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kudzu
05-03-2018, 07:25 AM
How the Jews Invented God, and Made Him Great

The God of the Old Testament started out as just one of many deities of the ancient Israelites. It took a traumatic crisis to make him into the all-powerful creator of the world.


Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in a single, omnipotent deity that created the heavens and earth. But if he was and is the only god, why would God need a name?

The Bible explicitly tells us that God has one, which indicates he had to be distinguished from other celestial beings, just like humans use names to identify different people.

What that name might be is another matter. The Jewish prohibition on speaking God’s name means that its correct pronunciation has been lost. All we know is that the Hebrew Bible spells it out as four consonants known as the Tetragrammaton – from the Greek for “four letters,” which are transliterated as Y-H-W-H.


The existence of a proper name for God is the first indication that the history of Yhwh and his worship by the Jews is a lot more complicated than many realize.


In gods we trusted

Modern biblical scholarship and archaeological discoveries in and around Israel show that the ancient Israelites did not always believe in a single, universal god. In fact, monotheism is a relatively recent concept, even amongst the People of the Book.

Decades of research into the birth and evolution of the Yhwh cult are summarized in “The Invention of God,” a recent book by Thomas Römer, a world-renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne. Römer, who held a series of conferences at Tel Aviv University last month, spoke to Haaretz about the subject.

continued

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-the-jews-invented-god-and-made-him-great-1.5392677


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 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.”

While Yhwh’s cult was certainly important in the early First Temple period, it was not exclusive.

“Jeremiah speaks about the many gods of Judah, which are as numerous as the streets of a town. There was certainly worship a female deity, Asherah, or the Queen of Heaven,” Römer told Haaretz. “There was certainly also the worship of the northern storm god Hadad (Baal).”


The plurality of deities was such that in an inscription by Sargon II, who completed the conquest of the kingdom of Israel in the late 8th century BCE, the Assyrian king mentioned that after capturing the capital Samaria, his troops brought back “the (statues of) gods in which (the Israelites) had put their trust.”

As the Yhwh cult evolved and spread, he was worshipped in temples across the land. Early 8th-century inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud probably refer to different gods and cultic centers by invoking “Yhwh of Samaria and his Asherah” and “Yhwh of Teman and his Asherah.” Only later, under the reign of King Josiah at the end of the 7th century BCE, would the Yhwh cult centralize worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.

Nor, in ancient Israel, was Yhwh the invisible deity that Jews have refrained from depicting for the last two millennia or so.

In the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea 8 and 1 Kings 12:26-29 relate, he was often worshipped in the form of a calf, as the god Baal was. (1 Kings 12:26-29 explains that Jeroboam made two calves, for the sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan, so the people could worship Yhwh there and wouldn’t have to go all the way to Jerusalem. Ergo, in northern Israel at least, the calves were meant to represent Yhwh.)

In Jerusalem and Judah, Römer says, Yhwh more frequently took the form of a sun god or a seated deity. Such depictions may have even continued after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile: a coin minted in Jerusalem during the Persian period shows a deity sitting on a wheeled throne and has been interpreted by some as a late anthropomorphic representation of Yhwh.

Römer even suspects that the Holy of Holies in the First Temple of Jerusalem, and other Judahite sanctuaries, hosted a statue of the god, based on Psalms and prophetic texts in the Bible that speak of being admitted in the presence of “the face of Yhwh.”


continued

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-the-jews-invented-god-and-made-him-great-1.5392677

kudzu
05-03-2018, 07:39 AM
This is a gilded statue of the god EL from Megiddo.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e1/f1/cb/e1f1cbbfa766c53286ff20cf105a458b.jpg

kudzu
05-03-2018, 09:23 AM
This explains the evolution to monotheism......

kudzu
05-03-2018, 02:59 PM
FYI...............

PostmodernProphet
05-03-2018, 03:02 PM
shared ignorance does not become knowledge....

kudzu
05-04-2018, 03:59 AM
shared ignorance does not become knowledge....

You should know....

PostmodernProphet
05-04-2018, 05:37 AM
You should know....

/shrugs......you're the one garnering thanks from the board's most notorious idiots......

kudzu
05-04-2018, 05:54 AM
/shrugs......you're the one garnering thanks from the board's most notorious idiots......

Can you say WHERE you went to Bible college?

