[Archaea]

And this intro is interesting:

One place to begin our story is with the work of Boyd Kirkland on
the development of the Mormon understanding of God.4 Kirkland argued
that the current Mormon convention of equating God the Father
with Elohim and God the Son with Jehovah (Yahweh), derived from the
122 DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT, VOL. 41, NO. 4
1916 First Presidency Statement drafted by James E. Talmage, matches
neither biblical nor nineteenth-century Mormon sources. This conclusion
is in general true canonically (i.e., for the biblical text as redacted in
its final form), and for a long time I assumed the same thing across the
board. I began to rethink this issue only when I was introduced to the
work of the independent Methodist scholar, Margaret Barker,5 which in
turn led me to a more recent trend in the scholarship of ancient Israel of
seeing the monotheism we associate with Israelite theology as coming
only at the end of a long line of development. Kirkland acknowledges
such a development to a certain extent, but he sees it as a simple movement from an earlier stage of monolatry to extreme monotheism. The
more recent trend in scholarship is to see the development as more profound, beginningbeginning with a polytheistic pantheon much like that of the Canaanites.
6
According to this view, at first the Hebrews worshipped a small pantheon
consisting of the high god El, his consort (scholar-speak for “wife”)
Asherah, their sons Yahweh and Baal, and the other (less important and
often unnamed) sons of the Gods. Just as the Mormon understanding of
God developed over time (as Kirkland documents), this early pluralistic
understanding of God also developed over time in the movement toward
monotheism. Baal was a very similar deity to Yahweh and therefore was excluded
from the pantheon very early to make way for Yahweh’s claims. El
was more complementary to Yahweh in his characteristics, so he and
Yahweh were simply merged into each other (resulting in the compound
name Yahweh Elohim, rendered “the LORD God” in the King James Version).
The other sons of the Gods became angels—still divine beings, but a
lower class of being than the dominant Yahweh.7
The understanding of Asherah changed over time in response to
these developments. At first She was the wife of El, the mother and procreator
of the Gods. As El was merged into Yahweh (around the tenth century
B.C.E.), Asherah came to be viewed as the consort, not of El, but of
Yahweh. For instance, an inscription at Kuntillet ’Ajrud in the northern
Sinai, fifty-five miles nothwest of Eilat, dating to roughly the ninth to
eighth centuries B.C.E., states: “I have blessed you by Yahweh of Samaria
and his Asherah” [brkt ’tkm lyhwh shmrn wl’shrth].8 Eventually, the functions
of Asherah were also absorbed into Yahweh’s; then, in an effort to
put a stop to any independent worship of Her, reformers linked Her polemically
to (the now thoroughly discredited) Baal, despite the fact that
Barney: How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven
such a linkage does not seem to have had any historical basis. This reform
movement against the worship of Asherah took place from the eighth to
the sixth centuries B.C.E.; and by the time of the conclusion of the Babylonian
Exile, the worship of Asherah as such had been stamped out.