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Hmmm yes okay so here we have the most audacious reference sheet I've ever drawn: the big G man Himself. I definitely broke at least three of the Ten Commandments in the course of writing and building my D&D campaign, but oh well I'm Heathen so I'm not too hung up on it lol. Since Yahweh is considered to be the one true god by a little over half the entire world's population in some form or another, I'm willing to bet you know most of the stories about Him already. It's arguable that more ink and blood has been spilt over the origins and nature of this god than any other entity in all of history or mythology. Most of us when we just use the word "God" in passing, we refer to this one found in the Hebrew Bible. As such, summarizing the historical context and His characterization is going to be, to put it lightly, an absolute pain in the ass, and deserves much more time than some anthropology nerd on DeviantArt can expend in a drawing description. But alright, let's strap in, and I will do my best to educate in the most scholarly and respectful manner I can, and I guess… well… pray to God that the Internet will go easy on me.

For starters, "Yahweh" is just the closest academic approximation for how the name is pronounced. In Hebrew, a language that has no vowels, it is rendered as "YHWH", and is considered by most believers to be ineffable outside of a scholarly context. The name is potentially attested as early as the 14th century BCE on an Egyptian stele carved during the reign of Amenhotep III, which lists the "Shasu of Yhw" among the Pharaoh's conquered enemies. The Shasu were Semitic nomads hailing from the lands of Edom and Midian on the northernmost border of what we would today identify as the Arabian Peninsula. This actually lines up quite nicely with the narrative in the Book of Exodus where Moses is incorporated into his culture from these peoples, who then bring the worship of Yahweh to the land of Israel. Indeed, the very etymology of the divine name seems to roughly correlate to a meaning of "the one that is", which may or may not be echoed in the famous declaration in Exodus: "I Am that I Am." While evidence for the historical Exodus is lacking, and I tend to follow the camp that it's an exaggerated legend of real events vaguely remembered by the priestly class who descended from this migration, it seems reasonable to assume this is the historical path of the Yahweh cult in the mid Bronze Age. The historical Exodus is a completely different discussion for another time though, so moving on.

Based on Egyptian accounts of the Shasu, and the imagery often associated with Yahweh in the Bible, especially Exodus, it seems that He was broadly a patron of raiders with associations with violent storms. You'll often see online blurbs gloss this as saying Yahweh was "a storm god" or "a war god", but I feel like wording it this way assigns a very Hellenistic rigidly elemental viewpoint to a culture which did not really view their divinities this way. He was not a "storm god", but His primary manifestation was the powerful raging storms which often cause deadly flash flooding in the region even to this day. When it's the 14th century BCE and you spend your whole life living in the desert, it's hard not to view that as anything else but the wrath of God. This actually put Yahweh in direct competition with the primary storm god of the wider Canaanite peoples: Ba'al. Canaanite mythology is mostly lost to the sands, but we get small windows from the Hebrew Bible itself and from the vast royal libraries unearthed in Ugarit. Ba'al was said to be in a cyclic conflict with Mot, the god of death, representing the natural framework of a desert culture heavily dependent on seasonal rains to keep their civilization afloat. We see Israelite resistance to the cult of Ba'al very strongly in the Hebrew Bible, most notably in the account of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel.

Another interesting connection the Bible reveals with its Canaanite forebearers is the passage in Deuteronomy which pretty clearly states that "El", which in modern Hebrew is considered another name for God but originally referred to a specific deity who was chief of the entire pantheon, divided the earth among his 70 sons, one of whom was Yahweh, who received the land of Israel. Some scholars speculate that Yahweh was a local derivative of El, but this seems unlikely. It makes much more sense that the attributes of El as a wise grandfatherly creator god were transplanted onto Yahweh by the ancient Israelites as the move to monotheism in the 1st millennium BCE slowly evolved. To portray a supreme divine ruler of the universe, the attributes of El were simply what the people and culture of the time expected that to look like, so that's how they began to portray their former patron of raiding and warriors. Indeed, since the word "el" does literally just mean "god" in general, the assimilation was actually quite easy without turning into heresy. The plural "elohim" ("gods") is used frequently in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible (written roughly in the 8th century BCE), though today this is again recontextualized to be just another singular name for God. Even El's consort, the goddess Athirat, is transformed into Yahweh's consort Asherah. This is a weird linguistic trick implementing the vowel pattern from the Hebrew word for "shame" (bosheth) to discourage her worship within the cult of Yahweh. This same stunt turns Ba'al Zebul into Ba'al Zebub, a mutation which would eventually turn the storm god into the demon Beelzebub in later literature.

