The Biblical God - Evolution or Revolution?

[Abdul Goatherd]

Continuation from the Shia Islam thread:

The Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, is quite a different matter. In it, it can be easily perceived the uneasy transformation of the old Semitic gof YHWH (a minor god in the Levantine Semitic tradition) into the God of Israel. And this god has flaws, very human flaws, just as the old gods had: jealousy, wrath, etc. In many parts of the Old Testament the existence of gods other than YHWH is not even denied, it's only stated that they are "abominations" and that the people of Israel must worship only YHWH, who is the God of Israel, bound to its people by a Covenant (notice again the transactional dimension of this relationship, a covenant in which the people of Israel worship YHWH in exchange for the Promised Land). The God of the Hebrew Bible has still not become the transcendent, totalizing figure of later, fully developed Judaism, of Christianity and Islam. It's still in transition from being Baal's minor pal and Asheroth's husband into the God of the rabbis, of the Gospels and the Quran.

Why is it that it took so long to settle on just one super-god?

I mean surely its easier to pray to and apease 1 super-god than thousands of minor god's and dieties.

If you are going to be supersitious then why make it harder for yourself?

Because the idea of a single God is counter-intuitive and needs a certain capacity for abstract thinking. It's in human nature to project human feelings and attitudes into the natural world. For example: why doesn't it rain when the crops need it? Because "someone" does not want it to rain; if this "someone" can make it stop raining, he must be a powerful one, and he must be quite pissed off with me/us (in the sense of "our tribe/clan/village"). Same for illnesses, extreme cold, extreme heat, pregnancy, etc. And that without adressing the other great source of the religious phenomena amongst humans, the fear of death.

It's much more immediate to associate every one of these "mysterious" phenomena with one deity each, as this way we reduce it to a more understandable and comfortable personal binary relationship between a human and a god. We want it to rain? We pray/sacrifice to the god/goddess X. We wish a male baby? We pray/sacrifice to the god/goddess Y. A transactional relationship is thus established between the worshipper and the god(s), in which worship (prayers, sacrifices, etc.) are offered in exchange for very definite wishes (long life, health, rain, male children, good harvests, etc). Notice that traditional, polytheistic religions never believed their gods to be omnipotent; for example in the Graeco-Roman religion, not even the gods could alter the threads of destiny threaded by the Parcae, and something similar happened in the old Norse religion.

The idea of an unique, all-powerful God, is something much more abstract and that has its roots not as much in the humanization of natural forces or events (with the transactional element), but in the projection of human morality on the natural world in absolute terms, and hence the centrality of the notions of "sin" and "divine law" in Abrahamic religions, mixed with the Platonic notion of the Logos, as the abstract being which is the apex of perfection and of which material things and human beings are only pale shadows. As there is only one moral, and only one moral code (there is only one concept of Goodness, of Justice, of Mercy, etc), there must be only one God, which is the very source and origin of these virtues in their most superlative sense (God is infinitely Good, Just, Merciful, etc.).

ah, but the Super-God... well... he's up there. Stuff's going on down here.

So right then, there's differentiation. Why is the crop going bad? A witch? But who gives her/him those powers? It can't be the Super-God. He's on our side. So... it's... something else?

And who are those jerks over there? They have their idol. And darnit, they beat our boys last year. They claim that their idol helped them out! Are they onto something?

And what's Tim down the hill doing? His wife is from some other place! And she's saying that there's some rain god that does a bang up job in wherever. Maybe that Rain God's pretty good?

by the time you get to Monotheism in the Levitical era, there's always this "other" god hanging around in the shadows. That's how you get gnosticism, and christianity, and satan, and whatever.

Even the avowedly arch-monotheists, have supernatural powers that are not Allah/whatever which they appeal to.

Disagree partly. There is a transition. But you won't find it in the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible/Old Testament - at least not explicitly. The OT is very much a big propaganda advertisement for the "God of Israel", in the grand, transcendent, totalizing sense you mean. From the beginning. It's just that along the way we get hints that real Israelites (that is, those living in 13th C.-8th C. or thereabouts) didn't quite think so - at least not yet. They are still caught up in "mere" YHWH. But of course, they didn't have the compiled Hebrew Bible at hand to inform and clarify his true nature. This wasn't the job of rabbis. It was the job of the book itself.

So you should see the Hebrew Bible as a document of "fully developed" Monotheism. Yes, it does insinuate that old time Israelite religion was less committed to it. But the Bible itself is completely and utterly committed.

I agree that the Old Testament does not state that transition explicitly, but the God of Israel/YHWH that emerges from the pages of the Old Testament still has many or even most of the characteristics of the old Semitic gods. He experiences human emotions and feelings (jealousy, fury or tiredness), talks directly to the prophets (notice that does not happen either in the New Testament or in the Quran, where God either talks through messengers or manifests Himself in mysthical ways) and the Old Testament makes Him not "The" Universal God, but simply the God of Israel. This is a God to be feared ("the Lord is a Man of War"), and the Old Testament goes to great extremes to portray Him as such; there's a Covenant between the Israelites and Him, and every time the Israelites break that Covenant, they suffer retaliation, but if they adhere to it strictly, they are rewarded. This has more in common with a commercial or employment contract that with what today we would understand as religion.

This is the image of God that emerges from the pages of the Old Testament, without entering in the (very interesting subject, and worthy of a thread of its own) matter of the history of the evolution of the Jewish people and its belief in YHWH. It's reflected for example in one of the classical lines of attack of Islamic religious polemics against Judaism, in which Muslim ulamas accused the Jews of "antropomorphism" because of the way God is depicted in their scriptures.

It was precisely the Pharisees who began to evolve this "primitive" conception of God towards a more universal one; for example by stating that the rules of purity that the Torah established for the Levites had to be applied to all Jews, as they were a "priestly nation", and who introduced the concept that the ultimate meaning of following the Torah verbatim was because this would grant the believers the ultimate reward, deliverance from eternal punishment. This was the point where the adherence to a moral code (the one established in the Torah) became the key element of religion, and it's from this point that the several Jewish sects of the I century CE took over, amongst them Christians.

tl, dr;

SemperVictor articulated evolutionary hypothesis that the Hebrew God - Yahweh, YHWH - started off as just one of several gods in a polytheist Levantine Semitic pantheon and got elevated over time into the single, transcendent, universal, totalizing God of the monotheistic Abrahamaic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

I don't think anyone disagreed with that hypothesis.

The disagreement came on the role of the Bible - that is, the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh/Old Testament.

SemperVictor sees the Bible as an evolutionary document, just one step in that process. That the Biblical God retains recognizable traces of YHWH of the old Israelites, and that its transformation into a universal, transcendent monotheistic God was not yet fully fleshed out in the Bible, and it would take more post-Bible work (by rabbinical scholars, evangelists, etc.) to pull it through.

Abdul disagrees. He sees the Bible as a revolutionary document. There may be traces of the YHWH of the old Israelites, but the Biblical God is already fully fleshed out, completely transcendent, universal and utterly monotheistic. No more "post-Bible" work was needed, save perhaps for some details. The transformation work was already completed pre-Bible, and the Hebrew Bible is the culmination, the final outcome, the propaganda piece announcing the completion of that process, and not an intermediary step in the process.

