The Religions of Ancient Canaan and Phoenicia

[Music] [Music] welcome to the history of the world podcast my name is Chris Haslam and you're listening to volume 2 the ancient world this is episode 10 the religion of Canaan and Phoenicia [Music] our first job this week in one of the more difficult podcast suits I've had to write is to explain l l spelt a L is a deity deities have been mentioned many times in relation to Near East Worship over the course of these vol 2 episodes we can recognize that many ancient world cultures had a number of gods and each of these gods would represent an aspect of the world in each culture there may be a God of crop fertility there may be a goddess of pregnancy there may be a God of craftsmanship there may be goddesses of fruit or love there may be gods of the moon and the Sun this was the typical polytheistic nature of Near East Worship often in cities there would be a supreme deity for example in Babylon the supreme deity was Marduk and we know of Marduk because anytime that Babylon was conquered the aggressors would take the statue of Marduk which was a sacrilegious act designed to spiritually weaken the city at least in the minds of the second millennium BC a Neary's population in or we find the supreme deity called in Anna who was worshipped especially by Sargon of Akkad's daughter and head Oh Anna after Sargon had conquered the city of or in the late 3rd millennium BC a Asher was the national god of the Assyrians and was the supreme day t of the first capital city of Assyria namely Asiya these are just some of the supreme deities that we have stumbled across during our journey through the ancient Near East but these cultures of Babylonia Sumeria and Assyria would have many other minor deities too so the style of religion was very much polytheistic which means to worship multiple gods L was the name that many cultures gave to their supreme deity so the name very likely represented a different spiritual entity in each individual culture but essentially it was the name of the supreme god although there are cognate words used throughout the Near East so in some cases L is ill and aloo among others depending on when and where in the near East you were L Zhang's understood to be the word that Canaanites used for their supreme deity the list of other deities in any chosen religious worship of any particular Near East culture could be described as its pantheon of deities and in Canaan L was the leader of the pantheon of deities and Asherah the goddess of motherhood and fertility was his queen consort now Canaan differed from Mesopotamia in Mesopotamia there were the rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates and it was somewhat easy for the residents who lived on the banks of these rivers to manipulate the flow of the rivers by building irrigation canals and therefore aid in the facility of the land to enhance the success of the agricultural yield something vital for the survival of the large and advanced societies of Mesopotamia especially when it came to having a surplus of harvest to be able to trade with in Canaan however this was not so easy and the Canaanites relied heavily on rainfall to be able to assist with the success of their own agriculture therefore it should come as no big surprise to learn that the supreme Canaan deity L was the god of water once again like the word el baile is also quite ambiguous when trying to give it a specific meaning in many Semitic languages Bale and its cognates across the languages is the word given to a man of significant standing so it could be a lord or a master or even a husband in the eyes of the Canaanites and in respect of their deities they all would have been known as the god of rain or otherwise as the rider of the clouds we can see from excavation of scripts from ogre eats that the local Levantine people of the second millennium BCE regarded Bale as the God of the weather in general if you recall we spoke of ogre eat during episode six which was their Late Bronze Age collapse episode it was the city of the Levant that was under the influence of the Hittite Empire at the beginning of the 12th century BCE and it appealed to the Alaska kingdom of Cyprus for help against invaders sadly the appeal was to no avail as the city of ogre eats fell but at least this does mean that we know that the worship of bail existed in this geographical area previous to 1200 BC a one of the texts from a great rates low also it is the time of his reign bail sets the season and gives forth his voice from the clouds he flashes lightning to the earth how else would ancient people interpret a violent thunderstorm as anything other than a spiritual reaction by a higher power another God worshiped by the people of a garite was the one called Maat Maat was considered to be a son of L and also the personification of death bayil warned his messages of the dangers of not but not continually threatens bail and it's not until a daughter of L and Asherah the goddess of the Sun Shep s warns MOT that L will turn against him if he continues to battle bail that mutt concedes the battle at one point during the story Mott kills bail and reign supreme before bail is brought back to life to battle Mott could this have been symbolic to the canaanites of periods of drought waiting for the weather deity bail to come back to life and bring rain to fertilize the land again we will come back to bail later in the podcast bail card when the culture that we primarily associate with the Phoenicians emerged and by that I mean the seafaring traders then the city of Tyre emerged as the powerhouse of Phoenician lands now for the sake of simplifying things I'm going to make an assumption that the Phoenicians and the Canaanites are the same peoples and that the Phoenicians actually referred to themselves as Canaanites and it was the Greeks who referred to these people as the Phoenicians in biblical writings we see them referred to as the Canaanites and in Latin and Greek scripts we see them referred to as the Phoenicians taya had its own supreme deity just like many other cities as we have already clarified tires deity was called Mel cut and as the lead