4 ms·

Some of this is visible in the Bible. For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods. From wh

Some of this is visible in the Bible. For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods. From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the creation and the flood have earlier references from older people's groups. The evolution of monotheism was much more about keeping a large diverse people group united. You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.

giraffe_lady 1y ago
I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well. That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them. Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system. You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.
- tiahura 1y ago
  Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”
  - toasterlovin 1y ago
    > Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Many of the biblical names ending in "ah" are YHWH names. This includes many of the prophets. So Elijah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Micaiah, Isaiah, for instance are all "ah" ending names that have a meaning related to YHWH in the same way that the "el" ending names are related to El. And then Joshua (and, hence, Jesus) is also a YHWH name.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  Some of the parallels between the Roman and Greek pantheons are also because they derive from the common Indo-European root. e.g. Jupiter, Zeus pater and Dyaus pitr being the sky father
ARandomerDude 1y ago
> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. How does this theory account for the overt hostility to Baal et al. in the Bible?
- cogman10 1y ago
  Unification. The authors of the Torah are laying down what correct worship is supposed to look like. I believe (and I'm not a biblical scholar, just like learning) the theory is that the priests at the time were dealing with a mixed culture and differing beliefs. One way to handle that is "Look at these evil/dumb heathens worshiping their weak gods". Painting the gods which likely some of the population still believes in dumb is a way to undermine and discourage belief. Sort of a "We are no longer team Bears, we are team bulls. The bears are actually inferior and dumb". Part of forming the new religion was merging concepts and powers from commonly believed in gods. A little like the early christians rebranding pagan holidays while actively purging pagans.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    Also similarly: The Orange Catholic Bible
    - petesergeant 1y ago
      Awww, I was hoping for more Orange Order and Catholicism trivia
- smithkl42 1y ago
  "Baal" was less a name than a title. In modern Hebrew, it just means "lord" or "husband". It was also apparently a title that could, at some stages of Israel's history, even be applied to YHWH, much like "Adonay" ("My lord"). For instance, the individuals named "Mephibosheth" and "Ish-bosheth" (two of the sons of Saul, a clear if imperfect Yahwist) were originally named "Meribaal" and "Ish-baal". Whoever put together 1 and 2 Samuel changed their names from "May Baal Contend" and "Man of Baal" to various plays on "shame" (bosheth). Their original names are preserved, oddly enough, in 1 Chronicles. If you could go back and ask, say, Samuel or David or Saul about how many gods existed and what their names were, I suspect all of them would have been clear that YHWH was the chief of the gods, and the only one that Israelites should worship, but beyond that you would have gotten some complicated and perhaps confused answers. Even some parts of the Bible take for granted that other gods besides YHWH exist - see, for instance, Psalm 82. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2082&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2082&vers... Over time, "Baal" began to denote a specific agricultural deity, and it became less appropriate to use as a title for YHWH. That seems to have kicked off (or was kicked off by) the well-known conflict between Yahwism and Baal worship - see, ad infra, 1 Kings 18. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2018&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2018&...
schuyler2d 1y ago
There's definitely some relatable and transmitted stories like the flood, etc. However, the Levant and Egyptian gods "grew up" in different contexts than Mesopotamia. Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. "El" means mountain and Baal was a storm god -- neither of which has (to my understanding) any trace to specific cities. That said, I agree there was some idea of a god "living" someplace specific -- e g. YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.
- exceptione 1y ago
  > YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle. What story do you refer to?
  - cogman10 1y ago
    https://biblehub.com/topical/ttt/a/ark_of_the_covenant_was_carried--sometimes_to_the_camp_in_war.htm https://biblehub.com/topical/ttt/a/ark_of_the_covenant_was_c...
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. I don't think this is really accurate; you can often tell where an ancient Egyptian was from by the choice of god honored in his name. The gods very much are localized to particular places. > "El" means mountain "El" means "god"; this one couldn't be more clear-cut. If someone told you it means "mountain", you should dismiss anything else they might say.
colechristensen 1y ago
>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire. You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not? Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god. Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  Iron Man (Earth-626), Iron Man (Earth-25519), Iron Man (Earth 42069 Prime)
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    No, those are different beings. Zeus Panhellenios who rules over all the Greeks, Zeus Apomyios who keeps flies off of spectators, Zeus Ombrios who rains on crops, and Zeus Keraunios who smites with a thunderbolt are all the same being. You address him differently depending on what you want from him. This is no different from the concern in modern American law with whether a public official takes some action in his private capacity or officially in his public capacity. Gods have no private capacity, but the major ones have many, many different public capacities. (The actual term for this is "aspect"; we would say something like "Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Apomyios".)
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god". Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god's name is "Hadad". (But in the general case, Freyja is just the ordinary word "lady" and has no other name that survives to us, and Adonis is the ordinary word "lord". Adonis is a special case in that his name is not the word "lord" in Greek; he is a borrowing of the Semitic deity Tammuz, and the Greeks copied his title, "lord", rather than his name.)
- cogman10 1y ago
  El was the great God and Father of all gods, YHWH was his son [1]. The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%28deity%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%28deity%29?wprov=sfla1
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God. That is not correct; the word simply meant "god" long, long before there is any attestation of a god that might use it as a name. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ilum#Akkadian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ilum#Akkadian

giraffe_lady 1y ago

I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well. That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them. Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system. You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.