The history of the cult of Yahweh becomes much clearer by the 7th century BCE, because well this is when the majority of the modern Bible began to be written. Deuteronomy was written by the priestly class under king Josiah traditionally in 622 BCE, coinciding with the king's crackdown on the worship of other Canaanite gods. The people were likely what we would describe as "monolatric", believing that other gods exist but that only one is worthy of worship. We don't begin to see strict monotheism until the post-Exilic period following the cultural nightmare that was the Babylonian destruction of Solomon's Temple in 587 BCE. This transition likely came about from the influence of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, who liberated the Jews from Babylon in 539 BCE. In the books of the Bible written after this period, we see clear parallels from the ancient Persian monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, and it may be that this same influence spawned the apocalyptic genre that eventually gave rise to Christianity, but again that's another story for another day. Since then, the cult of Yahweh has exploded from its origins as a minor tribal religion in the middle-of-nowhere desert to the dominant religion of the entire planet, mostly thanks to the rise of Christianity and Islam. There is obviously way more ground to cover with that, but I think that's as good a place as any to put a pin in it and just talk about my damned colored pencil drawing already-

Design notes, obviously not very many ancient depictions of God out there. Thou shalt not make a graven image, after all. There's one famous coin from the Persian period depicting Yahweh on His winged throne, and it pretty much matches what we expect the silhouette of God to look like in our modern age. Big bearded man in the sky. But this is God Himself, I wanted my version to stand out from the common image you see in cartoons. I played around with the layering, mixing different traditional Jewish dress with a more ancient Mesopotamian wing looking pattern. The baubles on His chest are a nod to the Tree of Life from Kabbalah, which is more complicated than internet gurus will try to pass it off as but, again, story for another day. Interestingly enough, texts of Kabbalah do actually describe the exact measurements and proportions of the body of God. Apparently God is this cartoon space alien looking thing, which I made the creative decision not to draw because even if it's accurate, it's a bit too far removed from our classic stereotype of God I think for people to click with. The rose on His belt is actually a nod to Dante's Paradiso, which just gets trippy as hell… er… heaven towards the end. The flaming sword is a pretty standard image associated with the Hebrew God, and I'm not gonna lie, I want one now. I settled on a sort of artistic frankenstein of typical Bronze Age swords, Egyptian weapon handles, and just a tiny pinch of the Sword of Goujian for flavor. I think it looks gnarly as all get out.

Overall, I'm actually quite happy with this draft. It may not be for me, but if I die and found that this is in fact the one true god, I like to think he would look like this. You know, as long as my eyes don't burn out of my skull like in the penultimate piece of biblical media: Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean those guys were Nazis, so at least they had it coming.

Description
Hmmm yes okay so here we have the most audacious reference sheet I've ever drawn: the big G man Himself. I definitely broke at least three of the Ten Commandments in the course of writing and building my D&D campaign, but oh well I'm Heathen so I'm not too hung up on it lol. Since Yahweh is considered to be the one true god by a little over half the entire world's population in some form or another, I'm willing to bet you know most of the stories about Him already. It's arguable that more ink and blood has been spilt over the origins and nature of this god than any other entity in all of history or mythology. Most of us when we just use the word "God" in passing, we refer to this one found in the Hebrew Bible. As such, summarizing the historical context and His characterization is going to be, to put it lightly, an absolute pain in the ass, and deserves much more time than some anthropology nerd on DeviantArt can expend in a drawing description. But alright, let's strap in, and I will do my best to educate in the most scholarly and respectful manner I can, and I guess… well… pray to God that the Internet will go easy on me.

For starters, "Yahweh" is just the closest academic approximation for how the name is pronounced. In Hebrew, a language that has no vowels, it is rendered as "YHWH", and is considered by most believers to be ineffable outside of a scholarly context. The name is potentially attested as early as the 14th century BCE on an Egyptian stele carved during the reign of Amenhotep III, which lists the "Shasu of Yhw" among the Pharaoh's conquered enemies. The Shasu were Semitic nomads hailing from the lands of Edom and Midian on the northernmost border of what we would today identify as the Arabian Peninsula. This actually lines up quite nicely with the narrative in the Book of Exodus where Moses is incorporated into his culture from these peoples, who then bring the worship of Yahweh to the land of Israel. Indeed, the very etymology of the divine name seems to roughly correlate to a meaning of "the one that is", which may or may not be echoed in the famous declaration in Exodus: "I Am that I Am." While evidence for the historical Exodus is lacking, and I tend to follow the camp that it's an exaggerated legend of real events vaguely remembered by the priestly class who descended from this migration, it seems reasonable to assume this is the historical path of the Yahweh cult in the mid Bronze Age. The historical Exodus is a completely different discussion for another time though, so moving on.

