Jesus of Christian mythology is a separate character and isn't part of the discussion. Please refrain from off-topic posts. If you have something to say on the contradiction that Jesus is your god and not Yahweh, please start your own thread.
Is Jehovah the God of all creation...?
- Thread starter Tht1Gy!
- Start date
What's your point?:shrug:
Much of th Old Testament is devoted to describing the origins and early history of the Hebrew people. According to the Bible, the Hebrews descended from a clan which lived in the Sumerian city of Ur around 2000 to 1500 B.C. The clan was befriended and ruled by a personality named Jehovah. The Bible claims that Jehovah was God.
According to the Biblical narrative, Jehovah encouraged the clan to leave Ur and settle in Haran—a caravan center in northeastern Mesopotamia. There, Jehovah later told the clan’s new patriarch, Abraham, to lead his tribe on a migration towards Egypt. The tribe complied, and over the ensuing generations it slowly made its way through Canaan towards the Nile River. Starvation finally forced the tribe to enter the Egyptian region of Goshen where the Hebrew sat first lived well under the pharaoh, but upon the coming of a new king to the Egyptian throne, the Hebrews were forced into slavery.
The Bible states that after four hundred years of servitude in Egypt, the Hebrews were led on an exodus out of Egypt by Moses under the watchful eye of Jehovah. By that time, the Hebrews numbered in the hundreds of thousands. After a long trek and many bloody battles, the Hebrew tribes returned to and conquered Canaan, which was the “Promised Land” pledged to them centuries earlier by Jehovah.
And so, according to the Bible, was born the Jewish religion.
Jehovah was clearly an important character in this Biblical story. Who was he? Was Jehovah God, as the Bible alleges? Was he a myth, as skeptics with a secular orientation would have us believe? Jehovah appears to have been neither.
The name Jehovah comes from the Hebrew word “Yahweh,” meaning “he that is” or “the self-evident.” This appellation conveys the idea that the Biblical Jehovah was a pure spiritual being; a true Supreme Being, if you will. But was he?
Old Testament descriptions of Jehovah have provided afield day for UFO writers, and for good reason. Jehovah travelled through the sky in what appears to have been a noisy, smoking aircraft.
A Biblical description of Jehovah landing on a mountaintop describes him this way:
. .. there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the sound of the trumpet was exceedingly loud;* and all of the people that were in the camp trembled.
* A trumpet-like sound accompanied many appearances of Jehovah.
And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the lower part of the mountain.
And Mount Sinai was altogether covered with smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke from the fire billowed upwards like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.
GENESIS 19:16-19
If an ancient Hebrew were to observe the rumbling, smoke, and flame of a modern rocketship, the description would not have been much different than this Biblical narrative of Jehovah. A later visit by Jehovah contained the same phenomena:
And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they moved away and stood far off.
GENESIS 20:18
Lest it be assumed that these descriptions might be of a volcano, further sightings reveal that Jehovah was a moving object:
And the Lord travelled before them [the Hebrew tribes] by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night:
He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, or the pillar of fire by night, from in front of the people.
EXODUS 13:21-22
Exodus 14:24, 40:34-38, and Numbers 19:1-23 contain identical descriptions of Jehovah as he led the Hebrew tribes to the Promised Land.
The ancient Hebrew eyewitnesses responsible for the above descriptions were not able to get a closer look at Jehovah. The Bible points out that no one was permitted to approach Jehovah’s mountaintop landing sites except Moses and a few select leaders. Jehovah had threatened to kill anyone else who tried. The early Bible therefore contains only descriptions of Jehovah as eyewitnesses saw him from a distance. It was not until much later that one of the Bible’s most famous prophets, Ezekiel, was able to get a closer look and describe Jehovah in greater detail. Ezekiel 1:1-25
According to the Biblical narrative, Jehovah encouraged the clan to leave Ur and settle in Haran—a caravan center in northeastern Mesopotamia. There, Jehovah later told the clan’s new patriarch, Abraham, to lead his tribe on a migration towards Egypt. The tribe complied, and over the ensuing generations it slowly made its way through Canaan towards the Nile River. Starvation finally forced the tribe to enter the Egyptian region of Goshen where the Hebrew sat first lived well under the pharaoh, but upon the coming of a new king to the Egyptian throne, the Hebrews were forced into slavery.
The Bible states that after four hundred years of servitude in Egypt, the Hebrews were led on an exodus out of Egypt by Moses under the watchful eye of Jehovah. By that time, the Hebrews numbered in the hundreds of thousands. After a long trek and many bloody battles, the Hebrew tribes returned to and conquered Canaan, which was the “Promised Land” pledged to them centuries earlier by Jehovah.
