How the Jews invented God and Made Him Great

YHWH condemning false worship?.........are you claiming this is God acknowledging that Asherah WAS the queen of heaven........he was condemning Israel for the worship of false gods.......


iike you, Israel chose to pretend Asherah really was the queen of heaven....Jer 44

what did God do to Israel for its disobedience?.....
Jeremiah 44

He took the good figs to Babylon.. the cream of the crop so to speak.
 
The Book of Jeremiah, written circa 628 BC, refers to Asherah when it uses the title "Queen of Heaven" in Jeremiah 7:16-18 and Jeremiah 44:17-19, 25.

There are references to the worship of numerous gods throughout Kings: Solomon builds temples to many gods and Josiah is reported as cutting down the statues of Asherah in the temple Solomon built for Yahweh (2 Kings 23:14). Josiah's grandfather Manasseh had erected one such statue (2 Kings 21:7

Duw, Kudzu, I can't imagine how people can rush in to argue with you. You know your stuff!
 
Duw, Kudzu, I can't imagine how people can rush in to argue with you. You know your stuff!

I enjoy this study.. and I have had a thing for Palestine since I was a kid and my Sunday school class offered cheap 2 week trips every April.
 
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

They must have gotten something right......here we are some 5000 years later and you are still posting about it. :bigthink:
 
Duw, Kudzu, I can't imagine how people can rush in to argue with you. You know your stuff!

obviously you would be stupid enough to believe his lies.......he knows jack shit about anything but the drivel he can paste from an atheist web site........
 
There are two startling (at least to me) bits of information that I had never considered before. Its an easy read.

Are you really open-minded?

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.”

When the name "Israel" is first used, it appears that "el" was synonymous with the word god, and so implies nothing about who the Hebrews worshiped earlier. So, I see no logic in claiming that if the Hebrews worshiped Yhwhw from the start, the name would have been Israyahu. (Aside from Yhwhw, or any variant, isn't a formal name.) The rest of the post is likewise not compelling.
 
Are you really open-minded?



When the name "Israel" is first used, it appears that "el" was synonymous with the word god, and so implies nothing about who the Hebrews worshiped earlier. So, I see no logic in claiming that if the Hebrews worshiped Yhwhw from the start, the name would have been Israyahu. (Aside from Yhwhw, or any variant, isn't a formal name.) The rest of the post is likewise not compelling.

I think religion evolved drawing on beliefs and myths from surrounding cultures. Consider the meaning of Yam or Yamm in Yam Suf.
 
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