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 El exhibited features quite different from Yahweh, as he was not considered a national deity associated with a particular dynasty, neither was he a combat or storm deity, nor was he strongly connected with the southern arid lands. Chapter 5 is devoted to El’s iconography; most interesting is the treatment given to the standing stones (biblical masseboth). Although Lewis sees standing stones as regularly used in cultic settings, he does not support the idea that they inherently represented divine images, as some scholars have implied (Avner 1984; Mettinger 1995), but rather they “could be used to mark encounters with a deity and not the deity per se” (171). However, Lewis’s statement that standing stones were used in the “non-mystical realm” to commemorate treaties, boundary negotiations, and funerals (172) should be qualified, inasmuch as funerary practices constituted an integral part of the afterlife beliefs of the peoples in the southern arid Levant (see the articles of Eisenberg-Degen, Galili, and Rosen 2021 and Tebes 2021).In Chapter 6 we are finally in Yahweh’s territory, beginning with the question of his origins. On the long-debated question of the meaning of Yahweh’s name, Lewis sides with mainstream scholarship considering it as originating from a noncausative form of the verb hyh “to be,” rejecting the Albright-Freedman-Cross causative hypothesis and the Arabic hwy (“to blow”) etymology. He then reviews the earliest possible extrabiblical attestations of the name Yahweh, accepting as likely only the New Kingdom Egyptian Shasu-Yahweh texts and Schneider’s (2007) proposal of a “Yah” name in a copy of the Book of the Dead. Lewis does take note of the at that time forthcoming study by Fleming, which reinterprets the early history of Yahweh without reference to the Egyptian name Shasu-Seir (see below), but he still views this material as relevant (761 n. 59). Lewis then evaluates the contending proposals for the geographical origins of Yahwism, concluding that, despite the shared cultural heritage between the northern Canaanite cult and the Israelite religion, there is still missing “its most vital ingredient: the god Yahweh!” (270). For Lewis, the most convincing explanation for the origins of Yahweh is still the Midianite hypothesis, a long-held view in biblical scholarship that sees the worship of Yahweh originating in the southern arid margins of the Levant; he particularly focuses attention on the biblical traditions dealing with Moses and his father-in-law and the poetic texts with topographic allusions to Yahweh coming from the south (which he parallels with the references to Yahweh of Teman at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud). Unfortunately, he does not offer a concrete answer as to how the Yahwistic worship reached ancient Israel, except for presenting the familiar diffusionist explanations with the Midianite caravans as main carriers of the southern faith. In Chapter 7 Lewis navigates through the thorniest issues concerning Yahweh’s iconography. He tackles the question of anthropomorphic representations of Yahweh in the material culture, concluding that none of the known examples from the material record can be regarded as representing such an image; for Lewis, the large Ayn Dara footprints serve as a formidable analogy for sacred emptiness in the Jerusalem temple and as a corrective against portrayals of the Iron Age religion as primitive (although he does not find empty-space aniconism in Kuntillet ‘Ajrud Pithos B [per Schmidt 2002], nor in the Taanach cult stand discovered in 1968). The same with theriomorphic imagery: even though the strongest biblical cases point to bull imagery, the material evidence is inconclusive; Lewis does not even acknowledge bull images on Kuntillet ‘Ajrud Pithos A but rather interprets them as Bes-like figures. The last three chapters provide extensive treatments of the diverse characterizations of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, using an impressive array of ancient Near Eastern texts and iconography for contextualization: Chapter 8 focusing on his portrayal as divine warrior and parent, Chapter 9 on his representations as divine king and judge, and finally Chapter 10 on Yahweh as the Holy One. In an excursus on the militaristic text of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud 4.2, Lewis identifies the “holy one” (qšdš) with Yahweh rather than El, with motifs echoing similar biblical contexts that describe Yahweh’s marching from the southeast (Judg 5:4; Ps 68:9; Deut 33:2). Fleming’s book, Yahweh before Israel, is a bold attempt to offer a well-constructed argument to supersede the Midianite hypothesis. The book is divided into seven chapters. In the Introduction (Ch. 1), Fleming relates how, after he long considered the theory of Yahweh’s origins in the southern steppe the best explanation possible, he began growing dissatisfied with it, leading him to “repudiate” the Midianite hypothesis, whose main lines he considers “scholarly antiques” (4, 12). Therefore, in Chapter 2 we move to the