And so, according to the Bible, was born the Jewish religion.
Jehovah was clearly an important character in this Biblical story. Who was he? Was Jehovah God, as the Bible alleges? Was he a myth, as skeptics with a secular orientation would have us believe? Jehovah appears to have been neither.
The name Jehovah comes from the Hebrew word “Yahweh,” meaning “he that is” or “the self-evident.” This appellation conveys the idea that the Biblical Jehovah was a pure spiritual being; a true Supreme Being, if you will. But was he?
Old Testament descriptions of Jehovah have provided afield day for UFO writers, and for good reason. Jehovah travelled through the sky in what appears to have been a noisy, smoking aircraft.
A Biblical description of Jehovah landing on a mountaintop describes him this way:
. .. there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the sound of the trumpet was exceedingly loud;* and all of the people that were in the camp trembled.
* A trumpet-like sound accompanied many appearances of Jehovah.
And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the lower part of the mountain.
And Mount Sinai was altogether covered with smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke from the fire billowed upwards like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.
GENESIS 19:16-19
If an ancient Hebrew were to observe the rumbling, smoke, and flame of a modern rocketship, the description would not have been much different than this Biblical narrative of Jehovah. A later visit by Jehovah contained the same phenomena:
And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they moved away and stood far off.
GENESIS 20:18
Lest it be assumed that these descriptions might be of a volcano, further sightings reveal that Jehovah was a moving object:
And the Lord travelled before them [the Hebrew tribes] by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night:
He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, or the pillar of fire by night, from in front of the people.
EXODUS 13:21-22
Exodus 14:24, 40:34-38, and Numbers 19:1-23 contain identical descriptions of Jehovah as he led the Hebrew tribes to the Promised Land.
The ancient Hebrew eyewitnesses responsible for the above descriptions were not able to get a closer look at Jehovah. The Bible points out that no one was permitted to approach Jehovah’s mountaintop landing sites except Moses and a few select leaders. Jehovah had threatened to kill anyone else who tried. The early Bible therefore contains only descriptions of Jehovah as eyewitnesses saw him from a distance. It was not until much later that one of the Bible’s most famous prophets, Ezekiel, was able to get a closer look and describe Jehovah in greater detail. Ezekiel 1:1-25
When the Hebrew armies reached Canaan, Jehovah displayed a genuinely psychopathic bent. To establish the Hebrews in their new homeland, Jehovah ordered the Hebrew armies to embark on a campaign of genocide to depopulate all of the region’s existing cities and towns. Under the new leadership of a man named Joshua, the first city to fall in Jehovah’s seven-year holocaust was Jericho. According to the Bible, the Hebrew army, numbering in the tens of thousands, slaughtered everyone in Jericho except, ironically, a prostitute because she had earlier betrayed her own people by helping two Hebrew spies:
And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
JOSHUA 6:21
After that was accomplished:
.. . they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord.
JOSHUA 6:24
The next target was Ai, a city with a population of 12,000 inhabitants. All of the citizens of Ai were butchered and the city was burned to the ground. This savagery was perpetrated city after city:
So Joshua killed all in the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the valleys, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.
JOSHUA 10:40
The genocide was justified by saying that the victims were all wicked. This could not have been the true reason because children and animals were also slaughtered. It is hardly fair to massacre an entire city for the crimes of a few; neither is it right to murder a child for the crimes of its parents. The real crime, according to the Bible, was that the natives of the region had become disobedient. The more obedient Hebrews were therefore elected by Jehovah to wipe out the natives and replace them.
There is some debate today about whether the Hebrew assimilation into Canaan was as genocidal as portrayed in the Bible. Modern archaeological digs into some of the battle sites named in the Bible (such as Hazor, Lachish and Debir) have revealed evidence of violent destruction during the time of Joshua. Other sites have yielded less conclusive evidence. Many people understandably prefer to play down the Biblical bloodshed as much as possible. To whatever degree the Biblical story of the conquest of Canaan is true, it does tell us something very important about genocide:
Genocide is often a tool for promoting rapid political or social change by quickly replacing one group of people with another. For this reason, genocide has emerged as a significant historical phenomenon in connection with many efforts at bringing about rapid political and social change.