Phoenician city when it came to their Mediterranean expansion mail carts would become an extremely important Punic deity in general and there were temples built for him throughout Punic lands when we say Punic we refer to Phoenicians and subsequently the Carthaginians all of whom share the same bloodlines as we discovered in the last podcast in the last podcast we mentioned the very important Carthaginian try colony based at the modern-day Spanish city of cordis and it was here that the Carthaginians were construct a temple dedicated to mail-cart this temple would be one of the last places that Hannibal would visit before his famous crossing of the Alps to confront the Romans Hannibal being a Carthaginian would be a faithful worshipper of mail-cart and as such would make the pilgrimage to Cadiz before embarking on one of the most highly regarded military journeys of history Hannibal's achievements are going to be saved for a future podcast but the purpose of this passage is to discuss the deity of mail-cart and the high esteem in which the Punic people's held him in the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus traveled to Tyre during his own lifetime to look for clues about the deity of Tyre but throughout his writings he referred to the deity as Heracles now Heracles is actually a character of Greek mythology who is a son of Zeus and a God or a hero of athleticism Herodotus clearly links the deity of Tyre to the Greek mythological legend Heracles so we could assume that mail-cart and Herakles are thought of has been the same person just that each culture had a name in their own language for him subsequently the Romans adopted Heracles into their own stories of mythology and as such they renamed him Hercules now this is where it gets interesting because in the last episode we spoke of The Pillars of Hercules which is the name given to the promontories which are either side of the Strait of Gibraltar and what we mean by promontories are peaks of land that act as an iconic gateway between the familiarity of the Mediterranean Sea and the dangerous Atlantic Ocean a gateway which it is suggested that only the Phoenicians dared to breach in order to reach the metal rich societies of the British Isles and West Africa according to legend the Pillars of Hercules are so named as the westernmost extent of the travels of Hercules during his 12 labors a Greek mythological story could it therefore be pure coincidence that a place where the Venetians dared to cross is possibly named after their own deity mail cart because of this link even if it is somewhat tenuous tenuous links can sometimes be all that we as historians have to go on especially when it comes to the origins of religion and spirituality the classical cultures of Rome Carthage and Greece seem to all have very similar polytheistic worship practices where many different gods exist for many different things and this can be traced back to the cultures of the ancient Near East who that although had a supreme city data is still recorded as worshiping multiple gods and this creation of gods for many different aspects of nature could even connect us to the shamanistic animism of prehistory that could be the purpose of the portable and parietal art of the Upper Paleolithic something we explored why in volume 1 temples and sacrifice the people of Cardus are very proud of their city and its heritage especially its Punic links Cardus was founded by the Phoenicians and used as a base by the Carthaginians while preparing for the Punic Wars against the Romans we mentioned that Hannibal went on pilgrimage to Cardus before setting off across the Alps to meet the Romans Strabo was a Greek historian that lived from the 1st century BCE to the 1st century CE and he mentions the temple of tarean Heracles which we may otherwise call mail-cart in the city of Cardus Strabo writes that there were two bronze pillars within the temple and that these pillars were regarded by some to be the true pillars of hercules it is also mentioned the Hannibal made sacrifices at this temple now this could refer to animal sacrifice something which we believe has been part of human society for a very long time certainly we studied the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic and one conclusion that we speculated on was that there must have been some form of ritual in regards to nomadic hunting when humans became agricultural it may no longer have been necessary to carry out the same rituals but there is very likely to have been some form of ritual to ensure a successful harvest or production of fertile livestock and it is possible that particular animals were sacrificed as an offering to the deities who would ensure agricultural success in response this might sound bizarre but would your ancient society take the risk of not performing these rituals if it meant that the weather gods would not bless your lands with rain or that they would grant more favor to the next city who were competing with yours for the fertile lands in between not honoring rituals was not the risk so these sacrifices were necessary and this points us towards an even more grim reality of ancient life that being the sacrifice of humans the best example that we have given of this is the grave of Queen puabi who was buried in the royal cemetery of or in the 3rd millennium BCE there humans and animals were sacrificed probably to accompany her into the afterlife at first glance the entourage of humans may have willingly poisoned themselves however closer examinations of the bodies indicate that some of them may have been struck about the head to incapacitate them either way it would appear that the sacrifices must have been seen as a necessity and the fear of not sacrificing living beings must have outweighed the horror of doing it the Romans and Greeks would have us believe that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians sacrificed their children to the gods but there are also historians that oppose this saying that this is greco-roman propaganda in my opinion certainly human and animal sacrifice is very much a part of our history whether we like it or not it's probably not