It’s hard to say Judaism was ever polytheistic. Perhaps it developed from a Polytheistic religion, but pretty much from the start it was henotheistic and monolatrist, but yes, the Big Guy did have the goddess Asherah as a consort. Some fragmentary things suggest there may have been lesser deities or perhaps only servants like angels.
That was kinda the thing in the Holy lands about then, each “kingdom” (using the term loosely) had it’s own deity, Chemosh for Moab, Moloch for the Ammonites, Qaus for the Edomites, etc. But it was apparently assumed they were all legit and in fact it was Ok to sacrifice to a neighboring deity when in his lands.
I’d say you could pin the start to around 9th century BCE, but if it was really the 10th that wouldn’t be a shock.
Hinduism is likely older, but since it was a gradual change, it’s hard to define the start of Hinduism.
So much so that I, a Jew, didn’t entirely understand you. I knew what you meant by “AD”, because that is a ubiquitous way of identifying dates, but I completely glossed over “OT”, reading it as “old time”. If you’d spelled it out, I would have understood you, of course.
FWIW, I refer to the scriptures I commonly discuss as the Bible (or it’s important subset, the Torah), the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon. If I’m afraid “the Bible” might be misunderstood, I refer to it as “the Jewish Bible”.
Many people (not saying you do this) see Judaism as “Christanity light” or simply as a precurosor to Christianity. Reality is that our philosophies and world views are very different is most areas, including such fundamental things as the concept sin, the afterlife, and what is necessary to be considered “in compliance”.
Our Torah is not the Old Testament, not only philosophically but also factually.
I believe that all cultural artifacts change over time, and if yourwant to find a modern example of a bronze age religion, you need to find people who are still in or recently left the bronze age. So, the Sentinelese islanders or the ǃKung, but not Hinduism, Judaism, or the animistic practices of modern Thailand.
Religion is to a large extent a way of organizing daily life and our understanding of the world. The day to day practice of our lives and our understanding of the world are so different than that of a person in the bronze age that I have to believe all “continuing” religions have mutated to adapt to those huge changes.
I believe the point is that, while no one here is in a position to confirm that Sentinelese religious practices stretch back in an unbroken tradition of thousands of years, that they haven’t all recently been converted to Christianity for example, and they are not known for their open-armed embrace of multi-culturalism, so there is a better than average chance their beliefs still hew close to ancient traditions. It would be interesting to get an account of religion among other, closely related, Andanamese Islanders like the Onge.
I am not claiming either that they are Hindu (huh!? How’d anyone think that? The !Kung aren’t Hindu, either) nor that that their current practices are ancient, but rather that since they are currently pre-iron-age, and don’t seem to have taken on any of the world’s major religions, their current religious practices ARE effectively “old time religion”.
Although, the various San peoples started being displaced by the Bantu in the 11th century, and Europeans showed up in the late 15th century, and a lot of them converted, intermarried, etc. So it’s not clear how “bronze age” or traditional the traditional !Kung (or other San groups) religious practices are.
The San trance dancing and shamanism, at least, is generally considered to be linked to depictions in rock art which predate the Bantu incursions by at least a millennium, going back to many millennia BCE in some sites, like Apollo 11 in Namibia.
Potato, potah-to. Bottom line is, if something in the New Testament seems to contradict something written in the Old Testament, then the New Testament statement is seen as the authoritative statement, and the Old is interpreted, or re-interpreted, in light of it.
Well yeah, that’s pretty standard textual analysis. If you receive new information, then that inevitably brings a new understanding to the information you already had, and sometimes re-interpretation.
Yes, I get that. My question earlier was whether post-temple Judaism is the same religion as pre-destruction of the temple Judaism. You succinctly clarified for me that indeed it is, and I thank you.
You’re welcome. I’m sorry, I thought there was a misunderstanding of why I disagreed with the statement that Christianity is the same as Judaism due to worshiping the same deity.