In short, the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh/Old Testament gives us a completely revolutionary concept of God, utterly transformed (if not completely disconnected) from any old Semitic deity. The Biblical God would be barely recognizable to an archaic old Semite, except in some very superficial ways. The Bible constructs a God that would be utterly bewildering and mind-blowing to anyone accustomed to polytheistic religion.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

I agree that the Old Testament does not state that transition explicitly, but the God of Israel/YHWH that emerges from the pages of the Old Testament still has many or even most of the characteristics of the old Semitic gods. He experiences human emotions and feelings (jealousy, fury or tiredness), talks directly to the prophets (notice that does not happen either in the New Testament or in the Quran, where God either talks through messengers or manifests Himself in mysthical ways) and the Old Testament makes Him not "The" Universal God, but simply the God of Israel. This is a God to be feared ("the Lord is a Man of War"), and the Old Testament goes to great extremes to portray Him as such; there's a Covenant between the Israelites and Him, and every time the Israelites break that Covenant, they suffer retaliation, but if they adhere to it strictly, they are rewarded. This has more in common with a commercial or employment contract that with what today we would understand as religion.

This is the image of God that emerges from the pages of the Old Testament, without entering in the (very interesting subject, and worthy of a thread of its own) matter of the history of the evolution of the Jewish people and its belief in YHWH. It's reflected for example in one of the classical lines of attack of Islamic religious polemics against Judaism, in which Muslim ulamas accused the Jews of "antropomorphism" because of the way God is depicted in their scriptures.

It was precisely the Pharisees who began to evolve this "primitive" conception of God towards a more universal one; for example by stating that the rules of purity that the Torah established for the Levites had to be applied to all Jews, as they were a "priestly nation", and who introduced the concept that the ultimate meaning of following the Torah verbatim was because this would grant the believers the ultimate reward, deliverance from eternal punishment. This was the point where the adherence to a moral code (the one established in the Torah) became the key element of religion, and it's from this point that the several Jewish sects of the I century CE took over, amongst them Christians.

The Biblical God is very much the Universal God. He is the Creator of everything - including the entire human race. And He wiped out the entire human race in a flood.

The covenant that matters most is actually the covenant of Noah. It is a universal covenant. God commits to not wiping out everyone again.

Now everyone -- all peoples -- were covered by that covenant, and everyone has the obligation to the universal God to behave. Not merely Jews.

Of course, everyone behaved badly and everyone annoyed Him - but He couldn't wipe out the human race and start again (as per covenant with Noah) Doesn't mean He can't punish or wipe out particular people that annoyed Him.

And the Cannanites annoyed Him particularly. They behaved really badly (for reasons the Bible doesn't make clear). What it makes clear is that He wanted to wipe out the Canaanites, and chose the Jews (more accurately, the Israelites) to do it for Him. That's a very special covenant for a very narrow purpose. He made it clear time and again that if the Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites as per His exact orders, He would wipe out the Israelites. And time and again, they disobeyed His exact instructions, and time and again God lost patience and started exterminating the Israelites - whether by plagues or by choosing another people to go kill them for Him - only to hear pleas of mercy, relent and give the Israelites another chance.

So the Biblical God is not the God of the Israelites. He is the Universal God, who picked the Israelites to conduct a single particular genocidal mission on His behalf. He has a special relationship, but it is not an exclusive relationship. He loses patience with Israelites/Jews intermittently, and choses another people to go give them a horrific time.

So from the outset, and throughout the Tanakh, the Biblical God is a totalizing, universal God.

The God of the Hebrew Bible is quite unique, and quite unlike any other god in most respects (and probably quite unlike the original "real" YHWH of the Israelites).

For starters, notice the Biblical God has no story of Himself. There is no theogony in the Bible. He shows up out of nowhere, no backstory, He wasn't born of Uranus, or whatever. He is not associated with any natural phenomena - He created all of it, so nothing stands out. He doesn't have have brothers or sisters or spouses or children, like gods & goddesses typically do (and the original YHWH probably did). He doesn't have an antagonist, he doesn't fight "evil" or trickster gods. And He doesn't mingle with mortals on earth, He doesn't challenge them to competitions, doesn't have sex with them and produce little demi-gods. His only mode of interaction is very bizarre and remote - through weird evanescent means of conveying instructions. Or via angels. He never show up Himself, whether in person or disguised as a bull, or whatnot.

There is no story about God in the Bible. We only know of Him second-hand, through the history of the Israelites as a people, and His intermittent attempts to exterminate them. We know nothing else about Him. We don't know what other business He is up to. For all we know, this God could be spending most of his time giving the Vietnamese a similarly hard time, for failing some weird mission He gave them out in Southeast Asia.

If he was YHWH, then there should be a story about YHWH. But there isn't. There's only a story about Israelites. We have no idea of His "story", what He did for Himself, How he killed off other gods, or made himself supreme. Y'know, the usual adventures and travails of a god. He has personally no quarrel with Baal or Asthartoth. He doesn't fight them, He doesn't acknowledge their existence. These other gods are not in the story - only statues of them made by those incorrigible Israelites. You call Him "jealous, fury or tiredness". But that is only with relation to impertinent, disobedient, useless human scum, not other gods.

God has only one antagonist - and that is Man. God's quarrel is with mankind in general and endless. He quarrels with Man because Man is willful. It is the only thing He doesn't really control.

The only time in the entire Bible we see God feeling threatened is when Adam eats from the Tree of Knowledge. That's the closest He gets to a "rival". Like God (and unlike angels), Adam has free will; like God, Adam is immortal (eats from the Tree of Life). So by also eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam is one step closer to becoming as powerful as God. That's the only time we see God get scared. He expels Adam, makes him mortal, to keeps angels on guard to make sure Adam doesn't sneak back into Eden.

That's the most we know about Him - the most we get of His "story", the closest we get to the "mythological" god-vs.god style typical of polytheistic religions. Everything else about Him is unknown. There is no tale about how He came to be, how angels were created, or where the cherubim come from (or even what they are), what He does on Sunday, or what He thinks of the King of the Hittites or what He did to the Vietnamese. The lack of Yahweh's own story is a complete break with polytheistic religions.

These "sentiments" you ascribe to Him (jealousy, rage, etc.) are not the sentiments of a normal god, as you might find in typical polytheist mythologies when gods are challenged by other gods. The Biblical God has no challengers. He is impatient with Man's wickedness and disobedience - a creature He so badly wants to wipe out, but can't because He promised He wouldn't. The Israelites don't control God with offers, magic or tricks, the usual polytheistic means of circumventing a god's wrath or punishment. The Biblical God cannot be manipulated or incanted by Man, as gods usually are. He is omniscient. He knows everything. Polytheistic-style manipulation doesn't work on Him. The only thing that saves the Israelites from annihilation is God's mercy.

