Yahweh was an ancient Levantine deity that became the national god of ancient Israel and Judah. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age if not somewhat earlier, and in the oldest biblical literature he possesses attributes typically ascribed to weather and war deities, fructifying the land and leading the heavenly army against Israel's enemies. The early Israelites were polytheistic and worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal. In later centuries, El and Yahweh became conflated and El-linked epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, and other gods and goddesses such as Baal and Asherah were absorbed into Yahwist religion. Towards the end of the Babylonian captivity, the very existence of foreign gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator of the cosmos and the one true God of all the world, giving birth to Judaism, which has 14–15 million adherents today. During the Second Temple period, speaking the name of Yahweh in public became regarded as taboo, and Jews instead began to substitute other words, primarily adonai (, "my Lord"). In Roman times, following the Siege of Jerusalem and destruction of its Temple, in , the original pronunciation of the god's name was forgotten entirely. Yahweh is also invoked in Papyrus Amherst 63, and in Jewish or Jewish-influenced Greco-Egyptian magical texts from the 1st to 5th century CE. Name The god's name was written in paleo-Hebrew as 𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄 ( in block script), transliterated as YHWH; modern scholarship has reached consensus to transcribe this as Yahweh. The shortened forms "Yeho-" and "Yo-" appear in personal names and in phrases such as "Hallelujah!" The sacrality of the name, as well as the Commandment against "taking the name 'in vain'", led to increasingly strict prohibitions on speaking or pronouncing the term in writing. Rabbinic sources suggest that, by the Second Temple period, the name of God was pronounced only once a year, by the high priest, on the Day of Atonement. History Periods Philip King and Lawrence Stager place the history of Yahweh into the following periods: Late Bronze: 1550–1200 BCE Iron Age I: 1200–1000 BCE Iron Age II: 1000–586 BCE Neo-Babylonian: 586–539 BCE Persian: 539–332 BCE Other academic terms often used include First Temple period, from the construction of the Temple in 957 BCE