It has been supposed by Christians that the variety of God’s names in the Old Testament—i.e., “El”, “Elyon”, and “Elohim”—is actually textual evidence for the Trinity.
The issue with this explanation is that ‘El,’ ‘Elohim,’ and ‘Elyon’ are not uniquely Hebrew words, so to understand their meaning requires a broader contextual understanding and cannot be constrained to theological developments in interpretation. This is especially necessary when considering the fact trinitarianism is a much later development relative to Judaism, trinitarianism not being even certainly a belief of early Christianity and definitely not a belief of Judaism.
The Ugaritic texts are a number of poems written in a Semitic language directly related to Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic and Hebrew sharing many words in common due to their common linguistic root (Northwest Semitic). It’s also dated by scholars to be more or less authored contemporaneously with the Book of Genesis, so use of words in the Ugaritic texts is relevant to their use in Genesis due to the proximity of their use in time. Although we lack more sources of equal antiquity and locality to the Book of Genesis and Ugaritic texts, we do have other, more recent, ancient sources in other Canaanite languages that also make use of these same words, and so it is worthwhile to also account for their use.
The word “elohim” used in the way it is within Judaic monotheism is completely unique. This meaning parallels no other Semitic cognate – all other cognates use the word to mean a plural of gods, i.e., a pantheon, and not one sole god. That Hebrew originally intended this meaning is clear in the grammar: “elohim” is a plural declension of “eloah” from “el”, and in Hebrew, plurals modify the verbs relating to it into plural forms, and often – especially in the Bible’s earliest texts – verbs describing “elohim” are modified into their plural forms.
This evidence both found from Semitic cognates and in the Hebrew’s grammatical structure makes it doubtless that the original meaning of “elohim”, even in Hebrew, was equivalent to pantheon. Furthermore, there are mythic parallels within Genesis and broader Semitic myth entailing thematic similarities. In Genesis 10, the table of nations describes the origins of supposedly all the nations in the world. There were 70 nations, numbered according to the 70 sons of Noah who were said to have founded them.
In Deuteronomy 32:8-9, it says that the nations of the world were divided according to the number of the “sons of God” (both terms “bene elohim” and “bene el” being used to refer to the “sons of God”). This term was also used prior in Genesis 6 in the form “bene ha elohim”, describing the “sons of the Elohim” that descended and bred with the “daughters of men”, their offspring becoming “mighty men who were of old, the men of renown” (Gen 6:4).
Hebrew’s “bene el” and “bene elohim” is cognate with Ugaritic’s “bn il” and “bn ilm”, respectively. Within the Ugaritic texts, this is used to mean either the “sons of gods” or “sons of El” (El, when used as a proper noun, referring to the supreme deity within Semitic religion). “Bn ilm” is used in reference to the 70 sons of El and his wife, Asherah. These 70 sons of El (bene el/bn il) corresponded with 70 nations of the world, each son being allotted a nation over which they would be the tutelary deity. The sons of El then took up wives from the “daughters of men” and their offspring gave rise to the noblemen that would rule the nations.
There are very clear parallels between the biblical narrative and the Ugaritic texts: seventy nations, seventy sons, marriage of the “bene ha elohim/bn ilm” with the daughters of men, their offspring producing mighty men of renown and nobility. Further even, it is evidenced both archaeologically and biblically that Yahweh’s cult once considered the goddess Asherah to be his wife, paralleling El’s own marriage to Asherah. These parallels are indicative of a pre-monotheist Judean tradition that developed out of the broader Semitic tradition with Yahweh’s – the tutelary deity of the Judeans/Israelites – elevation to the status of El.
This transition of turning what was originally a national deity into the supreme god with the inheritance of his wife, his titles, and his name, is not new. The same is observed in the Assyrian religion (Ashur), the Babylonian religion (Marduk), and possibly the Canaanite religion (Baal). Notable is that Yahweh not only adopted the name, titles, and wife of El, but he also adopted the name and titles of Baal, Yahweh going by the name “Baal” multiple times in the Bible. And Baal too, like Yahweh, was married to Asherah.
Given the nation of Judah and Israel’s late iron age emergence from without the Canaanites and Hebrew’s strong linguistic likeness to the Canaanite language, it is plausible that Yahweh usurped both the traditions of El and Baal – they possibly existing already as a unified cult in Canaan – as the Judeans elevated him from being merely a deity peculiar to them into being the chief god himself. The presence of the Baal cult among the Judeans also has both archaeological and biblical evidence, the latter particularly detailing (with much detest) its prolificity among the Hebrews.
And more yet: when we carefully inspect Deuteronomy 32:8-9, we read that the “Most High”—Elyon—divided the nations according to the “sons of God”—bene el or bene elohim depending on the Dead Sea Scrolls fragment—and that the “LORD’s”—YHWH—allotted portion was the people of Jacob’s heritage.
When we take into consideration all the aforementioned, accounting for the Judean tradition’s context within the broader Semitic tradition and its parallels and cognate terms, these verses seem to clearly present Yahweh being distinguished from Elyon as the tutelary deity of Jacob’s descendants; that Elyon, in dividing the nations according to his sons, gave Yahweh – he being one of the sons of El – the allotment of Jacob’s descendants.
And what brings legitimacy to this interpretation is the fact that hundreds of years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were created, these texts being the oldest known scripts of the Bible and wherein we find the use of ‘bene el’ or ‘bene elohim’ in this verse (and others), this version of the verse was inexplicably altered to omit “sons of God” and to instead read either “angels” or “sons of Israel”. Genesis 6:1-4 received likewise censorship in later scripts. So “wrong” was this more original version of the verses that the 1st/2nd-century Jewish sage and rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was said to have put a curse upon anyone who uses the “sons of God” version.
These conscious attempts by ancient clergy to censor their own holy text shows that, even in antiquity, the verses were thought to be deeply problematic remnants of a Jewish tradition that would directly contradict claims to a supposed “unbroken and pure connection” between their ancestral prophetic traditions and their monotheism.
This doesn’t even begin to cover all biblical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence, but I believe it suffices to show that none of the Abrahamic religions’ understandings of the Mosaic tradition’s most ancient origins are accurate to the record.
Apotheism 