YAHWEH
Yahweh was an ancient Levantine deity worshiped in Israel and Judah as the primary deity and the head of the pantheon of the polytheistic religion of Yahwism. Though no consensus exists regarding the deity's origins, scholars generally hold that the deity is associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman, and later with Canaan. The deity's worship reaches back to at least the Early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age, if not somewhat earlier.
In the oldest examples of biblical literature, Yahweh possesses attributes that were typically ascribed to deities of weather and war, fructifying the Land of Israel and leading a heavenly army against the nation's enemies. The early Israelites engaged in polytheistic practices that were common across ancient Semitic religion, as their worship included a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, such as El, Asherah, and Baal.
In later centuries, El and Yahweh became conflated, and El-linked epithets, such as ʾĒl Šadday (אֵל שַׁדַּי), came to be applied to Yahweh alone. Characteristics of other deities, such as Asherah and Baal, were also selectively "absorbed" in conceptions of Yahweh.
In monotheistic Judaism the existence of other deities was denied outright, and Yahweh was proclaimed the creator deity and the sole deity to be worthy of worship. During the Second Temple period, Judaism began to substitute other Hebrew words, primarily ăḏōnāy (אֲדֹנָי, lit. 'My Lords'). By the time of the Jewish–Roman wars—namely following the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the concomitant destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE—the original pronunciation of Yahweh's name was forgotten entirely.
Additionally, Yahweh is invoked in the Aramaic-language Papyrus Amherst 63 from ancient Egypt, and also in Jewish or Jewish-influenced Greco-Egyptian magical texts from the 1st to 5th centuries CE.
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