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Regular Member
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: New York State
Posts: 440
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Loomis
I don’t think these are “slips of the tongue.�
I don’t think Friedman had all the facts when he wrote Who Wrote the Bible.
I don’t think he understood that El was Israel’s god, and that there are plenty of stories about him in the OT.
Do you mind if we get specific?
In the very first chapter he draws an artificial line between El (described as ‘the old pagan god’) and Yahweh (described as ‘the God of Israel’).
When I google define pagan the first hit I get is this:
Whether you like it or not, Friedman is describing the relationship of the gods El and Yahweh to the stories in the Bible. He could have remained neutral on this issue (for example – he could have talked about baseball), but instead chose to make a few allegations.
Friedman is asking us to believe that the god named El did not belong to the stories in the Bible, and that El was NOT worshipped by ‘real’ Israelites. Friedman says that El was a pagan god and that Yahweh was Israel’s god (exclusive of all other gods including El).
That … is the part that I object to.
That … is the part that is ignorance and unequivocally wrong.
Like I said in my other posts – it is misleading and irresponsible because it denies the syncretic way the religions and stories in the Bible evolved. And that is the very subject at hand. (not baseball)
If the purpose of Who Wrote the Bible is to explain why some authors referred to their god as ‘Yahweh’ while other authors used the name ‘El’, then the reader is entitled to know that El was a separate god. El was the original god of Israel. Israelites worshipped El. Real ones. Yahweh was the god of Judah. Some of the stories in the OT are about El. There is no reason to think that the authors who wrote about the god El knew who Yahweh was or worshipped him.
This is simply not always true. Why not admit it?
And if Friedman understands the facts then why is he asking us to believe it?
Sometimes ‘the name of God in the Bible’ is El. And its not because it’s the same god with a different name. It’s the El we all know and love: father of Shachar, Shalim, and Yahweh/Baal. The El who used to get drunk at parties.
I don’t think Friedman was being malicious when he wrote this; he was just clueless like most folks. The difference being that Friedman was asking for some amount of undeserved repect on the issue.
If the Documentary Hypothesis demands that The name of God in the Bible is Yahweh because of what Friedman wrote, then the Documentary Hypothesis should die. :devil: |
Nowhere does Friedman deny the syncretic nature of the Yahweh-El relationship. In fact, he explicitly mentions it on pages 81-82:
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I have pointed out two places where the name Yahweh occurs in E stories. Until now, I have said that the name of God was a key distinction between J and E. Now let me be more specific. In J, the deity is called Yahweh from beginning to end. The J writer never refers to him as Elohim in narration. In E, the deity is called Elohim untll the arrival of Moses. From the first time that Moses meets God, this changes. In the famous E story of the day that Moses meets God - the story of the burning bush - Moses does not know God's name, and so he asks.
And Moses said to God (Elohim), "Here I am coming to the children of Israel, and I say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they will say to me, 'What is his name?' What shall I say to them?" {Exod 3:13}
The deity first gives the famous response "I am what I am." (The Hebrew root of these words is the same as the root of the name Yahweh.) And then he answers:
Thus shall you say to the children of Israel, "Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you." This is my name forever: By this I shall be remembered from generation to generation. {Exod 3:15}
In E, Yahweh reveals his name for the first time to Moses. Prior to this scene in Exodus, he is called El or Elohim.
Why did the writer of E do this? That is controversial. Some think that this story reflects the religious system in the northern kingdom of Israel. In choosing the golden calves (young bulls) as the throne platform, King Jeroboam was perhaps identifying Yahweh with the chief Canaanite god, El. El was associated with bulls and was known as Bull El. Jeroboam was thus saying that Yahweh and El were different names for the same God. The E story would then serve this merger of the deities. It would explain why the deity had the two different names: he was called El at first, and then he revealed his personal name Yahweh to Moses. This explanation of the name change in E is attractive in that it shows another logical tie between E and the kingdom of Israel. This fits with all the other clues we have seen that E was from Israel.
However, there is a problem with this. In Judah, King Solomon used golden cherubs as the throne platform. And the god El was not only associated with bulls, but with cherubs as well. The statues that each kingdom used, therefore, do not make good evidence for explaining why E has the name revelation to Moses. Besides, all the other evidence we have seen indicates that the author of E was against the religious system that Jeroboam started in Israel. The E author depicted Moses destroying the golden calf. It is difficult, therefore, to argue that this author followed that religious system's theology on the identity of God.
Some investigators doing research on early Israelite history have concluded that, historically, only a small portion of the ancient Israelites were actually slaves in Egypt. Perhaps it was only the Levites. It is among the Levites, after all, that we find people with Egyptian names. The Levite names Moses, Hophni, and Phinehas are all Egyptian, not Hebrew. And the Levites did not occupy any territory in the land like the other tribes. These investigators suggest that the group that was in Egypt and then in Sinai worshiped the God Yahweh. Then they arrived in Israel, where they met Israelite tribes who worshiped the God El. Instead of fighting over whose God was the true God, the two groups accepted the belief that Yahweh and El were the same God. The Levites became the official priests of the united religion, perhaps by force or perhaps by influence. Or perhaps that was their compensation for not having any territory. Instead of land, they received, as priests, 10 percent of the sacrificed animals and produce.
This hypothesis, too, fits with the idea that the author of E was an Israelite Levite. His story of the revelation of the name Yahweh to Moses would reflect this history: the God that the tribes worshiped in the land was El. They had traditions about the God El and their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then the Levites arrived with their traditions about Moses, the exodus from Egypt, and the God Yahweh. The treatment of the divine names in E explains why the name Yahweh was not part of the nation's earliest tradition.
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The fact is that in virtually all the biblical stories in which El is named, he is considered the same god as Yahweh. El and Yahweh were apparently identified with each other very early in both Israel and Judah (see, for instance, Joel Ng's article on the subject at eblaforum); by the time the earliest major biblical texts were written (8th century BC, according to most estimates), monotheistic tendencies were already emerging; the earliest "monolotrous" prophetic works appear; the main texts of J, E, and P are all monolotrous (i.e., other gods exist, but only Yahweh is to be worshipped). Monolotry was still a minority movement in Israel and Judah at this time, restricted to a few prophetic reformers and, when the politics made it advantageous, the Jerusalem priests, as well as the occassional monarch (i.e. Hezekiah and Josiah) who fell under the influence of the movement. The vast majority of the population held on to its polytheistic roots until after the end of the kingdom. But the texts that have come down to us are the monolotrous ones, as this movement's descendent, monotheism, was the one that took power after the Exile. The few place in which Yahweh and El appear be separate (Deuteronomy 32, Genesis 49, possibly Psalm 82) are very early poems. This merging between Yahweh and El was not unique, El was in fact assimilated by various Levantine gods in this period- Chemosh in Moab, Milcom in Ammon, and Qaus in Edom. This likely reflects an increasing "nationalization" of the various Canaanite peoples at this time- i.e., different ethnicities (of which the Israelites were one) were arising out of the older generalized "Canaanites," and sought to distinguish themselves from each other.
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02-13-2006, 01:31 PM
