In order to examine the potential mobile social origins of YHWH and Ahura Mazda, it is useful to understand some of the terminology used in such investigations. Following Frachetti, this dissertation uses the phrase “mobile pastoralism” to describe various social and economic strategies that belong to a category that is primarily defined by “mobility.” Historically, societies in this category have stood out in stark contrast to “settled” societies that are often associated with agricultural modes of food production. Like categories of “religions deemed monotheistic” and “religions deemed polytheistic” the differences between categories of “mobile pastoralism” and “settled agriculturalism” are more complex than a simple (and artificial) contrast between modes of food production. In Pastoralists, Philip Carl Salzman writes, 

[M]any anthropologists have, over the past decades, found it convenient to disaggregate analytically the two main elements of the term nomad: (1) raising livestock on natural pasture, and (2) moving from place to place. The current convention is to use pastoralism to refer to the raising of livestock on nature pasture and nomadism to refer to moving from place to place. This disaggregation allows scholars to acknowledge and investigate various subsistence activities undertaken by mobile societies, including small-scale agriculture, hunting/fishing, gathering, and herding. Interestingly, Salzman notes that the etymology of the word “nomad” from Greek, through Latin, to English derives, ultimately, from the same meaning as “pastoralism.¹

Salzman’s comments point to the historical association of pastoralism and mobility as well as an understanding that these activities are undertaken by, and define, various societies that can be grouped into a common category. Salzman writes, “[The] reference in the OED definition to ‘a race or tribe’ (admittedly outmoded terminology) clearly points to nomadism as, in some sense, a collective activity, participated in by a community larger than the individual household.”² This is particularly cogent to the current investigation, as this dissertation is concerned with social and religious developments at the scale of society. 

Scale seems to be key in distinguishing between subsistence activities undertaken by mobile and settled peoples. Salzman points out “[Nomadism] refers not to the rare or occasional displacement of people from one location to another, as in moving to a new house or migrating to a new community or country; rather, it refers to the regular, repeated, and frequent displacement of household and home base and community.”³ If mobility or settlement could be quantified, Salzman’s observation might suggest that the “amount” of mobility or settlement defines the social categories of “mobile pastoralism” or “settled agriculturalism.” It seems that the same can be said for describing the “pastoralism” of mobile societies as somehow “more” than the same activities undertaken by settled societies. Salzman writes, “Pastoralism may be extremely important in a community or society, but it would be misleading to reduce the nature of that society to pastoralism. Similarly, there are many agricultural and even industrial societies in which pastoralism is very important. Cattle herding in the American West and the pampas of Argentina is integral to the economies and diets of those countries, and India, which has the largest population of cattle in the world, most of it nourished on so-called natural pasture, depends upon cattle for dairy products, fertilizer, and traction for plowing.”⁴ This points to the significance not merely of the “amount” of pastoralism invested in by a society, but the “percentage” of subsistence activities taken up by this mode of food production. Applying this insight to mobility, it seems reasonable to follow Salzman’s notion that the extent of the population involved, and the percentage of time and effort invested, in movementidentify these societies as fundamentally different from settled “civilizations.” These insights are particularly useful in differentiating between categories, like those to which different religions belong, that have long been assumed to be more complex than previously described.

The last chapter pointed to the historical dominance of narratives of differentiations, “incompatibility,” and “Otherness,” building blocks apparently integral to religions deemed monotheistic, in discourse on “monotheism” and “polytheism” in and outside of the academy. Interestingly, a similar bias can be identified with regard to scholarship regarding mobile pastoralist societies into the 21^stcentury: the lenses through which these peoples are viewed, recorded, reported, and analyzed stem from settled agriculturalist perspectives. The numeric dominance of settled agriculturalist populations around the globe suggests a virtual inevitability of this situation. Recall Redford’s note regarding Egyptian reports of “Shasu” as early as the middle of the 3^rdmillennium BCE in which this term applied to all of “those ‘wanderers’ the Egyptians habitually came into contact with in the north, and rapidly became a term with societal implications.”⁵ Redford’s explanation points to the ongoing difficulty of rendering mobile societies in terms authentic to the self-identification and experiences of insiders. This is cogent to the present investigation because this dissertation, like the sources engaged in this chapter, is the product of a settled social context.