PostmodernProphet
05-04-2018, 06:01 AM
Can you say WHERE you went to Bible college?

haven't I made it clear by now that my degree isn't from a Bible college?....while on the subject, is your degree in engineering like so many other people on the internet that fancy themselves to be experts on theology?.....

kudzu
05-04-2018, 06:26 AM
haven't I made it clear by now that my degree isn't from a Bible college?....while on the subject, is your degree in engineering like so many other people on the internet that fancy themselves to be experts on theology?.....

I just wondered if you had studies ancient history or archaeology or geology or even geography ?

No.. I am not an engineer.

Have you read Kramer's History Begins at Sumer?

PostmodernProphet
05-04-2018, 07:00 AM
I just wondered if you had studies ancient history or archaeology or geology or even geography ?

No.. I am not an engineer.

Have you read Kramer's History Begins at Sumer?

I was a history major and sociology major in undergrad before going on to law school......I have not paid much attention to archaelogy and for the life of me cannot imagine why you think geology is relevant........I am quite knowledgeable regarding geography.........no I haven't read Kramer....and I won't bother.....like most of your references here I expect it bears no relevance to the conversation.....you are an expert at linking sources which leave a facade of expertise while not actually having any bearing on the discussion.......

meanwhile, as I recall you have never studied theology, which actually IS a topic we are discussing.....

kudzu
05-07-2018, 07:05 PM
I was a history major and sociology major in undergrad before going on to law school......I have not paid much attention to archaelogy and for the life of me cannot imagine why you think geology is relevant........I am quite knowledgeable regarding geography.........no I haven't read Kramer....and I won't bother.....like most of your references here I expect it bears no relevance to the conversation.....you are an expert at linking sources which leave a facade of expertise while not actually having any bearing on the discussion.......

meanwhile, as I recall you have never studied theology, which actually IS a topic we are discussing.....

Have you read Devers?

William Dever, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, has investigated the archeology of the ancient Near East for more than 30 years and authored almost as many books on the subject. In the following interview, Dever describes some of the most significant archeological finds related to the Hebrew Bible, including his own hot-button discovery that the Israelites' God was linked to a female goddess called Asherah.

PostmodernProphet
05-07-2018, 08:14 PM
Have you read Devers?

William Dever, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, has investigated the archeology of the ancient Near East for more than 30 years and authored almost as many books on the subject. In the following interview, Dever describes some of the most significant archeological finds related to the Hebrew Bible, including his own hot-button discovery that the Israelites' God was linked to a female goddess called Asherah.
lol....so you're saying he is incredibly stupid?.....

kudzu
05-08-2018, 03:57 AM
lol....so you're saying he is incredibly stupid?.....

So you have never read Devers or Finklestein..

Are you still practicing law?

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 06:06 AM
So you have never read Devers or Finklestein..

Are you still practicing law?

no and yes.....are you still practicing theological deception?.......

kudzu
05-08-2018, 06:17 AM
no and yes.....are you still practicing theological deception?.......

You said you belong to a mainline church.. What denomination rejects serious study.. science, archaeology, geology, linquistics, and geology?

Ancient history of Egypt and the Levant is really interesting and much broader than the history invented by the Hebrews.

You do know that Egypt ruled Sinai and Canaan at the time of the "Exodus".. Does your church deny that?

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 06:53 AM
You said you belong to a mainline church.. What denomination rejects serious study.. science, archaeology, geology, linquistics, and geology?

Ancient history of Egypt and the Levant is really interesting and much broader than the history invented by the Hebrews.

You do know that Egypt ruled Sinai and Canaan at the time of the "Exodus".. Does your church deny that?

I'm not aware of any denomination that rejects serious study......that does not have to include someone who believes that Ashera was the wife of the God of Abraham.......sorry....

as for Sinai.....it was a wilderness then and still is.....Egypt could have "ruled" it.....that doesn't mean they gave a moment's attention to it.......

kudzu
05-08-2018, 07:00 AM
I'm not aware of any denomination that rejects serious study......that does not have to include someone who believes that Ashera was the wife of the God of Abraham.......sorry....

as for Sinai.....it was a wilderness then and still is.....Egypt could have "ruled" it.....that doesn't mean they gave a moment's attention to it.......

The Jews believed that Ashera was God's wife..

