But the Old Testament Says Yahweh Is God
By W.R. Selvig
I understand the hesitation. For most of us raised in church, the thought feels unshakable: “The Old Testament calls Yahweh God, so of course Yahweh must be the Father Jesus revealed.” It feels dangerous to even ask the question, like the ground beneath our feet might give way. I know that feeling well—I wrestled with it myself for years.
I don’t deny that the Old Testament presents Yahweh as God. That’s plain enough in the text we’ve inherited. But what I began to notice was the tension between the way Yahweh is portrayed in those stories and the Father that Jesus reveals in the Gospels. Yahweh commands wars of extermination, the killing of men, women, and children. Jesus, by contrast, teaches us to love even our enemies and to forgive seventy times seven. Yahweh strikes people down with plagues. Jesus walks into the midst of the sick and heals them. If they are the same being, why do their characters seem so opposed?
As I dug deeper, I stumbled on a striking passage in Exodus 6:3. Yahweh himself says, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name Yahweh I was not known to them.” And yet, if you read Genesis as we have it today, the name Yahweh is written all through those stories. Both cannot be true at the same time. What this reveals is that someone—later editors—went back and inserted the name Yahweh into earlier narratives. In other words, what we have in our Bibles is not a perfect record of God’s self-disclosure, but a text shaped and reshaped over time.
This is not simply my idea. Scholars like Emanuel Tov, Mark S. Smith, and many others have demonstrated that Israel’s scriptures went through periods of redaction—especially during the exile—where Yahweh was elevated and blended with titles that originally belonged to El Elyon, the Most High. In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve a version of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 that reads differently from the Masoretic Text. In that older version, Elyon divides the nations among the “sons of God” and gives Israel to Yahweh. That means Yahweh and Elyon were understood as separate figures, with Elyon above Yahweh.
As a Christian, I had to stop and ask myself… If Yahweh was not the Father, but instead really was a bene-elohim like some scholars say… that means that Jewish scribes used their influence and, in their edits, conflated Yahweh into the Most High (scholars agree on this). And do I believe what the Jewish faith believes? Christianity is not an extension of Judaism. They are completely different belief systems. Jewish mysticism is even considered Satanic by some. And yet we have given them carte blanche to edit these old texts and determine how they will be interpreted? They wanted to promote Yahweh! What if Yahweh was not God but he was their assigned deity (as some scholars say) and in their effort to make him the Most High, they erased all traces of other beings and the actual Most High Himself—and we bought it hook, line, and sinker?
“Nope,” you say quickly. “This is heresy,” you may be thinking. You have been trained to think that, by the way. Because the religious training runs deeeeep. You have been groomed, and taught, and trained to not question what you’ve been taught. Yet all teaching should be allowed to be questioned. Because, if it is true, it will prove itself out. If you are not allowed to question or think critical (even by yourself) you show that you have symptoms of being brainwashed. You are accepting teachings without examination.
If the Jewish scribes conflated El Elyon with Yahweh and editied in Yahweh’s name everywhere so that you thought Yahweh was the Most High, how would we know today? What if I told you that Jesus knew this conflict, Paul understood this conflict, and one of Jesus’s main purposes in coming was to show that Yahweh was not the Father that He knew. To show us that His Father nobody had seen or heard before. To introduce us to the one who had been erased from history. To show us that He represented that Father and that His character was the Father’s character. He said to test the fruit. Paul said the Old Testament is veiled. What if that veil is the layer upon layer of Jewish redactions and edits made to make you think Yahweh is God? And what if that is what it means when it says Satan deceived the entire world?
By calling Yahweh God, even Christians unknowingly submit themselves to the law that was given by angels (fallen?) to multiply sin so that accusations can be piled up against humanity and humans would be enslaved forever to these principalities and powers called the bene-elohim. Please remember that scripture teaches that Satan decieves the whole world. The. Whole. World. I believe that deception has been “controlled” by the scribes of Yahweh, who instituted the law and Yahweh himself calls himself the lion, the leopard and bear in Hosea 13:7-8. This rhetoric is repeated in Revelation 13:2 when the Beast is described as a leopard, lion, and a bear. This predatory system is the one that principalities want to keep in regulating humanity. Because of this, without knowing what they do, I believe the scribes gatekeep the scriptures and made their theological edits when they instituted the Hebrew version of the New Testament hundreds of years after Jesus was on the earth. Where the Greek useed the word Theos for “Father” (instead of “Kurios” which was the accepted term for YHWH), the editors inserted Yahweh anyway. This changes the meaning and understanding in favor of the Beast and the Beast sytem, completely deceiving those who do not look into it and reseach.
Jesus had to come.
He fulfilled the law to complete it and then put it aside.
He purchased our freedom as a ransom to a tyrant.
He paid the ridiculous price of blood so that we could be purchased for the Father (not from the Father).
This leaves us with a question. When Jesus says, “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father,” who was He pointing to? Was He affirming the violent deity who commanded genocide, or was He unveiling Someone greater—the merciful, life-giving Father He came from? The writer of Hebrews helps us here: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). The Son is not one more prophet in line with the old voices—He is the final and perfect revelation of the Father.
So yes, the Old Testament presents Yahweh as God. But Jesus comes as the true Word of the Father, and when we hold Yahweh’s actions up against Jesus’ life, something doesn’t fit. Could it be that Jesus was revealing not Yahweh at all, but El Elyon, the Most High?
That is the invitation before us—not to abandon Scripture, but to read it honestly, with Jesus as the lens. The Old Testament gives us a record of humanity’s wrestle with the divine. The New Testament gives us the Son who finally says, “This is what the Father is really like.”
My prayer is that this doesn’t feel like losing your faith, but like finding it more deeply rooted in the goodness of the Father Jesus came to reveal.
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