Pagan Origins of Judaism

the Canaanite people predate the arrival of Israelites by roughly two millennia the proto Canaanites arose around 3,500 BC as a Mesopotamian based country and settled in sites such as a bluff from which we derive the Ebla archive and other places west of the Euphrates Canaan is a region in the ancient Near East during the late second millennium BC situated in the southern Levant the setting comprises regions of Phoenicia celestia and parts which would later be known as Israel Canaan had significant geopolitical importance in the Late Bronze Age Amarna period as the area where the spheres of interest of the egyptian hittite and assyrian empires converged knowledge of canaan from archaeological sources is almost exclusively from artifacts dated to the period in which the region existed under the hegemony of the new kingdom of egypt since the egyptian empire controlled this region during that time much of our knowledge from archeology comes from the Amarna letters and other documents of governance which record information from the time of egyptian rule much of the primary source knowledge of canaan stems from excavations in areas such as Tellez or tel megiddo and gezer the late bronze age state of Murray what is now rust Shama and Syria is considered a quintessential source of Canaanite culture and religion from which was found the augur Riddick texts and other artifacts of Canaanite culture the Israelite religion is one which originated out of these Bronze Age polytheistic ancient Semitic religious traditions specifically the Canaanite religion it exhibits a synchronization with elements from Babylonian religion as well as some Egyptian influences the religion began as a henna theistic offshoot of the Canaanite worship of El along with his secondary epithet Yahweh which refers to el Yahweh Sabah often translated as Lord of hosts which likely means el who creates the armies l who was the supreme god of the Mesopotamian Semites later became the chief god of the Hebrew Bible in Canaan he was known to be the father and the ruler of the Divine's as well as the Creator the God of the Jews evolved gradually from the Canaanite hel who was the high god of the pantheon to the Israel Israel I tell who is likewise the chief god of the Hebrews the essential qualities of the Canaanite L were retained in the God of the Hebrews along with memories of the Theogony of L and the gods over time the Israelite group of Canaanites converged the sky gods L and his son Baha Dodd and L was conflated as Yahweh early on the Israelites also also worshiped Yahweh along with his wife Ashura who was originally the consort of L in the Canaanite tradition for a long time scholars of the Hebrew Bible concluded that a major difference between the God of the Bible and the gods of other traditions was that so-called pagan gods had sexual lives and consorts while Yahweh did not but in the late 20th century archaeologists uncovered two intriguing inscriptions from two different middle II mid Middle Eastern sites the inscriptions were blessings not only in the name of Yahweh but also his consort Ashura over time there was a push towards my knowledge the worship of one God among many but not necessarily denying the existence of other gods which made it so that the Israelites focus on L Yahweh compelled them to make it appear that there was a greater divide between Yahweh and the older God ba thus in order to build up and emphasize the distinction between Yahweh and Baal the Hebrew text goes to great lengths to make Yahweh's conflict with bahala parent this marked the trend of Israel rejecting its heritage although the Israelites apparently broke off from Canaanite tradition at some point the essential elements from the Canaanite sources were maintained in the Bible such as the same dwellings and epithets of L L resides on Mount Zion and in certain texts he dwells with an attempt just like the Tabernacle described in Exodus titles of the Canaanite hell were preserved in the Hebrew tradition such as the following Elyon which is most time rahem which is bull also L was called the God of patriarchs a warrior and L was called olam which means eternal these were the names for the Canaanite L and they became the names for the Hebrew hill interestingly Babel relating to Babylon is a conjunction of Bob and L meaning gate of the God but it was not singly L from which Yahweh evolved but also Baal Haddad the Canaanite storm God indeed also the name which Jews substitute for Yahweh lest they utter it is Adonai the term from Canaanite at dawn which means Lord it's a synonym for Baja which also means Lord the connection between Yahweh and Baal is undeniable we find narrative instances of the Israelites undertake understanding of this connection in parts of the Hebrew text such as Exodus 32 8 crafting of the bull by Aaron in the Hebrews as Moses was on Sinai in which it is said these are your God's o Israel