This is far away from Yahweh of the old Israelites. Old Yahweh had a long story about Himself. Old Yahweh was fearful of Baal. Old Yahweh could be ritually manipulated, appeased and tricked by magic. None of these polytheistic features are in the Biblical God (except the sacrificial offerings at the Temple, although they don't seem particularly effective in the Bible)

(I have more to say, but I'm getting tired and got to go get some sleep)

 

[Avernite]

Hmm.
I think there's support for both options.

The description you give in post 2 is a clear explanation of why you think the bible is different. And yet the the second and third words of the Bible are read as "Lord of the Gods" by many biblical translators. The snake in genesis 3 suggests Adam and Eve could be like gods if they eat the fruit (as if gods, plural, are a real thing you can become).

In some sense, however, I agree with you. The story of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel (and the rest of Genesis 4) basically reads like a polytheistic family tree, except everyone below God is clearly described as NOT godlike, but only human (with possible aspirations of godhood). In that sense, Genesis might be a revolutionary tract rewriting the polytheistic family tree of old Israel into a specifically human descent (with oddities, like how all humans supposedly descend from Adam and Eve, and yet Eve had two sons - almost as if the revolution was incomplete and left odd lines of descent more fitting with the pantheon of Israel decending from Adam and Eve via its relationships with humans and other pantheons). So a layman might conclude that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of the gods (like Rhea/Gaea and Chronus/Ouranos/...), with Jabal as god of cattle, Jubal of music, Tubal-Kaën of smithing, and so on.

This would seem quite fitting with, say, Genesis 5 being an addition with all the ages and "and at the end he died" to emphasise these were human descendants of Adam, not gods.

And then we get to Genesis 6 1-4, and suddenly there are sons of gods to lust after the women of mankind, with their children being the heroes (demigods?) of old. Oops. Seems a short paragraph of polytheism stuck around again.

Genesis 9 might then be a primordial "human" descendance of the Israelites, the tribe that lived under the gods descended from Adam before they figured (out) that God was the only God. It has similar styling as the first commands to Adam, but now passed to Noach. Their sons are possibly the peoples of Israelite Kanaan/Judaea, with a Tarsis, Saba, Chawila (mentioned earlier in Genesis as a country/nation), Kanaan, all followed by the first human king Nimrod ruling over Babel, Uruk, Akkad and Kalne.

Of course it's immediately followed by what Abdul notes as God only being 'scared' of mankind, with the whole Tower of Babel story showing off that humanity is, apparently, somewhat of a threat to God. Not intermediate godlings threatening the upper God, but only man.

Next we see that, to Abraham (and before that Noach), God appears pretty much as any polytheistic god. "I will give you this, I will give you that, you do this, do that", no burning bushes or angelic messengers here.
Then we get a bit of Abraham-the-legendary-hero who surprisingly meets another priest of God, reading more like the epic Gilgamesh for a bit than any particular religious specification (though only a single God is mentioned, so it would fit well with monotheism). Though the next bit is again Abraham making a normal animal offering in exchange for God doing something for him, so not such a revolution there. And the true bond of God and Abraham is subsequently detailed as a pretty clear exchange - make yourself known as mine by circumcision, and I will give you descendants aplenty and give them their own land.
And then we have Sara laughing about the idea of having a son at her age in Genesis 18. "I didn't laugh! Promise!" "Oh yes you did!". Does that sound like the transcendent God of modern Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Or does that sound like an interacting polytheistic-like god?
Nevermind Abraham bargaining about the destruction of Sodom as if he was Odysseus trying to score points in discussion with Athena...

So summing up, at least early Genesis reads with two minds. On the one hand, it seems very much monotheistic. On the other, it has a lot of comparison with a heroic epic of some polytheistic religions including some descent of man and possibly the gods. God bargains, God speaks, God acts like one of the nicer Greek gods (well, except for Sodom and Gomorrah, but they had it coming, so that also fits for the nicer Greek gods).

 

[Semper Victor]

The Biblical God is very much the Universal God. He is the Creator of everything - including the entire human race. And He wiped out the entire human race in a flood.

The covenant that matters most is actually the covenant of Noah. It is a universal covenant. God commits to not wiping out everyone again.

Now everyone -- all peoples -- were covered by that covenant, and everyone has the obligation to the universal God to behave. Not merely Jews.

Of course, everyone behaved badly and everyone annoyed Him - but He couldn't wipe out the human race and start again (as per covenant with Noah) Doesn't mean He can't punish or wipe out particular people that annoyed Him.

And the Cannanites annoyed Him particularly. They behaved really badly (for reasons the Bible doesn't make clear). What it makes clear is that He wanted to wipe out the Canaanites, and chose the Jews (more accurately, the Israelites) to do it for Him. That's a very special covenant for a very narrow purpose. He made it clear time and again that if the Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites as per His exact orders, He would wipe out the Israelites. And time and again, they disobeyed His exact instructions, and time and again God lost patience and started exterminating the Israelites - whether by plagues or by choosing another people to go kill them for Him - only to hear pleas of mercy, relent and give the Israelites another chance.

The Old Testament talks about a Covenant, but a Covenant that is either renewed or re-interpreted at different times. God establishes a covenant with Noah, a covenant with Abraham, a covenant with Moses and a covenant with David. Some Biblical scholars have advanced the theory that what the fnal biblical narrative presents as a single covenant linking Abraham with their descendants was originally a covenant between the royal house of Judah and their personal God, which happened to be YHWH, and which was later extended to the whole of the Jewish people. But I'm digressing.

The fact is that the establishment of a covenant is a behaviour that in my opinion, is unbecoming of an omnipotent God. Classical Islam for example forbids even selling the Quran, because it would be untoward to trade the Word of God. And God's irritation, fury and impatience with the Israelites (as portrayed in the biblical narrative) are also quite unbecoming of someone who posseses infinite Wisdom, infinite Goodness, infinite Mercy and who on top of it all, is eternal and uncreated (hence, why the impatience?). In my view, those attitudes and feelings belong with the old Semitic gos, like Baal, Asheroth, etc. But not with the universal Platonic God, who is an entity who transcends them.

So the Biblical God is not the God of the Israelites. He is the Universal God, who picked the Israelites to conduct a single particular genocidal mission on His behalf. He has a special relationship, but it is not an exclusive relationship. He loses patience with Israelites/Jews intermittently, and choses another people to go give them a horrific time.

So from the outset, and throughout the Tanakh, the Biblical God is a totalizing, universal God.

The God of the Hebrew Bible is quite unique, and quite unlike any other god in most respects (and probably quite unlike the original "real" YHWH of the Israelites).

For starters, notice the Biblical God has no story of Himself. There is no theogony in the Bible. He shows up out of nowhere, no backstory, He wasn't born of Uranus, or whatever. He is not associated with any natural phenomena - He created all of it, so nothing stands out. He doesn't have have brothers or sisters or spouses or children, like gods & goddesses typically do (and the original YHWH probably did). He doesn't have an antagonist, he doesn't fight "evil" or trickster gods. And He doesn't mingle with mortals on earth, He doesn't challenge them to competitions, doesn't have sex with them and produce little demi-gods. His only mode of interaction is very bizarre and remote - through weird evanescent means of conveying instructions. Or via angels. He never show up Himself, whether in person or disguised as a bull, or whatnot.

