That’s why it puzzled me after I found that out about the begats in the Bible gospels, how the Christians wrote it through the males. Were the Hebrews originally a matriarchal dominant culture?
It is matrilineal and not matriarchal, it appears that it was not until the 2nd or 3rd century CE.
The Christians were a gentile cult for the most part, if you don’t care about tribal identity that type of lineage is of little importance.
Women had little to no power in biblical times and none in the church, many still maintain that sexist position today.
All the way back to Genesis chapter 5 the Hebrew bible lists its genealogies by male line. It wasn’t an innovation the Christians came up with.
Yes, no, and yes.
In general, women had little if any power in 1st century Palestine. That’s what makes the stories of Jesus’ interaction with women so revolutionary. But it wasn’t just Jesus; the rest of the NT and information we have about the church of the first and second century indicates that women were tremendously important. Just look at all the women that the Apostle Paul greets and commends in his letters. Some scholars have argued that women even held leadership positions in the early church and I’ve even seen scholars suggest that there were what we would recognize as women priests.
As the church became institutionalized within the Roman Empire, this early streak of feminism fell away for the most part and, as you say in many parts of the church women are still treated as second class members.
The latter is not 100% true - while it is true that the culture as depicted in the OT is, literally, patriarchal, there are certainly examples of women wielding great power - for example, in the Song of Deborah.
Deborah personally leads the Israelites in battle (the male general of the Israelites, Barak, insists that she come!). The enemy general Sisera flees the battle and is assassinated by another woman - Jael.
The interesting part is that the song of Deborah is probably one of the earliest drafted bits of quasi-historical legendarium in the OT. The OT as a whole covers a very turbulent period of social development - from pre-iron age nomadic tribes to iron-age kingdoms - and it would appear that, like in many parts of the world, the more “civilized” the Israelites got, the more solid the gender divide became.
The discussion of the roles of women in religious societies is interesting, but it’s separate from the original thread topic. Please start a new thread for that discussion.
The vowels of ’ǎdonāy are ǎ, o, ā. When applied to the consonants of YHWH, you get Yəhowāh. The change of the first vowel a>e is because, for phonosyntactic reasons in ancient Hebrew, the underlying vowel schwa ə becomes ǎ when it goes with aleph. When you put it with yod, it becomes ə.
I can see how YHWH + ǎ/ə, o, ā = Yəhowāh > Jehovah. I don’t see how they got “Yahweh.”
The name appears to be derived from an Arabic root meaning (of the wind) ‘to blow’. The Hebrew text of YHWH can be read as a transcription of the Arabic verb yahwiy* literally meaning ‘it [the wind] blows’. In other words, originally the name of a sky/weather god.
*The initial consonant y- is the marker for the 3rd-person masculine singular imperfect indicative verb conjugation, in both Arabic and Hebrew. The Arabic root is H-W-Y; the final -y in the root is transcribed as -h in Hebrew due to a convention in Hebrew orthography governing weak verb roots. These weak root letters in both Arabic and Hebrew are an underlying /w/ or /y/ which can take various pronunciations and transcriptions depending on grammar, but as finals are usually written with a final letter heh in Hebrew; in this case the weak final letter is written as ya’ in Arabic and heh in Hebrew.
Wouldn’t it be just incredibly fascinating if we could literally trace the use of that word back to it’s beginnings in whatever Neolithic (or Paleolithic) context it arose? We know so much, but also so little!
Context? The Sky Father, Dyeus Pater, Möngke Kök Tengri. YHWH is one of the earliest outbreaks of patriarchal religion on record. YHWH’s associated mythology has a creation story that matches up point for point with the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, in which the father god overthrows the mother goddess.
One major problem of tracing comparative mythology is that it is often impossible to determine the actual relationship between myths. For example, the mythology in the OT has numerous points of similarity to that of Babylonia and Sumeria; yet it isn’t easy to determine whether the OT mythos descends from that of Babylonia, or whether they share a common origin in myths now lost.
You say the stories match point for point, but then your summary of Enuma Elish sounds completely different than the Genesis story. Who is the “mother goddess” in Genesis?
Does anybody think that maybe, just maybe, there’s an off chance, that even for those who believe the Biblical story of creation, that the few paragraphs in Genesis describing the creation of the entire universe, might be, possibly, perhaps, just a summary that is missing some details?
But that isn’t the problem being discussed here. It isn’t that one story has details the other one lacks, it’s that one story directly contradicts the other.
Unless one of the missing details is “…And God caused time to run backwards for a couple of days.”, of course.
So it’s not possible that in encapulating the creation of the entire universe into a few words that God used some ambiguous language that might later be misinterpreted by those reading it many generations following the event? Yeah, I guess there’s no possibility that God meant around the 6th day some things happened, not particulary in the order he’s relating them. After all, God would have taken great care not to leave any uncertainty that could be misinterpreted in Genesis, just as he did in the rest of the Bible. Especially because the specific order of these events that happened only once are so important to the lives of all those who would read about them in the future.
If God feels that we should be using this book as a guideline for how we should live, then he should damn well hire a competent proofreader.
I see no point in even entertaining these sorts of “What if God. . . .?” scenarios.
There really is not a lot of controversy, (once one steps away from the now minority literalist perspective), that Genesis is a collection of writings that were put together from earlier tales. Beginning with Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis in 1877, biblical scholars have recognized a multitude of sources for the narratives throughout the Torah/Pentateuch and into Joshua and even Judges or later works. Believers do and non-believers do not see the hand of God inspiring the selection and prioritizing of the various narratives, but all see the work as a human effort that was (or was not) inspired by God without being dictated by God.
And after Cain whacked Abel, God ran him off. He goes up into the mountains, shags his wife and has a son. Where did the wife come from?