and even if they rejected YHVH’s ethical values, as long as one of the gods they worshipped was YHVH. To a secular academic, ‘Yahwism’ is whatever religious beliefs and practices the Israelites were engaged in historically, completely regardless of what their practices or beliefs were, and regardless of the gods they worshipped – as long as YHVH was one of them. To them, sacrificing children to Molekh was therefore all part of Yahwism by definition – because it’s something the Israelites did, while also worshipping YHVH at the same time. Archaeological and textual evidence indicates that many ancient Israelites practised forms of YHVH-worship alongside devotion to other deities.
To a Talmidi, what makes something ‘Yahwism’ is the sole allegiance to YHVH and YHVH’s ethics; to a secular academic, what makes it ‘Yahwism’ is that it is whatever the Israelites happened to believe in and practise; it’s nothing to do with theology.
Yahwism as a purely late human Invention
Academics also see the form of Yahwism which we call ‘pure Yahwism’ as an invention of human beings in late antiquity, the end-result of a long process of being shaped and moulded by Israelite fanatics and purists. The place this comes from is the assumption that there is no such thing as God who could possibly have directed the process, and no such thing as prophecy (prophets are simply people who speak from the devised imaginings of their own minds). There is no such thing as God at its origin, and no such thing as prophecy refining the religion.
Historical “Yahwism” and normative Yahwism are not necessarily identical. Historical research asks what people believed and practised, without looking at motives or intent; Talmidaism and Karaism ask what YHVH originally intended us to believe and practise. It is like looking at a crime-scene: one person merely describes what they see from the outside, the other interprets the motives behind why it happened, looking at the inside process. Or you could say it is the difference between describing and documenting a fossil, and describing a living, breathing animal.
Prophets experience YHVH as a living God, not as an invented belief. Someone who has experienced the full power of the living God will describe God in a completely different way to someone who only knows what God is merely from observing religious people.
How Secular Academics explain it
In secular biblical scholarship, history, and archaeology, “Yahwism” is used as a strictly descriptive, non-theological term; it is a purely cultural term to describe whatever the religious practices of the Israelites were. Academics use it to separate the historical evidence of the ancient Iron Age kingdoms (the time of Saul to the Babylonian Exile) from much later religious developments (Second Temple Judaism).
Academics do not view historical Yahwism as pristine monotheism. Biblical critiques and archaeological evidence (such as the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions, which practically equate YHVH with Baal, and make Asherah YHVH’s consort) show that ancient ‘Yahwism’ was frequently polytheistic. For many ordinary ancient Israelites, YHVH was worshipped alongside other Canaanite deities, notably Baal, El, or Asherah (often viewed as YHVH’s consort, but I would say that just because many Israelites believed it, doesn’t make it true; in early history most people believed that the Earth was flat, but that didn’t ever at any point in history make it true).
In academic circles, Yahwism is therefore the diverse, historical, Iron Age, polytheistic religion of Israel and Judah. Pure monotheism is merely a late invention that evolved from polytheism and monolatry (‘worshipping one god while acknowledging the existence and validity of other gods’) into monotheism (‘there is no other god but YHVH’).
A different view of the historical and archaeological record
That is not how we would interpret the archaeological record. We would never seek to deny the historical evidence – during the monarchic period, most Israelites were indeed polytheists, and prophets like Elijah and Hosea had a difficult and painful struggle to assert their Yahwist beliefs. We therefore interpret the historical record differently.
In the same way as various scientific truths and principles have always existed from the beginning of time, and the present theories – while not always known – were always true, so also pure monotheistic Yahwism has always existed as an eternal truth, but was not always known by human beings, and it took us a long time to get here.
So for example, just as the scientific reality of gravity or natural selection has always been true, even when humans believed otherwise, and sought to explain the reality differently with often silly ideas, so likewise, pure Yahwism has always existed; it just took us a long time to get here.
Analogy: The Long Journey of Scientific Truth
There are several well-known scientific theories that have a long history of murky origins, but which have been refined over the centuries by those who observed and pursued what is true, undeterred by what the majority believed. One such theory is what causes disease – from folklore-teachings that it was caused by evil spirits, curses, or bad air, to eventually be refined into acknowledging what disease is actually caused by. Disease was always caused by pathogens from the beginning of time, it just wasn’t always accepted that it was:
Germ Theory of Disease (From Miasma and Folk Folklore)
- The Folk Origin: For thousands of years, ordinary people used the Miasma theory (‘bad air’), evil spirits or spiritual curses to explain sickness. If a swamp smelled terrible and people nearby got sick, folk wisdom concluded that the foul odour itself was the killer. It was a purely visual and sensory-driven folk theory.