There is no story about God in the Bible. We only know of Him second-hand, through the history of the Israelites as a people, and His intermittent attempts to exterminate them. We know nothing else about Him. We don't know what other business He is up to. For all we know, this God could be spending most of his time giving the Vietnamese a similarly hard time, for failing some weird mission He gave them out in Southeast Asia.

If he was YHWH, then there should be a story about YHWH. But there isn't. There's only a story about Israelites. We have no idea of His "story", what He did for Himself, How he killed off other gods, or made himself supreme. Y'know, the usual adventures and travails of a god. He has personally no quarrel with Baal or Asthartoth. He doesn't fight them, He doesn't acknowledge their existence. These other gods are not in the story - only statues of them made by those incorrigible Israelites. You call Him "jealous, fury or tiredness". But that is only with relation to impertinent, disobedient, useless human scum, not other gods.

I agree with your remark about the lack of a theogony; that's indeed one of the key differences that sets the biblical God apart from other gods. One thing in which I don't agree though is in his lack of direct communication. The Bible states explicitly that He spoke directly to Abraham, Isaac or Moses in the same way I could speak with the guy at the bar on the corner. Directly, in a direct conversation. Not face to face, because the biblical narrative is very careful in not assigning a body to God (yet another important innovation, and related to the lack of a theogony). That's still the way of the gods of old.

In the Quran, it's the angel Gabriel who reveals God's words to Muhammad, and in some instances in the hadith, Muhammad "hears" a voice inside him. Paul's experiences with God are similarly intimate, and of a mysthical nature, as he himself described in Galatians. The New Testament God, or the Quranic God, has retired from the world and does not engage anymore in direct talks with His prophets like he did with Moses on the top of mount Moriah.

God has only one antagonist - and that is Man. God's quarrel is with mankind in general and endless. He quarrels with Man because Man is willful. It is the only thing He doesn't really control.

The only time in the entire Bible we see God feeling threatened is when Adam eats from the Tree of Knowledge. That's the closest He gets to a "rival". Like God (and unlike angels), Adam has free will; like God, Adam is immortal (eats from the Tree of Life). So by also eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam is one step closer to becoming as powerful as God. That's the only time we see God get scared. He expels Adam, makes him mortal, to keeps angels on guard to make sure Adam doesn't sneak back into Eden.

The story of Creation in Genesis is one of the most philosophically charged, interesting and original bits of the biblical tale. Mostly, it sets down the line for what will be later the bumpy relationship between God and the children of Israel, but even here there are things that do not add up to the modern conception of the monotheistic Abrahamic God. The most glaring one is this "and on the seventh day, God rested". An omnipotent God needs to rest? In Quran 2:255 we see a subtle jib at the Genesis' tale:

There is no other god besides Him, the Living, the Eternal. Never a moment of unawareness or slumber overtakes Him. To Him belongs everything in the heavens and everything on earth.

That's the most we know about Him - the most we get of His "story", the closest we get to the "mythological" god-vs.god style typical of polytheistic religions. Everything else about Him is unknown. There is no tale about how He came to be, how angels were created, or where the cherubim come from (or even what they are), what He does on Sunday, or what He thinks of the King of the Hittites or what He did to the Vietnamese. The lack of Yahweh's own story is a complete break with polytheistic religions.

I agree with you about that.

These "sentiments" you ascribe to Him (jealousy, rage, etc.) are not the sentiments of a normal god, as you might find in typical polytheist mythologies when gods are challenged by other gods. The Biblical God has no challengers. He is impatient with Man's wickedness and disobedience - a creature He so badly wants to wipe out, but can't because He promised He wouldn't. The Israelites don't control God with offers, magic or tricks, the usual polytheistic means of circumventing a god's wrath or punishment. The Biblical God cannot be manipulated or incanted by Man, as gods usually are. He is omniscient. He knows everything. Polytheistic-style manipulation doesn't work on Him. The only thing that saves the Israelites from annihilation is God's mercy.

This is far away from Yahweh of the old Israelites. Old Yahweh had a long story about Himself. Old Yahweh was fearful of Baal. Old Yahweh could be ritually manipulated, appeased and tricked by magic. None of these polytheistic features are in the Biblical God (except the sacrificial offerings at the Temple, although they don't seem particularly effective in the Bible)

About YHWH's behaviour in the pages of the Old Testament, I think that even if his moods are justifiable from a human point of view (probably a human ruler would have begun a GULAG campaign long before ), I must insist that we're not dealing with a human being here, but with a transcendent deity who exists out of the boundaries of space and time, and who is the ultimate source of all morality. Even if the old paraphernalia of magic, amulets, etc, did not apply to Him, God changes opinion arbitrarily, tortures his believers just to try them (Job's tale), has attacks of fury ... It's a mix of old and new, between the behaviour of the old gods and what we would today understand or accept as the "proper" behaviour for God. And then there's the inherent contradiction of Him being the creator of the universe, but at the same time being the God of Israel (the worship of other gods by other peoples is olympically ignored), in the most strictly parochial sense. The writers of the Bible went over this contradiction by means of the Covenant, but still, it's quite a poorly thought of literary resort (in my opinion), and again reminiscent of the "transactional" relationship between gods and mankind, in which men worshipped the gods in exchange for something explicit (and this element is not absent of the biblical narrative, because God rewards the Israelites with the land of Canaan, as long as they fulfill their part of the Covenant). The only thing lacking is the signature of all the involved parts .

 

[Avernite]

Was reading a bit further...

Exodus 7: Mozes/God performs miracles for the Egyptians. The Egyptian mages match them to a quite serious extent before being blown out of the water.

My God > your gods, maybe, but not all that strong evidence for a true difference of type between the God of the Hebrews and the gods of Egypt.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

The description you give in post 2 is a clear explanation of why you think the bible is different. And yet the the second and third words of the Bible are read as "Lord of the Gods" by many biblical translators. The snake in genesis 3 suggests Adam and Eve could be like gods if they eat the fruit (as if gods, plural, are a real thing you can become).

In some sense, however, I agree with you. The story of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel (and the rest of Genesis 4) basically reads like a polytheistic family tree, except everyone below God is clearly described as NOT godlike, but only human (with possible aspirations of godhood). In that sense, Genesis might be a revolutionary tract rewriting the polytheistic family tree of old Israel into a specifically human descent (with oddities, like how all humans supposedly descend from Adam and Eve, and yet Eve had two sons - almost as if the revolution was incomplete and left odd lines of descent more fitting with the pantheon of Israel decending from Adam and Eve via its relationships with humans and other pantheons). So a layman might conclude that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of the gods (like Rhea/Gaea and Chronus/Ouranos/...), with Jabal as god of cattle, Jubal of music, Tubal-Kaën of smithing, and so on.

This would seem quite fitting with, say, Genesis 5 being an addition with all the ages and "and at the end he died" to emphasise these were human descendants of Adam, not gods.

It is quite possible the Adam & Eve could be leftover theogony. Although keep in mind the word "Adam" is not a proper name but a descriptor, literally "earthling", so Adam seems to be destined for humanity from the outset. There might have been a section where the other gods, goddesses, angels, etc. were created, but if so, those sections were obviously thrown out by the Bible editors.

