Your arguments are utterly illogical and present, from the very start, an utterly false dichotomy. Therefore, everything which follows is neccessarily wholly invalid conclusions.
For those of us reading along, I don’t suppose you could offer a little more specificity for this statement?
As in, the two presented alternatives do not cover all possibilities. Yahweh may not have any relation to the presented panthon, or any resemblance may have occurred later after encountering the Canaanites. Likewise, even assuming Yahweh did speak to the Jews, there is no necessary reason they would have particularly understood much.
There’s a million different views one can take on the historicity of the Bible. The odds that I would choose one which meshes with your personal view was of course impossible. In fact, until you do state your position, I really have no choice but to throw up (what will seem to you to be) straw men.
I went to the library (downtown Seattle Public Library) today and went through their ancient histories section on Israel. None of the books–not even the old one from 1958 (by Martin Noth)–said anything other than that there doesn’t seem to be any support for the idea of a single, unified conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. Noth’s explanation, which seems to fit with what I can piece together from the non-missing sections of Mr. Green’s book, is that various nomadic tribes from South and East of Canaan moved North into relatively unpopulated areas in the highlands and slowly moved into the Canaanite cities and took them over via simple attrition. But this was a disorganized occurrence that happened at different rates in different locales. Different Jewish tribes came from different locations and settled in at different times over the course of a thousand years. The battles actually chronicled in the Bible most likely refer to very specific scuffles between the locals (Canaanites) and the Israelite (e.g. Shasu) nomads.
But, these people were most likely Canaanite. All of the Nomadic tribes who lived South and East of Canaan, the Midianites, Kenites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites all appear to have spoken a Canaanite dialect. Most seem to have worshipped El/Baal equivalents; El Shaddai (Kenites), Chemosh (Moabites), Chemosh/Moloch (Ammonites). The Edomites are presumed to have worshiped El/Baal simply by virtue of having been in the region. And all of these groups are listed as relatives of the Israelites. Moses married a woman of the Midianites (or the Kenites) and the Israelites formed an alliance with them. They also formed an alliance with the Edomites. “The Ammonites were regarded by Hebrews as close relatives of the Israelites and Edomites.”
These people were all considered to be part of their own people (relatives), and yet they worshipped Canaanite gods. Moses considered the Kenite’s El to be equivalent to Yahweh.
Overall, this makes it seem fully plausible that Yahweh was another incarnation of Chemosh/Baal/Hadad/Moloch/El, if only by association.
…presuming the Canaanites to be a separate, unrelated people. So far I haven’t seen any evidence of that.
:dubious: How is a stone tablet with clearly written rules unclear?
It was good enough for Dagon
A conservative old pagan
Who still votes for Ronald Reagan
It’s good enough for me!
Here you ocne again reveal your disinclination to use critical thinking. I present no alternative and am in fact quite neutral on the matter here and how. I simply and brutally point out that you have i this thread repeatedly used bad logic, poor or nonexistent evidence, and false dichotomies to force a conclusion handed to you by a historian making wild guesses.
This has nothing to do with anything at all. I neither claim nor require it.
This is a nice theory… with absolutely no evidence. I also daydream that Genghis Khan was actually a Siberian deerherder descended from Chinese aristocracy based on my whim and weird poetic allusions I can make into anything. I have the good graces to keep it to myself. It could have happened. Or it might not. And even if it did, it wouldn’t account for records of the Israelites by other peoples.
I neither denied that they were potentially related nor require it for any particular theory. The tribes and nations living in that area are, in any case, so intermixed that any such relationship is inevitable sooner or later - and utterly irrelevant.
This doesn’t mean much either. Many tribes have some vague idea of a supreme god somewhere, maybe, and more than a few Christians/Moslems/Jews identify their god with that being. This is actually quite consistent across much of the world.
On the other side, we have ample instances of deities being mashed together after the fact. Witness half the Egyption pantheon, or for a more specific example the entire Roman pantheon merging with the (originally unrelated) Greeks.
And here we get to the heart of the problem.
El != Baal != Hadad != Moloch != Chemosh. They were all patrons of various areas, but worshipped in others for specific things. It’s not at all clear how they related, because in different times and places they varied a lot. Ba’al’s cult was definitely known in Israel, but was also very seperate from the worship of Yahweh. A further problem is that the very word Ba’al means “a lord”, and the concept of a god as the highest noble is pretty old in every land.
Most of the pantheons of ancient cultures are presumed to have emerged from city gods or those favored by cerain rulers, or if you prefer those gods who favored certain rulers. However, the Jews, even from a very early time, did not accept new gods or join theirs together with others. It is plausible that El and Yahweh were originally conveived of as the same, but it is no less plausible that Yahweh was understood as the patron specifically of the tribe of Israel. It is not even certain that the Canaanites had much of relationship to the Israelites at all.