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 07:01 AM
The Jews believed that Ashera was God's wife..

yet made no mention of it in the Torah?......would these be the non-Jewish Jews or what?....or are you referring to Jews of the 20th Century?.....

kudzu
05-08-2018, 07:25 AM
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8396534/Bibles-Buried-Secrets-asks-did-God-have-a-wife.html


blob:http://www.dailymotion.com/652f238f-5fb6-460f-a1c0-6fad78304a92

Are you familiar with Francesca Stavrakopoulou? She's a British theologian.

kudzu
05-08-2018, 07:27 AM
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ik5oi


Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou has a BA, MA, P.hd and DPhil from University of Oxford. She is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at Exeter University as well as being Head of Theology and Religion. She is also the author of several books. Here's a link to Dr. Stavrakopoulou's publications and videos.

https://www.louisesommer.com/single-post/2015/01/17/About-Asherah

domer76
05-08-2018, 07:51 AM
/shrugs......you're the one garnering thanks from the board's most notorious idiots......

^Ass-kicking results in classic defensive move.

kudzu
05-08-2018, 07:53 AM
I'm not aware of any denomination that rejects serious study......that does not have to include someone who believes that Ashera was the wife of the God of Abraham.......sorry....

as for Sinai.....it was a wilderness then and still is.....Egypt could have "ruled" it.....that doesn't mean they gave a moment's attention to it.......

Egypt had fortresses in Canaan.. See "When Egypt Ruled Canaan"...

Leonthecat
05-08-2018, 07:58 AM
So man created God in his own image; in the image of man he created Him; male and female they created Him.

kudzu
05-08-2018, 08:05 AM
yet made no mention of it in the Torah?......would these be the non-Jewish Jews or what?....or are you referring to Jews of the 20th Century?.....

No.. I am talking about the old testament.. All the cites are there in the links I have given you.

Jewish women worshiped Asherah re: fertility and childbirth.. and thousands of small statues and icons have been excavated in Jerusalem.

See Queen of Heaven and Asherah Pole.

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 12:23 PM
Egypt had fortresses in Canaan.. See "When Egypt Ruled Canaan"...
I can't see what you don't link.....please don't bother mentioning things you refuse to document.......it just wastes people's time.....

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 12:25 PM
No.. I am talking about the old testament.. All the cites are there in the links I have given you.

Jewish women worshiped Asherah re: fertility and childbirth.. and thousands of small statues and icons have been excavated in Jerusalem.

See Queen of Heaven and Asherah Pole.

look.....Asherah is not mentioned in the Torah or anywhere else in the OT as the wife of God........"all the cities are there in the links".......we aren't talking about cities.....we are talking about your documentation for the claim Asherah is the wife of God "according to the Jews".......do you have something to back up your idiotic claim or not?......

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:30 PM
I can't see what you don't link.....please don't bother mentioning things you refuse to document.......it just wastes people's time.....

27 verses referencing Asherah.

https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Serving-Asherah

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:30 PM
I can't see what you don't link.....please don't bother mentioning things you refuse to document.......it just wastes people's time.....

There's a whole thread on Egyptian rule of Canaan.

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:33 PM
look.....Asherah is not mentioned in the Torah or anywhere else in the OT as the wife of God........"all the cities are there in the links".......we aren't talking about cities.....we are talking about your documentation for the claim Asherah is the wife of God "according to the Jews".......do you have something to back up your idiotic claim or not?......

When Egypt Ruled Canaan.

https://www.justplainpolitics.com/showthread.php?95172-When-Egypt-Ruled-Canaan

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:37 PM
What Are Clay Female Figurines Doing in Judah during the Biblical ...

https://thetorah.com/what-are-clay-female-figurines-doing-in-judah-during-the-biblica...

Aug 16, 2016 - Jerusalem, Beer-Sheva, Tel Erani (8th-6th BCE). ... The figurines are almost always found broken and discovered in secondary ... they might have been used: Are they depictions of a female deity such as Astarte or Asherah?

