Yahweh evolved out of existing Canaanite polytheism.
El was the highest god of this pantheon, Ashera was his wife/consort and chief goddess, Ba’al was their child, god of storms and fertility, amongst others gods like Anat and Astarte.
The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, mostly switches between referring to ‘God’ as El, and ‘The Lord’, Adonai, Elohim, which is actually plural and means ‘The Gods’, and YHWH.
Adonai was originally a title given to Ba’al.
Yahwism basically started as a cult, in Canaan, that amalgomated Ba’al and El together into a single God, originally referenced Ashera but then wrote her out of the religion, and then just smashed many of the stories about or involving El and Ba’al together, causing the incongruous naming scheme and duplicatative, often directly adjacent, stories in the hebrew Torah, which are largely the same general plot, but have inconsistent details.
This is why Yahweh is jealous and demands destruction of idols to his predecessors in Canaan, and seems to acknowledge that other gods do actually exist, but he is the best and most powerful.
Where God basically retcons his name. You see I used to go by El, but now my name is Yahweh!
Its integral to establishing the mythic history that Yahweh and his flock are actually not from Canaan, they’re escapees from Egypt, and Yahweh promised them Canaan…
While in reality, the Exodus story is completely impossible as described (would have been something like 2-3 million people leaving Egypt, at a point in history where that was comparable.to the total population of lower Egypt), there is 0 archaeological evidence for anything like that ever occuring… but having a unifying myth is useful for justifying conquering some of your small neighboring Canaanites, even if the stories about thag are also largely mythic and exagerated.
…
Something somewhat analagous seems to have happened something like 600-700 years earlier in Egypt, when Akhenaten decided that actually, Aten was the best and only important god, that the others had died or grown weak.
This attempt at either monotheism or monolatrism didn’t work out so well, it was so unpopular that shortly after Akhenaten’s death, polytheism was reinstated, Akhenaten’s name was removed from official historical records, his monuments were destroyed, and the dynasty that came after him reffered to him as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the criminal’.
A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.
The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.
Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.
I believe that in terms of conquering the Canaanites it’s fairly well accepted that they were basically the same peoples, and it was just the relatively rich coastal cities vs the Hebrews who were mostly rural interior peoples unified by their new cult of monotheism and conquest.
Don’t think about how time is a flat circle too hard!
What’s the sedentarism connection? I thought maybe I misunderstood the definition, but it means what I thought and I guess I’ve never heard of the idea.
Established monotheistic religions dogma nearly always has their god as a male. You find female gods in polytheism; Wicca recognizes a goddess who tends to be considered “the top god”, but it’s a polytheistic religion with deities of both sexes (modern Wiccaanism may have adopted genderless deities for inclusively, idk). I an aware of no major monotheistic religions that allow that god may have no gender.
OP is speculating about “a” god, implying one of the monotheistic religions, and probably Christianity or Judaism - in both of which God is absolutely and unarguably defined as male. They’re religions defined by men, naturally with a man at top.
If you’re going to throw out Jehova and Allah and all the other dogmatically male gods of popular monotheistic religions, why not just shit-can the whole absurd idea of religion instead of trying to twist it to yet another different silly religion?
I don’t think monotheism was a big thing before. I just suspect that early religions were created with a respect and fear of nature and that the deities served as a foil for all the forces of nature around humans.
Our way of life was to live among divinity, and in reverence to it.
Then monotheism arrives, alongside so called “civilization”, sedentarism allows dominion over nature, and a new philosophy comes. This philosophy is a dogmatical undermining of the creative forces of nature (mostly represented as femme) in favour of a pragmatical and extractive view (“you will not have any god other than me”) allowing for a disrespect of natural resources that a direct connection to our current climate change problem.
It was a direct attempt at removing the ancient values of coexistence with nature, starting with oppressing femmininity and undermining what they historically and spiritually represented.
I am not throwing out monotheistic religion, I am not throwing out religion at all. You are right in saying I’m “exchanging” one religious view from another, but my feeling is that the original meaning of spirituality has been tainted by ancient propaganda.
This is all speculation, I’d be lying if I said otherwise, but in seeing the powers that be today and the way they act, and think…it just all seems so convenient to say that humanity is “naturally” inclined to fuck up their land. I do not believe that. I believe that humanity is naturally inclined to be gullible, and that someone made us believe we were above nature and should destroy and make violence to it, exactly what we are taught to do with women and feminility in general.
It wasn’t. There’s an established theory that the earliest religions started with pantheism, believing that things in the natural world had spirits - wind, trees, animals; you’d make offerings to the rain spirit if you wanted rain.
