The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity by Theodore J. Lewis, and: Yahweh before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name by Daniel E. Fleming , and: Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God by Robert D. Miller II (review)

The question of the origins of Yahweh, ancient Israel's deity, has never lost its position as one of the most important pursuits of biblical scholarship. During recent years, however, there has been a true explosion of research on the genesis of Yahwism, with at least ten books and edited volumes integrally dedicated to the topic. Here, I aim to discuss three of these works, written by Theodore Lewis, Daniel Fleming, and Robert Miller II, purposefully chosen because they thoroughly discuss the so-called Midianite (or Kenite) hypothesis via interdisciplinary approaches. However, the interested reader should of necessity consult the other publications, most of which present specific approaches to the history of Yahweh (see Römer 2015; van Oorshot and Witte 2017; Flynn 2020; Pfitzmann 2020; Amzallag 2020; Stahl 2021; Tebes and Frevel 2021). This review also provides a great opportunity to dig into some current historiographical issues of biblical studies, insomuch as the three books were published at about the same time and explicitly interact with each other. Despite their common subject, they present very different examinations of the same textual and archaeological material, betraying distinct epistemological matrices.

The earliest of these works is Lewis's The Origin and Character of God, a massive 1,000-page volume presenting a comprehensive study of the biblical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence of the worship of Yahweh, coupled with a vast discussion of the history of scholarship on the matter. It would be neither possible nor productive to review at length such work, and therefore I will focus mostly on Lewis's treatment of Yahweh's origins and early characteristics. From the start (Acknowledgments), Lewis recognizes substantial discussions with Fleming, both reading each other's drafts. The book is divided into ten main chapters, each one comprised of lengthy theme-focused sections. In the introductory Chapter 1, Lewis establishes that his approach is that of a historian of religion, understanding the religion of ancient Israel within its ancient Near Eastern context and looking at contemporary literary and iconographic portrayals of divinities. Chapter 2 combs through the history of scholarship on ancient Israelite religion, from the late medieval period and the Enlightenment to modern biblical scholarship, contextualizing all contributions in their current social and intellectual atmospheres. In Chapter 3, Lewis presents the methodological choices he had to make for reconstructing the ancient "Israelite" religion—an umbrella term that, he recognizes, presents too many problems but that he still chooses to use as a "heuristic convention" (53). When addressing the thorny issue of source criticism, Lewis is pragmatic, recognizing the existence of irreconcilable models; instead of choosing one over the others, he uses the classical JEDP nomenclature, with the understanding that it is easier for advocates of competing models to make the necessary adjustments than the other way around.

Chapter 4 begins with the study of El worship in early Israelite religion, a deity whose name Lewis, along with mainstream scholarship, considers is present in the name "Israel." After studying the evidence from the Late Bronze southern Levant and Ugarit, he turns to the references to the El deity in the biblical text, admitting "the problem of deriving older El traditions from a corpus that has been passed down through later hands" (114). However, it is clear that...