deconstruction of the main bastion of the modern Midianite hypothesis: the New Kingdom Egyptian references to Shasu-Yahweh in the temple lists of Soleb (Amenhotep III) and Amara West (Ramses II). Fleming rightly notes that, while it is clear both lists are copies, most analyses have too easily restored the earlier Soleb text in Column N4, which is incomplete, from the later Amara West wall text, which is longer. In the Soleb list, only three, and most likely four, Shasu names can be restored in the so-called α set (trbr, yhw3, śmt, pysp3ys); while the Amara West list is in reverse order, containing six names (ś‘rr, rbn, pysp3ys, śmt, yhw3, (t)rbr). Following a clever detective method, Fleming measured the Soleb columns from the temple’s original publication, reaching the conclusion that there is only space for nine names in Column N4. Since most of the columns have combinations of four or five names, he then suggests that in the Column N4/α set “[t]here is not room for ś‘rr as a sixth . . . This name is the one familiar geographical evidence, to us and perhaps to the ancient Egyptians, that could give the Shasu-land any particular location within the broad inland steppe” (44). For Fleming this has huge implications in terms of historical geography, for if Seir was not original to the list and was added only by the Amara West scribes, then Soleb’s Shasu-Yahweh loses its only connection with the arid southern Levant; to the contrary, Shasu-Yahweh would be better located in the central Levant, the region targeted by Amenhotep III’s policy in Asia. The later name Seir would represent a period in which Egypt retreated to the southern Levant, in the time of Ramses II, with the later scribes reinterpreting the Shasu-names of previous centuries according to the realities of the thirteenth century BCE. Fleming is to be commended for such meticulous work, and this conclusion is entirely possible. However, it depends on many “ifs” to be likely: if the Amara West list contains the same Shasu names as the Soleb list; if both list names follow the same order; and, most importantly, if the combination of names in Column N4 follows an arrangement of four-five sets. The last “if” is certainly possible, but on the other hand the possibility cannot be discarded that the α set with the Shasu names contained six names; that is not unheard of, as Column N12 does actually contain one set of six names. This would leave the β set in Column N4 with three names; the only name that can be reconstructed in that set is bt ‘[. . .], located right before the beginning of the α set and sitting next to Shasu trbr, and therefore there is a place for the missing Shasu ś‘rr at the other side of the column.It is within Chapter 3 that Fleming focuses attention on the biblical evidence. The chapter starts with a comprehensive history of scholarship on the Midianite hypothesis, painting with colorful details the versions of it proposed by early scholars such as Ghillany, Tiele, Stade, Budde, Meyer, Gressmann, and Rowley. Fleming notes that, even if for modern proponents of the Midianite hypothesis the emphasis lies on the Egyptian evidence and the old biblical poetry, the platform upon which this theory is built was first constructed upon a long tradition of biblical scholarship linking (on feeble grounds, as he suggests) Yahweh with the Midianites or Kenites. After a detailed textual-critical analysis of relevant texts in Exod 3 and 6, Fleming concludes that the Bible does not preserve a tradition that Yahweh became the god of Israel in Moses’s times; “Yahweh must be named because of perceived narrative problems, and Moses has the privilege of bringing the name to Israel because of the prestige he enjoys as the central figure of early Jewish religious tradition” (97). Nor was Yahweh somehow worshipped by Jethro, “the priest of Midian,” a view that does not find any basis in the texts of Exod 2 and 18. Whatever the uncertainties in these texts, the Midianite hypothesis is now solidly grounded on that poetry which sees Yahweh as coming from southern locales, texts that are broadly considered, since the days of Albright and Cross, as the most ancient in the Hebrew Bible.Therefore, in Chapter 4, Fleming embarks upon the difficult task of problematizing these texts’ arguably “old” date. He (re-)considers texts like Judg 5 and Ps 68 as monarchical victory texts produced in the northern kingdom of Israel (ninth–eighth centuries BCE) for whom the references to the mountain of God (“he of Sinai”) are not related at all with the historical origins of Yahweh but rather are envisioned as the residence of this war-like deity, much like Ugaritic Mount Zaphon. Locales such as Seir, Edom, Mount Paran, and Teman are later elaborations of the Sinai theme, denoting the movement of Yahweh from the southlands but with little relevance for his original point of departure. The only relevant epigraphic source to anchor the chronology of these texts is Kuntillet ‘Ajrud 4.2; although here Fleming draws freely from Lewis’s “excursus,” he nuances the latter’s linking of KA 4.2 with the aforementioned archaic biblical