- The Refinement Process: Over centuries, scientists slowly stripped away the supernatural and sensory elements. Girolamo Fracastoro in the 1500s proposed ‘disease seeds’; Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered ‘animalcules’ using early microscopes; and John Snow mapped cholera to water pumps rather than air. Finally, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch proved microscopic pathogens were the true cause.
- The Yahwist Analogy: Just as some Israelites attributed historical events and misfortune to a deity who was one of many, who needed to be appeased like neighbouring gods, the biblical prophets refined this into a universal, morally consistent Creator. They moved the faith from surface-level ritual appeasement, to an internal ethical reality – much like moving away from blaming disease on a bad smell, to treating it as an unseen microscopic pathogen.
I could also mention scientific theories such as Plate Tectonics (away from Catastrophism and ‘Continental Drift’), or the Oxygen Theory of Combustion (Overturning the concept of Phlogiston), or Modern Evolutionary Theory (away from Lamarckism and Breeding Folk-Wisdom). All these scientific truths were not accepted in the beginning, but over the centuries, false ideas were cut away, until the truth of the scientific theory was left.
Just because some whacky theory was believed in the past, doesn’t mean that it was valid
Disease, Plate Tectonics, Combustion and Natural Selection have always been true – what people used to believe about them does not detract from what is currently known about them, and it does not make what used to be believed equally true. So just as no reasonable person would argue that ‘there is no true understanding of what Disease is; all theories of Disease ever held by human beings are equally valid, and our understanding of it now is merely the historical end-result of centuries of refinement, until we arrived at our current understanding of what disease is’, so too we do not argue that Yahwism – something true which has always been true – has had other ‘true forms’ throughout history, and whatever was practised in polytheist periods was just as true a form of Yahwism as what it is now. Not at all.
By analogy, the academic view of Yahwism is like saying, ‘The belief that disease is caused by evil spirits or bad air is just as true and valid as believing it is caused by microscopic pathogens; the belief that disease is caused by pathogens is only a recent invention by fanatical purist scientists, who are completely ignoring what disease was historically believed to be caused by’. The Talmidi view of Yahwism is instead like saying, ‘The idea that disease is caused by microscopic pathogens has always been true, whether people believed that or not; it is not merely a modern invention, it is an eternal truth’.
Pure water and muddy Water
Secular scholars argue that it was a natural part of Yahwism to worship other gods, but Talmidis and Karaites view it differently. We acknowledge that at certain periods, Israelites did indeed turn to other gods, and we wouldn’t ever try to deny it.
It is like water. Water is chemically H2O, and nothing else, and no scientist would ever try to argue that water should be defined as anything but H2O. Furthermore, water rarely exists in nature as pure H2O; it is usually adulterated or mixed with other things. However, just because these other things are naturally found in water, it doesn’t mean that that’s what makes it water. For Talmidis and Karaites, pure Yahwism is the sole worship of YHVH alone, and that comes with certain ethical values and principles (in the same way as healthy drinking water comes with certain minerals and gases dissolved in it). Just as the chemical formula H2O refers only to water, and not to whatever impurities it happens to be mixed with at the time, so too, Yahwism is Yahwist monotheism, not what Israelites happened to be mixing it up with at the time.
To take the analogy further, academics are doing something which is akin to saying that until recent human history, humans have had to drink impure water, and therefore to be true to what water historically was, it would be dishonest and incorrect to claim that drinking clean water is good for you; it is equally valid to drink it with its toxic or unhealthy contaminants, because clean water is merely a late invention of water-purists.
The water (H₂O) analogy highlights the difference between a theological/normative approach (the Talmidi and Karaite view) and a historical/descriptive approach (the secular academic view). It highlights how two people can look at the exact same physical evidence, and yet arrive at different definitions based on their starting methodology.
Using this analogy, the core disagreement comes down to how each group defines the ‘essence’ of what water is:
- The Talmidi Definition (the Chemical Ideal): We define Yahwism by its essential ‘chemical compound’: the sole worship of YHVH (pure H2O) and God’s ethical laws (the beneficial minerals and gases dissolved in it).[1] Anything else found in the glass – whether it is the mud of Canaanite polytheism or the salt of imported foreign beliefs – is an impurity or a contaminant. It is a deviation from what healthy drinking water truly is.