That said, remember, there are two Creation myths in the Bible.

Version #1 (Genesis 1) - God creates everything in seven days, including all of Mankind on the sixth day (no Adam here).

Version #2 (Genesis 2) - God starts earth without vegetation, there is a solitary oasis on a barren earth, creates Adam out of dust, etc.

Version #2 is more "mythological" and closer to polytheistic myths. But consider Version #1 which precedes it. It seems like a intro deliberately designed to smother and undermine the second. As if "God creates everything, that's all you need to know; anything you read after this is kinda silly." The Biblical editors wanted that up front.

One possibility is, of course, that there may have originally been two separate Gods at play - the first Creator a Uranus-like God, the second God of Eden a Zeus-like God, and the link from one to the other is erased (perhaps there was an archaic old Israelite myth which tells the story of YHWH's revolt and deposition of the Creator God)

But whatever the original story, there seems to be a conscious desire by the Biblical editors to universalize and monotheise (is that a word?), i.e. revolutionize the God concept, even at the risk of appearing incoherent. Let's excise the all the god vs. god bits, and retain only the god vs. man parts.

And then we get to Genesis 6 1-4, and suddenly there are sons of gods to lust after the women of mankind, with their children being the heroes (demigods?) of old. Oops. Seems a short paragraph of polytheism stuck around again.

Well spotted.

But I think this reinforces my view on the function of the Bible. The conscious editing is why I call the Bible revolutionary, rather than evolutionary. The Biblical editors knew what they wanted to get at. In other words, this whole Bible was a propaganda piece for a well-formed Monotheistic God concept. They mucked it up at times by leaving stray old things like that. They weren't uncertain about it. They just screwed up the cut-and-paste job occasionally.

Rewriting the antagonism to be only God vs. Man yields a fundamentally different and revolutionary view of good & evil. This (IMO) is the purpose of the Monotheistic revolution contained in the Bible. In old polytheism, there are nice gods and evil gods, and mankind is a plaything between them. The universe, taken as a whole, is neither good nor bad, having both good and evil in it. But in the Biblical view, all evil comes from Man. God is good, the universe is good, it is man that sucks. Man, not bad gods or demons, is the source of evil - all evil.

That's why I resist SV's characterization of the dubious "sentiments" (jealousy, rage) of the Biblical God as reminiscent of the petulant fits of polytheistic gods.

God is never evil. All his apparently brutal acts - like the extermination of humans in the flood, of Sodomites, of Canaanites, of the Egyptian firstborn, his mistreatment of Job - are always totally justified, directly or as part of some grand, good design.

Polytheists have men pushed around by good gods & bad gods. In polytheism, people can use magic and amulets to manipulate gods, and re-direct bad gods and demons away, and access good gods. Monotheism offers no such option. God - the only god - is good. There is no bad god to blame. You are evil. Only a personal moral transformation can ward off the evil - because all evil stems from you.

And the entire Bible is written (or more precisely, edited) in this fashion. God good, Man bad.

The editing job is not always successful - there are occasions where the Bible editors slip up (e.g. when Saul gets possessed by "an evil spirit" and tries to kill David - a metaphor or real demon?). But the theme is otherwise always there.

This is revolutionary. This is nothing like polytheism.

For there to be good outcomes on earth, Man must be good. God will always help you be good. He gave you a damn instruction book - it doesn't get more explicit & straightforward than that. But you do evil anyway because you suck, you ignore the law and choose to disobey, you choose evil. The "devil" didn't make you do it. Baal didn't make you do it. You did it.

God is always good, never bad. You are bad, but you can choose to be good. The central commandment of the Bible is as personal as it gets - to banish evil, YOU must change:

"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates" (Deutoronomy 6: 4-9)

That is all people need to do for there to be good outcomes. No polytheistic-style offerings demanded, no virgin sacrifices, no magic needed, no manipulation or tricks. Just remember and obey the Law, you stupid humans, and everything will be fine. God will not let you down (Job excepted).

This is revolution brought by the Monotheistic Bible. There's no "evil" in the realm of the divine. Not only is God - old Yahweh - always and wholly good, Monotheism gives no space for supernatural evil to exist. There is evil on earth, yes, but that's entirely Man's fault. Man is bad but can be good if he chooses to be. You cannot create good outcomes on earth by magic and manipulation of the supernatural, but only by being good yourself (i.e obeying the law). This the entire theme of the Bible, as it was edited by the Biblical editors. It is a stark, moralistic and revolutionary perspective on the universe, completely at variance from the more amoral, ambivalent view of the universe proposed by polytheistic religions. The Biblical God is not old Yahweh anymore.

Post-Biblical work just pounds on this same theme, same message, but doesn't change or perfect the view. The message is already there, completely and starkly, in the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

If anything, post-Biblical traditions "dumbs it down" a little - allowing for afterlife rewards, the Devil, prayers of supplication, etc. - to make the relentless Monotheism of the Bible palatable to those who still have lingering polytheistic feelings and would really like to continue using amulets, offerings, and stuff to manipulate outcomes on a day-to-day basis.

 

[Semper Victor]

But I think this reinforces my view on the function of the Bible. The conscious editing is why I call the Bible revolutionary, rather than evolutionary. The Biblical editors knew what they wanted to get at. In other words, this whole Bible was a propaganda piece for a well-formed Monotheistic God concept. They mucked it up at times by leaving stray old things like that. They weren't uncertain about it. They just screwed up the cut-and-paste job occasionally.

Rewriting the antagonism to be only God vs. Man yields a fundamentally different and revolutionary view of good & evil. This (IMO) is the purpose of the Monotheistic revolution contained in the Bible. In old polytheism, there are nice gods and evil gods, and mankind is a plaything between them. The universe, taken as a whole, is neither good nor bad, having both good and evil in it. But in the Biblical view, all evil comes from Man. God is good, the universe is good, it is man that sucks. Man, not bad gods or demons, is the source of evil - all evil.

That's why I resist SV's characterization of the dubious "sentiments" (jealousy, rage) of the Biblical God as reminiscent of the petulant fits of polytheistic gods.

God is never evil. All his apparently brutal acts - like the extermination of humans in the flood, of Sodomites, of Canaanites, of the Egyptian firstborn, his mistreatment of Job - are always totally justified, directly or as part of some grand, good design.

In that, I don't agree. Neither the God of Israel nor the compilators/editors of the Tanakh worried in the slightest about the morality of such actions as the killing of all the firstborns of Egypt. They were acts done by God and thus holy in themselves, and automatically righteous; but that has nothing to do with any notion of a moral code. YHWH was a warrior God ("the Lord of Hosts"), and thus he fought on behalf of His people, just as Ashur did for the Assyrians, or the Olympic gods did for their favorites in the Illiad. If anything, the grand design is to fulfill God's promise to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the Promised Land, nothing else.

Polytheists have men pushed around by good gods & bad gods. In polytheism, people can use magic and amulets to manipulate gods, and re-direct bad gods and demons away, and access good gods. Monotheism offers no such option. God - the only god - is good. There is no bad god to blame. You are evil. Only a personal moral transformation can ward off the evil - because all evil stems from you.