passages (“the ideas and images are familiar, but the wording and details are new to us” [152]) and, rather, prefers to see continuities with the late text of Hab 3.Chapter 5 is where Fleming demonstrates his mastery of both biblical and cuneiform sources, offering a new thesis on the origins of the name Yahweh. Taking as a point of departure his idea that the Egyptian Shasu-Yahweh originally is the name of a people, not a deity, he meticulously reviews evidence from second-millennium BCE Mari and first-millennium BCE Arabia, demonstrating the wide dissemination of group names with theophoric forms. Fleming also assesses the evidence of Yahwi- names in the Amorite onomasticon, although he explicitly refrains from explaining the form or meaning of the name Yahweh from Amorite names, rather aiming to demonstrate the possibility that the Shasu names could have originated as shortened personal names. But is there any evidence in the Hebrew Bible that the name Yahweh was conceived originally as a reference to a people and not to a god?In Chapter 6 Fleming responds with an emphatic yes, arguing that the key text is the Song of Deborah; his own reconstruction of the text leads him to suggest that the original opening containing the allusion to “the people of Yahweh” (‘am Yhwh) (Judg 5:12–13), one of the oldest compositions in the Bible, represents a hymn of victory of an alliance of independent groups battling under that name, akin to the Egyptian term Shasu-Yahweh. The mentions of “Israel” and Yahweh as “god of Israel” in Judges 5 belong to secondary revisions, echoing the ambitions of the ninth-century BCE Omrides: “In Judg 5:12–22/23, Yahweh is defined by the people. He is not a king; he is a warrior; and he is not a storm god” (223). More damning to the Midianite hypothesis, the notion of Yahweh coming from Seir and Edom (Judg 5:4) would also represent an Omride reelaboration, meaning that the geographical setting of “the people of Yahweh” loses its southern connection, bringing this military alliance closer to central Canaan. Fleming’s historical reconstruction is clever and should be given full consideration, although I would express caution for two reasons. First, although the author analyses ten other biblical references to “the people of Yahweh,” his own redating is still mostly based on a reading of Judg 5. Second, and most importantly, it would conflict with the well-known reference to “Israel” in the Merneptah stela (and probably an earlier fourteenth- / early thirteenth-century BCE reference, if Zwickel and van der Veen’s 2017 reconstruction stands up to scrutiny). Fleming cursorily reviews the matter, suggesting that Israel and the Shasu-Yahweh were two completely different groups; while Merneptah’s Israel lay in a highland space adjacent to the Jezreel Valley (per the “lesser” Israel of Saul and David), the Shasu-Yahweh people belonged to the realm of the “back-country herding groups” (231). At this point it is important to remember that the Merneptah stela provides no information on the precise location of “Israel,” nor of its socioeconomic organization, and that this reference is separated by several centuries from the ninth-century BCE polity of Israel. It was certainly a group considered a “people” by the Merneptah stela’s determinatives, a group that could have dwelled anywhere between Ashkelon and Gezer near the Mediterranean and Yanoam in the Jordan River Valley—that is to say, a “back-country” indistinguishable from Fleming’s ‘am Yhwh. Archaeological surveys have shown great homogeneity in the settlement pattern and material culture of the northern hill country during the Iron I period (Killebrew 2005: 157–62), so we shouldn’t expect great differences as far as the socioeconomic background of the local population goes.Finally, in Chapter 6, Fleming looks for analogies in the ancient Near East to explain the transformation of the name Yahweh from characterizing a group to defining a deity and to the still-unexplained Yahweh “convergence” with Israel’s god El (for the latter, he follows Smith’s 2002 model). The obvious start is, of course, Aššur, the name of both a city and a god, but Fleming is not only interested in perfectly matching names but also in the relationship between names and political structures. He finds in the epigraphical evidence from ancient South Arabia polities envisioned as kin of deities, such as Qataban’s “descendants of ‘Amm” (wld ‘m) and Saba’s “descendants of Almaqah” (wld ’lmqh), terms that he equates with the biblical characterization of Moab as “people of Kemosh” (Num 21:29; Jer 48:46). Although these parallels provide more background for the well-known biblical notions of fictive kinship, they are far from providing excellent equivalents to Fleming’s ‘am Yhwh, given that there are no perfect matches between names of groups and names of deities, and less so the coexistence of two gods. Fleming does not provide a definitive answer as to how Yahweh became the name of Israel’s deity, replacing El as chief god, but he considers the process as politically driven by the Omrides. It is interesting that he does not