Then it evolved into - they’re animals, but also gods. Think Egyptian pantheology.
Then it evolved into, gods are just really powerful, ageless people who are responsible for certain aspects of human life, and who live in a great version of the best thing we have: Ceres makes your crops plentiful, and lives in Mount Olympus; Freya helps you make babies and lives in Valhalla.
Then it evolved into monotheism. There’s only one God: Allah, Jehova, Yahweh. Although, it should be pointed out that the old testament - the Tora, abridged - doesn’t say there aren’t other gods, but only that you shouldn’t worship them. In the ancient Semitic writings, Yahweh actually has a wife (Asherah); some scholars believe they ruled together. This is technically henotheism, but that’s for religion nerds; we generally consider Judaism monitheistic. The new testament changes this and claims there is only one God - one of the Christian Bible’s very many self-contradictions. But it’s a really good view at the progression from polytheism to monotheism, all in one book.
The Jewish God is absolutely a dude: he has a wife. The Christian God is a dude, if only because he’s always, invariably referred to as “he.” That’s not surprising because Christianity is just Judaism, part II. The Islamic God, Allah, is also canonically male.
We still have lots of great, living examples of the whole range, and others I haven’t mentioned: Shinto, Buddhism, Wicca, and a variety of indigenous religions still practiced around the world. We even see a resurgence of some indigenous religions that never quite died out and are becoming more popular.
Pantheism: everything is an aspect of god
Panentheism: god is in everything
Deism: We are, each of us, God
Polytheism: There are gods
Henotheism: There are gods, but only one is the right one
Monotheism: There is only one God
Atheism: There is no god
Agnosticim: Maybe there’s a god?
The point, though, is that there’s evidence of a evolution, each belief system growing out of the previous, each making Man more significant in the grand scheme of things, and that monotheism is fairly late in the game. Deism might be the most recent to come along; IDK, I’m not really up to speed on current theory.
He’s a tool for manipulation first and foremost, and therefor must be relatable regardless of any grammar rules or even what’s actually written in the Bible.
They would probably use “they” instead in any case, if it were to change. “It” is for objects, pets and clowns.
Why is god a “he” instead of an “it”?
They patriarchy erased most matriarchal myth and cultures during the dawn of sedentarism
Yahweh evolved out of existing Canaanite polytheism.
El was the highest god of this pantheon, Ashera was his wife/consort and chief goddess, Ba’al was their child, god of storms and fertility, amongst others gods like Anat and Astarte.
The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, mostly switches between referring to ‘God’ as El, and ‘The Lord’, Adonai, Elohim, which is actually plural and means ‘The Gods’, and YHWH.
Adonai was originally a title given to Ba’al.
Yahwism basically started as a cult, in Canaan, that amalgomated Ba’al and El together into a single God, originally referenced Ashera but then wrote her out of the religion, and then just smashed many of the stories about or involving El and Ba’al together, causing the incongruous naming scheme and duplicatative, often directly adjacent, stories in the hebrew Torah, which are largely the same general plot, but have inconsistent details.
This is why Yahweh is jealous and demands destruction of idols to his predecessors in Canaan, and seems to acknowledge that other gods do actually exist, but he is the best and most powerful.
This is why you get Exodus 6:3
https://biblehub.com/exodus/6-3.htm
Where God basically retcons his name. You see I used to go by El, but now my name is Yahweh!
Its integral to establishing the mythic history that Yahweh and his flock are actually not from Canaan, they’re escapees from Egypt, and Yahweh promised them Canaan…
While in reality, the Exodus story is completely impossible as described (would have been something like 2-3 million people leaving Egypt, at a point in history where that was comparable.to the total population of lower Egypt), there is 0 archaeological evidence for anything like that ever occuring… but having a unifying myth is useful for justifying conquering some of your small neighboring Canaanites, even if the stories about thag are also largely mythic and exagerated.
…
Something somewhat analagous seems to have happened something like 600-700 years earlier in Egypt, when Akhenaten decided that actually, Aten was the best and only important god, that the others had died or grown weak.
This attempt at either monotheism or monolatrism didn’t work out so well, it was so unpopular that shortly after Akhenaten’s death, polytheism was reinstated, Akhenaten’s name was removed from official historical records, his monuments were destroyed, and the dynasty that came after him reffered to him as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the criminal’.
So the biblical god was just an amalgamation of stories from the bloody reign of some possibly prehistoric warchiefs, it seems to me
A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.
The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.
Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.