Not always. In Graeco-Roman polytheism, not even the gods could reverse the proceeds of Fate; the use of magid, prayers, amulets, etc, only reached to a point, and that was a fact accepted by its followers.

And the entire Bible is written (or more precisely, edited) in this fashion. God good, Man bad.

The editing job is not always successful - there are occasions where the Bible editors slip up (e.g. when Saul gets possessed by "an evil spirit" and tries to kill David - a metaphor or real demon?). But the theme is otherwise always there.

Not "Man" in a universal sense, but the Israelites are portrayed as unfaithful to the Covenant, and thus as oath-breakers. This is a very primitive conception of "mankind" (only God's "chosen people") and circumscribes Israel's "sinfulness" to a very narrow field, that of the breaking of an oath. Again, I see in there no high-flying moral philosophical concerns about Good and Evil. There's very little moral duality in the Old Testament, there's just God and the Israelites, and the Israelites' continued failure at keeping their side of the Covenant.

This is revolutionary. This is nothing like polytheism.

For there to be good outcomes on earth, Man must be good. God will always help you be good. He gave you a damn instruction book - it doesn't get more explicit & straightforward than that. But you do evil anyway because you suck, you ignore the law and choose to disobey, you choose evil. The "devil" didn't make you do it. Baal didn't make you do it. You did it.

God is always good, never bad. You are bad, but you can choose to be good. The central commandment of the Bible is as personal as it gets - to banish evil, YOU must change:

"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates" (Deutoronomy 6: 4-9)

That is all people need to do for there to be good outcomes. No polytheistic-style offerings demanded, no virgin sacrifices, no magic needed, no manipulation or tricks. Just remember and obey the Law, you stupid humans, and everything will be fine. God will not let you down (Job excepted).

This is revolution brought by the Monotheistic Bible. There's no "evil" in the realm of the divine. Not only is God - old Yahweh - always and wholly good, Monotheism gives no space for supernatural evil to exist. There is evil on earth, yes, but that's entirely Man's fault. Man is bad but can be good if he chooses to be. You cannot create good outcomes on earth by magic and manipulation of the supernatural, but only by being good yourself (i.e obeying the law). This the entire theme of the Bible, as it was edited by the Biblical editors. It is a stark, moralistic and revolutionary perspective on the universe, completely at variance from the more amoral, ambivalent view of the universe proposed by polytheistic religions. The Biblical God is not old Yahweh anymore.

Post-Biblical work just pounds on this same theme, same message, but doesn't change or perfect the view. The message is already there, completely and starkly, in the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

If anything, post-Biblical traditions "dumbs it down" a little - allowing for afterlife rewards, the Devil, prayers of supplication, etc. - to make the relentless Monotheism of the Bible palatable to those who still have lingering polytheistic feelings and would really like to continue using amulets, offerings, and stuff to manipulate outcomes on a day-to-day basis.

The written Law of Moses, as codified in Exodus, Numbers and Levitic, and condensed further in Deuteronomy, is not a moral code. It's a legal code in the narrow sense, applied to a very circumscibed group of people, and not very original in itself. The real innovation is that in it, all deviations from the Law are made not offences against the king like in contemporary legal codes (what today we would call "civil offences"), but offences against God. That's a real breakout, and one of the greatest innovations in the Old Testament, because the Law turned Israel de facto into the world's first theocracy, ruled by the Law of God.

But the Law is not a moral code, in the same sense as, for example, Justinian's Code is not a moral code. It's a book of laws, nothing else, with a divine origin. And many of its concerns have nothing to do with morality of any kind and much to do with rituals, sacrifices, contracts, etc. (and even provisory methods for choosing a new king for Israel should the need arose). I can't resist the temptation to copy here one of its pearls, Deuteronomy 25:11-12:

If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.

 

[Avernite]

God is always good, never bad. You are bad, but you can choose to be good. The central commandment of the Bible is as personal as it gets - to banish evil, YOU must change:

"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates" (Deutoronomy 6: 4-9)

That is all people need to do for there to be good outcomes. No polytheistic-style offerings demanded, no virgin sacrifices, no magic needed, no manipulation or tricks. Just remember and obey the Law, you stupid humans, and everything will be fine. God will not let you down (Job excepted).

You call that the central commandment, but Genesis has quite some others; Noach's is quite general and would be fitting as a precursor to your commandment (you aren't all evil, and so God will promise to not wipe out everything).
However, Abraham's is quite central too, and a bit less abstract;

Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised, including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner—those who are not your offspring. 13 Whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. 14 Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

I do not see how you can posit Deuteronomy is clearly superior to Genesis' commandments, but Genesis has quite a different style of commands.

It seems in that sense more likely that part of the Tanakh/OT was revolutionary, and the pre-existing books (presumably at least Genesis and Exodus) only received a light sprinkling of its influence to ensure it didn't completely undermine the revolution.

 

[Cavalry]

it is less about one super god vs many gods. Greek/Roman has the super god Zeus too. It is more about an official super organized religion that downplay all other religious. Probably the first achieving of this only happen if your whole nation was ruled by religious chief of one religious like Old Israels.

Or there is someone said the God is a Israel King family's private war god but at one time they begin to share that god to all of Israel.

 

[Calad]

SemperVictor sees the Bible as an evolutionary document, just one step in that process. That the Biblical God retains recognizable traces of YHWH of the old Israelites, and that its transformation into a universal, transcendent monotheistic God was not yet fully fleshed out in the Bible, and it would take more post-Bible work (by rabbinical scholars, evangelists, etc.) to pull it through.

Abdul disagrees. He sees the Bible as a revolutionary document. There may be traces of the YHWH of the old Israelites, but the Biblical God is already fully fleshed out, completely transcendent, universal and utterly monotheistic. No more "post-Bible" work was needed, save perhaps for some details. The transformation work was already completed pre-Bible, and the Hebrew Bible is the culmination, the final outcome, the propaganda piece announcing the completion of that process, and not an intermediary step in the process.

In short, the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh/Old Testament gives us a completely revolutionary concept of God, utterly transformed (if not completely disconnected) from any old Semitic deity. The Biblical God would be barely recognizable to an archaic old Semite, except in some very superficial ways. The Bible constructs a God that would be utterly bewildering and mind-blowing to anyone accustomed to polytheistic religion.

These both are intresting point of views but matter is more complicated.

Jesus only borrowed Jewish God and claimed to be his son, later Holy Spirit was included into picture and the Trinity was born. This is complitely contradictionary to monotheism and main reason why Christianity plit so badly during its history. Nobody has ever explained Trinity logically, because it cannot be. You can always argue back and forward about Trinity but once you are in minority you are heretic.

So around 30AC God was anything but ready concept, during next 2000 concept of God still evolved further. Actually when Saints were introduced Christianity started to resebmle more old Hellenistic religion than old Jewish religion!

Now question is why did Jewish God evolve into totalitarian God? Reason lies in their history: Israel is not a rich country and it has been always overrun by stronger state. Because of poverty, oppression and strong tradition Jewish religion and God evolved into something much harder and simpler than Egyptian or Hellenic Gods did. I agree with Abdul that Jewish God had reached its final form and Bible included nothing on it. This is why Jewish Faith was able to survive because it was already hardboiled in centuries of oppression and survived on our modern day.

 

[Eusebio]

Reading this thread I think Abdul and Semper generally agree, but put different emphases on the polytheistic source vs the monotheistic redaction. I have to go along with Abdul and make the point that while they're chopping up the old myths and legends of Israel, the Biblical redactors are quite clearly compiling a set of books whose intended purpose is to guide the Jewish people in their worship of the all-powerful God of Israel, and was universally taken to be a monotheistic document until the invention of critical tools in the 19th century. But this is really getting into a philosophical debate about how one can ascribe meaning to a text.

it is less about one super god vs many gods. Greek/Roman has the super god Zeus too.

Zeus is most certainly not a "super god". In the Iliad he can't even rescue his own son Sarpedon from certain death in battle because it would upset Fate and cause a sort of divine anarchy to ensue. Zeus is only the guardian of the laws of the universe, not its progenitor.

In that, I don't agree. Neither the God of Israel nor the compilators/editors of the Tanakh worried in the slightest about the morality of such actions as the killing of all the firstborns of Egypt. They were acts done by God and thus holy in themselves, and automatically righteous; but that has nothing to do with any notion of a moral code.

That's simply wrong though: just because you disagree with a moral code doesn't mean the Biblical authors did not have one. Why are the firstborn of Egypt killed? Because Egypt sinned by trying to keep the Israelites in slavery, and as Numbers 14:18 says, "the sins of the father are visited upon the son". The morality of the Old Testament (its oldest parts at least) is based on generational justice.

 

[Semper Victor]

That's simply wrong though: just because you disagree with a moral code doesn't mean the Biblical authors did not have one. Why are the firstborn of Egypt killed? Because Egypt sinned by trying to keep the Israelites in slavery, and as Numbers 14:18 says, "the sins of the father are visited upon the son". The morality of the Old Testament (its oldest parts at least) is based on generational justice.

The killing of the firstborns of Egypt was not an action based upon a moral code, it was an act of war, pure and simple. Just as God stopping the Sun while Joshua was doing battle, or bringing down the walls of Jericho. Numbers 14.18 is a conception of morality based on ancient moral codes that existed in the Middle East long before the redaction of the Bible (like Hammurabi's Code), and thus nothing new at all. And notice that such a passage is basically at odds with the later development of Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity and Islam, because if sins are inherited, then the notion of a personal judgement in the Day of Judgement is worthless. The Quran even specifically states that in that final day, God will only judge every one for their own sins, and not for anybody else's. Which is what could be expected philosophically from a fully developed notion of a Monotheistic, omniscient God.

The image of the God of Israel in the Old Testament is again. a mix of old and new, with God behaving the same as a king of Assyria or Babylon in regards to war and justice. We're talking about a God that is the God that leads Israel into war and up to victory upon their foes, not about a universal God. The difference between the Israelites and the Assyrians or Syrian Aramaeans in this respect is that the Israelites had dropped the rest of the pantheon and were on their way to transferring ever more power and transcendence upon YHWH.

Even the notion of the nation of Egypt as `sinners`is debatable. The one who obdurately resists against the Lord's will is Pharaoh, not "Egypt". Which makes the approach towards God's act in Exodus as a moral action debatable even according to legalistic and moral notions of the ancient Near East. Especially when the Mosaic Law is at pains at trying to stop lawlesness and false testimonies. Harsh as the Law might be, it always tries to point out that only the guilty ones must be punished. God's action is nothing more than a collective punishment like the ones He enacted many times before and after. Hell, if the writers of Exodus had wanted to inject some morality upon God's action, they could have resorted to the same literary device as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, when God agreed to spare them if Lot could produce a single just man from amongst them. Neither in Egypt nor later in the conquest of Canaan the writers of the Bible bothered with such niceties.

God is simply above the Law, a Law that is made for His people, but not for God Himself. Which by the way would've made perfect sense, who would have thought that legal codes applied to gods?

In modern monotheism this would shock us because it's unthinkable that a morality or even a legal code based on God's will would not be inherently just in itself, and thus according to the ultimate source of Justice, which is God Himself.

 

[Kovax]

That's the most we know about Him - the most we get of His "story", the closest we get to the "mythological" god-vs.god style typical of polytheistic religions. Everything else about Him is unknown. There is no tale about how He came to be, how angels were created, or where the cherubim come from (or even what they are), what He does on Sunday, or what He thinks of the King of the Hittites or what He did to the Vietnamese. The lack of Yahweh's own story is a complete break with polytheistic religions.

There has some speculation about the Cherubim and Seraphim. Two of the native tribes that allied with the early Israelites was called the Cherubites and Seraphites. Can you guess what god the Cherubites worshipped? Would that be the Cherubim? Consider the political implications of being allied to a country with its own god. You can't admit that their god is a god, because your own religion forbids it: "Thou shalt have no other gods before you". You can't tell your allies that their god is fake, or not a god, or else you won't have an ally. The safe course is to say nothing, and just ignore it. Centuries (or millennia) down the road, long after the political situation has changed and tribes have been absorbed or conquered and forgotten, the question comes up about the Cherubim and Seraphim, because they're mentioned in the Bible. Now you've got to somehow fit them into the cosmology that you've constructed, so they're portrayed as some undefined worshiping creatures of great power, but NOT gods. The names have been passed down through the millennia, but all of the other details are forgotten.

The other difference between the Israelites and the Assyrians was that the Israelites carried the Arc of the Covenant into battle. From the description, a box of a specific type of wood, lined inside and out with gold leaf, it makes a decent example of a "Leyden jar", such as Benjamin Franklin experimented with in the Philadelphia area several thousand years later. Connect the Leyden jar to a metal head on a long wooden pole via a chain, and have that at the forefront of your army. The first soldier in the opposing army to hit or be hit by that metal head gets a real surprise, and if the army has its shields firmly locked for mutual protection against sling bullets and stones, the whole front line draws an "arc" from the Arc.....and then your troops charge them. The descriptions of the "Holy of holies" and the strange lights can be easily explained if the priests are dealing with extremely high voltage electricity and attempting to capture lightning bolts to recharge the Arc.

 

[Boblof]

Even the notion of the nation of Egypt as `sinners`is debatable. The one who obdurately resists against the Lord's will is Pharao, not "Egypt".

It's not even the Pharaoh who sins really, all through the whole plagues episode of Exodus it is clearly stated that it is God that "hardens Pharaoh's heart". God is essentially engineering a situation that allows him to show off his might to the Hebrews and smite a whole lot of Egyptians.

Exodus 7:3–4
“But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my people the Israelites.”