discuss the religion of Ammon: the debates about Milkom or El as the main Ammonite deity would provide a closer analogy to his ‘am Yhwh. Per its title, Miller’s Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God takes as a given the Midianite hypothesis, aiming to study the evidence of the origins of Israel’s god in the southern arid Levant and northwestern Arabia. Written at about the same time as Fleming’s book was published, Miller was able to address some of Fleming’s claims against the Midianite hypothesis. The book is divided into seven chapters. In the Preface, Miller sets about by expressing his “philosophical worldview,” which is “constructivist and functionalist,” that is, he sees multiple subjective meanings in the evidence, which in turn are sociohistorically contextual. Methodologically, he attempts to generate/adapt explanatory theory and do research “as two parts of the same process” (7–8). In order to understand the meaning of each piece of evidence, the path is to explore the context of discourse and then provide ethnographic comparisons. This latter methodological approach materializes when Miller analyzes “Midianite religion.”In his treatment of the southern origins of Yahweh in the Bible (Ch. 1), far from presenting a traditional textual-critical approach, Miller seeks to reconstruct the earlier lore behind the textual material, following the studies of folkloristic scholars who work with oral societies and his own work on the Hebrew Bible emerging in an oral-and-written culture. Thus, he breaks down the Midianite hypothesis into a set of memorats, the core of which are dated to the late preexilic period. But this is not all. Drawing from Krohn’s “Historical-Geographical Method,” he also investigates the different geographical elements in texts that he calls “variants,” such as Deut 33:2; Judg 5:4–5; Hab 3:3a; Ps 68:8–9; and Zech 9:14. The basic theme in all these variants is “God marched from the South,” a primarily mythic south that meant a divine abode, not a temple or shrine (Miller compares it with Mount Zaphon in the Ugaritic mythology).Chapter 2 summarily discusses the evidence from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, focusing on the reading of “Cain” in KA 4.3, while Chapter 3 reviews other “inconsequential” extrabiblical references to Yahweh, such as Papyri Amherst 63, Louvre E.32847, and Yahwistic names in (pre-?)Nabataean rock inscriptions in Sinai, eighth-century BCE Syria, or sixth-century BCE Sealand. More attention is devoted in Chapter 4 to the Egyptian references to the Shasu-Yahweh. Here, Miller contests Astour’s (1979) and Fleming’s rejection of the connection of Shasu with Seir, on the grounds that “the Shasu-Yahweh list is not the sole reason to place the Shasu-Yahweh near Edom. Shasu-Punon is also relevant, as is the sure evidence of Papyrus Anastasi 6” (83–84). Regarding the meaning of the name Shasu-Yahweh, Miller draws from ethnographic sources of diverse sort (Scandinavia, Western Apache, Huichol Indians, Batswapong of Botswana) to suggest that it represents a placename with god-name, a statement that the place was considered being sacred to the deity, thus coinciding with the biblical variants that the “Southland belongs to God” (87). This is surely an attractive suggestion, although the use of ethnographic comparisons from all over the world is less convincing than the parallels from closer ancient Near Eastern sources, such as the well-known Ugaritic myths.Chapter 5 is devoted to reviewing the evidence of Iron Age Edom; although initially attracted by Römer’s (2015) proposal of antecedents of Israelite Yahwism in the “pre-Qausite” Edomite religion, Miller concludes that there is no pre-Qaus stage of Edomite religion and that worship of Qaus was very different from Yahwism. When discussing the data from the Wadi Fidan 40 cemetery, Miller states that in many cases mortuary customs have no bearing on the beliefs of the deceased, and more specifically, he contests the identification of standing stones in several graves, given that “it requires great imagination to see them as even remotely anthropomorphic” (105–6). Yet, several studies have demonstrated how funerary practices constituted a central focus of the cosmovision of the desert nomadic peoples who lived in the Negev and Edom during centuries, standing stones being an integral part of the mortuary and cultic paraphernalia (see, again, Eisenberg-Degen, Galili, and Rosen 2021 and Tebes 2021).Since Edomite religion is out of the question for unlocking the origins of Yahwism, in Chapter 6 we move to the study of the “Midianite religion.” Here Miller starts by defending the use of ethnographic analogy as a valid tool for interpreting cults without texts (as was the case with Midian). With an exhaustive review of epigraphic and archaeological material, Miller discusses the religion of the Late Bronze and Iron Age northern Hejaz. The inclusion of Tayma in the discussion of Midianite religion is debatable: the few biblical references clearly distinguish Midian from Tayma, while the latter was located far away from classical and early