What religions are older than Judaism? Were there any middle eastern/mesopotamian flourishing by the time the Hebrews came around?
When did the Jews come around, and when was Genesis written?
It seems like a lot of questions, but I’m sure someone can point me in the right direction. I’m having an argument with a friend who says that Yahweh was the original god of mankind, but I asked him why no cultures before the Jews knew of that diety.
I’m not near my references now, but I suspect that Zoroastrianism and Hinduism might be older than Judaism (among religions still practiced). Shintoism has a claim to great age, but I don’t know how old people believe it to be.
Egyptian religion and Sumeriam worship, to name two, are almost certainly older, but I doubt there are any living adherents.
I spologize to any strict adherents to Judaism, to whom the clear answer is that certainly no faith can claim greater age, since their faith can be traced back to the source.
Read Bulfinch’s Mythology for the Greek, Roman and ancient Germanic religions—few of which are still flourishing, but boy were they colorful and entertaining!
While I’m not an adherent of Judaism, strict or not, I’m not sure that such an apology is necessary. I don’t think that Adam and Eve would be considered Jews, at least not adherents of the Jewish religion.
I don’t see a problem from the perspective of Orthodox Judaism - indeed it is pretty clear from the Torah that other religions were about when G-d revealed himself to Abram.
Sua
If one defines the beginning of Judaism as when Abraham lived, there might not be any still-pacticed religions that predate it.
If one defines the begging of Judaism as the revealation at Sinai, I’m pretty sure Hinduism predated it, but I don’t think any others did (that is, limiting ourselves to well-known world religions; perhaps aboriginal tribesmen in various parts of the world can make convincing claims for greater antiquity for their mode of worship).
The Hebrew patriarch Abraham flourished somewhere between 2000-1825 B.C. Our only source of information on his existance is Genesis; we have no direct archaeological evidence.
There were many religions in existance in the Middle East by the time of Abraham. The upper and lower kingdoms of Egypt were united in 3100 B.C., more than a thousand years before Abraham, and their pantheon of gods is well known.
The Sumerian city of Ur, Abraham’s birthplace, was a center of worship of the moon-god Sin, long before Abraham.
The stories that became Genesis coalesced into one narrative about the 12th?11th century B.C.
Yes, there were countless gods and religions before Judaism, but there was also at least one monotheistic religion before then as well.
According to my old college world history book, Traditions and Encounters, A Global Perspective on the Past, the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV and other devotees considered their god Aten the one and only true god.
Granted, there probably aren’t too many followers of Aten around today. But at the time, most Hebrews were still worshipping the same multitude of gods as their Mesopotamian neighbors until Moses got pissed and scribbled on some tablets.
Judaism was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, quoting the same book as above…
Christianity and Islam also borrowed heavily from Zoroastrianism.
It should be mentioned that the aborigines of Australia have been practicing pretty much the same religion for 60,000 to 40,000 years. The first Mesopotamian civilization existed only 11,000 years ago.
Caixinth, is there any evidence that aborigine “spirituality” (the preferred term) existed 60,000 or even 40,000 years ago? The dates you mention refer to indicate how long the continent has been inhabited (40,000 years is usually accepted, but some contest the 60,000 figure).
The oldest religions are probably from the middle Paleolithic period, 200,000 to 40,000 years ago or so. This is based on the assumption that the disposal of the dead has special significance for cultures that entertain certain ideas about human nature, destiny, and place. Paleolithic peoples such as the Neanderthals were known to bury their dead along with tools, trinkets, etc., as early as 50,000 years ago. This could indicate a belief in the permanence of something in a person that could survive death: the soul.
“Venus figurines,” flourished in the Upper Paleolithic (40,000 years ago) and were symbols of fertility–meaning that fertility, along with other desirable traits, may have been anthropomorphised into deities and possibly worshipped as such.
At any rate it seems fairly obvious that the oldest religion would have to be a form of paganism or pantheism, which identifies divinity and/or spirituality in nature (things such as fertility, to which our remote ancestors would have been quite closely connected). I’d like to point out that this does not mean that Wicca is the oldest religion, as some of its adherents like to claim; Wicca is actually a fairly new phenomenon.
As for early monotheism, there were more than one or two. LokiTheDog mentioned the Egyptian cult of Amenhotep IV, although he normally goes by the name Akhenaton today (Amenophis to use his Greek name). During his reign (1353–36 BC) he set up the cult of Aton, from which he took his name (it means “he who is useful to Aton”). Akhenaton’s wife, by the way, was the famous Nefertiti, a woman who adhered to his cult even when its founder started to make forced compromises with the older religious orders.
There were similar occurrences in Greek, Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese cultures.
You are correct abe, aborigines colonized Australia 40,000 years ago but their religion or at least the common Rainbow Serpent variant has only been dated to 9000 years ago. I supposed I just assumed that as all cultures have religion something must have existed prior to that.
Zoroastrism, an ancient Greek religion founded by Zarathustra, estimated to have lived six thousand years before Plato. 1080 BCE.
It has been mentioned already :). Persian, not Greek. The 6000 B.C.E. ( not exactly 6000 years before Plato ) estimate is a theological claim of some conservative Zoroastrians. Others claim 600 BCE. Historians are closer to the date you gave - 1500-1000 BCE.
1500-1000 B.C.E is often mentioned as a fertile growth period of Hinduism. It is believed that some key epics that underpin Hinduism were “written” (they were primarily part of an oral tradition) by then, and a lot of the belief systems, such as re-birth, pantheistic deities etc were formulated by then. However, historians date some of the Upanishadic texts,which really are the philosophical backbone behind much of the practices of Hinduism to ~900 B.C.E. So, that would mean Zorasterianism preceded Hinduism.
Sources on the web put the birth of Zoroaster ~ 600 B.C.E, I am really wondering if it did precede Hinduism.
Tamerlane,
Where did you see the 1500-1000 B.C.E dating?
I think that it was widely believed that Zoraster was roughly a contemporary of Buddha, Confucius etc until recent textual analysis of the Zorastrian holy book whose language was found to be a much older style.
BTW when do historians believe that Judaism came about? I remember reading in the NY Times that historians are now skeptical of the existence of Abraham and even the Exodus as well as many other events described in the OT.
Of course such comparisons are difficult for religions which evolved slowly but IMO for most comparisons Hinduism is the most plausible choice. If you are thinking of the very earliest signs there are plausible arguments that some Hindu deities and ideas come from the Indus valley civilization. If you are talking more concretely about the earliest texts; the Rig Veda IIRC is dated around 1500-1000BC. If you are talking about mature religous concepts, the Upanishads at around 900BC could still be the oldest (I don’t know about Zorastrianism though)
litost: Basically what Cyberpundit said - The older dates are based on linguistic analysis of the texts. The 1080 BCE number comes from Diogenes Laertius, an ancient commentator that put Zarathustra as living ‘600 years before Xerxes invaded Greece.’ Since this is roughly parallel to what the linguists have come up with, it has superceded 600 BCE as the standard date.
Here’s a brief article that discusses this in passing:
http://www.livius.org/za-zn/zarathustra/zarathustra.htm
BTW Tamerlane since you are the historian out here, what do you think of theories that many fundamental ideas in both Judaism and Christianity actually come from Zoraster including perhaps the very idea of a single,universal loving god ,the idea of a cosmic battle between good and evil etc.
I have seen various essays on the Net discussing this but I am not sure what the scholarly consensus is. I admit that it amuses me ,whenever I hear Christian conservatives blathering about “Judaeo-Christian values” and the like ,to imagine that that they are harking back to the ideas of a bearded Iranian dude.