ABSTRACT
Since A. Alt’s famous essay on the “God of the Fathers”,1 much has been said about the religion of the patriarchs as a phase of Israelite religion belonging to the pre-settlement period. It began a discussion about the continuity or discontinuity between such a nomadic form of religion as Alt proposed and that of the Canaanite El religion of the land of Palestine, as well as its relationship to the Yahwism of Moses.2 Now I do not wish to review here the history of the discussion or the various critiques and qualifi cations that have been made on Alt’s original thesis. Instead, I want to focus on certain points in the discussion that still play a prominent role in any attempt to reconstruct a patriarchal religion, namely, those which concern the ’ēl epithets and the closely related references to sacred trees, sacred stones and altars.