People who are familiar with Jewish moral teachings may be surprised at the brutal behavior ascribed to Jehovah and the Hebrews. The most famous of the Jewish moral teachings are, of course, the Ten Commandments, which were reportedly given to Moses by Jehovah during the Hebrews’ trek to the Promised Land. After Moses’ death, Jehovah and the armies of Israel clearly violated the Commandments in a big way. Thou shalt not kill was transgressed when the Hebrews massacred the inhabitants of Canaan.
Not "literally" God as the Jews and Christians would have you believe but rather mythical in nature like all other Gods and Goddesses. Simply one version of God created by man to reflect the supreme being.
For a good historical look at the History of Yahweh and the Cannaanite Deities..see Mark L Smiths Book "The early history of God : Yahweh and other Deities in ancient Isreal."
As far as I know he is recognized as a leading scholar in this area,although many scholars disagree with his interpretation of events concerning the deity..the Goddess Asherah and her role in early Israeli culture.
Yahweh apparently came to Israel from Edom or another southern location (Smith discusses this in another book, "The Origins of Biblical Monotheism"). He was incorporated into Israel's pantheon, which was Canaanite: it featured the deities El, Baal, Anat and Asherah.
Smith's thesis is that the development of monolatry (which preceeded monotheism) in Israel began with a process of convergence and differentiation.
At an early stage, during the Iron I period, Israel was undifferentiated, a normal Canaanite society: "The number of deities in Israel was relatively typical for the region" In particular "Baal was an accepted Israelite god" and criticism of his cult only began in the eighth or ninth centuries.
There was a transition at some point from Baal being worshipped alongside Yahweh without conflict, to a struggle between their cults, to the final emergence of Yahweh's cult alone. This transition included Yahweh's taking over Baal's imagery as storm god.
The real historical question that emerges is not Jeremiah's 'Why did his people turn away from the Lord,' but 'Why did the prophets turn away from Baal?' We do not yet have a clear answer, only the certainty that Baal came to be seen as a "threat" by the priesthood.
As far as the Goddess Asherah and her role...Smith acknowledges that most scholars believe some goddess, probably Asherah, was worshipped during the period of the monarchy; but he believes she may have been forgotten already by the period of the judges. Her symbolism was obviously incorporated into Yahweh's cult ,...and later purged from it. Necessary, given the very patriarchial nature of the priesthood.
Last edited:
What we know of the basic elements of the Ba‘al myth actually comes from two groups of texts. The Babylonian creation hymn, Enuma Elish, describes a great battle among the gods, primarily between Marduk, the champion of the gods, and Tiamat, the primeval ocean or the "deep."
The second group of texts come from Ugarit, in northern Syria. They are chiefly concerned with the emergence of Ba‘al as the leader of the gods. Basically, Ba‘al was the storm god, the bringer of rain, and thus fertility, to the land. There was rivalry among the gods and a struggle erupted between Yamm, the sea, and Ba‘al, the rain. With the help of his sister Anat, the goddess of war, and Astarte, the goddess of earth and fertility, Ba‘al defeated Yamm, and his cohorts, Tannin, the dragon of the sea, and Loran (or Lothan, cf. Isa 27:1), the serpent with seven heads.
The gods began to build a magnificent house for Ba‘al so that he could be at rest and provide abundant rain for the earth. But Ba‘al was challenged by Mot (or Mut), the god of death and the underworld. Mot temporarily triumphed and Ba‘al disappeared into the underworld. Anat and Shapash, the sun god, found Ba‘al, brought him back to life, and restored him to his house.
This series of stories is even more clearly, especially in its details, an agrarian myth personifying the cycle of rainy and dry seasons of the Middle East. Like the Enuma Elish, these texts deal with the danger inherent in drought and ensuing famine. The disappearance of rain in the dry season (Ba‘al’s descent into the underworld) portended catastrophe if it did not return in the Spring.
But this myth is more explicitly concerned with fertility, specifically cast in terms of human sexuality. Worship of Ba‘al involved imitative magic, the performance of rituals, including sacred prostitution, which were understood to bring vitality to Ba‘al in his struggle with Mot. It takes little imagination to see the connection between the human sexual act and rain watering the earth to produce fruit. It is interesting to note in passing that the biblical traditions use these same agrarian images of being fruitful or barren to describe vitality in human beings.
While we have no surviving Canaanite religious texts, the accounts of Ba‘al worship in the Old Testament correspond closely to the existing versions of the Ba‘al myth and what we know of religious practices in surrounding areas. The influence of this religious system on Israel can hardly be overestimated. Contrary to how some statements in the biblical traditions are often understood, the problem that faced Israel through most of its history was not that the people totally abandoned Yahweh for the worship of Ba‘al. Rather the problem was syncretism, the blending of Yahweh worship with Ba’al worship.