we see in the Israelite religion precisely what one should expect to see from a religion evolving from and assimilating religions surrounding in numerous passages Yahweh is depicted as any ancient Near East storm deity the most notable of which is bahadin like Baal Yahweh is a warrior who descends from his mountain home riding on a chariot of clouds his voice is thunder and his weapon is lightning the earthquakes and the skies release rain at his command in primeval times he asserted his authority by defeating the sea becoming the ruler of the skies Exodus 15:3 reads Yahweh is a warrior Yahweh is his name numbers 23 22 l who brings them out of Egypt is for them the horns of a wild bull numbers 24 8l who brings him out of Egypt is like the horns of a wild bull for him he shall devour the nations that are his foes and break their bones l of the Canaanites was also called bull and warrior here are some examples of parallels between Baal and Yahweh as attested to by the Ugaritic literature in the BA all cycle and the Hebrew Bible let me tell you Prince ba let me repeat writer on the clouds now your enemy Baal now you will kill your enemy now you will annihilate your foe you will take your eternal kingship your Dominion forever and ever and the Hebrew Bible reads behold your enemies Yahweh behold your enemies perish all evildoers are scattered your kingship is an eternal kingship your Dominion is for ever and ever the parallels with Baal extend also to the motif of the mountain where Yahweh have revealed himself there was thunder and lightning and the heavy cloud on the mountain and Mount Sinai was covered with smoke because Yahweh had descended upon it in fire and the whole mountain trembled violently the same imagery is used of balls theophany then Baja opened a break in the clouds but all sounded his holy voice but all thundered from his lips the Earth's high places shook the association of Yahweh as a storm God is also echoed in judges chapter five verses four through five Yahweh when you went out from say ear when you marched from the highland of Edom the earth shook and heavens to streamed in the clouds streamed with water the mountain shook before Yahweh the one of Sinai before Yahweh the God of Israel and Psalm 104 verse three Yahweh sets the beams of his chambers on the waters he makes his clap the clouds his chariot he rides on the wings of the wind there is also a shared emphasis on the seventh day for it was on the seventh day of daniel's incubation right in the temple that Baal intercedes for him and L blesses him just as it is on the seventh day that Yahweh called to Moses on the cloud covered mountain indeed the characteristic origin of Yahweh in the roots of L and BA is preserved in Hosea 2:16 which reads Yahweh says you will call me my husband and no longer my BA Frank M cross suggested in 1973 a potential connection with the Egyptian deity Fatah who has given the title doogie T Lord of gas in which Fatah is called Lord eternal and that it may be this identification of L with Fatah that led to the epithet Alam which means eternal so early and so consistently with the Israelites another similarity is that both the gods Pathan and L create the world through their very will and not through a divine battle between gods the Jews also seemed to be oddly concerned with circumcision which serves as another connection to Egyptian culture the earliest historical record of circumcision comes from Egypt in an inscription of the tomb at Saqqara dating to around 2400 BC while circumcision might have been done for hygienic reasons it was for the Egyptians part of their obsession with purity and was associated with spiritual and intellectual development these connections would all make sense considering the Levant was politically and culturally dominated by the Egyptian Empire in the time the Israelites are thought to have arisen by the end of the Late Bronze period however it is probably not until iron age 1 that a population began to identify itself as Israelite and the Israelite or the earliest documented instance of the name Israel is from the Egyptians delay of Merneptah around 1208 BC in which it records that Israel is laid waste and his seed is not the earliest possible occurrence of the name Yahweh is as a place name in the Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep the 3rd who reigned from 1402 to 1363 bc he refers to the land of yahoo which is the land of the SHA shoe being nomads from Midian thus the worship of Yahweh seems to have originated in areas south of Israel the name Yahweh which can take on various forms in the Semitic tongue of yah for theophoric purposes for example Adonai Jew which is Adan master and Yahoo referring to you or Yahweh contains the core name yah along with being the chief and ruler God Yahweh shares unequivocal resemblances to the Sumerian god yah who is culturally synonymous with Marduk and Baba Haddad yah and yah or Yahweh