Finally, we have the other problem that people in the ancient world were pretty cool with a lot of vagueness in a lot of things: religion, law, sometimes even national boundaries.
Since we have no knowledge of when the Canaanites began any religion at all, much less developed their pantheon, and when or where the Jews came from, or how their religion started, it’s not neccessary to any theory.
There is a rather large
One would think that, but simple observation reveals that most of the mpeople around are pretty bloody stupid, as well as prone to bending the rules they live by or simply ignoring anything inconvenient. Almost the entire history presented in the Torah is basically just this.
The OP accords pretty much with what I’ve read of Yahwistic origins. Some of the aspects are fairly certain. The Israelites, their language and their pantheon wre all originally Canaanite. Yahweh was originally a son of El, and Yahweh supplanted El after the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians, and refugees flooded into the southern region. That Asherah was worshipped as a consort of Yahweh is well attested in the archaeology. Eventually, the Yahweh cult was sanctioned by Josiah as the only legal cult, and the Jerusalem Temple as the only legitimate site of sacrifice. This was done to centralize power in Jerusalem.
The exact timelines are in question, as are the movements and mergers of the various Canaanite subgroups which eventually coalesced into Judah, but it’s essentially correct that it all has Canaanite origins, and that Yahweh was basically the last god standing out of the pantheon.
How are you defining “Jews?” if you’re defining them specifically as the people who practiced monotheistic Yahweh worship, you’re technically correct, but only by definition. The point is that the Israelies did not really become “Jews,” until fairly late in the game (starting henotheistically around the 8th Century BCE, not truly montheistic and theologically developed until after the Babylonian captivity (during which time they were greatly influenced by Zoroastrianism).
Before the 8th Century (and definitely during the alleged time of David and Solomon), the arhaeology shows no evidence of monotheistic, or even henotheistic worship, but shows a ton of evidence for basically run of the mill, Canaanite polytheism.
Incidentally, one intersting aspect of Israelite culture which actually is evident from very early on is that they didn’t eat pork. You can find all kinds of Canaanite temples in Israelite regions, but you never find any pig bones. It’ one of the fingerprints archaeologists use to identify Israelite sites.
Ask the rabbis. How long is the Talmud?
We shall worship with the Druids
Drinking strange fermented fluids
Running naked through the wuids
It’s good enough for me!
Are you saying that they were influenced by Zoroastrianism during the Babylonian captivity? I thought it was after that, after the Persians took over.
By the way, I’m now in the middle of the course Historical Jesus from Stanford University, as an audiobook/podcast. It’s basically the audio of a course taught by Thomas Sheehan. Are you familiar with that, and if so, what’s your opinion of it? I’m enjoying it very much.
Well, kind of both, I guess. Technically, Cyrus took over during the captivity (and that’s when the influence began), but yeah, most of the influence came after he released them. I should have been more careful with my phrasing.
Not familiar with it, but I found his book, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity online, so I’ll read it and let you know what I think. At a glance, he appears to be advocating the apocalyptic prophet model (similar to Ehrman’s). I’ll have more thoughts after I read it.
I suspect that several of the “tribes of the Jews” weren’t Yahwists. Since there’s multiple origins given for Yahweh ranging all over from the Southwest to East and lots of the tribes are shown as having practiced non-Yahweh worship, it seems more likely that various groups (Midianites, Ammonites, etc.) moved North and settled, but it was from the Israelite segment that a centralizing power (King Saul?) arose and brought everyone together and started to force Yahweh and the Moses story on the other groups.
Well, we don’t
Show me, k?
The golden calf (as one instance out of hundreds).
I don’t have a bible with me at the moment but IIRC that was the 32nd chapter of Exodus, right? (feel feel to correct me if I remember that wrong)
In that account, the people grew restless because Moses was dawdling up on Mount Sinai and fashioned a golden calf in order to have a “festival to Jehovah.”
However, it’s worth noting the following:
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The festival was not to a different God at all, but a festival to Jehovah; the same God they were already serving.
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Not only was this kind of Idolatry against the rules, and totally uncool, it infuriated Moses (a man that was described as one of the meekest men walking the earth) enough that he shattered the brand spanking new 10 Commandments, fresh fron the finger of God himself. (Moses subsequently had to ask God to make them again, and he obliged)
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Not only was Moses angry, but God himself had several thousand of them smited, right then and there.
So, does “the Bible makes a case for the Israeli people worshiping more than one god at the same time” ?
The answer is no. To the extent the Jews deviated from worshiping the God Jehovah exclusively (or practiced Idolatry) it was condemned and in every instance there was hell to pay. (pun intended)
Every. Single. Time.
I’d be interested in other instances.
Sorry, I felt like taking a few days off from serious posts to this thread since generally each response seems to require a few hours of reading on Wikipedia and Google books.
