CypressHSMom

Hello, everyone! I am new to posting here, but a long time reader. I wanted to get some help on a concern of mine regarding the origins of Judaism. I have a friend, J, who is a Messianic, that really loves to share her thoughts with everyone. She loves to point out the hypocrisy in Christianity, which I have no problem with, I just want things to work both ways.

I read a book not too long ago, I believe the title was "Mesopotamian Myths", which touched briefly on the pagan origin of Judaism. Can anyone recommend a different source where I might find more information on this subject?

Easter is coming, and I already dread the "you shouldn't celebrate <insert holiday here> because it's EVIL" lecture. I want to be prepared with any and all relevant information. I don't know anything about debate and formal logic, but I want to be armed with some kind of knowledge, LOL.

I don't know if it matters for recommendations, but I am neither Christian nor Jewish. I do enjoy reading about religious history, but the more I learn, the less I can believe.

I appreciate any responses!
Jillian

Marduk

I can think of a few good books off hand:

Canaanite Myth & Hebrew Epic
Who wrote the Bible
The Bible Unearthed
Or search the archives here


http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=43947

JohnKin79

Tell your friend that there's a word for jews who believe Jesus was the Mesiah . . . Christians.

Marduk

“Tell your friend that there's a word for Jews who believe Jesus was the Messiah . . . Christians.�

But there are people who are called Messianic Jews, the “Jews for Jesus� folks, they, like Jesus, keep all the Jewish laws, holidays & traditions, unlike most Christians. The 7th Day Adventists and the now defunct “Worldwide Church of God". They also maintain the fri-sat Sabbath.

Sarpedon

Wow, it looks like these jews have picked up the most annoying charachteristics of christianity, but left alone the rest.

There seem to be two schools of thought on the Judaism theory. One holds that Judaism is a result of the mixture of Zoroastrianism and native semitic beliefs. The other holds that it is a combination of the Egyptian Aten (monotheistic sun worship) cult and native semitic beliefs. Search the web for Aten+Akhenaten+Yahweh or Israel to find references to these.

And prepare to be called Anti-Semitic when you bring this up to her.

spin

Religious stories did the rounds in the ancient world so there is a lot of interconnectedness in what gets told. The flood stories were around before the Jews emerged from Canaan as a separate entity.

Understand this: archaeology shows that there was no conquest of Palestine, but that the people who lived in the area continued to live there and their culture developed there. Check out the books Marduk mentions and see his link.

It is difficult to know when Judaism became monotheistic, for there are inscriptions which come from Palestine a) at a place called Kuntillet Ajrud (9th century BCE) and b) at Khirbet el-Qom (8th c. BCE) which mention being blessed by "Yahweh and his Asherah", so that Rahweh had a consort goddess before the exile. You might remember that the first commandment says that you should have no other god beside the Lord, not that there is no other god. It was only later in Jewish cultural history that the Jews became monotheistic.

Religions evolve. Messianism is a late evolution. At the time of the writing of part of the book of Isaiah, the Persian king Cyrus could be called the Lord's messiah (Isa 45:1) because he, it is claimed, did the Lord's work, though obviously he didn't believe in Yahweh, being from a family of devout Zoroastrians. Messianism mainly developed from the 2nd c. BCE as a reaction to the oppression of the Greek Seleucid empire, when King Antiochus IV desecrated the temple and turned it into a temple of Zeus (from the apocryphal or catholic book 2 Macc 6:1-2), then to the Romans...

There's lots of material you could use if you have time and energy.


spin

Baidarka

Try "The Savage In Judaism" by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz.

capnkirk

Spin,

Overall, an excellent post. I might offer one small clarification however. While you are correct in that Cyrus didn't believe in Yahweh in the Judeocentric sense of his being "THE" Almighty, he did believe that Yahweh was one of the gods on the side of light in the Zoroastrian hierarchy under Ahura-Mazda. This belief supposedly provides his motive for sending the Hebrews home to worship him.

Mageth

Another excellent book: "A History of God", by Karen Armstrong. In the book, Armstrong discusses the evolution of the (primarily Abrahamic) God concept from its roots in a region of many gods through the various monotheisms today, covering the three major branches of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).