Islamic Midian, which sources from those periods position in the modern Midian peninsula and specifically the town of Al-Bad. Regardless, the chapter is a great source of information regarding the Hejazi religion of the first millennium BCE; of note is Miller’s description and reconstruction of Tayma’s enigmatic cultic Building O-b1, which he identifies as a sort of chapter house rather than a temple (Hausleiter seems to have abandoned his early parallelism [Hausleiter 2013: 314–17] with either Egyptian temples or early Greek temples). The “Midianite religion” also included the use of three open-air shrines in the Negev (two on mountain summits), interpreted, per ethnographic comparisons with examples from Mexico and the Andes, as “peak sanctuaries . . . devoted to deities who live in the sky or mountains” (141). The worship of astral or mountain deities is certainly possible, but the easiest explanation for the simple architecture of the desert shrines is environmental: in a region with little rain and pastoral groups constantly on the move, easy-to-build, open-air structures were the best option for worshipping the local deities. In his discussion of a menhir (Miller carefully avoids calling it “standing stone”) found at Yotvata, he contends Avner’s (e.g., 1984) identification of the standing stones in the Negev as representing gods. Although, certainly, standing stones had a far wider range of purposes (they were also used for the commemoration of events and persons, witnessing of treaties, and demarcating borders and tombs), the greater value given to examples of menhirs in the Tibet Mountains than to Neolithic standing stones found in the Negev is inappropriate. For the afterlife beliefs, Miller unfortunately did not make use of the very recent preliminary reports of the Bronze and Iron Age burials excavated at Qurayyah (e.g., Luciani, Binder, and Alsaud 2018). Particularly important is Miller’s discussion of the iconography on the Qurayyah Painted Ware, a Late Bronze to early Iron Age pottery produced in northwestern Arabia and found in several places of southern Jordan and the Negev. Miller expresses reservations about the idea that the more commonly present naturalistic depictions (animals, especially ostriches, but also people) relate to the religious world. I have elsewhere provided ample parallels in the local rock art demonstrating that they certainly do: providing a glimpse of the cultic imagery of the desert populations, which included worshippers, rituals, and ritually symbolic animals (see Tebes 2021).In Chapter 7, Miller unveils his own reconstruction of the introduction of the southern cult of Yahweh by Midianite copper smiths to ancient Israel. After reviewing the evidence of copper metallurgy at Timna and Faynan, Miller takes a long detour through anthropological studies of metallurgy, particularly in modern Africa but including the Ṣleb from Arabia. Drawing from these supposed parallels, he concludes that Midianite Kenite smiths moved north to early Israel, bringing with them the worship of Yahweh. He certainly does not shy away from obvious charges of diffusionism, but the distribution of Qurayyah Painted Ware and the evidence of copper/bronze metallurgy in Iron I Israel (but enigmatically not the Beersheba Valley, with the notable exception of Tel Masos) would provide evidence that “[p]roducts and raw materials move, and ideas follow” (188; for a similar reconstruction, see Amzallag 2021).From the above review, it is clear that the three authors employ quite different epistemological and methodological approaches. This is not, of course, a grand discovery, since it reflects the current state of biblical scholarship; a perusal of the other seven works devoted to the origins of Yahweh would most likely render similar results. Yet, none of the three books reviewed can be pigeonholed into robust categories. Miller’s work can be considered more traditional in the sense that it draws from a long tradition of biblical scholarship on the Midianite hypothesis, but his abundant utilization of oral folklore theory and ethnographic parallels is certainly not common in biblical studies. Interestingly, Fleming, a scholar noted for his dual interest in biblical studies and Assyriology, pursues a more traditional textual-critical approach but at the same time criticizes the main tenets of the Midianite hypothesis. Despite the different positions of Miller and Fleming regarding the Midianite hypothesis, both concur that in the “old” poetic portions in the Bible Yahweh’s association with southern locales does not describe historical realities but rather a Ugaritic myth-like divine dwelling. Unsurprisingly, Lewis’s book is the most balanced one, at least with respect to the question at hand, and this is due to its being meant as a reference work about Yahweh, presenting, as a reference work should, the most relevant views on the important aspects of the discussion. So, what’s new about Yahweh? In short, a lot, although one could say that the search for his origins says more about our own historiographical outlook than about ancient Israel’s deity.