National god in the context of Kingdom of Ma'in

In Judaism, God has been conceived in a variety of ways. Traditionally, Judaism holds that God—that is, the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the national god of the Israelites—delivered them from slavery in Egypt, and gave them the Law of Moses at Mount Sinai as described in the Torah. Jews believe in a monotheistic conception of God ("God is one"), characterized by both transcendence (independence from, and separation from, the material universe) and immanence (active involvement in the material universe).

God is seen as unique and perfect, free from all faults, and is believed to be omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and unlimited in all attributes, with no partner or equal, serving as the sole creator of everything in existence. In Judaism, God is never portrayed in any image. The names of God used most often in the Hebrew Bible are the un-pronounced Tetragrammaton (Hebrew: יהוה, romanized: YHWH) and Elohim. Other names used to refer to God in traditional Judaism include Adonai, El-Elyon, El Shaddai, and Shekhinah.

Amun was a major ancient Egyptian deity who appears as a member of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad. Amun was attested from the Old Kingdom together with his wife Amunet. His oracle in Siwa Oasis, located in Western Egypt near the Libyan Desert, remained the only oracle of Amun throughout. With the 11th Dynasty (c. 21st century BC), Amun rose to the position of patron deity of Thebes by replacing Montu.

Initially possibly one of eight deities in the Hermapolite creation myth, his worship expanded. After the rebellion of Thebes against the Hyksos and with the rule of Ahmose I (16th century BC), Amun acquired national importance, expressed in his fusion with the Sun god, Ra, as Amun-Ra (alternatively spelled Amon-Ra or Amun-Re). On his own, he was also thought to be the king of the gods.

Ma'in (Minaean: 𐩣𐩲𐩬; Arabic: معين, romanized: Maʿīn) was an ancient South Arabian kingdom in modern-day Yemen. It was located along the strip of desert called Ṣayhad by medieval Arab geographers, which is now known as Ramlat al-Sab'atayn. Wadd was the national god of Ma'in. The spoken language was Minaic. The kingdom appears in the historical record in the 8th century BCE, and transition from a city-state to kingdom in the last quarter of the 7th century BCE. The date of the end of Ma'in is heavily disputed, but the most popular hypothesis places its demise in the 1st century CE.

The Minaean people were one of four ancient Yemeni groups mentioned by Eratosthenes. The others were the Sabaeans, Ḥaḑramites and Qatabānians. Each of these had regional kingdoms in ancient Yemen, with the Minaeans in the north-west (in Wādī al-Jawf), the Sabaeans to the south-east of them, the Qatabānians to the south-east of the Sabaeans, and the Ḥaḑramites further east still.

Yahwism, also known as the Israelite religion, was the ancient Semitic religion of ancient Israel and Judah and the ethnic religion of the Israelites. The Israelite religion was a derivative of the Canaanite religion and a polytheistic religion that had a pantheon with various gods and goddesses. The primary deity of the religion and the head of the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. The majority of scholars hold that the goddess Asherah was the consort of Yahweh, though some scholars disagree. Following this divine duo were second-tier gods and goddesses, such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, with each having priests and prophets, and numbering royalty among their devotees.

The practices of Yahwism included festivals, ritual sacrifices, vow-making, private rituals, and the religious adjudication of legal disputes. For most of its history, the Temple in Jerusalem was not the sole or central place of worship dedicated to Yahweh, with many locations throughout Israel, Judah, and Samaria. However, it was still significant to the Israelite king, who effectively led the national religion as the worldly viceroy of the national god.

Yahweh was an ancient Semitic deity of weather and war in the southeastern ancient Levant, and the national god of the iron age kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Although there is no clear consensus regarding the geographical origins of the deity, scholars generally hold that Yahweh was associated with Seir, Edom, Paran, and Teman, and later with Canaan. The worship of the deity goes back to at least the early Iron Age and apparently to the late Bronze Age.

In the oldest biblical texts, Yahweh possesses attributes that were typically ascribed to deities of weather and war, fructifying the Land of Israel and leading a heavenly army against the enemies of the Israelites. The early Israelites engaged in polytheistic practices that were common across ancient Semitic religion, because the Israelite religion was a derivative of the Canaanite religion and included a variety of deities from it, including El, Asherah, and Baal. Initially a lesser deity among the Canaanite pantheon, Yahweh became conflated with El in later centuries, taking his place as the head of the pantheon in the Israelite religion. El's consort Asherah became associated with Yahweh, and El-linked epithets, such as ʾĒl Šadday (אֵל שַׁדַּי‎), came to be applied to him alone. Characteristics of other deities, such as Asherah and Baal, were also selectively absorbed in conceptions of Yahweh.

Milcom or Milkom (Ammonite: 𐤌𐤋𐤊𐤌 *Mīlkām; Hebrew: מִלְכֹּם Mīlkōm) was the name of either the national god, or a popular god, of the Ammonites. He is attested in the Hebrew Bible and in archaeological finds from the former territory of Ammon. His connections to other deities with similar names attested in the Bible and archaeologically are debated, as well as his relationship to the Canaanite supreme deity El, or the putative deity Moloch.

