I think there is enough evidence to show that the deity the Jews and Christians worship started out as a tribal deity, but when were the attributes of omnipotence (all-powerful), omniscience (all-knowing), omnibenevolence (all-loving or all-good), omnipresence (existing everywhere), and perfection formalized?
I don’t think it answers your question—and I too would be interested to know where/when/by whom those attributes were first formalized—but I think there’s some useful context in this old thread:
According to some dude:
I’d say; in philosophical terms, the idea of an all-knowing, all-good, and presumably all-powerful God is first known to have been developed by the Platonists, with hints in pre-Socratic philosophy.
The “problem of evil” arising from the “tri-omni” God was purportedly first stated by Epicurus around 200 BCE.
If he knows what he is talking about I don’t know.
Also note that the Judeo-Christian God is not the only God.
Note the wording of the First Commandment, that specifically refers to other Gods. Though the mon-theistic idea did seem to creep in there later.
But Islam, which was created a few hundred years later, does explicitly make the claim of an only God. “There is no God but Allah…”.
The original Jews were polytheists, like other Canaanites. Over time they eliminated their other gods (demoting some to archangels), aspects of their remaining god (eg he no longer had an image) and finally all other gods. These changes accelerated any time something bad happened. So when northern Israel was conquered, the Jews dropped worshiping other gods (gradually) and after the Babylonian conquest and Persian “rescue”, we got monotheism.
It’s been suggested monotheist was influenced by Zoroastrianism, which also gave them the idea of Satan (you needed an explanation for all the evil), only they demoted Zoroastrianism’s “evil god” to a fallen angel.
Genesis was written in the 5th-6th century BCE, and the concept of modern God must have been firmly rooted by then.
Of course the Islamic god is the same as the Jewish and Christian god, even if some of the latter would prefer to believe otherwise.
Among Hebrews. But it was a minority view among the total of religious faithful around the world.
That’s really interesting. I was under the impression that Genesis and the other books of the Torah were a lot older than that. I’d always thought that they were already ancient texts by the time of King David around the 10th century BCE.
The text we know as Genesis was composed then, but it’s a collation of pre-existing texts, which in turn recorded older oral traditions. So the stories, ideas, etc embodied in Genesis are likely considerably older than the text itself.
Possibly among Hebrews. But it could be, and has been, argued that Judaism then was henotheistic rather than monotheistic.
A prohibition against having other gods does not imply that those other gods exist. There are a number of stories in the Old Testament of conflicts between the Israelites and other cultures that amount to “Our God is real, but yours isn’t”. One could very reasonably say that those other cultures had other gods, without considering those gods real.
Of course, the prohibition against having other gods also does not imply that they don’t exist. The Hebrew people started off as polytheistic, like the rest of the peoples around them. And there are also some stories in the Bible of others having supernatural power that did not come from the God of Abraham (albeit, inferior supernatural power).
Yes, and no. From a Jewish POV you might say the Christian god in Trinity, and the Islamic account of how Allah gave direct dictation of the Qu’ran to Muhammad, in Arabic, both claiming to be the same God “of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” are essentially fanfic.