Gawen

I'm somewhat confused. If El was the top dog and Yahweh was one of his sons...AND El's sons were sacked and condemned to mortality...how is it Yahweh is still worshiped?
In Psalm 82, Yahweh is not explicitly mentioned even though Deut 32:8-9 seems to implicate him among the "sons of Elyon", right?

spin

It's understandable that one gets confused: our major source was written down so long after the religious ideas that you are looking at that they have been greatly mystified. El was the father of the gods type figure in the Canaanite religion just as Saturn was for the Greeks and Ea was in Mesopotamia. Yahweh was a son just as Zeus and Marduk were. Yahweh had a consort as archaeology has revealed inscriptions at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom talk of Yahweh and Asheratah. Asherah is usually know in the Hebrew bible as the queen of heaven and her symbol was the tree (sometimes the bower). We read of strange deeds under every green tree. When Yahweh was represented in sanctuaries as the pillar, there would be a tree beside it to represent Asherah (see for example Josh 24:26).

Yahweh it seems was always the particular god of the Hebrews. When the ruling elite were dragged into exile the Canaanite context was probably broken and soon they were in the cultural milieu of the monotheistic Persians and their king of heaven. Syncretism is a very common religious process when two cultures come into contact religious ideas cross from one to the other and perhaps vice versa. In such a context Yahwism may easily have taken on traits of Ahura Mazda.

It would be such a development that would make sense of the promotion of Yahweh.


spin

squiz

I thought Saturn was Roman.

spin

You're right. I was working from faulty memory. Kronos.

Interestingly the Greeks have the same basic motif of the younger generation surpassing the older twice. As Zeus overthrew Kronos, so Kronos had overthrown Ouranos.


spin

neilgodfrey

It appears that Yahweh was a relatively latecomer to making to the centre of Israelite religion, and this may have been largely through the efforts of "the Deuteronomists". This would explain some of the inconsistencies throughout the OT re the use of El and Yahweh.

One school came to fuse Yahweh with El, and others maintained the clear distinction. The reforms of the Deuteronomists (those fusing Yahweh and El) were probably not as overwhelmingly successful as the Deuteronomist authors would have liked their readers to have believed. There is evidence of deep conflicts between the Yahweh=El alone Dt's and the "traditionalists" who adhered to the traditional El - Yahweh/Baal distinction: the many groves and altars that were rationalized as originating with the Patriarchs versus the centralized Dt's opposed to those.

So it is probably a mistake to expect consistencies throughout literature that was produced by different schools and further sometimes redacted by rivals over time.

I hope one day to complete some of this discussion primarly from Margaret Barker's "The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God" begun here.


Neil

Ben C Smith

Is this inscription available online anywhere? Do you happen to have a transcription?

Ben.

spin

There is something on the Wiki Asherah page here. (Judith Hadley has published on the issue in various scholarly journals.)


spin

Lucis

ouranus wasn't a real god because he was just an anthropomorphization of the sky. khaos was the true king of gods.

Ben C Smith

Okay, thanks.

Ben.

Minimalist

Archaeology has shown that Jerusalem was an insignificant village and Judah a backward and poverty-stricken region until the 7th century BC. If you view it in the context of "nationalism" it makes more sense.

"We're getting more powerful and THIS is our god." For a number of historical accidents the later writings which glorified this particular god have survived to be abused by modern generations.