a case of where the sacrifice took place as how much sacrifice did each particular culture carry out the Bible states that the Canaanites carried out gruesome sacrifice of children by burning them alive so there is definitely an infanticide connection there but all the sources were enemies of the Canaanites Phoenicians and Carthaginians so we may never know the entire truth the reported place of Canaanite child sacrifice according to the Hebrew Bible was Tophet and one opponent of this practice was Yahweh Yahweh is a name given to the god of iron age Israel and Judah certainly around the time of the siege of lakish which was the subject of our podcasts episode 8 his name was represented by four letters y h w h the reason for this is because the name was being written in what we've referred to as an abjad style of writing which is when an alphabet with no vowels is being used Arabic Hebrew and Syriac alphabets are a good modern example of objects the most famous archaic object is the Phoenician alphabet which is something we mentioned in episode 9 the name Yahweh was first written information script by using four letters which have been translated into the Latin script as Y H WH and the vowel sounds that need to be inserted to make the name vocal have been a matter for much debate most people will say the name is Yahweh but if we break down the name into its four letter form which is actually directly called the Tetragrammaton we can turn Y H WH into the phonetic sounds yeah her work her and by shifting the sounds which is a common thing in language evolution we can suppose that the Y sound transformed into adjacent and the W sound transformed into a V sound so yah were transformed into J and this is the origin of the name Jehovah which we find most commonly used for the Christian movement called jehovah's witnesses who are literally god's public witnesses to the missionary work within their communities that they are well known for after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in the sixth century BC a Jewish people accepted Yahweh as their universal God which claims the God of Israel to be supreme and refers to him as the Lord due to his name Yahweh been deemed to be too divine to be uttered however the name Israel itself contains the word l which in this sense means God as we mentioned right at the very beginning of the podcast biblical texts explain this by stating that L and his queen consort Ashura had many sons one being Bale who we spoke of earlier and another being Yahweh who was given the nation of Israel by his father L according to biblical texts it was the king of Judah called Josiah who proclaimed that Yahweh should be worshipped exclusively by the Jews so there is a serious danger of us getting lost in detail and trying to describe things which are ambiguous and contentious if we are trying to literally translate and understand every script many Phoenician scripts have been lost due to the fact that they like to use parchment which doesn't stand the test of time like clay tablets but we do believe that some of the works of Hebrew texts such as those written in the Hebrew Bible derive from Phoenician writings in essence we can talk about peoples and we can talk about the evolution of God as a concept so let's firstly tackle the peoples we can say that the most likely conclusions of all that we have studied is to say that the Canaanite people lived in the Levant for as long as we care to believe so potentially from the dawn of ancient times 5,000 years ago there appears to be no evidence of supplanting cultures just subjugation so we can say that from the Canaanites we get the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians it is feasible to say that they are all one and the same bloodline just referred to by different names according to the source of the name and the period that we're talking about these Levant ein peoples are probably comparatively closely related to the original people of the first kingdoms of Israel and Judah and as such as the first peoples who we may refer to as Hebrew and ultimately what the greco-roman would attribute as synonymous to the Jewish people in general in today's world we refer to the Semitic speaking Israelites as Hebrew all his reliance are biblically believed to be descendants of Abraham who is the patriarch of Judaism as well as Christianity and Islam and who may have been born in the Mesopotamian city of or the tribe of Benjamin was one of the twelve tribes of Israel mentioned in the Hebrew Bible one of the members of this tribe was called Sol and it was he who would become the first king of the United Monarchy of Israel it is suggested that all of this happened in the 11th century BCE as the king of Israel so falls out of favor with God and this is when David takes a prominent place in the story of the birth of Judaism David according to the Hebrew Bible God favored the young Israelite called David who was a humble Shepherd with a reputation for fighting off wild animals in the duty of protecting his flock during the war with the Philistines the mightiest Philistine warrior called Goliath would call out the strongest Israelite to meet him on the battlefield Goliath was so huge that he struck fear into the hearts of these reliance but when David overheard Goliath's challenge despite not being an Israelite soldier he asked King Saul to let him face Goliath believing that God was with him sald obliged and David met Goliath on the battlefield this legendary battle between the mightiest mountain of a man the Philistine Goliath and the humble young Israelite Shepherd David echoes down to modern day with the shots of a sling David defeated Goliath winning the Israelites the unlikeliest victory over the Philistines in the most legendary underdog victory David's popularity within Israel would soar and so would realize how out of fader he had become by comparison to David when David ultimately became the king of the Israelites he would take Jerusalem from the Jebusites who occupied it he would then go on to rule Israel for 40 years before being replaced by his son Solomon King Solomon would be the last king of the United Monarchy