are virtually the same God the Torah draws heavily from other ancient Near East influences which pre-existed it incorporating and modifying them things such as the laws of eshnunna Hammurabi middle Assyrian laws and UNAMI the covenant theme which runs throughout is known to be directly related to the Hittite suzerainty contracts and the vassal treaties of SR Hadden one example of the Covenant from outside the Hebrew Bible lies in the Phoenicians inscribed arsalan Tosh amulets which refer to the eternal ones covenant a Council of Holy Ones and the sons of El interestingly there's also a fifth century AD Christian amulet from Cyprus which associates ray and Osiris with Yahweh and Jesus in imagery on one side and a palindrome text on the other stating Yahweh is the bearer of the secret name the Lion of Ray secure in his shrine this is interesting because the throne of El is depicted with features of a lion and the earliest possible instance of L and an artifact depicting him with two lines the Israelite accounts of creation contain clear allusions to ancient near-eastern cosmogony 's the first verse is draw upon the babylonian epic a new maha lease which means when on high both begin with a temporal clause the book of Genesis beginning with when L created on earth in which also nothing existed but primeval waters male and female fresh and salt OPSEU and TMO respectively the god Marduk manages to create the world by destroying TM on with wind ripping her asunder and forming the sky and the earth from her carcass Genesis applies the same styles and motifs of its ancient Near Eastern setting only D mythologies that lacks any Theogony of the gods which the texts discuss the memory of the battle narrative though is preserved in other parts of the Tanakh there are still significant differences however between typical ancient Near East religious traditions and the Hebrew Bible the most remarkable feature being the suppression of Mythology in the Hebrew tradition there is no biography or Theogony of Yahweh while the Bible is not mythology it does indeed contain myths and legends the polemical inversion of the Hebrew narrative as opposed to other myths is apparent in the emphasis on human importance and dignity created in divine image which is lacking in the narratives of their ancient Near East neighbors where humans tend to be menials human affairs are the theme of importance in the biblical account and thus the absence of mythologized stories of gods is substituted with mythologized stories of humans in that sense the often suggested question is the Bible trustworthy and depicting historical events is a wrong question to which the answer would be no a better question would be is the Bible trustworthy in depicting historical opinions and the answer to that is an obvious yes the text of the Torah is constituted of at least five sources as described in Bell House's theory Jay Yahoo has written around 950 BC and Judah II L o has written around 850 BC in Israel D deuteronomist written around 600 BC in Jerusalem P priestly written around 535 in exile of Babylon and our redactor which is the final edition of the combined sources although wellhausen states have been disputed and any of the sources could be decades if not centuries later in fact the Hebrew Bible itself explicitly admits this sort of phenomena when it sites prior sources at many times for example the book of Jasher the book of the Wars of Yahweh and the book of Edo this year this is not necessarily a modern idea either of wellhausen's considering the fact that similar analysis was concluded by scholars such as Baruch Spinoza thomas hobbes and john has struck in the 1600s in je text yahweh is the most anthropomorphic forming man from clay with his hands enjoying walks in the cool of evening stitching clothes for Adam and Eve from animal pelts enjoying the food Abram cooks for him speaking face-to-face with humans being bargained with and so forth Jay is particularly interested in the traditions of Judah and it supports Judah against Israel for example suggesting that Israel acquired its capital at Shechem by massacring the inhabitants and Jay supports the priests who descend from Aaron who were established in Jerusalem the capital of Judah while wellhausen placed the date for je text at around 950 BC a crucial study by HH Mead demonstrated that Jay was conscious of the prophetic works of the seventh century BC while the prophets did not know of the traditions of the Torah meaning that Jay cannot be earlier than the seventh century BC many current theories place Jay even later such as that of Russell American etext is characterized by its virtually exclusive use of the plural term Elohim for the deity along with its use of the phrase fear of God it holds a rather abstract view of the deity and strangely uses Horeb instead of Sinai for the mountain where Moses received the laws etext favoring Israel represents traditions from the