The Israelites never abandoned the worship of Yahweh. They simply added the worship of Ba‘al to their worship of Yahweh (called syncretism). They had one God for crises and another god for everyday life. The actual worship of Ba‘al was carried out in terms of imitative magic whereby sexual acts by both male and female temple prostitutes were understood to arouse Ba‘al who then brought rain to make Mother Earth fertile (in some forms of the myth, represented by a female consort, Asherah or Astarte).
The second group of texts come from Ugarit, in northern Syria. They are chiefly concerned with the emergence of Ba‘al as the leader of the gods. Basically, Ba‘al was the storm god, the bringer of rain, and thus fertility, to the land. There was rivalry among the gods and a struggle erupted between Yamm, the sea, and Ba‘al, the rain. With the help of his sister Anat, the goddess of war, and Astarte, the goddess of earth and fertility, Ba‘al defeated Yamm, and his cohorts, Tannin, the dragon of the sea, and Loran (or Lothan, cf. Isa 27:1), the serpent with seven heads.
The gods began to build a magnificent house for Ba‘al so that he could be at rest and provide abundant rain for the earth. But Ba‘al was challenged by Mot (or Mut), the god of death and the underworld. Mot temporarily triumphed and Ba‘al disappeared into the underworld. Anat and Shapash, the sun god, found Ba‘al, brought him back to life, and restored him to his house.
This series of stories is even more clearly, especially in its details, an agrarian myth personifying the cycle of rainy and dry seasons of the Middle East. Like the Enuma Elish, these texts deal with the danger inherent in drought and ensuing famine. The disappearance of rain in the dry season (Ba‘al’s descent into the underworld) portended catastrophe if it did not return in the Spring.
But this myth is more explicitly concerned with fertility, specifically cast in terms of human sexuality. Worship of Ba‘al involved imitative magic, the performance of rituals, including sacred prostitution, which were understood to bring vitality to Ba‘al in his struggle with Mot. It takes little imagination to see the connection between the human sexual act and rain watering the earth to produce fruit. It is interesting to note in passing that the biblical traditions use these same agrarian images of being fruitful or barren to describe vitality in human beings.
While we have no surviving Canaanite religious texts, the accounts of Ba‘al worship in the Old Testament correspond closely to the existing versions of the Ba‘al myth and what we know of religious practices in surrounding areas. The influence of this religious system on Israel can hardly be overestimated. Contrary to how some statements in the biblical traditions are often understood, the problem that faced Israel through most of its history was not that the people totally abandoned Yahweh for the worship of Ba‘al. Rather the problem was syncretism, the blending of Yahweh worship with Ba’al worship.
The Israelites never abandoned the worship of Yahweh. They simply added the worship of Ba‘al to their worship of Yahweh (called syncretism). They had one God for crises and another god for everyday life. The actual worship of Ba‘al was carried out in terms of imitative magic whereby sexual acts by both male and female temple prostitutes were understood to arouse Ba‘al who then brought rain to make Mother Earth fertile (in some forms of the myth, represented by a female consort, Asherah or Astarte).
Unfortunately, what several reviewers (notably Boadt, Hess, Edelman, Handy, and the present reviewer) wrote of the first edition is true of the present one. Problems having to do with Smith's use of evidence and historical argument remain. Evidence is drawn from different times and places with little attention to context.
Biblical texts are too often treated as though directly representative of the period spoken of rather than primarily of the views of the
period when they may have been written. Smith accumulates references but leaves the
precise relations among them indistinct. It is often difficult to find a clear thread of
argument and adequate justification for the conclusions drawn.
Thus while Smith excels at accumulating references to all sorts of sources from a wide range of times and places (as well as bibliographical references in the notes), he generally skims over these superficially without developing a nuanced argument and giving only occasional attention to problems of interpretation on historical method and more attention to specific social and cultural contexts.
Biblical texts are too often treated as though directly representative of the period spoken of rather than primarily of the views of the
period when they may have been written. Smith accumulates references but leaves the
precise relations among them indistinct. It is often difficult to find a clear thread of
argument and adequate justification for the conclusions drawn.
Thus while Smith excels at accumulating references to all sorts of sources from a wide range of times and places (as well as bibliographical references in the notes), he generally skims over these superficially without developing a nuanced argument and giving only occasional attention to problems of interpretation on historical method and more attention to specific social and cultural contexts.
Do I understand you correctly, that you are disparaging a source that you cite?:shrug: