How the Jews invented God and Made Him Great

kudzu said:
There are two startling (at least to me) bits of information that I had never considered before. Its an easy read.

Excerpt:

The main source for investigating the history of God is, of course, the Bible itself.

When exactly the Jewish holy text reached its final form is unknown. Many scholars believe this happened sometime between the Babylonian exile, which began after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE (some 2600 years ago), and the subsequent periods of Persian and Hellenistic rule.

However, the redactors of the Bible were evidently working off older traditions, Römer says.

“Biblical texts are not direct historical sources. They reflect the ideas, the ideologies of their authors and of course of the historical context in which they were written,” Römer explains.

Still, he notes, “you can have memories of a distant past, sometimes in a very confusing way or in a very oriented way. But I think we can, and we must, use the biblical text not just as fictional texts but as texts that can tell us stories about the origins.”

What's in God's name

The first clue that the ancient Israelites worshipped gods other than the deity known as Yhwh lies in their very name. “Israel” is a theophoric name going back at least 3200 years, which includes and invokes the name of a protective deity.

Going by the name, the main god of the ancient Israelites was not Yhwh, but El, the chief deity in the Canaanite pantheon, who was worshipped throughout the Levant.

In other words, the name "Israel" is probably older than the veneration of Yhwh by this group called Israel, Römer says. “The first tutelary deity they were worshipping was El, otherwise their name would have been Israyahu.”

The Bible appears to address this early worship of El in Exodus 6:3, when God tells Moses that he “appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai (today translated as "God Almighty") but was not known to them by my name Yhwh.”

In fact, it seems that the ancient Israelites weren't even the first to worship Yhwh – they seem to have adopted Him from a mysterious, unknown tribe that lived somewhere in the deserts of the southern Levant and Arabia.

The god of the southern deserts

The first mention of the Israelite tribe itself is a victory stele erected around 1210 BCE by the pharaoh Mernetpah (sometimes called "the Israel stele"). These Israelites are described as a people inhabiting Canaan.

So how did this group of Canaanite El-worshippers come in contact with the cult of Yhwh?

The Bible is quite explicit about the geographical roots of the Yhwh deity, repeatedly linking his presence to the mountainous wilderness and the deserts of the southern Levant. Judges 5:4 says that Yhwh “went forth from Seir” and “marched out of the field of Edom.” Habbakuk 3:3 tells us that “God came from Teman,” specifically from Mount Paran.

All these regions and locations can be identified with the territory that ranges from the Sinai and Negev to northern Arabia.

Yhwh’s penchant for appearing in the biblical narrative on top of mountains and accompanied by dark clouds and thunder, are also typical attributes of a deity originating in the wilderness, possibly a god of storms and fertility.

Support for the theory that Yhwh originated in the deserts of Israel and Arabia can be found in Egyptian texts from the late second millennium, which list different tribes of nomads collectively called "Shasu" that populated this vast desert region.

One of these groups, which inhabits the Negev, is identified as the “Shasu Yhw(h).” This suggests that this group of nomads may have been the first to have the god of the Jews as its tutelary deity.

“It is profoundly difficult to sort through the haze of later layers in the Bible, but insofar as we can, this remains the most plausible hypothesis for the encounter of Israelites with the Yhwh cult,” says David Carr, professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

The many faces of god


How exactly the Shasu merged with the Israelites or introduced them to the cult of Yhwh is not known, but by the early centuries of the first millennium, he was clearly being worshipped in both the northern kingdom of Israel and its smaller, southern neighbor, the kingdom of Judah.

His name appears for the first time outside the Bible nearly 400 years after Merneptah, in the 9th-century BCE stele of Mesha, a Moabite king who boasts of defeating the king of Israel and “taking the vessels of Yhwh.”

continued

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology...ews-invented-god-and-made-him-great-1.5392677
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His consort was Asherah! Thanks
 
Phantasmal said:
His consort was Asherah! Thanks
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Early on.. yes. Asherah was God's consort. They have found 4,000 small clay icons to Asherah in Palestine so at some point in history women turned to Asherah in matters of childbirth and fertility. That tells me that religion evolved over time.
 
kudzu said:
Early on.. yes. Asherah was God's consort. They have found 4,000 small clay icons to Asherah in Palestine so at some point in history women turned to Asherah in matters of childbirth and fertility. That tells me that religion evolved over time.
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It’s why Christianity came up with Mary, the faithful missed their Goddess.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
more for the list of "things atheists make up"........
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Read your Bible..

These are examples of icons to Asherah found in Palestine.

pillarfigurines-300x200.jpg
 
kudzu said:
Defending what? The discussion is about the evolution of Judaism.
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no it isn't.......it is about what you and other atheists have made up.......it has nothing at all to do with Judaism......

there's as much truth in your posts about the Bible as there are in your claims of a home in Tripoli......I doubt you've ever been out of Kansas........
 
PostmodernProphet said:
no it isn't.......it is about what you and other atheists have made up.......it has nothing at all to do with Judaism......

there's as much truth in your posts about the Bible as there are in your claims of a home in Tripoli......I doubt you've ever been out of Kansas........
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Your life may be very small.. My father's house in Tripoli was across the street from the US embassy.

Pretty obvious you don't know much about the Bible or anything else.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
no it isn't.......it is about what you and other atheists have made up.......it has nothing at all to do with Judaism......

there's as much truth in your posts about the Bible as there are in your claims of a home in Tripoli......I doubt you've ever been out of Kansas........
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Your life may be very small.. My father's house in Tripoli was across the street from the US embassy.

Pretty obvious you don't know much about the Bible or anything else.
 
think of man as only having a verbal history ( most of mankinds time)


they end up loving and missing certain members of their tribe because when they passed all that knowledge was now gone.


they imagine that person not really gone but living up in the mountains with the mist or some such comforting idea.


then after a couple of generations of verbal history that whole memory is a myth


they become a god


then there are just to many gods to keep track of at some point


someone ends up squishing all the stories together




that is why humans imagine a human like god in the end


without a written language its hard to pass on knowledge with any accuracy
 
Jack said:
No. I understand 'religion' and 'gods' helped Ancient People understand the World around them.
I live in the 21st century and rely on Science to evaluate and examine the World around me.

I do think it is fun to read the stories of the Ancients. Cupid and his arrows, Zeus with his flowing beard, the Story of Achilles. I always liked the Sun God the best. Did you know that on a world-wide basis, he was the Most Popular?
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Jesus is LORD
 
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