what happened to the old gods, the ones that no one believes in anymore?

[Humanist_Activist]

19. Oh yes they do, and to make it more confusing...

sorry, I love mythology, so I read up on this stuff. Anyways, the word El was the name of a single god, the head of the Canaanite Pantheon, Yahweh was a God of War, El was the leader, more or less. Its very complicated, and changed from time period to time period, but this is the simplified version. El, being head god, eventually his name devolved to just mean "god" as a generic term. Hence part of the confusion. El Shaddai was Abraham's god, but never really given a proper name(probably was El proper, but how are we to know?) Yahweh is a proper name, but to add to the confusion, in many modern Bibles, its translated to "the Lord" or "Almighty", which leads to some awkward translations.

Yahweh(Jehovah), as I said, was a god of war, a useful god to worship during as portrayed in the Exodus story, when he entered the picture, so to speak, in the Bible.

Note the term El, which is now generic explains the names of most of the angels, which end with "el" which translates in their names to "of god", such as power of god, messenger of god, and so on and so forth.

The mental gymnastics seem to exist only in the monotheistic religions, most polytheistic religions were and are used to mutable and changing gods, gods merge, divide, have different aspects, etc. Hence the reason for so many hyphens, in a manner of speaking, in a lot of gods that were worshiped, particularly Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods, they were combined and divided many times in history, add in the gods of Gaul and of other surrounding regions of the pre-Christian Roman empire and it gets confusing as hell.