Based on Egyptian accounts of the Shasu, and the imagery often associated with Yahweh in the Bible, especially Exodus, it seems that He was broadly a patron of raiders with associations with violent storms. You'll often see online blurbs gloss this as saying Yahweh was "a storm god" or "a war god", but I feel like wording it this way assigns a very Hellenistic rigidly elemental viewpoint to a culture which did not really view their divinities this way. He was not a "storm god", but His primary manifestation was the powerful raging storms which often cause deadly flash flooding in the region even to this day. When it's the 14th century BCE and you spend your whole life living in the desert, it's hard not to view that as anything else but the wrath of God. This actually put Yahweh in direct competition with the primary storm god of the wider Canaanite peoples: Ba'al. Canaanite mythology is mostly lost to the sands, but we get small windows from the Hebrew Bible itself and from the vast royal libraries unearthed in Ugarit. Ba'al was said to be in a cyclic conflict with Mot, the god of death, representing the natural framework of a desert culture heavily dependent on seasonal rains to keep their civilization afloat. We see Israelite resistance to the cult of Ba'al very strongly in the Hebrew Bible, most notably in the account of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel.

Another interesting connection the Bible reveals with its Canaanite forebearers is the passage in Deuteronomy which pretty clearly states that "El", which in modern Hebrew is considered another name for God but originally referred to a specific deity who was chief of the entire pantheon, divided the earth among his 70 sons, one of whom was Yahweh, who received the land of Israel. Some scholars speculate that Yahweh was a local derivative of El, but this seems unlikely. It makes much more sense that the attributes of El as a wise grandfatherly creator god were transplanted onto Yahweh by the ancient Israelites as the move to monotheism in the 1st millennium BCE slowly evolved. To portray a supreme divine ruler of the universe, the attributes of El were simply what the people and culture of the time expected that to look like, so that's how they began to portray their former patron of raiding and warriors. Indeed, since the word "el" does literally just mean "god" in general, the assimilation was actually quite easy without turning into heresy. The plural "elohim" ("gods") is used frequently in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible (written roughly in the 8th century BCE), though today this is again recontextualized to be just another singular name for God. Even El's consort, the goddess Athirat, is transformed into Yahweh's consort Asherah. This is a weird linguistic trick implementing the vowel pattern from the Hebrew word for "shame" (bosheth) to discourage her worship within the cult of Yahweh. This same stunt turns Ba'al Zebul into Ba'al Zebub, a mutation which would eventually turn the storm god into the demon Beelzebub in later literature.

The history of the cult of Yahweh becomes much clearer by the 7th century BCE, because well this is when the majority of the modern Bible began to be written. Deuteronomy was written by the priestly class under king Josiah traditionally in 622 BCE, coinciding with the king's crackdown on the worship of other Canaanite gods. The people were likely what we would describe as "monolatric", believing that other gods exist but that only one is worthy of worship. We don't begin to see strict monotheism until the post-Exilic period following the cultural nightmare that was the Babylonian destruction of Solomon's Temple in 587 BCE. This transition likely came about from the influence of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, who liberated the Jews from Babylon in 539 BCE. In the books of the Bible written after this period, we see clear parallels from the ancient Persian monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, and it may be that this same influence spawned the apocalyptic genre that eventually gave rise to Christianity, but again that's another story for another day. Since then, the cult of Yahweh has exploded from its origins as a minor tribal religion in the middle-of-nowhere desert to the dominant religion of the entire planet, mostly thanks to the rise of Christianity and Islam. There is obviously way more ground to cover with that, but I think that's as good a place as any to put a pin in it and just talk about my damned colored pencil drawing already-

Design notes, obviously not very many ancient depictions of God out there. Thou shalt not make a graven image, after all. There's one famous coin from the Persian period depicting Yahweh on His winged throne, and it pretty much matches what we expect the silhouette of God to look like in our modern age. Big bearded man in the sky. But this is God Himself, I wanted my version to stand out from the common image you see in cartoons. I played around with the layering, mixing different traditional Jewish dress with a more ancient Mesopotamian wing looking pattern. The baubles on His chest are a nod to the Tree of Life from Kabbalah, which is more complicated than internet gurus will try to pass it off as but, again, story for another day. Interestingly enough, texts of Kabbalah do actually describe the exact measurements and proportions of the body of God. Apparently God is this cartoon space alien looking thing, which I made the creative decision not to draw because even if it's accurate, it's a bit too far removed from our classic stereotype of God I think for people to click with. The rose on His belt is actually a nod to Dante's Paradiso, which just gets trippy as hell… er… heaven towards the end. The flaming sword is a pretty standard image associated with the Hebrew God, and I'm not gonna lie, I want one now. I settled on a sort of artistic frankenstein of typical Bronze Age swords, Egyptian weapon handles, and just a tiny pinch of the Sword of Goujian for flavor. I think it looks gnarly as all get out.

Overall, I'm actually quite happy with this draft. It may not be for me, but if I die and found that this is in fact the one true god, I like to think he would look like this. You know, as long as my eyes don't burn out of my skull like in the penultimate piece of biblical media: Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean those guys were Nazis, so at least they had it coming.