I believe that in terms of conquering the Canaanites it’s fairly well accepted that they were basically the same peoples, and it was just the relatively rich coastal cities vs the Hebrews who were mostly rural interior peoples unified by their new cult of monotheism and conquest.
Don’t think about how time is a flat circle too hard!
What’s the sedentarism connection? I thought maybe I misunderstood the definition, but it means what I thought and I guess I’ve never heard of the idea.
Established monotheistic religions dogma nearly always has their god as a male. You find female gods in polytheism; Wicca recognizes a goddess who tends to be considered “the top god”, but it’s a polytheistic religion with deities of both sexes (modern Wiccaanism may have adopted genderless deities for inclusively, idk). I an aware of no major monotheistic religions that allow that god may have no gender.
OP is speculating about “a” god, implying one of the monotheistic religions, and probably Christianity or Judaism - in both of which God is absolutely and unarguably defined as male. They’re religions defined by men, naturally with a man at top.
If you’re going to throw out Jehova and Allah and all the other dogmatically male gods of popular monotheistic religions, why not just shit-can the whole absurd idea of religion instead of trying to twist it to yet another different silly religion?
I don’t think monotheism was a big thing before. I just suspect that early religions were created with a respect and fear of nature and that the deities served as a foil for all the forces of nature around humans. Our way of life was to live among divinity, and in reverence to it. Then monotheism arrives, alongside so called “civilization”, sedentarism allows dominion over nature, and a new philosophy comes. This philosophy is a dogmatical undermining of the creative forces of nature (mostly represented as femme) in favour of a pragmatical and extractive view (“you will not have any god other than me”) allowing for a disrespect of natural resources that a direct connection to our current climate change problem.
It was a direct attempt at removing the ancient values of coexistence with nature, starting with oppressing femmininity and undermining what they historically and spiritually represented.
I am not throwing out monotheistic religion, I am not throwing out religion at all. You are right in saying I’m “exchanging” one religious view from another, but my feeling is that the original meaning of spirituality has been tainted by ancient propaganda.
This is all speculation, I’d be lying if I said otherwise, but in seeing the powers that be today and the way they act, and think…it just all seems so convenient to say that humanity is “naturally” inclined to fuck up their land. I do not believe that. I believe that humanity is naturally inclined to be gullible, and that someone made us believe we were above nature and should destroy and make violence to it, exactly what we are taught to do with women and feminility in general.
I just don’t believe it is a coincidence
It wasn’t. There’s an established theory that the earliest religions started with pantheism, believing that things in the natural world had spirits - wind, trees, animals; you’d make offerings to the rain spirit if you wanted rain.
Then it evolved into - they’re animals, but also gods. Think Egyptian pantheology.
Then it evolved into, gods are just really powerful, ageless people who are responsible for certain aspects of human life, and who live in a great version of the best thing we have: Ceres makes your crops plentiful, and lives in Mount Olympus; Freya helps you make babies and lives in Valhalla.
Then it evolved into monotheism. There’s only one God: Allah, Jehova, Yahweh. Although, it should be pointed out that the old testament - the Tora, abridged - doesn’t say there aren’t other gods, but only that you shouldn’t worship them. In the ancient Semitic writings, Yahweh actually has a wife (Asherah); some scholars believe they ruled together. This is technically henotheism, but that’s for religion nerds; we generally consider Judaism monitheistic. The new testament changes this and claims there is only one God - one of the Christian Bible’s very many self-contradictions. But it’s a really good view at the progression from polytheism to monotheism, all in one book.
The Jewish God is absolutely a dude: he has a wife. The Christian God is a dude, if only because he’s always, invariably referred to as “he.” That’s not surprising because Christianity is just Judaism, part II. The Islamic God, Allah, is also canonically male.
We still have lots of great, living examples of the whole range, and others I haven’t mentioned: Shinto, Buddhism, Wicca, and a variety of indigenous religions still practiced around the world. We even see a resurgence of some indigenous religions that never quite died out and are becoming more popular.
The point, though, is that there’s evidence of a evolution, each belief system growing out of the previous, each making Man more significant in the grand scheme of things, and that monotheism is fairly late in the game. Deism might be the most recent to come along; IDK, I’m not really up to speed on current theory.
Because “it” is dehumanising and it would be hard to relate to something that’s not human
Isn’t god supposed to be a “supreme being” not a “supreme human”?
He’s a tool for manipulation first and foremost, and therefor must be relatable regardless of any grammar rules or even what’s actually written in the Bible.
They would probably use “they” instead in any case, if it were to change. “It” is for objects, pets and clowns.
Because the Christian God is male.