UCLA

The patriarchal narratives in the book of Genesis feature unique language addressing the deity, comprised of invoking the “God of the Fathers” and related rhetoric. Beginning with Albrecht Alt in 1929, scholars have attempted to identify the “God of the Fathers” given the canonically enigmatic ways this invocation is expressed in the patriarchal narratives. This study reframes the question by asking why such language might be used to articulate one’s connection to the divine.

Biblical scholarship has primarily employed comparative data from Northwest Semitic texts and inscriptions (to include the rather large corpus of texts from Ugarit) as a means of contextualizing the world of ancient Israel presented in the Hebrew Bible. However, the bulk of this data in conversation with the “God of the Fathers” in the Hebrew Bible is colored by contact with the Neo-Hittite Anatolian speaking communities dwelling in the same region. This Syro-Anatolian legacy comprises an under-researched approach to the Hebrew Bible. This study fortifies the use of comparative Northwest Semitic data by addressing the Anatolian (i.e., Hittite and Luwian) language traditions as dialogue partners with the distinctive features found in Northwest Semitic traditions.

This investigation takes a two-pronged approach to reevaluating the topic of the “God of the Fathers” in the Hebrew Bible, by undertaking: 1) an examination of the biblical narrative in light of social memory, and 2) an assessment of the topic in light of cultural contact and convergence. Further approaches within the fields of biblical studies, Near Eastern archaeology, and Near Eastern religion are employed in this study to explore the topic to a greater degree today than in recent years. Additionally, the present investigation looks at the common language associated with the paternal relationship to the divine as a way of addressing the ensuing difficulties in translating such rhetoric means for dialoguing with the concept of the “God of the Fathers” in the Hebrew Bible. In their interpretation of such language in the ancient Near East, scholars have rendered translated various expressions concerning the “God of the Fathers” as both “Father Gods” and “Deified Fathers.”

This work concludes that the rhetoric behind invoking the "God of the Fathers" forms an identity statement regarding the divine control of one’s being. This rhetoric became especially important during the period of Assyrian westerward expansion in the eighth century BCE and best fits within the context of Hezekiah’s reforms when divergent religious traditions populated Jerusalem. With such rhetoric, no paternal deity is immediately identifiable and when an identity for the god of one’s fathers can be proposed, such a deity is not always able to be identified beyond the person in question. Furthermore, worship of a specific, mythologized El as found at Ugarit regularly proposed by earlier studies is not supported for ancient Israel as a whole. Though the possibility of such worship with specific families may very well have been the case, not all theophoric uses of El names (or even theophory in general) refer to the specific mythologized El. Thus, the use of the rhetoric invoking the "God of the Fathers" is primarily an invocation of one's family deity, and secondarily equated with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible in order to personalize the enforcement of the canonical Yahwism of Jerusalem.