| As historians and scholars have studied the Bible, one unanswerable question has continued to puzzle them: Where did Ancient Israel come from? Many scholars have presented theories attempting to provide some possible answers to this question based on the Bible (and/or other ancient texts) or archaeological data or both. However, while each theory has valid arguments based on textual or archaeological data, these theories leave several questions unanswered and none fully agree with all the data available. There are data that support both a Canaanite and a non-Canaanite origin for Ancient Israel, yet these major theories focus on either the Canaanite origins of Ancient Israel or the non-Canaanite origins for Ancient Israel and never both. Thus, new theories that incorporate both sources for the origins of Ancient Israel must be formulated to get us closer to answering the question of from where Ancient Israel came.;This thesis uses the data from ancient texts, including the Bible, and archaeology to present a new theory about the origins of Ancient Israel. In order to discover both the Canaanite and non-Canaanite origins of Ancient Israel one must look to the gods and goddess worshipped by the early Israelites. When one discovers the origins of the main deities venerated by Ancient Israel, namely, Yahweh, El/Elohim and Asherah, the origins of early Israel then becomes clearer. Yahweh was a non-Canaanite deity, El and Asherah Canaanite deities and all three were worshipped to some degree by Ancient Israel. When Israel first emerged as a distinct population group in the Ancient Near East around 1200 BCE a new, distinctive religion emerged as well. This religion integrated several Canaanite religious practices and rituals with a non-Canaanite deity, Yahweh, with some of the unique religious features of a non-Canaanite origin, to form a new, hybrid religion. The merging of these numerous separate and different religious features argues for the existence of two sources of influence, one Canaanite and one non-Canaanite. Thus, based on these combined religious elements the origins of Ancient Israel must be from both these sources and not one or the other as the major theories suggest. |
