Magic Primate

I'm trying to trace the roots of the Judeo-Christian God. If you have any good links or reading recommendations I'd appreciate them.

Meanwhile, here's some bits and pieces I've found so far.


Yahweh is interpreted very differently by the early Christian Gnostics:

"This gloomy ruler has three names: "The first name is Yaldabaoth. The second is Saklas (the fool). The third is Samael (god of the blind).
He is wicked because of the Mindlessness that is in him. For he said, 'I am God, and there is no other God besides me,' since he did not know from where his own strength had come."

(The Secret Book of John, from Marvin Meyer's The Secret Teachings Of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels, p.65, pub. A.D. 1986)

Yaldabaoth is Yahweh. He is the arrogant and delusional offspring of Sophia (aka. the Holy Spirit).


The early Israelites were actually polytheists and their other principle dieties were Baal/Baalzebub and Astaroth (who were later demonised of course).

This is a very helpful link:

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To further show that the our and us in these Genesis passages referred to the god-pair of early Hebrew polytheism, we have only to review the history of the ideological clashes between the proponents of Baal and those of Yahweh that went on in the Caananite-Israelite lands from the time of the judges until the fall of Judah and the Babylonian captivity

During these times, Baal and his consort Ashtoreth were worshiped by many Israelites both in Samaria (Israel) and Judah even after the captivity, mainly by those who remained in the conquered lands. Yahwists like Ezra finally purged the Israelites (by then known as Jews) of all Baal residuals and even forced them to give up their Baalish wives and families (see Ezra 9-10 ). Ezra's purging of Baal appeared to be complete. It was his wish to erase Baal completely from the Israelite past; however, the residuals in Genesis 1 and 3 continue to remind us not only of Israel's polytheistic past but of the Canaanite origins of Judaism.

Using archaeological evidence on one hand and biblical between-the-line implications on the other, the following conclusions support the premises stated above:

(1) Most of the Israelites at the time of the exodus (about 1250 B.C.) were already located in the Canaanite area, which, incidentally, was at that time a part of Greater Egypt. A relatively small number, probably only one tribe (Levi), were in Egypt. Exodus 1:15 , for example, says that only two midwives were needed to attend the births of Hebrew children. Furthermore, the Israelites needed divine help to defeat a small seminomadic tribe (Ex. 17:8-13 ) in contradiction to the later editor's estimate of an army of 600,000 men (12:37 ) besides children (and women?).
(2) This relatively small group of Israelites from the outside (Egypt proper) formed some type of symbiotic relationship with the much larger inside group (which consisted of Israelites and Canaanites, the so-called mixed multitude) to form the "12 tribes" (when they were not fighting each other).
(3) The outside group was the Yahwist cult, the inside group the Baal cult. The struggle between the two groups went on for well over 500 years.
(4) Apparently it was not until the reign of Josiah that the Yahwist group was able to achieve dominance. The "lost book" of Deuteronomy was discovered in the house of the LORD (2 Kings 22:8 ), and the Passover was reinstituted after a lapse of 500 years (if indeed it even existed before then). The golden calf (symbol of the Kings of Israel) from the reign of Jeroboam was suppressed (2 Kings 23:15 ).
(5) Biblical scholars agree on how the Pentateuch was put together. The sources were (E) Elohist, (J) Yahwist, (P) Priestly, (D) Deuteronomist, and (R) Redactor. The last two were written to dovetail with the first two, and the writers tried to do two things: (1) eliminate all contradictions, and (2) eliminate all vestiges of the Israelite primitive past of pagan polytheisism.

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Put that in your incense burner and smoke it.

I'm also noticing that Astaroth is closely linked to the Egyptian goddess Isis and I'm wondering if Baal may be an interpretation of Osiris and thus their offspring Yahweh would be none other than a bastardisation of the god Horus.