tiahura 1y ago
Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”
- toasterlovin 1y ago
  > Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Many of the biblical names ending in "ah" are YHWH names. This includes many of the prophets. So Elijah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Micaiah, Isaiah, for instance are all "ah" ending names that have a meaning related to YHWH in the same way that the "el" ending names are related to El. And then Joshua (and, hence, Jesus) is also a YHWH name.
griffzhowl 1y ago
Some of the parallels between the Roman and Greek pantheons are also because they derive from the common Indo-European root. e.g. Jupiter, Zeus pater and Dyaus pitr being the sky father

ARandomerDude 1y ago

> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. How does this theory account for the overt hostility to Baal et al. in the Bible?

cogman10 1y ago
Unification. The authors of the Torah are laying down what correct worship is supposed to look like. I believe (and I'm not a biblical scholar, just like learning) the theory is that the priests at the time were dealing with a mixed culture and differing beliefs. One way to handle that is "Look at these evil/dumb heathens worshiping their weak gods". Painting the gods which likely some of the population still believes in dumb is a way to undermine and discourage belief. Sort of a "We are no longer team Bears, we are team bulls. The bears are actually inferior and dumb". Part of forming the new religion was merging concepts and powers from commonly believed in gods. A little like the early christians rebranding pagan holidays while actively purging pagans.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  Also similarly: The Orange Catholic Bible
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    Awww, I was hoping for more Orange Order and Catholicism trivia
smithkl42 1y ago
"Baal" was less a name than a title. In modern Hebrew, it just means "lord" or "husband". It was also apparently a title that could, at some stages of Israel's history, even be applied to YHWH, much like "Adonay" ("My lord"). For instance, the individuals named "Mephibosheth" and "Ish-bosheth" (two of the sons of Saul, a clear if imperfect Yahwist) were originally named "Meribaal" and "Ish-baal". Whoever put together 1 and 2 Samuel changed their names from "May Baal Contend" and "Man of Baal" to various plays on "shame" (bosheth). Their original names are preserved, oddly enough, in 1 Chronicles. If you could go back and ask, say, Samuel or David or Saul about how many gods existed and what their names were, I suspect all of them would have been clear that YHWH was the chief of the gods, and the only one that Israelites should worship, but beyond that you would have gotten some complicated and perhaps confused answers. Even some parts of the Bible take for granted that other gods besides YHWH exist - see, for instance, Psalm 82. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2082&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2082&vers... Over time, "Baal" began to denote a specific agricultural deity, and it became less appropriate to use as a title for YHWH. That seems to have kicked off (or was kicked off by) the well-known conflict between Yahwism and Baal worship - see, ad infra, 1 Kings 18. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2018&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2018&...

schuyler2d 1y ago

There's definitely some relatable and transmitted stories like the flood, etc. However, the Levant and Egyptian gods "grew up" in different contexts than Mesopotamia. Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. "El" means mountain and Baal was a storm god -- neither of which has (to my understanding) any trace to specific cities. That said, I agree there was some idea of a god "living" someplace specific -- e g. YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.

exceptione 1y ago
> YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle. What story do you refer to?
- cogman10 1y ago
  https://biblehub.com/topical/ttt/a/ark_of_the_covenant_was_carried--sometimes_to_the_camp_in_war.htm https://biblehub.com/topical/ttt/a/ark_of_the_covenant_was_c...
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. I don't think this is really accurate; you can often tell where an ancient Egyptian was from by the choice of god honored in his name. The gods very much are localized to particular places. > "El" means mountain "El" means "god"; this one couldn't be more clear-cut. If someone told you it means "mountain", you should dismiss anything else they might say.

colechristensen 1y ago

>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire. You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not? Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god. Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.

xeonmc 1y ago
Iron Man (Earth-626), Iron Man (Earth-25519), Iron Man (Earth 42069 Prime)
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  No, those are different beings. Zeus Panhellenios who rules over all the Greeks, Zeus Apomyios who keeps flies off of spectators, Zeus Ombrios who rains on crops, and Zeus Keraunios who smites with a thunderbolt are all the same being. You address him differently depending on what you want from him. This is no different from the concern in modern American law with whether a public official takes some action in his private capacity or officially in his public capacity. Gods have no private capacity, but the major ones have many, many different public capacities. (The actual term for this is "aspect"; we would say something like "Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Apomyios".)

thaumasiotes 1y ago

> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god". Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god's name is "Hadad". (But in the general case, Freyja is just the ordinary word "lady" and has no other name that survives to us, and Adonis is the ordinary word "lord". Adonis is a special case in that his name is not the word "lord" in Greek; he is a borrowing of the Semitic deity Tammuz, and the Greeks copied his title, "lord", rather than his name.)

cogman10 1y ago
El was the great God and Father of all gods, YHWH was his son [1]. The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%28deity%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%28deity%29?wprov=sfla1
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God. That is not correct; the word simply meant "god" long, long before there is any attestation of a god that might use it as a name. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ilum#Akkadian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ilum#Akkadian