of Israel as the country would be split into two after Solomon's death the kingdom of Israel would emerge from the north while the kingdom of Judah would emerge from the south Jerusalem would become the capital city of the kingdom of Judah and a temple dedicated to Solomon was completed in 95 3 BCE at Mount Zion in the capital city itself the temples deity was Yahweh and such was its beauty that many would travel great distances to see it the Ark of the Covenant containing stone tablets of the Ten Commandments would find a permanent home here those Hebrew men of the lands of Israel were encouraged to make regular pilgrimages to the temple to affirm their worship of Yahweh the true God any worship taking place at other temples and shrines would be considered to be idolatry idolatry is the worship of idols or false gods in another sense it is the worship of anyone other than Yahweh the Almighty God of the lens of Israel it is this version of monotheism that led to the birth of the great monotheistic faiths of the modern world namely Judaism Christianity and Islam otherwise known as the Abrahamic religions after Solomon's death the Kingdom of Israel would split the kings of Israel and Judah after Solomon were as one might expect differing in their degrees of piety in regards to the worship of the deity of solomon's temple at Jerusalem namely Yahweh prophets who represented God's Word would warn peoples of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah that they may attract their ultimate destruction should they not change their ways as such and as we learned earlier in the podcast series the Assyrians would come to the Levantine lens and they would take Israel and destroy Judah we concentrated quite closely on this during episode 8 on the siege of lakish which took place in 701 BCE what we do know is that Jerusalem was spared as the King Hezekiah may have come to terms with the Assyrians and spared the capital city as a consequence after the fall of the Assyrian Empire the Babylonians would become the dominant power of the Near East biblical texts state that prophets continued to warn the people of Judah to remain faithful to their covenant with God but this was in vain to some degree as he stated to be the reason for the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians the Babylonians were so enraged with the enos of the Judeans that they destroyed Solomon's Temple and deported all of the elite class of Judean s-- it would not be until the Babylonians were defeated by the Achaemenid Persians that the Judeans were permitted to return to Judah and a second temple was constructed on Temple Mount in Jerusalem to replace Solomon's Temple which we mentioned had been destroyed a date of 516 BC is offered as the beginning of worship at this new temple during their exile the Jewish people decided that the existence of any God other than Yahweh should be denied taking things one step further than the movement against idolatry and cementing monotheism as a recognised attribute of the Jewish people so what happened to L and Bale L was really no longer spoken of in the monotheistic world and there was no room for talk of bail and any talk of bail was viewed as a thing of shame however some do interpret that bail and Yahweh are in fact one and the same thing so there is no real concluding evidence of how these names really came and went and how they related to each other and it's very likely that different interpretations of information existed between different tribes so it's pretty much impossible to find a definitive story in fact the Canaanite god bale is associated with a Philistine God the Lord of the Flies Bale zboob who has been since regarded in Abrahamic religions as a major demon and whose name in the Christian Church is more widely known as Beelzebub which is another name for the devil next time we're going to wrap up her story of the ancient Near East by bringing you another one of our summary episodes before we make the geographical move to Egypt where we will go back in time and pick up the story from the end of the prehistoric volume thank you very much for engaging with this week's podcast a bit of a diversion from the normal chronology of history but really I think these episodes are important to gain an understanding of the spiritual beliefs of the people of these areas and potentially why they went about their day-to-day lives in the way that they did because some of the rituals and day-to-day behaviors seem quite bizarre to our sites I think it's quite important for us to visit the mindsets of these people and their ritualistic behavior I think it opens a door to us in the way that we can maybe view their behaviors I received a message from one of our patreon skerin pleasure sneek who said thanks for taking on a such an ambitious podcast subject I'm still in the early episodes great job on sound quality in those early days it usually takes podcasts awhile to get that right looking forward to all the podcasts I have to catch up on thanks to the good sound quality I can listen while driving thanks very much Karen that's a really valuable message for me the podcast was criticized recently for the sound quality I saw release and I thought oh I can't really see that it's too bad but I did try and open it up to see if anyone else would criticize it and nobody has actually in Karen I think you've affirmed that the sound quality is quite good hopefully if it isn't or if there is anything sort of defective about the podcast quality you'll be kind enough to let me know there's a nice shame in being critical it's the way that things get better so please bring it on if you're struggling in any way at all with the podcast I think I mentioned possibly in the last podcast that I developed a bibliography page for the web site so please visit that there I'm also developing a couple of other pages one of them will be a page - to direct you towards links that have been useful in the creation of the podcast so all the links that were ever posted on social media I'm hoping to gather them all up and put them on one page because if you maybe listen to the the sixth episode of volume one then