Nark, I read the thread that you posted and I am astonished that Jehovah had a Father! I never heard of El . My first thought is that He is the God to be worshiped since apparently, He was first before Jehovah.
El was the highest god of the Canaanite pantheon, the aged "father" of the other gods and creator of the world. He led the heavenly divine assembly from the tops of Mount Hermon (cf. Mount Olympus in Greek mythology). All the other gods were "sons of El" and one of them, Baal, was the god who directly ruled the land, rode the thunderclouds as his chariot and brought rain and storm to the land, and who gave kingship of Canaan's rulers. Baal ruled from the tops of his own mountain Zaphon (known to the Greeks as Cassius, where Zeus defeated the dragon), which lay in the north in Phoenicia. Baal demonstrated his might by proving his supremacy over the sea, by killing the dragon god (Yam, meaning "sea", who is related to the seven-headed sea dragon Lotan, who had earlier been defeated by the goddess Anat) who controlled the sea. Baal ruled at the permission of El and the kings of the Canaanite city-states claimed that they ruled at the permission of Baal.
El appears throughout the OT as one of the names of God, often in passages that preserve other bits of ancient Canaanite tradition, or in traditions associated with the early patriarchs. See, for instance, names like 'l-`lywn "El-Elyon" (Genesis14:18, 19, 20, 22, which has the associated title qnh-shmym-w-'rts "creator of heaven and earth" that frequently was used of El in Canaanite tradition; cf. also Psalm 78:35), 'l-r'y "El-Roi" (Genesis 16:13), 'l-shdy "El-Shaddai" (Genesis 17:1, 28:2, 35:11, 43:14, 48:3, 49:25, Exodus 6:2, etc.), 'l-`wlm "El-Olam" (Genesis 21:33), and other examples in Genesis 33:20, 35:7, 46:3, and 49:25. See also the temple of El-berith in Judges 9:46. El by itself occurs elsewhere as a divine name, particularly in texts heavily laden with traditional imagery (see "stars of El" at the "mountain of assembly" in Isaiah 14:13, the Phoenician king declaring himself to be El in the midst of seas in Ezekiel 28:2, etc.). Elyon also occurs frequently as a divine title by itself (see 2 Samuel 22:14, Psalm 97:2, Isaiah 14:14). In Numbers 24:16, Balaam uses Elyon and Shaddai as names parallel to El. The Phoenician mythology preserved by Philo of Byblos also mentions a god named Elioun that was regarded as "the highest".
Deuteronomy 32:8-9 is the only text in the OT where Yahweh is clearly distinguished from El (where the latter is called Elyon), and the picture is very much of the Canaanite type, which portrays Yahweh as one of the sons of Elyon, who was given Israel as his own land to rule over. Here Yahweh fills the same role that Baal fills in Canaanite tradition. The tuletary function of Yahweh in Israelite religion also means that when Israel had skirmishes over territory claimed by the neighboring nations, Yahweh would also confront the gods that assist these enemy nations. This old polytheistic notion of the different gods establishing the borders between the nations can be found in Judges 11:23-24 where Jephthah says:
"Now since Yahweh, the god of Israel, has driven the Amorites out before his people Israel, what right have you to take it over? Will you not take what your god Chemosh gives you? Likewise, whatever Yahweh our God has given us, we will possess" (Judges 11:23-24).
Thus, when Moab was defeated in war, the Israelites said that "Chemosh goes into exile" (Jeremiah 48:7), while the Moabites viewed their own political fortunes as dictated by their god Chemosh as well: "Omri was the king of Israel, and he oppressed Moab for many days, for Chemosh was angry with his own land ... And Chemosh said to me, 'Go take Nebo from Israel!' And I went in the night and fought against it from the break of dawn until noon, and I took it, and I killed its own population, and from there I took the vessels of Yahweh and hauled them before theface of Chemosh" (King Mesha Stele, COS 2.23). Similarly, when Israel "serves gods that were no part of their heritage" (Deuteronomy 29:24-27), Yahweh becomes jealous that "they have forsaken me and worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Molech the god of the Ammonites" (1 Kings 11:33), instead of following the god allotted to their nation. That is also why Ezekiel and the other prophets explain Israel's destruction by the Assyrians and Judah's destruction by the Babylonians as the result of their religious "apostasy" -- by turning to the gods of other nations, Yahweh abandoned his political support and left them defenseless to the forces of the Assyrians and Babylonians, just as Chemosh let the Moabites lose to the Israelites in the King Mesha Stele because he "was angry with his own land".
In many texts of the OT, Yahweh fills the role that Baal had in Canaanite tradition. In fact, since Baal was merely a title meaning "Lord", Yahweh was frequently worshipped by the name Baal, a practice that Hosea objected to (see Hosea 2:18-19). Thus Yahweh ruled from the "recesses of Zaphon" (Isaiah 14:13-14; cf. "Baal-Zaphon" in Exodus 14:1, 9, Numbers 33:7), identified in some texts as Mount Zion itself (Psalm 48:1-3), who rode the clouds as his chariot and brought rain to the land (Deuteronomy 33:26, 2 Samuel 22:10-11, 14-15, Psalm 29:1-11, 68:5, 104:13-18, Isaiah 19:1, 30:23-25, Jeremiah 3:3, 5:24, 10:13, 14:4, 51:16, Zechariah 14:16-17, Amos 4:7, Malachi 3:10), who fought the sea dragons Rahab, Yam, and Leviathan and demonstrated his power over the sea (Exodus 15:8, Job 26:12-13, Psalm 74:12-15, 89:9-10, Isaiah 19:1, 27:1, 44:27, 51:9-10; notice how Isaiah 51:9-10 associates the splitting of the Red Sea with Yahweh's battle with the dragon Rahab, and Leviathan is the same name as Lotan in earlier Canaanite tradition), and that Israel's kings ruled at the consent of Yahweh (see 2 Samuel 7:13-14, Psalm 2:6-7, etc.). Much of the conflict over Baal in the pre-exilic period had to do with the introduction of a foreign Baal from Phoenicia, via religious reforms in the northern kingdom.
But in much of the OT, Yahweh has already been merged with El, such that El is just a title of Yahweh and Yahweh has all the functions of El, as the creator of the earth and as the head of the heavenly assembly. Passages like Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 mix together epithets and motifs that originally applied to one or the other. The Israelites who worshipped Asherah as the wife of Yahweh would have already conflated El with Yahweh since Asherah was the wife of El, not Baal, in Canaanite tradition. But even after strict monotheism arose in the exilic period, the old El-Baal dynamic still persisted in apocalyptic literature, as can be seen in the aged "Ancient of Days" (= El) conferral of kingship to the Son of Man figure who comes on the clouds (= Baal, Yahweh) in Daniel 7 and in the Book of Parables in 1 Enoch. As both of these sources were a direct influence on the NT, we can also see the same dynamic in the Father and Son relationship between God and Jesus Christ who receives the kingdom from his Father.
My bible does not have the "alone, all by himself" in it. Maybe my bible is missing some stuff. (NIV BIBLE in 90 days cover to cover).
I dunno, the online NIV says: "This is what the LORD says: 'Your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb, I am the LORD, who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself".