What are the names of the deities the Israelites worshiped before Yahweh?

Answer 1

Yahweh was one of the very earliest deities in the Hebrew pantheon, so it is more appropriate to talk of the deities they worshipped alongside of God, rather than before him. The Hebrew gods were more or less common to the West Semitic peoples, which included the Phoenicians, Canaanites, Moabites and Hebrews.

The worship of one God (Yahweh) alone seems to have become the state religion of Judah in the late-seventh century BCE reign of King Josiah, although some scholars insist that this really happened during the Babylonian Exile and was retrospectively written into the Book of Kings at that time. Regardless of the state religion, it seems the ordinary people continued the worship of other gods until after the Babylonian Exile. If Lady Wisdom can be considered a deity, then she continued until at least the end of the first century CE, and is even mentioned in the New Testament.

El (Elohim) was the father of the seventy gods of the world, one of whom was Yahweh (YHWH). The Pentateuch refers to Elohimas well as Yahweh, whether as one or two separate gods, but they must have become the same deity by relatively early times. In Psalm 82, written during the Babylonian Exile, we have El berating the other gods and telling them they would die like mortals, leaving only El. Whether or not that was an older myth, it suited the needs of the Yahweh-only party because it taught that if there had been other gods, they were no more.

Recent archaeological finds indicate that the consort of Yahweh was Asherah. In addition, there are large numbers of cultic figures that appear to be of a fertility goddess and are believed to have been of Asherah. There are many biblical references to the 'groves' which were holy to Asherah.

The Bible mentions various gods such as Baal and Moloch but, especially as the Old Testament was written by followers of the Yahwist-only position, they tend to come across as foreign, not indigenous gods. The scholarly position is that they were indigenous. Better information is found indirectly from the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel 8:14 describes women in the Temple "weeping for Tammuz" - the Semitic god condemned to hell by the goddess Astarte after she was crucified and resurrected. There must have been a whole cult around Astarte and the shepherd-god Tammuz, with annual rituals of death and resurrection. Ezekiel 8:16 says: "And he brought me into the inner court of the Lord's house, and behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east." Here we see confirmation that the sun god was part of the pantheon of Judah. Elsewhere, including the golden calf of the Exodus and of King Jereboam, there is evidence of the moon god.