you'll know that there was reference to Washoe the chimpanzees videos on YouTube and now that they've gone so far than the Facebook page they're almost irretrievable so what I would like to do is put them in a permanent place so that anyone visiting the podcast for the first time can then go and discover these links it also gives somewhere to go to have a little play about with some of the interactive web sites that have been quite fun to play with and also those web links that have been sent in by fans of the podcast who found things that have astonished me and have entertained me so I'd like to share those with you so we're working on that the other page that we're looking to create is a list of podcasts that we familiar with and podcasts that we promote so generally speaking on me I've always said it one of my big favorites is the Rex factor that I've just entered into series 3 which I've been anticipating for a long time so I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into series 3 of Rex factor if you like your English and British history then I highly recommend that one it's a very good light back good-humoured podcast and it's very well worth a listen you might well become addicted to it another one that the podcast which I always recommend is the history of ancient Greece by ryan stick who tirelessly promotes the work of others including my work so he deserves all the promotion that we give him in return and it's a really good high-quality podcast I strongly recommend that one going off on a bit of a tangent I was invited by one of our listeners John McKinnon to listen to he's rock odd Podcast which I was a little bit hesitant about listening to at first because I'm often listening to history narratives and reading history books I don't often give myself a lot of time for such entertainment however I was embarking on a long drive during the week and I decided I'm gonna give this a go and find out what it's all about and I was actually really hooked to it and I listened to it from start to finish in one go and I've really really enjoyed it so I'm gonna recommend it to the history of the world podcast listening public so if you want to give it a try you might find it it's very enjoyable I thought it was an absolute quality job he enlisted the help of Doug Metzger who does the literature and history podcast and I mentioned him previously in reference to his work on the epic of gilgamesh and how he brought that to life during one of his podcast Doug met squeeze and really really skilled and a writer and he really does justice to Joel MacKinnon's work so give it a go you might just love it I know that I did I was really blown away and pleasantly surprised by how great it was and really it was such an engaging project and you know you can do it in three hours the whole thing in three hours and and I recommend you give it a go you might enjoy it it's called planet and sky and it's by Joel McKinnon I shall post a link on the social media pages now talking of social media if you're not following me on Twitter what are you waiting for follow me on Twitter it's at hot world podcast hop in h.o.t history of the world podcast hot world podcast follow me on Twitter there's a lot of useful stuff gamers forwards a lot of link sharing as well so we're really getting the history of the world listeners community interacting with each other which is really my wish so I think that that is what it's all about promoting history interacting sharing ideas this is really what educates all of us together so come and join in with the interaction on Twitter okay so now before we sign off for the week we're gonna introduce a new feature and this is called the patreon question time so what we do at this point we invite our patreon the ones that contribute more than $10 to the show and you can do that by visiting the patreon website so you can find links on social media web so I end through the history of the world podcast.com website you can contribute towards the shows running costs obviously we've got the websites we've got the the podcast hosting platform and not to mention all the the books and materials that we have to buy to keep the show going so if you go to the patreon page and donate to us and if you accrue more than 10 dollars in donations you get to ask a question and this is exactly what Mattie yokomo has done he's written in and so they say I'd like to know how did the Empire's borders come to be defined like the Roman Empire they didn't have maps per se did they like we have how did they know where their borders were was it just because all the hostel were put to the sword and there was no more rebellions that region became part of the Empire did they even consider it like that is the whole maps borders of Empire much more of a modern thing did scholars ponder where the borders were decided or guess where the limits were one ended Aniyah and the other empire started so there how did our definition of empire borders happen it's an excellent question is no straightforward answer to this but it's such a good question and something that I thought about in the past when reading about history the nature of borders and and how it differs from one society to another and from one time to another I'm gonna attempt to answer the question I'm gonna try and pinpoint six examples of borders that I can see throughout history and see if it's sort of educates us a bit more about the nature of empire and Kingdom and country borders so the first example I'm going to talk about is when we go back to ancient times and something we've touched upon when the Battle of Kadesh took place between the Hittites and the Egyptians in the 13th century BCE where were the borders well there was no real treaty that we know of before this happened so we can only assume that the borders were where the nearest military units said the borders were so if you were living in that area and then there was a hit I military unit who said listen you answer to me then you probably answered to that military unit so until the Egyptians came along and kicked the Hittites out and made you subject to them made you pay tribute to them then the