You’re missing the point. Unless you’re going to argue that the Bible is a faithful rendition history of the region, we have no way to determine which parts are true, which represent an echo of a historic happening, or which are just plain off made up except through two methods. Those are 1) archaeology, and 2) paralleling.
Obviously, solid archaeological evidence is preferred, but where it’s lacking, what alternative is there to taking what we know about humanity, religion, and our written records of ourselves as left in similar times and places as compared with the archaeological record. We take that and find similarities and extrapolate, then we see if the archaeological data we have can support those extrapolations. And really, regardless of how much or little archaeological finds there are, it’s quite likely that most of the reconstructed history of every civilization is going to rest more on this sort of deduction than it rests on smoking gun evidence.
That this isn’t perfect is a given. But it is an equally imperfect methodology for every study of every civilization.
If you think a specific extrapolation doesn’t make sense or the evidence used to support its viability doesn’t actually support it, then go ahead what that is. But it’s pointless to say, “But they’re just making stuff up without anything more than a single tablet that’s hardly legible.” Well yeah, but, that’s about the level of 99% of historical evidence. That’s an argument against believing any historical account of anything previous to the 16th century when paper production began to spread, and really outside the scope of this thread. So, like I said, if you have a particular argument against a particular extrapolation then go for it, but it’s beyond me to prove the validity of “historic reconstruction” as an art.
You made any claim yet, other than saying, “They might be wrong.” Or, “They’re all teamed together and you can’t trust anything they say!”
Either of those is a fine position to take, but I’d really rather you prove rather than simply assert.
All I can say is that I didn’t cherry pick my history books. I went through the full shelf in the library. I’ve presented everything I’ve seen on Google books, and so far I’ve not seen anything which has said anything other than what I did. If you think that the body of scholarly opinion is saying something other than what I’ve said, then show me that. If you’re think they’re wrong, show where their line of reasoning is fallacious.
That gods are malleable was my point.
Evidence that “Ba’al” means lord and not the other way around–i.e. that “ba’al” didn’t come to mean “lord” in later usage?
But if you read through Mr. Green’s book, this is the exact topic of his work. Saying they’re all Ba’al is a bit of a misnomer, agreed. What they all are is Canaanitic storm gods. Similarly as there might be a pantheon of soft drinks, Seven Up and Coca Cola are certainly separate things, but Pepsi and Coke can be considered the same depending on the granularity of how you’re looking at the subject. Or in some cases, I might order a “coke” in a restaurant and they’ll bring me a Pepsi.
Ba’al is certainly “coke”, and certainly using the terms “storm god” and “cola” would be more accurate, but there’s a whole tradition of calling everything by the masthead name. Historians consider Chemosh to be the same as Ba’al. They do that because, even though the people who worshiped Ba’al may not have agreed, we have the benefit of being the outside viewer with thousands of years of perspective to put things in. Their quibbles don’t need to be ours, so long as we’re all aware of what the individual, historic groups would have thought–which we are.
Why are those independent of one another?
Looks like I didn’t need to look up anything after all.
But still, I have to say that I really don’t see what point you’re trying to make other than that "historical reconstructions of these events are speculative reconstructions :eek: ", which, unless you think that no one was aware of that point, seems rather odd to feel necessary to rant about.
Since you can’t even read back to post 14, here’s Jeremiah 19, Joshua 24 (specifically part 14), etc.
If you can read the Bible and come out of it saying that you believe that no Israelite ever could have built a temple, shrine, relic, or other icon dedicated to a deity other than Yahweh, then you’re not worth debating with, because that’s some serious blinders. The Bible talks about “bad” Israelites creating asherah poles, about bands of Moabite priests gaining popularity, about destroying all the idols to deities (except the golden calf, because Yahweh was being worshiped via bull iconography as an echo of El Shaddai–though it was eventually destroyed.)
You don’t need to be snarky. I asked you for a cite, and you gave me Exodus 32, right?
You also don’t need to take cover. I’m quite willing to have you either remove my blinders, or in the alternative, have you eat your bandwidth. (and the Golden Calf did not make your case)
I suppose we might be in more agreement than first blush, for I infer the comment ‘to make a case’ that the Israelite nation means that there was some general agreement that serving multiple gods was a sanctioned element of Judaism.
That is not the case, and if it is what you mean than I must press you for more cites, and ask you to trust I’m worth it. :dubious:
So maybe I misunderstood. But my point remains: Throughout human history heretics can be found, right? That some Jews deviated from the stated, unambiguous, monotheistic tenets of Jewish faith, does not mean that it was an element of their faith. It was just that: a deviation.
Not just a deviation, but one that was condemned, and universally was met with punishment.
So, does the bible indicate that some small part of the Jews, from time to time, were influenced by Pagan religions and deviated from their clear tenets? Yes.
Does the bible make a case for it?