According to the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran, the golden calf (Hebrew: עֵגֶל הַזָּהָב, romanized: ʿēḡel hazzāhāḇ) was a cult image made by the Israelites when Moses went up to Mount Sinai. In Hebrew, the incident is known as "the sin of the calf" (Hebrew: חֵטְא הָעֵגֶל, romanized: ḥēṭəʾ hāʿēḡel). It is first mentioned in the Book of Exodus.

Bull worship was common in many cultures. In Egypt, whence according to the Exodus narrative, the Israelites had recently come, the bull-god Apis was a comparable object of worship, which some believe the Hebrews were reviving in the wilderness. Alternatively, some believe Yahweh, the national god of the Israelites, was associated with or pictured as a sacred bull through the process of religious assimilation and syncretism. Among the Canaanites, some of whom would become the Israelites, the bull was widely worshipped as the sacred bull and the creature of El.

Enlil, later known as Elil and Ellil, is an ancient Mesopotamian god associated with wind, air, earth, and storms. He is first attested as the chief deity of the Sumerian pantheon, but he was later worshipped by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hurrians. Enlil's primary center of worship was the Ekur temple in the city of Nippur, which was believed to have been built by Enlil himself and was regarded as the "mooring-rope" of heaven and earth. He is also sometimes referred to in Sumerian texts as Nunamnir. According to one Sumerian hymn, Enlil himself was so holy that not even the other gods could look upon him. Enlil rose to prominence during the twenty-fourth century BC with the rise of Nippur. His cult fell into decline after Nippur was sacked by the Elamites in 1230 BC and he was eventually supplanted as the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon by the Babylonian national god Marduk.

Enlil plays a vital role in the ancient near eastern cosmology; he separates An (heaven) from Ki (earth), thus making the world habitable for humans. In the Sumerian flood myth Eridu Genesis, Enlil rewards Ziusudra with immortality for having survived the flood and, in the Babylonian flood myth, Enlil is the cause of the flood himself, having sent the flood to exterminate the human race, who made too much noise and prevented him from sleeping; the cuneiform tablets of Atra-Hasis report on this connections in a comparatively well-preserved state. The myth of Enlil and Ninlil is about Enlil's serial seduction of the goddess Ninlil in various guises, resulting in the conception of the moon-god Nanna and the Underworld deities Nergal, Ninazu, and Enbilulu. Enlil was regarded as the inventor of the mattock and the patron of agriculture. Enlil also features prominently in several myths involving his son Ninurta, including Anzû and the Tablet of Destinies and Lugale.

Wadd (Arabic: وَدّ) (Ancient South Arabian script: 𐩥𐩵) or Ved, if translated to English, was the national god of the Kingdom of Ma'in, inhabited by the Minaean peoples, in modern-day South Arabia.

Wadd is mentioned once in the Quran as part of a list of five false gods worshipped by the people of Noah. In the Islamic era, it was believed that Wadd was worshipped by a tribe known as the Banu Kalb, with a central idol being stored at the city of Dumat al-Jandal, which is in northwestern Arabia. Accordingly, this idol is said to have been destroyed by the early general Khalid ibn al-Walid.

Teutates (spelled variously Toutatis, Totatis, Totates) is a Celtic god attested in literary and epigraphic sources. His name, which is derived from a proto-Celtic word meaning "tribe", suggests he was a tribal deity.

The Roman poet Lucan's epic Pharsalia mentions Teutates, Esus, and Taranis as gods to whom the Gauls sacrificed humans. This rare mention of Celtic gods under their native names in a Latin text has been the subject of much comment. Almost as often commented on are the scholia to Lucan's poem (early medieval, but relying on earlier sources) which tell us the nature of these sacrifices: in particular, that victims of Teutates were immersed headfirst into a small barrel and drowned. This sacrifice has been compared with a poorly understood ritual depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron, some motifs in Irish mythology, and the death of the bog body known as the Lindow Man.

Vietnamese folk religion (Vietnamese: tín ngưỡng dân gian Việt Nam) is a group of spiritual beliefs and practices adhered to by the Vietnamese people. About 86% of the population in Vietnam are reported irreligious, but many among them practice folk religious traditions.

Vietnamese folk religion is not an organized religious system, but a set of local worship traditions devoted to the "thần", a term which can be translated as "spirits", "gods" or with the more exhaustive locution "generative powers". These gods can be nature deities or national, community or kinship tutelary deities or ancestral gods who are often deified heroic persons. Vietnamese mythology preserves narratives telling of the actions of many of the cosmic gods and cultural heroes. Ancestral veneration is practiced by most Vietnamese to varying degrees.

Qos (Edomite: 𐤒𐤅‬‬𐤎 Qāws, later Qôs; Hebrew: קוֹס‎ Qōs) also Qaus (Akkadian: 𒋡𒍑 Qa-uš), or Koze (Greek: Kωζαι Kōzai) was the national god of the Edomites. He was the Idumean structural parallel to Yahweh. The name occurs only twice in the Old Testament (if a possible allusion in an otherwise corrupted text in the Book of Proverbs is excluded) in the Book of Ezra and Nehemiah as an element in a personal name, Barqos ("son of Qos"), referring to the 'father' of a family or clan of perhaps Edomite/Idumaean nəṯīnīm or temple helpers returning from the Babylonian exile. Outside the Bible, Qos is frequently invoked in names found on documents recovered from excavations in Elephantine, where a mixed population of Arabs, Jews and Idumeans lived under the protection of a Persian-Mesopotamian garrison.