border would shift and you would be on the other side of it so the borders would not have been a politically agreed line I don't think during ancient times it would have actually been whoever was the one bullying you the most is where you were in terms of the border of the empire if we fast-forward to the Roman Empire certainly where I live in Great Britain we can see evidence of a border there where the Romans built a border built a wall which signified the border of the extent of their empire basically so the Romans decided to build a border and that was where the border was who's gonna argue with a with a stone wall that's fortified thanks very much that is the border so that was how the Romans deal with it I actually built the border and this would in turn lead to maybe a division between England and Scotland ultimately they always seem to be that traditional boundary between English and the Scottish over the course of the the history of the British Isles we can certainly see that there was a lot of disputes between where the border lived between England and Scotland and it really was just a case of military action pushing the border one way or the other so depending on where your army stuck their flag basically so if for example King Edward the first decided to march north and move the border between England and Scotland another 50 miles north then he could effectively do that through conquest certainly then there had to be sort of legal documents as well to determine what would happen if someone committed a crime on the opposite side of the board so if an Englishman committed a crime on Scottish turf where would he then go to be tried for his crime and under whose law so there would be a lot of trees so there was very much a legal reason for defining the borders certainly medieval times and in different parts of the world so there would maybe be a legal understanding that was written into a legal document or a treaty to determine where the border was certainly then if we go forward into the modern world and probably the period of colonialization when maybe the European power was subjugated subjugated most of Africa to themselves so they basically carved up the map of Africa and if you look at the modern map of Africa you will see a lot of straight line borders and this is a very very unnatural thing this is where Europeans sat down with a map of Africa and a ruler and a pen and basically said there we go draw a line Germany's territories one side of the border and English territories the other side of the border so very very clinical treatment of the map of Africa and as such this would mean displacement of people the ethnicities of people so so the modern countries of Africa today do not reflect the ethnicities of Africa that were historical then so like we basically as Europeans we created the countries of Africa and they're not abundant they're not really accurate according to the ethnicities and to the kingdoms and the local tribes kingdoms and ethnicities of Africa are not recognized by these country borders similar thing happened when India and Pakistan were divided in the 20th century by the British Empire as it was then before they went fully independent as nations there was really a lot of displaced people by this border and it was you know if you're gonna draw a border and you're gonna divide cultures by it by means of one line through the middle of a country then you are gonna get an awful lot of displaced people and it's some very very raw feelings attached to that to that period of history to that episode in the division of the old Indian Raj in the modern world we say that certainly with the Crimean Peninsula where you know where is the border in terms of how many countries of the world look at the Crimean Peninsula it belongs to the Ukraine however following the the unrest of 2014 the Russians would tell you that the Crimea belongs to them so where we see actual border and it is really the lesson we learn is the border is really where you decided so unless two countries can agree on where a border 'is if they can put it on paper then fine if you can actually put a line in the in the sand or actually build a border then it's quite categorical but then also if two parties can't agree where the border is then the border really only exists in the imagination of both of those countries so borders are really not real things they're only real if humans can agree where they belong and that's really what the nature of borders is and in most cases in a piece in a piece chasing world countries do agree on where the borders exist and in most cases they're not disputed but in some cases they very much still arm and you only have to look at maybe the border between Ethiopia and Somalia to see that it's incomplete so there you go that really is what borders is they're an imaginary line at the end of the day essentially it's an imaginary line and it's only any good if both parties either side of that border honor it what a fantastic question Matti Yocum I hope I've managed to get near to the answer for you and I'm sure there are historians and scholars out there that could give you a much more combat an answer but I did promise I would answer your question and and therefore I've done my best to do that so hopefully every that was at least interesting and a bit insightful well that's it for this week and next week we will be rounding off the Near East the ancient Near East will bring it all to a close in readiness to move on to our next set of podcasts which will be about ancient Egypt so that will be in two weeks time so I'd really like to thank you for listening to the podcast hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to meeting out with each other again one week from now the history of the world podcast is available on many different podcast platforms so please don't forget to race and reviewers wherever you find us visit our website at history of the world podcast comm and email us and history of the world podcast at mail.com support the podcast at patreon by clicking the support the podcast link at our website and join us on social media at Facebook Twitter and Tumblr

