Sheshbazzar

Hi spin, you mentioned earlier about using cut and paste in formating my replies to your posts, being as I am relatively new to computer usage, this is a computer skill that I had never attempted using before this post.
Thank you for assisting me, I'm sure that with plenty of practice this new skill will prove to be most beneficial in the future, as there are quite a few of your statements that I will be asking you to further clarify.
Thanks again for all of your gracious words of encouragement. Sheshbazzar

spin

Domesticating the beast gives you such power!

Sheshbazzar

I had no intention of implying that the Hebrew bible was composed at one date, I was asking you to supply "any date, in any time that is pleasing to you", when you believe the Tanaka (that is the compiled books of the 'Law-Prophets-Writings') took on its ever after honored position within the Jewish religious cultus.
In previous posts you have referred to "prior to Jeremiah" and to "all those monotheistic reforms of Josiah", Are you simply trying to say that the compilation of the books called the Torah came during and after these two, and that the ancient texts underwent a reworking and editing at that time to fit within the teachings of a newly minted iconoclastic and monotheistic Jewish Yahwist cult? and that prior to that time "the central religion contained polytheism"?
Not arguing against your premise, just asking for your opinion on WHEN this transition occurred, and whether it is reasonable to postulate a monotheistic 'takeover' or 'reform' with a total lack of any prior monotheistic idea or conception to draw upon.
In other words it seems (to me) that lacking any background of monotheistic conceptions among the populace to draw upon, any such effort would have been as doomed to failure as Akhenaton's, because the populace having their own polytheistic religious traditions, with gods under every green tree, and high places upon every hill, would have had absolutely no understanding of the idea, nor any incentive to accept it, or to place themselves under the control of it.

spin

As a single corpus, the early rabbinical period.

No. I was using Jeremiah as a stereotyped example of a Jewish monotheism. Though I have no real idea when the Jeremiah material was written -- I don't think any biblical material was written down before the exile --, I didn't feel it was necessary to argue a date for Jeremiah at the time, because it has an earliest possible date of around 600 BCE. The writing process went on mainly during the 2nd Temple. It is interesting that Jeremiah doesn't get a good representation in the DSS and that the differences between the MT and LXX versions seem best understood if the Jeremiah tradition wasn't stable when the Hebrew Vorlage to the LXX developed.

The Persians were fundamentally monotheistic during their control of Palestine (and were aggressively so under Xerxes I) and almost certainly provided the momentum for sections of the Jewish population to make the move. The Jews who moved to Elephantine in southern Egypt in the exilic period were polytheistic and had to adjust when trying to get official support for the rebuilding of their local temple.

The God of Heaven seems to me to be a sufficient prior monotheistic idea.

Agreed.


spin

andrewcriddle

'his Asherah' occurs as a stereotyped form in several inscriptions.

According to Keel and Uehlinger 'Gods Goddesses and Images of God in Ancient Israel', which I'm (re)reading at the moment, it is at least highly unusual in Hebrew to have a personal proper name with a possessive suffix. (His consort/wife would IIUC be straightforward, his Asherah is much more problematic.)

Keel and Uehlinger think it most likely that 'his Asherah' refers directly to a cult object probably a pole or stylized tree, with the relation of the cult object to the Goddess Asherah left unclear by the inscriptions. (The cult object unquestionably is in its origins a symbolic representation of the personal Goddess Asherah, but this is a separate question from its meaning in 9/8 th century BCE Israel.)

Keel and Uehlinger suggest, on the basis of the epigraphical evidence that in the 9/8 th century Asherah should be regarded as a mediating entity associated with Yahweh rather than as a personal independent active female deity. (They also suggest that in the 7th century Asherah's original status as an independent active personal female deity was revived followed by opposition to any role for Asherah at all among strict Yahwists.)

Andrew Criddle

spin

There are two separate thoughts about the appearance of the word Asherah at Kuntillet Ajdrud. The first is that Asherah seems to have been a title rather than a name, just as Baal was. Keel and Uehlinger's quibble is a common one, but is based on lack of knowledge, ie they are just guessing.

One of the things that has always troubled me in the Hebrew tradition is the fact that the theophoric element in names was mainly YHW, Isayahu (Isaiah), Yermiyahu (Jeremiah), Zecharyahu, Eliyahu, etc. Usually theophoric elements constitute the complete name of the god. The Egyptians recorded the name in the phrase "Yahu in the land of the Shasu". A thousand years later at Elephantine the Jewish god was referred to as Yahu (YHW). If the original name of the god was Yahu, then we would have the name Yahu plus a suffix to form YHWH. The name Asherah which lacks the usual feminine /t/ ending in Hebrew (at Ugarit the name is Athirat), but when a suffix is added to a feminine noun, that /t/ is reinserted, so that at Kuntillet Ajrud we have )$RTH along with YHWH, with both words having suffixes. Given the lack of epigraphy, how can one resolve the question? Was the tetragrammaton originally a trigrammaton?


spin