 

[Avernite]

There has some speculation about the Cherubim and Seraphim. Two of the native tribes that allied with the early Israelites was called the Cherubites and Seraphites. Can you guess what god the Cherubites worshipped? Would that be the Cherubim? Consider the political implications of being allied to a country with its own god. You can't admit that their god is a god, because your own religion forbids it: "Thou shalt have no other gods before you". You can't tell your allies that their god is fake, or not a god, or else you won't have an ally. The safe course is to say nothing, and just ignore it. Centuries (or millennia) down the road, long after the political situation has changed and tribes have been absorbed or conquered and forgotten, the question comes up about the Cherubim and Seraphim, because they're mentioned in the Bible. Now you've got to somehow fit them into the cosmology that you've constructed, so they're portrayed as some undefined worshiping creatures of great power, but NOT gods. The names have been passed down through the millennia, but all of the other details are forgotten.

The other difference between the Israelites and the Assyrians was that the Israelites carried the Arc of the Covenant into battle. From the description, a box of a specific type of wood, lined inside and out with gold leaf, it makes a decent example of a "Leyden jar", such as Benjamin Franklin experimented with in the Philadelphia area several thousand years later. Connect the Leyden jar to a metal head on a long wooden pole via a chain, and have that at the forefront of your army. The first soldier in the opposing army to hit or be hit by that metal head gets a real surprise, and if the army has its shields firmly locked for mutual protection against sling bullets and stones, the whole front line draws an "arc" from the Arc.....and then your troops charge them. The descriptions of the "Holy of holies" and the strange lights can be easily explained if the priests are dealing with extremely high voltage electricity and attempting to capture lightning bolts to recharge the Arc.

To have a militarily useful spark from that is pretty inconceivable. The shock may be a bit scary, I suppose, but you need someone to be actually touched. 'I get hit, I hurt' is not a very divine concept that causes warriors to scatter.

Unless the Ark is somehow so well designed that it can hold truly amazing charges, but at that point you almost need divine intervention to make it so in biblical Canaan/Israel.

 

[Semper Victor]

It's not even the Pharaoh who sins really, all through the whole plagues episode of Exodus it is clearly stated that it is God that "hardens Pharaoh's heart". God is essentially engineering a situation that allows him to show off his might to the Hebrews and smite a whole lot of Egyptians.

Exodus 7:3–4
“But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my people the Israelites.”

Yes, you're right. In other words, God sets up a spectacle to show His power off to the Israelites and shock them into belief.

If there's something really new and deeply innovative in the Tanakh is not a religious or moral conception, but a legal and social one‚ that there's a universal Law that is appliable to everybody in the same way, without exceptions. That was really revolutionary, because it was a real blow to the tribal and familiar structures that were essential to survive in ancient Middle Eastern societies in front of the arbitrariness of the legal codes of those times.

And this has been since then a really attractive notion for societies ruled by arbitrary rulers, the notion that there's a holy law dictated by God which is appliable to everybody, even to the powerful and rich. Not an evanescent and intangible moral code, but a hardcoded legal code put clearly on script, and readily appliable.

 

[Arilou]

What do you mean when you say "The Bible" here? Because the Hebrew Bible is created at distinct point, and seems to point towards differing views of God. (though possibly they're being combined/redacted into a set of vaguely agreeing points, similar to how the different christian texts are put together uneasily to from the New Testament)

 

[Semper Victor]

What do you mean when you say "The Bible" here? Because the Hebrew Bible is created at distinct point, and seems to point towards differing views of God. (though possibly they're being combined/redacted into a set of vaguely agreeing points, similar to how the different christian texts are put together uneasily to from the New Testament)

To the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh, which is broadly similar but not equal to the Christian Old Testament.

 

[Barsoom]

The Hebrew Bible (and the Christian one) is a composite which has been edited as different times by different editors. I agree with Abdul that the final edit has been done with a reasonably clear purpose but even then, it was done by multiple editors, with varying degrees of strictness, and with the constraint that many of their readers/listeners were already familiar with large parts of the text and may have resisted overly enthusiastic edits. The text therefore preserves older views of God put their by previous writers and editors, who in their turn faced similar restraints vis a vis their own publics.

There is extra-Biblical evidence that YHWH began as a Canaanite god among other gods, complete with a wife and other family relations. Stories from this polytheistic period are largely reinterpreted or overwritten in the Biblical text we now have but some trace elements may remain. It seems, again from extra-Biblical sources, that YHWH became the patron deity of the royal house of Judah. He may also have been especially honored in the more powerful northern kingdom of Israel but that may also be a retcon by later editors, possibly during the first big re-edit.

This first big re-edit is ascribed to the reign of Josiah of Judah. After the destruction of Israel, Judah took in refugees and may have attempted to take over some of its land, justifying this expansion by comparing its faithfulness with Israelite laxity. Even at this stage God probably was only first among gods rather than the sole existing deity; the major element of the edit was to put emphasis on the compact between God and His people and on the honoring of that covenant by the respective rulers of Judah and Israel.

The second big re-edit is after the return of the Babylonian exiles. This edit again puts emphasis on the contract but this time to justify claims to the land by returning elites against the people now occupying their land. The epic of the conquest of Canaan by Joshua suited their purpose excellently; it may have been upgraded from folk story to Biblical tale or perhaps invented wholesale at this time. This edit was likely monotheist, perhaps because henotheism developed into monotheism in Judah in the intervening period or perhaps under the influence of Persian ideas encountered during the exile.

The third big re-edit occurs after the encounter with Hellenism and is more or less contemporaneous with the emergence of Christianity. The thematic of many debates at this time is universalism vs. particularism. The Maccabee revolt against the Seleucids fit the latter: the emphasis on Gods special relation with the Jews sets them apart from other peoples and helps preserve their traditions. Later Maccabees, however, set out to convert their neighbors, so such a limitation didn't fit their proselytizing style. A fierce debate between rival theologians ensued, which was resolved only after Christianity (a universalizing Jewish sect which under the influence of Paul of Tarsus jettisoned some of the hardest conditions for membership) grew to a position of strength, after which it became prudent for Jews not to put too much emphasis on their own proselytizing.

 

[Kovax]

Even the book of Genesis reflects the divergent stories of the various tribes of Israel. The first three chapters are each a retelling of the same basic story, with small but significant variations in the order of creation and the relationship between man and woman. Rather than attempt to force the other tribes to accept the changes to their own creation account, it was deemed better to write them all down and let the reader decide between them. The important point is what they all agree on, not what makes them different. This closely parallels the Gospels of the New Testament, which differ in details, but essentially tell the same story. Later editing of both has made it more difficult to determine what the original writers put down, and adjusted them for a better fit with later interpretations.

The evolution of Judaism from a set of food safety laws with a religion attached into an increasingly monotheistic religion in its own right can in large part be attributed to Zoroastrian influences, as well as various less obvious inclusions and ideas from multiple sources. This affinity or contact with eastern "wise men" may have continued for some time long after the Exodus, and there is even speculation that the "Three Wise Men" of the Christmas story made their excursion due to shared prophecies from long before, and may have been Zoroastrian astrologers.

Take note of the Egyptian "Book of the Dead", in that the general arrangement and order of prayers is still followed by many, if not most, Christian prayers:
1 - We're so pathetic
2 - You're so strong
3 - We ask you to do this for us
The influences of the past are often clear, and other times lost to history.