Channel: Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Views: 416,085

Rating: 4.7214217 out of 5

Keywords: Ancient Canaan, Phoenicia, Ancient History, Ancient Near East, Ancient Levant, World History, Ancient Israel, Judaism, Ancient Hebrews, Bible History, Biblical Archaeology, Baal, Melqart, Hercules, Yahweh, Hebrew, David and Goliath, Solomon’s temple, Babylonian exile of the Jews, El, Mythology, Ancient Babylon, Ancient Egypt, Hittites, Sea Peoples, Ashur, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumeria, Ur, Mesopotamia, Semitic, Phoenicians, Carthage, Carthaginians, Heracles, History Podcast, History of the World

Id: c9klkMKZczA

Length: 50min 16sec (3016 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Americanshanty]

Important Note The name/title El was that of the primary god of the ancient Canaanite and later Israelite religion. El which means lord is ever present in names such as Elijah, Joel and Israel. It is also the origin of the name Allah. Or Al-ah.

El while the primary deity within Canaanite religion, was just one of a much larger pantheon of gods. Being the water god, he later was combined with two other near eastern gods to create the deity we think of today. He was worship alongside other gods such as Baal and Ashura for most of Canaanite and Israelite history, but eventually the others got faced out.

From what I understand, most Israelites at least during the early days where Polytheistic. The monotheist where considered the oddballs until they eventually took over. That's why the bible is full of stories worshiping other gods. The temple centric branch of old Judeaism eventually faced out the other gods similar to how Zeus became the primary and most revered God in the Greek pantheon.

(Just thought this was an interesting bit of history that indirectly influenced our world today. Just a history nerd.)

[u/bright1111]

The Elohim said let us make man in our image. That’s not some nod to a trinity, that’s multiple gods

[u/throwaway-lurkmeistr]

There was an interesting article posted on here awhile back, I'm looking for it. Until I find it here is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)

Edit: Still looking, but here is another good post about it

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/77pjuw/the_hebrew_word_for_god_is_a_name_not_a_title/

Edit:

Here is the one I was looking for

https://www.haaretz.com/amp/archaeology/.premium-first-evidence-of-life-sized-divine-statues-found-in-lachish-1.8930283

[u/andimnotbragging]

Name a bigger bitch in the OT than Jehovah

[u/camred85]

I've been wondering about this, is it possible that all the tribes around that time and aers were using God's name, including the true followers of yahweh which I'm assuming they would be a group in UR which included Abraham, and that's the reason why Yahweh told Abraham to leave UR and he would make a great nation out of him, ultimately having the tribes using gods name destroyed.

That's what I've been wondering

[u/borghive]

Aliens!