Maura Labingi

I found this book fascinating; for one thing, it explains why so many words in Hebrew, like “Israel” and “Bethel” and “Samuel” end in “el”. Turns out that according to the religion of the Canaanite people, “El” was their original chief creator deity. “YHWH” (commonly pronounced in our times as “Yahweh”) was one of the sons of “El”, and had been assigned by his father to be the protector or mascot deity of the “Hibiru” or Hebrew tribe of Canaanites. At one point the “Hibiru” group split off from their Canaanite relatives, and decided to elevate their tribal deity YHWH by conflating him with the chief god El, even giving YHWH El’s wife Ashera, the “Queen of Heaven” for a time (and later discarding her, making YHWH a single male god, and the only god.) So if you’re interested in how the original Abrahamic religion, Judaism, evolved over time from pantheism to monaltry to monotheism, I think you’ll enjoy this book.