Archaeologists discover: God's wife? - Archaeology - Haaretz.com

https://www.haaretz.com › Archaeology

Sep 15, 2013 - “You shall not plant any tree as an Asherah beside the altar of the Lord .... The fact is that Judahite pillar figurines were found in two Jerusalem ...
The Asherah in Ancient Israel: Goddess o

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:40 PM
Goddess Figurine from Megiddo · Jerusalem: Fall of a City—Rise of a ...

jerusalem.nottingham.ac.uk/items/show/88

This figurine of a goddess was excavated from a house at Megiddo which ... Candidates for this figurine include Athirat, Anat, Astarte, Qudshu, Ishtar and Asherah. ... In this collection you will find examples of this religious diversity in Israel and ...

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:40 PM
Figurines Collection of the Canaanite Mother Goddess 'Asherah ...

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/399413060673980168/

Figurines Collection of the Canaanite Mother Goddess 'Asherah' (Israel Museum, Jerusalem). Ahab built sacred poles containing images of asherah. Find this ...
Searches related to asherah figurines found i

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:45 PM
Understanding Asherah—Exploring Semitic Iconography · The BAS ...

https://members.bib-arch.org/biblical-archaeology-review/17/5/4

Going back in time, instead of forward, we find references to Asherah in numerous .... There is a dispute as to whether the middle figure is male or female; some say ... the cult of Asherah had even penetrated into the Temple at Jerusalem—an ...

kudzu
05-08-2018, 12:51 PM
In 1968, I discovered an inscription in a cemetery west of Hebron, in the hill country, at the site of Khirbet el-Qí´m, a Hebrew inscription of the 8th century B.C.E. It gives the name of the deceased, and it says "blessed may he be by Yahweh"—that's good biblical Hebrew—but it says "by Yahweh and his Asherah."

Asherah is the name of the old Canaanite Mother Goddess, the consort of El, the principal deity of the Canaanite pantheon. So why is a Hebrew inscription mentioning Yahweh in connection with the Canaanite Mother Goddess? Well, in popular religion they were a pair.


Dever says he nearly had a heart attack when he first read the inscription on this slab. It links the Israelite God, Yahweh, to the Canaanite Mother Goddess, Asherah.

The Israelite prophets and reformers denounce the Mother Goddess and all the other gods and goddesses of Canaan. But I think Asherah was widely venerated in ancient Israel. If you look at Second Kings 23, which describes the reforms of King Josiah in the late 7th century, he talks about purging the Temple of all the cult paraphernalia of Asherah. So the so-called folk religion even penetrated the Temple in Jerusalem.

Is there other evidence linking Asherah to Yahweh?

In the 1970s, Israeli archeologists digging in Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai found a little desert fort of the same period, and lo and behold, we have "Yahweh and Asherah" all over the place in the Hebrew inscriptions.

Are there any images of Asherah?

For a hundred years now we have known of little terracotta female figurines. They show a nude female; the sexual organs are not represented but the breasts are. They are found in tombs, they are found in households, they are found everywhere. There are thousands of them. They date all the way from the 10th century to the early 6th century.

They have long been connected with one goddess or another, but many scholars are still hesitant to come to a conclusion. I think they are representations of Asherah, so I call them Asherah figurines.

There aren't such representations of Yahweh, are there?

No. Now, why is it that you could model the female deity but not the male deity? Well, I think the First and Second Commandments by now were taken pretty seriously. You just don't portray Yahweh, the male deity, but the Mother Goddess is okay. But his consort is probably a lesser deity.

We found molds for making Asherah figurines, mass-producing them, in village shrines. So probably almost everybody had one of these figurines, and they surely have something to do with fertility. They were no doubt used to pray for conceiving a child and bearing the child safely and nursing it.

It's interesting to me that the Israelite and Judean ones are rather more modest than the Canaanite ones, which are right in your face. The Israelite and Judean ones mostly show a nursing mother.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/archeology-hebrew-bible.html

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 03:58 PM
There's a whole thread on Egyptian rule of Canaan.

and you haven't documented a single word........

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 04:06 PM
the existence of idols in the Middle East isn't proof that the Jewish religion worshiped them.......Israel and Judah both went into captivity for worshiping idols.....the Jewish religion CONDEMNED idolatry......

PostmodernProphet
05-08-2018, 04:10 PM
When Egypt Ruled Canaan.

https://www.justplainpolitics.com/showthread.php?95172-When-Egypt-Ruled-Canaan

does not back up your claim......

kudzu
05-08-2018, 06:15 PM
does not back up your claim......

Hahaha.. You are a riot.