Yahwism meaning

Yahwism presents itself under a variety of aspects, and the history of Israel's relations to the God Yahweh (whose name is not necessarily of Israelite origin) can hardly be disentangled amid the complicated threads of the earlier history.

The view that the seeds of Yahwism were planted in the young Israelite nation in the days of the " exodus " conflicts with the belief that the worship of Yahweh began in the pre-Mosaic age.

Yahwism is a religion which appears upon a soil saturated with ideas and usages which find their parallel in extrabiblical sources and in neighbouring lands.

But Yahwism, like Islam, had its sects and tendencies, and the opponents to the stricter ritualism always had followers.

The history of Baalism among the Hebrews is obscured by the difficulty of determining whether the false worship which the prophets stigmatize is the heathen worship of Yahweh under a conception, and often with rites, which treated him as a local nature god; or whether Baalism was consciously recognized to be distinct from Yahwism from the first.