More evidence for Baal/Baalzebub as Caananite Osiris:



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Baal(im) [Canaanite] ("Lord" / "Master") / Baalzebub / Beelzebub ("Baal The Prince")
Son of El and sometimes married to his sister Anat, he was responsible for fertility though he later became associated with the sun; he was killed by Mot, but after Anat had killed and dismembered Mot (cf. Isis & Osiris & Set), Baal was reborn from the pieces; later a fallen angel. The female equivalent of the title was Baalat(h), or ("Lady" / "Mistress"). The city of Baalbek was named after Baal-Biqah, and had temples dedicated to Jupiter & Venus & Mercury; the main temple was originally for Baal-Hadad, who the Romans identified with Jupiter and the sun, hence their name of Heliopolis ("City Of The Sun"). Baal was also an earlier title / name for Yahweh :
"And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali. For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name." [Hosea 2:16-17] .

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Astaroth as Isis:

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Astarte / Istar / Athtar / Ashera(t) / Ashtoreth [Phoenician] / As(h)taroth / Ashteroth [Canaanite] (cf. Ishtar)
Sister of Baal and goddess of fertility & birth, sometimes wife of El; an Asherah (pl. Asherim) was a sacred grove or "high place" as mentioned numerous times in the bible; later a fallen angel.
Names Of Places :
Ashteroth-Karnaim / Ashteroth-Kernaim ("Ashteroth With Two Horns")
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OK, I found no direct link between Yahweh and Horus, although both of them are sky gods. Perhaps the idea of him as the son of Astaroth was incorporated later. Here are his roots:


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Y(a)hw(e)h / Y(a)hv(e)h / Ya(h)(u) / Yo(h)
Originally a god of the sky, in common with older myths of crops and vegetation he gave grain and wine to man; he threatened people who believed in any of the other gods, and is a manifestation of the nasty side of Ea / Enki / El; he made mankind from clay / earth (cf. Aruru & Khnum & Nammu & Ptah) :
" ... and God said unto Michael: Bring me a clod from the four corners of the earth, and water out of the four rivers of paradise. And when Michael brought them God formed Adam ... " [Bartholomew 4:52]
"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, ... " [Genesis 2:8]
" ... for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." [Genesis 3:19]
He also appropriated some of the attributes of other deities (cf. Baal). As names were believed to have power over things and a commandment said his name should not be taken in vain, worshippers substituted the word Adonai ("Lord") beneath the vowel-less 'Yhwh', which created the artificial 'Yehova' / 'Jehovah'. A link with Ea is proposed by David Rohl in the second volume of his search to historify the biblical stories, where the puzzling statement "And God said unto Moses, 'I am that (which) I am': and he said, 'Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, "I am" hath sent me unto you.' " [Exodus 3:14] appears, for whilst some have assumed it to be either a pointless or profound self-referencing phrase along the lines of "I am me", he posits that it is a play on words, as in Hebrew it is eyah asher eyah, so the sounds for "I am" and "Ea" are the same, and God is really saying "I am Ea" to educate Moses into the original name which had been forgotten.

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From here

The god Khnum also seems to have a bearing on the Yahweh myth:


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Khnum / Kneph [Egyptian] ("To Unite / Build")
One of the oldest gods, he formed mankind from clay on a potter's wheel (cf. Aruru & Nammu & Ptah & Yahweh) whilst Thoth alloted the man's years; he had various titles which implied he was the first god and the maker of all that followed, and took on aspects of Ra & Osiris & Geb & Nut, so he became a variation of Ptah.

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Interestingly he is also associated with Aten, whose cult under Akhenaten was the first known incidence of monotheism. His insistence that the only the Aten was to be worshipped would tie in with Yahweh's insistence that he was the only god to be worshipped. Moses was supposed to have had training as an Egyptian priest around the same time as Akhenaten's cult which was suppressed after his death leading some to speculate that Moses was an escapee from the Aten cult. I don't think there's much direct evidence for that though.


These are interesting comments:


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When the ancient Hebrew lexicographers added vowels to YHWH, they borrowed the vowels of the powerful Egyptian and Phoenician Sun God deities. When the vowels of the Egyptian Sun God Aten were added, YHWH became Y(A)HW(E)H...

When the vowels of the Phoenician Sun God Adonai were added, YHWH became Y(A)H(O)W(A)H, which finally became “JEHOVAH,” which translates “I am” and “The Eternal One” in Hebrew. The Hebrew verb is “halvah,” from which the name YHWH is derived. The verb “halvah” means, “to be.”
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from
a source of uncertain integrity

More from unverified sources but very intriguing nevertheless:


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There are those scholars who find the origin of the sole God (the 'father-God' of the code books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Egypt) in the Aton/Aten belief system. Some western historians maintain that Moses had got the idea of a sole God from Akh-en-aton. Furthermore they believe that Moses was a historical person who has lived in Egypt at the time of this religious reform attempt by Akh-en-aton and was influenced by his monotheism. We do not know much about the Aton/Aten belief system, but if Moses was an Egyptian, then the belief system he has imposed on the Hebrews must have been nothing but the Aton/Aten religion. ...
...One should know that Moses is not the initiator of monotheism. Monotheism has existed in the tradition that became the Nordic Edda. The notion of a single, invisible and almighty God, the creator of the universe, a father of love and goodness, of compassion, sensibility and trust, had long been in evidence in the Vedas. Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, also has proclaimed his God as the one and only. In the Papyrus of Prisse, dating from about 1000 years before Moses, God has following to say of himself: "I am the unseen One who created the heavens and all things. I am the Supreme God, made manifest by Myself, and without equal. I am yesterday, and I know the morrow. To every creature and being that exists I am the Law." PLease make a note: This concept of god has appeared about 1000 years before Moses! How about this? It is very easy to detect the chief attributes of the God of The Old and New Testaments and Islam. Is it not? This One God without equal was referred to in Egypt as 'the nameless,' 'the One Whose name cannot be spoken.' The name of the God of Moses also cannot be uttered freely. That is why YHWH the 'tetragrammaton' (four letters) and eventually Jehovah have replaced it in daily use. When the Egyptian God's name was 'unspeakable' Moses was not around. It was long before him. Most important of all this Egyptian God has called himself 'Nuk pu Nuk' (Holger Kersten).

Prepare yourself for the shock!

When 'nuk pu nuk' is translated into English it means exactly, 'I am who I am'. Yes! An almost identical announcement could be seen in Exodus 3:14: 'I am that I am.' Which is how the God of Moses announces himself to his prophet.

YHWH-Yahweh may be older than the time of Moses. Bible speaks of a much earlier institution of his worship. Let Spenta Mainyu repeat; It is absolutely logical to accept the assumption that Moses was an Egyptian, that he made the people around him accept his religion, which must be the Aten religion of Akh-en-aton or a version of it shaped by the 'man called Moses'. We do not know how the Mosaic belief system was like thousands of years ago. What we know is only the last form of it, reshaped by the Jewish priests over a period of 800-900 years. But there seems to be a very important clue: The 'Shema' which is the Jewish confession of faith, in Deuteronomy 6:4-9: "Shema Yisroel Adonay Elohenu, Adonay Echod" or "Shema Israel Adonay Elohenu, Adonay Ehad" (Adonay replaces the unspeakable YHWH). The proper English translation of which seems to be: "Hear Israel, our Lord is Adonay, only Adonay". If the uncanny similarity of the Egyptian Aten/Aton, the Hebrew Adonay, and the Greek Adonis is not pure chance, and something which originates from a common root or a common identity in the prehistory, then replacing 'Adonay' with 'Aton' gives us the following confession of faith: "Shema Israel Aten elohenu, Aten ehad." The English translation of which is "Hear Israel our God is Aton, only Aton." There is no monotheism here. There is henotheism, which means that there are other gods but 'only this one' is ours.
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There were also other commandments in force in the region before Mosaic era. Here are some examples, judge for yourself! First, laws from Ancient Egypt, where we find the injunction in the 'teachings of Amenemope':

Do not remove the boundary stone on the boundaries of the fields,

..and do not displace the measuring cord,

Do not covet a yard of ploughland

..and do not tear down the widow's boundary.

Do not covet the poor man's goods

..and do not hunger for his bread.

Do not set the balance wrongly,

..do not tamper with the weights,

..do not reduce the portions of the corn measure.

Do not bring anybody into misfortune before the judges

..and do not warp justice.

Do not ridicule the blind man, nor be scornful of any dwarf,

..do not render vain the intentions of the lame.

Have you noticed anything divine in these? They are entirely acceptable and man made. No one has needed a divine being who thought or who formulated these laws then; no one has thought of 'downloading' them from a divine source; most important of all, no one has needed a divine intervention or a heavenly force to get them accepted by the people and to keep them in force.

Furthermore according to the ancient Egyptian belief, a deceased person had to make the following confession before 42 judges of the dead in a court room:

I have not made any man sick

I have not made any man weep

I have not killed

I have not commanded any man to kill

I have not done harm to any man

I have not diminished the amount of the foodstuffs in the temples

I have not damaged the loaves offered to the Gods

I have not stolen the loaves offered to the dead

I have not had any (illicit) sexual relations

I have not engaged in any unnatural lewdness

Here is another parallel of the Ten Commandments, this time from Assyria: An Assyrian priest who was trying to extract the evil spirit which entered a sick person had to ask the following:

Did he make a God angry?

Did he insult a Goddess?

Did he confront his mother and father? Or set little store by his elder sister?

Did he say 'it is' instead of 'it is not.'

Did he interfere with the scales?

Did he break into his neighbour's house?

Did he go closer than necessary to the wife of his neighbour?

Did he spill the blood of his neighbour?

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CX

Fascinating analysis, MP. Even so I'm not sure it's terribly earth shattering that Yahwist belief should have developed out of earlier systems of religious thought. The israelite culture as a seperate identifiable unit is not, even by conservative standards seen in the historical record until the 10th century B.C.E. at the earliest. Given that and the extensive evidence for other Levantine cultures preceeding it we should expect that the beliefs of the Yahwists come from somewhere and did not pop into existence out of whole cloth. It is widely accepted, for example, that the strict dualism of later Jewish theology is a product of Persian influences (notably that of Zoroaster).

Magic Primate

Yes of course. But interesting and potentially fun to throw in the faces of fundamentalists every now and again.

Volker.Doormann

God is a term from the Nordic Edda poems, it has no relation to the Jewish culture. Christianity has neither understood the Jewish scriptures nor the NT teaching of Jesus.

Judaism is a collection of myths and cults of Mesopotamia and the ancient India. For a long time the Semitic speaking people of Mesopotamia have worshiped the planets of the sky/heaven. Moon was the deity 'Sin', Sun was Shamash, and the bull mentioned by Moses was the shape of the ascending Moon in the East illuminated by the sun, today a symbol of Islam. A_star_te is Venus. Melchizedek= Melech Zedek = 'King of Righteness' is Jupiter.

A spiritual deity in all that countries in the 'orient' (means 'EAST' because the ascending New Moon 'Horn' in the morning above the horizon was holy from astrological reasons) is Al or El or En.

Sumerian:

Lord / BELUM or EN
Lord / En
Lord of / BEL
Lord of heaven / En-Zu
Lord of swine / Nin-Kilim
Lord of the command / En-Lil
Lord of the Earth / En-Ki
Lord of the seed / Bilu-Sha-Ziri
Lord of the wind / Enlil
Lord of wisdom / En-Zu

Because there were seven planets the planets were called in plural EL_OHIM.

El Azar is equal to the egyptian El Osiris and is called La_zarus in the time of Jesus.

YHWH ( has not realy a spiritual character, but a very physical) has it's root in India. The trinity aspect of life ( creation - preservation - distortion/changing ) (also known as symbols in the Quran as the 3 goddess ) is symbolized in the 3 figures Brahma (Abrahm) - Vishnu - Shiva. Shiva is a symbol for the distortion/regeneration of physical life. This is captured by the Semitic people in Mesopotamia about 2000 BCE as SCHI-WAH 'that, what gives physical life' and is known in Hebrew as 'Chavvwa' or 'khav-vaw' or HWH or EVA. YHWH means ' I am - the (physical) life'. This is the Genesis myth with a naked woman and naked man; they where only able to create mortal physical life with a 'tree of life' (Symbol of Shiva) and a 'Garden of Joy' (Hebrew: 'gan eden' (female symbol). No gods. Only eternal spiritual/astrological and physical/biological symbols - valid until today.

Volker

Volker.Doormann

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Tellurian

I thought the name yahwah came from the tetragrammaton which was the 4 letters that represented the name of the Edomite god. The 4 letters were pronounced yahd hay wa hay which were combined into yahwah.

I read that the 4 letters spelled out the name Adonel which came from the western semitic words Adon which meant Lord and El which meant God, so combining Adon and El you got the Lord God or the god whose name was Lord, as in Lord God of Israel.

Doctor X

It is the "causitive imperfect of the Proto-Canaanite Hebrew verb 'to be.'"

Silly.

Seriously, Frank Moore Cross has a still timely book--Canaanite Myth and the Hebrew Epic--which discusses the whole issue. It was a verb which appeared to be attached to longer divine names . . . "El that makes the big mountain" and stuff like that. I would recommend that.

As for where YHWH went as a deity with a pantheon . . . much less is clear. It seems reasonable that he was a Baal figure--even an alternative--who had a consort. The problem is the paucity of evidence--while some depictions of YHWH exist, none really exist of YHWH and Mrs. YHWH--there is a controversial inscription on a pot of "YHWH and his asherah" over two figures. Unfortunately the figures are male--Bes figures according to some scholars.

Anyways, Cross' book is a great start.

--J.D.

DrJim

The divine name YHWH derives from a very common Hebrew root meaning "to be", hence "He Is" or "He causes to be" or some such.

It is an anceint Jewish tradition not to pronounce YHWH, so when reading the bible aloud, Jews would say "Adonai" instead, which is a title derived from a common Hebrew word that means "Lord". When vowels were added to the biblical text in the early centuries of the common era, to remind the reader to make the substitution, the editors "pointed" YWHH (that is, added vowel-points) as ADONAI.

Around the 13th century, some biblical commentators, unaware of Jewish tradition simply read the artificially pointed YHWH as JeHoVaH (J being pronounced then as our Y). By the 16th century, this became a bit of a habit with some influential books being printed which used Jehovah.

I have come across some claims that Jehovah's Witnesses' literature has sometimes admitted that "Jehovah" is probably an error, but since it is so well known, it may as well be used.

In very many biblical translations, LORD printed in all caps (or small caps) reflects an original YWWH in the text. Lord, written in regular case letters is what you get when Adon is used directly. Sometimes you can get YHWH Elohim, which is usualy rendered "The Lord God".

JRL.

Doctor X

Dr. Jim:

For what it is worth, an orthodox Jew explained that the use of "Lord" and the prohibition of using YHWH comes from writing--to write down the name and have this possibly be destroyed is a bad thing. According to him, this had, over time, been misconstrued as a prohibition against pronouncing the name . . . but, hey, it is tradition now.

In "god's English"--"God" usually substitutes for the various "El" names--from Elohim to El Shadday, et cetera. "Lord" does usually substitute for YHWH. I regret this since it covers the different sources--different sources have different names. Also, I still feel that Elohim represent a polytheistic tradition--in some texts--which is lost in translation--bene elohim--"sons of the gods," for example.

--J.D.

premjan

there is a deity yahvah in the hindu rig veda (oldest hindu scripture).