- The Academic Definition (Environmental/Limnological): Academics operate like environmental scientists testing a natural lake. They do not define ‘lake water’ by what is written in a chemistry textbook; they define it by what is observed to be sloshing around in the lake sample. To them, if 80% of the ancient Israelites over a 400-year period were ‘drinking’ and practicing a religion mixed with Asherah and Baal, then historically, those ‘impurities’ were an intrinsic, authentic, functional part of the ecosystem of that religion; to claim that healthy drinking water can ever really exist is a dishonest representation of the facts.
How Academics View the ‘Purification’ Process
Modern Yahwists, such as Talmidis and Karaites, would see the refinement process as attempts to arrive at something pure and drinkable, which promotes health and is no longer dangerous. Academics would instead look at the contaminants and say that they are an essential part of what the water is.
Because scholars look at the timeline from the outside, they do not see pure H₂O as what water ever was. Instead, they argue that the religion began as a muddy, polytheistic river (common to all ancient Near Eastern cultures) and was only gradually distilled over centuries into drinkable H₂O by a specific group of people, who came up with the notion of clean water; clean water never existed before that.
In scholarship, this distillation movement is called the ‘YHVH-Alone Movement.’ Scholars view the prophets (like Elijah, Hosea, and Jeremiah) and the reforming kings (like Hezekiah and Josiah) not as people trying to return to a time when Yahveh alone was worshipped, but as radical revolutionaries who were fighting an uphill battle to strip the native Canaanite impurities out of the Yahwist Israelite identity, in order to create something they themselves dreamed up in their own minds.
By analogy, the academic view of Yahwism is like saying, ‘Historically there was no such thing as pure H2O, so H2O is an imagined invention of a radical distillation and filtration system; it is therefore incorrect for people to think that uncontaminated, potable H2O is a worthy goal to be achieved’. The Talmidi view of Yahwism is like saying, ‘Water is chemically H2O, not whatever impurities it happens to be mixed with – we shouldn’t have to just put up with contaminated H2O. The job of distillation is to separate out the contaminants from the H2O to make it drinkable and healthy’.
The Talmidi position is that historical mixtures of YHVH-worship with other religious practices do not determine what Yahwism ought to mean, just as substances mixed into water do not change the chemical identity of H₂O itself.
From the secular academic perspective:
1. Early Israel: The water is naturally murky and mixed with other regional deities.
2. The Prophets & Reformers: They act as the filtration system, calling people to filter out everything except YHVH (because that’s what they wanted).
3. Post-Exile: The filtration is finally successful, leaving behind the clear, pure water of strict monotheism in post-exilic Judaism.
The Talmidi Alignment with the Biblical Ideal
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai and found the people worshipping the Golden Calf, the text does not say, ‘And thus the Israelites practiced a valid syncretic variant of Yahwism.’ It says they corrupted themselves and turned aside quickly from the way they were commanded.
The Torah and the Prophets never present Israelite polytheism as a ‘valid variant’ of Israel’s faith; they consistently present it as a contaminant, an unfaithfulness, or a breach of a legal contract (the Covenant). Abraham represents an early model of exclusive allegiance to YHVH, which became widely contaminated over the centuries (first by Egyptian beliefs, and then by Canaanite beliefs and practices). We acknowledge that early on, many Israelites were indeed polytheists, then turned to monolatry (‘YHVH above all others’), and finally to monotheism (‘YHVH alone’). We are not a blinkered people who fancifully believe there was ever a Yahwist ‘Golden Age’, when every Israelite in the First Temple period worshipped YHVH alone; that’s not even what the Hebrew Bible itself says.
YHVH’s divine system of ethics, values and beliefs represent what is eternally true Yahwism, not what Israelites perfectly observed and practised. Israelites only gradually got there after centuries of prophetic voices from God calling them there.
Talmidis are not so unrealistic to think that there was ever a time of pure, unadulterated, monotheistic Israelite Yahwism, but rather that pure Yahwism is what is given directly by YHVH through holy men and women; Yahwism is what exists eternally from YHVH, regardless of what imperfect human beings have started with, added to, or to how it has been misunderstood by Israelites over the centuries.
Conclusion
Prophetic criticism of Israelite society is not what invented pure, monotheistic Yahwism. What prophetic voices were, were voices directly from God, trying to achieve the Yahwism that YHVH intended right from the start, even if that’s not how it started among human beings. They were calling people back to what YHVH originally intended for us in the beginning. Yahwism is what comes directly from YHVH, not from what is created by human beings.
[1] Humans and most animals cannot consume pure, distilled H2O without becoming ill; it has to be consumed with certain dissolved minerals in it.