The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
If you think that history.com is WP:RS, you need to read that guideline again. Especially when no one in particular is named as the author of that article. Even admitting that history.com would be RS, it would be very low on the pecking order, and certainly does not trump full professors from WP:CHOPSY. Whether Yahwism and Yahweh have to be merged, that's another question, but I oppose the wholesale deletion of Yahwism. The tool for detecting bad sources marked the link to history.com in red. Need I say more? We have a name for stuff like Judaism is the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, dating back nearly 4,000 years. We call it tall stories. About 2000 BCE there were no Jews/Hebrews/Israelites whatsoever, there was no such thing as Hebrew language, and the ancestors of Israelites certainly weren't monotheistic back then. 1500 BCE? Pretty much as I said before. Another: More than 1,000 years after Abraham, the prophet Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt after being enslaved for hundreds of years. Let conservative Jewish scholars speak about that: Greenberg, Moshe; Sperling, S. David (2007). "Exodus, Book of.". In Skolnik, Fred; Berenbaum, Michael; Thomson Gale (Firm) (eds.). Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. 6 (2nd ed.). pp. 612–623. ISBN978-0-02-866097-4. OCLC123527471. Retrieved 29 November 2019. Current scholarly consensus based on archaeology holds the enslavement and exodus traditions to be unhistorical. According to Shaye J. D. Cohen, a Yeshiva boy who became a Bible professor at Harvard University, "Most Israelites were actually of Canaanite stock; their ancestors did not participate in an Exodus from Egypt; Israelites did not build the pyramids!!!" http://ruml.com/thehebrewbible/notes/09-Notes.pdfhttps://courses.biblicalarchaeology.org/hebrewbible/notes/09-Notes.pdftgeorgescu (talk) 12:16, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Another nom for deletion solely because a random user is offended? Pass. Zhomron (talk) 14:49, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with tgeorgescu's view of the beginnings of Judaism. A case can be made that Josia (7th c. BCE) was the first Jew, although most of the Torah had not yet been written during his reign.
I think Yahwism, being the (or a) precursor of Judaism, is important enough to deserve its own page. Reading the current page, however, I kind of despair. Take the second sentence: "Yahwism was essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses." This seems utterly wrong to me. It confuses the older role of Yahweh as one of the many gods in the Canaanite pantheon with the monolatristic (or henotheistic) Yahweh-alone party, as Morton Smith called it. It is hard to say though when this sect took off; Kings 1 and 2 cannot be trusted as historical sources. It is highly unlikely that David (or whatever was the name of the king residing in Jerusalem at the time) was of the Yahweh-alone persuasion. The Yahweh article considers the Elijah stories in Kings as history; I think they were made up by 7th/6th century ideologues (Josiah or early Exiles).
The Iron Age sections of the current Yahweh article are pretty good in explaining Yahwism (without mentioning the term), I think ("In 9th century, the Yahweh-religion began to separate itself from its Canaanite heritage..."). The Canaanite religion page, however, isn't very helpful for our purposes. So, again, I agree with tgeorgescu as regards preferred content, but I'm in doubt about the current Yahwism page. A qualified oppose: either it ought to be rewritten in the spirit of the Yahweh article, or it should be deleted. GdB (talk) 15:13, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
First of all this is not because I'm offended and somebody just violated WP:AGF IMO . IM not Jewish even though that isn't at all important. Secondly the paragraph of the history.com article is part of a 3 paragraph explanation that starts w/ something 2 the effect of "jews beieve". However the 4000 years old date is not prefaced with anything to a similar affect. There has also been no opposition to my main point, witch is that the info in this article is already covered in 3 different articles and does not need be merged as the info is already there. Maybe the term Yahwism could become a disambiguation, but that requires deletion of this article first. Greenhighwayconstruction (talk) 20:16, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Again, if you had proposed the merger of Yahwism with Yahweh, I would have voted support. tgeorgescu (talk) 23:53, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I would be willing to compromise at merge however I think that Canaanite Religion would be a better home. I also think that it would be easier to merge with Canaanite Religion as most info on the Yahwism article is already on the Canaanite religion page. Greenhighwayconstruction (talk) 00:13, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Oppose article is well sourced,a nd clearly meets WP:N, and has pretty significant content that seems to warrant it's own article. -- Aunva6talk - contribs 22:55, 8 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely nobody is disputing if this article is properly sourced that is not at all the focus of the debate. This "significant content" is in like 3 other places on Wikipedia. Yes it is notable but there are enough articles that state what this article is stating. Greenhighwayconstruction (talk) 17:52, 9 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: Relisting because the AfD was so malformed I believe it negatively impacted peoples' ability to comment. There was no link to or mention of the original article in the nomination, so people had to guess what article was being AfD'd, look at the raw AfD list, or look at others' contribs to find it. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:18, 10 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Oppose: as per Aunva6, Zhomron, and Tgeorgescu above, there's no convincing reason to delete a well-sourced, standalone article about the early history of Judaism and ancient Hebrew religion; moreover, Greenhighwayconstruction's proposal to merge it with Canaanite religion doesn't make any sense, since the ancient Hebrews separated themselves from the Canaanites and built their own society and religious tradition independently of them and their polytheistic Semitic pantheon.[1][2][3][4][5][6]GenoV84 (talk) 11:38, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep although I personally think this theory about early Israelite religion is mistaken, it's an important strain in contemporary religious scholarship.--Jahaza (talk) 23:06, 13 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: I'm amazed this completely nonsensical nomination wasn't speedily kept under WP:SK1. There is no rationale for deletion at all; at best, the nominator makes a rationale for merging, which AfD is the incorrect venue to specifically request a merge (WP:PROMERGE is the correct venue). I can't even parse what the nominator is trying to say in any of their comments. This may be delving into WP:CIR territory. Curbon7 (talk) 23:38, 13 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
With regret keep but change its tone - I think that an article of this kind needs to be kept, but its tone is all wrong. It reads as if the position that it takes is generally accepted. It may be accepted among liberal theologians, but certainly not among conservatives. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:16, 14 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I will add to that: the subject is clearly contested between the orthodox and skeptics. This depends on how much credit can be given to the Hebrew Bible as a historical document. This is difficult, because the Bible is written from a monotheistic POV, seeking to play down polytheistic elements in the religion of Israel. This gets mixed up with issues as the the date of the Exodus and even whether there was an Exodus; with issues as to the date of Abraham and the succeeding patriarchs to whom Yahweh revealed himself; and with the extent to which Israel was primarily monotheistic as opposed to the extent to which pre-existing Canaanite religions crept into popular Israelite religion. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:30, 14 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia kowtows to mainstream WP:SCHOLARSHIP. So, the article does not cover the orthodox views, since such views do not belong to mainstream Bible scholars. tgeorgescu (talk) 21:01, 14 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I completely agree that the tone is wrong, but the article is a good starting point for expanding in the right direction.--Jahaza (talk) 21:32, 14 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I went ahead and tagged the article as unbalanced as a service to readers (and reminder to editors) that will remain after the AFD comes to an end.--Jahaza (talk) 21:39, 14 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep this article doesn't seem to be in such dire straits that it should be deleted, but maybe it can be improved in some way. Andrevan@ 22:34, 15 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose No valid reason offered for deletion, and the "dispute" cited is from an unreliable source. Dimadick (talk) 01:10, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wrong venue. Merging is an option, but a malformed AfD is not something I'd recommend as a starting point. SWinxy (talk) 02:38, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. No proven case for deletion or for merge. Why is this discussion still open? gidonb (talk) 04:12, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.