Northern Kingdom of Israel and exhibits a fascination with its heroes such as Joseph and Joshua speaking negatively of Aaron for example claiming that he led the Israelites to worship the golden calf before the redactor edited it eat extolled the story of Abraham and Isaac in which Abraham has not stopped and Isaac never appears again suggesting rather that Isaac was sacrificed in the early tradition recorded in the Midrash still preserves the version of the tale in which Isaac was killed while the Jay texta picks the anthropomorphic cob that is involved with humans on earth the ello historic whant Lee involves angels for example telling of a ladder of angels that leads up to L whereas NJ this is simply a dream in which God is above the location etext also goes to excessive lengths to depict the Egyptians negatively and it depicts Moses as threatening Pharaoh and bringing the plagues himself the priestly source P text is unique among the other sources and is characterized by significant contradictions with them in P text Aaron and the priesthood have an exalted status and there is no sacrifice ordained by God at Sinai ritual laws and origins of shrines are stressed as is the role of priests unique to P is the assertion that only descendants of Aaron were allowed to officiate in the inner sanctum P's God is majestic and transcendent and according to P all things occur because of his power also unique to P is that the deity reveals himself in stages first as Elohim then as El Shaddai to Abram and then as Yahweh only to Moses and those following him in Exodus 6:3 Yahweh reveals his name to Moses saying that no one had yet known this name and Abraham Isaac and Jacob only knew him as El Shaddai but according to J text in Genesis 15 Abraham clearly knows the name of Yahweh and Yahweh himself says I am Yahweh P is significantly concerned with holiness meaning ritual purity and Israel is posited as a priestly Kingdom and holy nation with elaborate rules that are aimed at preserving this purity most scholars agree that P source was written either during or after the exilic period around five-30 BC the deuteronomist source although found mostly in Deuteronomy through second Kings underlies much of the Hebrew Bible the deuteronomistic history originated independently of the books Genesis Exodus numbers and the history found in the book of the chronicles scholars trace all or most of it to the 6th century BC it tells of a story in which a book of the law was supposedly found during the reign of King Josiah and which caused the King to embark on a series of religious changes and it has been suggested that the source this source was manufactured in order to validate his program of religious change Deuteronomists theology is conceived in the form of the suzerainty or covenant between Israel and Yahweh who elected them and requires them to live according to his law under this treaty yahweh has granted a conditional promise to the israelites of the land of canaan the interpretation asserted in d text explains israel successes as the result of obedience and its failures as the result of disobedience contrary to the other three texts in which independent shrines or priesthoods are represented as legitimate D texts insists on a centralized worship around the Temple in Jerusalem lastly D text asserts all Israelites as brothers and sisters and each will answer to God for his treatment of his neighbor these four texts were combined at two points in time by editors or redactors who appear to have kept as much as possible from the source documents firstly by combining J and E to form je the redactor of je is thought to have added very little only a few phrases in the attempt to remove serious contradictions and maintain the flow of the story between the texts the main exception to this is in the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac when the redactor added an angel stopping Abraham and replacing the boy with a ram during the Babylonian exile je was unified with PMV by a different redactor which many theorized to be ezra during the time of cyrus the great and that as we have it is the combined sources of the Hebrew Bible

Channel: Sigalius Mýricantur

Views: 359,349

Rating: 4.5406504 out of 5

Keywords: Judaism (Religion), Paganism (Religion), The Bible (Religious Text), Canaanites, history, Egypt, New Kingdom, Amarna, Hammurabi, Baal, Enuma Elish, El, Israel, Christianity, Yahweh, Adonai, mythology, Hebrew

Id: ZECezMYug8c

Length: 22min 39sec (1359 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Rango_Bango]

that was really interesting thanks, probly will do a 2nd watch that was a lot of info haha

[u/scotsgirl77]

I appreciate the comparison of texts’ words and characteristics used as well as the linguistic comparison. The side by side helps to see the connection.

[u/ScarthMoonblane]

I'm no expert, but there seems to be some leaps of logic being represented here as fact.