sotto voce

Drivel, Cheerful.

Sheshbazzar

You do have our permission to just ignore such edifying contributions Charlie.

sotto voce

Edifying? Parroting out the crap of Amazon's 'scholars' without a shred of argument is edifying?

Do feel free to justify what you allege, Cheerful.

Sheshbazzar

Reading comprehension problem? It was your smart ass two word replies to Cheerful Charlie's posts that lack substance and are unedifying.
And deserve to be ignored.

sotto voce

From me, just one word is enough.

Cheerful Charlie

The original El Myth cycle came from Northern Semites and was the basis of Judaism. El's wife was Ashera, one of his sons was Baal. In the myth, Ball rebelled, he wished to be ruler, and he castrated El. Asherah, his wife went to war with with Baal and defeated him, Ball remained thr chief of the sons of God, But El prevailed due to his wife Asherah's efforts. Then the whole thing drifts into rather silly shaggy dog stories.
I can see why some smart proto-Israelites would dislike this as a religion, same as many Greeks were repulsed by the Homeric Gods and their antics.
And you can read in the OT how the Yawehists went to war with those who clinged to the remanant ofthe old mythology. The war against the Bala worshippers, theose worshipping "the hosts of heaven" and Ashera are prominent in parts of the OT.

In Egypt late in the reighn of Rameses II there was collected a remarkable set of papyruses called the Lieden Papyruses. There we find over 400 "hymns" where the writers try to harmonize the numerous Goods of Egypt with the idea of a single God. There is but one God, Osiris, Amun, and Re are but aspects of God.

So we have two seperate things going on in Canaan and Egypt. But in Egypt this would fail. Though some better educated Egyptians may believe in a single God, most stayed polythesists and even imported Semitic Gods and others into their pantheon,m Baal, Qanesh (a popular ferrtility goddess) and others. The main battle in Israel did not start to take place in earnest until 700 BCE.

About the time of the Leiden papyruses, there were found in Egyptian map lists the name of a village near the Negev YWH, which demostrates that Yahweh was known
in the Southern reachees of Canaan, probably most properly pronounce bet WYH, house of Yahweh. How that became grafted on the obvious El myth cycle which would become a religious battle of simplification and shedding of earlier El mythology is something we can know nothing of directly. All we know of it is the battle took place about 700 BCE, 6 centuries after the Leiden papyruses were written.

Job 1 and 2 were early mythology where the fact that God had lots of sons as per el, the host of heaven, and Genesis 3 and 6 demonstrate again, the sons of God, as per El, a name used in the early OT for God.

But the Leiden stuff would not have been applicable to what was going on in Israel, it was for most of it, an attempt to harmonize many Gods into one. Not so in Israel, which was a much later attempt to purify their mythology by eliminating early Gods all together, by force if necessary such as aggressively cutting down the asherahs, the sacred groves dedicated to the goddess Asherah.

There was the tale of how the Israerlite priests "found" the books of Moses in the temple and presented them to the 18 year old king Josiah in the 7th century BCE.
Many centuries after the supposed events. And Ankhaten or the Lieden hymns.

And it is interesteing to see that the Egyptian n efforts to create a monotheistic framework emphatically failed even in Egypt.

Cheerful Charlie

sotto voce

A-hah. So look up your evidence, Cheerful.

sotto voce

Invention is such fun!

Sheshbazzar

Apparently Cheerful has been doing a much more thorough job of doing so, and has much more to say that is of substance, than his current one liner pundit.

sotto voce

Then why do you have to keep interrupting?

Go on, Cheerful. You know what you have to do. Ignore the noises off.