Origins of the Judeo-Christian god and religion

no, this is not true. (look, faith, see! watch me defend the historicity of the bible!)because you see, beowulf etc are traditional stories. genesis is a traditional story.but kings is not. there are more books in the bible than genesis, and some of them legitimately ARE histories. (how accurate they are is a separate question.) the problem with fundamentalists is that they cannot sort the two out. it's not all history. what about psalms? those aren't history. they're traditional.the bible is a library of many texts from many sources, by many authors and many times. they are all the same subject, or genre, or focus, and many don't even agree on some pretty basic stuff. it is wrong for the fundamentalists to lump it all into the blender and hit "puree" and it is equally as wrong for the other side to do the same.

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yeah, ok, i'm curious too.the ugaritic tradition might extend back further. i'm not sure the ages of documents. even though our earliest bible is 200 bc, there are earlier text, and textual indications the material in the bible is older than that.if the sumerian ea = yah = yahweh, then i think the sumerians win. but i'm not sure that connection can be made (even though i suggested it previously).

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I think this is a very important point. The Bible is not a book but a collection of writings from different periods, authors, etc.Individuals and groups have sought in retrospect to impose an interpretation on the Bible that supports their vision of the religion. Hence we have Jehovah Witnesses, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist each making the Bible what they believe it should be. There is enough ambiguity and conflict to support a wide range of interpretations.I'm still fascinated, mind boggled, and disappointed that people of a wide range of faiths can in the present imagine that some selection of ancient writings whether the Vedas, the Torah, or Koran, or even as modern as The Book of Mormon can be taken literally as the manual written , dictated, or inerrantly inspired by the source of the universe and yet this belief is routine in societies from India to the US. Homo Sap is a fascinating species.lfen

The first thing that occurred to me was that they would be asking Moses to justify his claim to be their deliverer by naming their God. So I looked up the usual commentaries at Blue Letter Bible and found Matthew Henry saying pretty much the same thing, followed by the thought that they'd forgotten the name of the God of Abraham: Huh? What's an evidential pantheon? I thought you were going somewhere with all this. You seem to have fizzled out. What is your point? Why does what I "prefer" matter? I think it's fair to say that MOST of what we know from the Bible we know by INFERENCE. No need to state everything, most things can be fairly easily figured out from the context. Extrapolate backwards from the fact of polytheistic religions galore from Abraham's time through the rest of the Bible. Unnecessary. I have no idea what you are talking about. Do tell. None of this is making a bit of sense to me. Etc etc etc etc. I'm totally lost. Have no idea what you're talking about. For one thing you seem to have a particular historical context in mind I didn't have in mind and that's assuming a lot, but I still don't get your thought. Maybe tomorrow I'll get it but somehow I doubt it. Anyway can't get through it tonight.

god can write in planets, stars, and galaxies; he can paint sky with rainbows and sunsets, sculpt the earth itself to his choosing. he tells us of his love in the very fabric of the universe -- and the human heart. what need does god have for puny books?

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And then there is the most intimate immediate mystery of consciousness of being!lfen

i'll admit, that's an interesting and plausible reading. but no more likely than the others, without additional information. i'll think about it. i'm asking you your opinion on what you think the text means. did the hebrew forget god in egpyt? did they follow any egyptian gods? was god remembered, but as part of a pantheon (that one that we know exists in egypt). or do you like the matthew henry option? right, but we extrapolate backwards based on a set of preconcieved notions. where did the other gods come from? you are forced assume they were just made up at some point, unless you can find some indication in genesis 1 or 2 or 3 of multiple gods.but the state of the bible is one such that the hebrews do not debate the existance of other gods (let alone fight against them) until moses. why not before then? why the henotheistic traditions? why the pseudo-polytheism of job 1 and 2? why the "we" in genesis 1? none of these sit well with the assumption. ishmael, father of the arabs, is the bastard son of abraham, according the bible. i've worded it a bit harsher than you're used to, because i'm trying to keep the cultural context.genesis was written after abraham lived (even if it was written by moses). genesis exists to explain the origins of things -- things that exist at the time authorship. the arabs existed when genesis was written. genesis portrays ishmael as the illegitimate son of abraham -- he's denied the birthright that isaac gets. (common theme in genesis)the condition between arabs and jews today exists, explains genesis, as a dispute over the birthright to the holy land. because ishmael is not the proper heir, a bastard, the holy land belongs to the jews, not the arabs (according to the bible.) i haven't read the qu'ran, but i would imagine it probably says the opposite. the command to worship no other gods is given in exodus 20. there is a marked shift in attitude at this point. israel goes from peaceful neighbor or subjugate slave to conquering crusader, killing all the infidels.genesis has a very different relationship to other religions than exodus does. it's more accepting -- henotheistoc. you said it took time to reduce god to an idol. it didn't, they did it at the very holy mountain of god. sinai/horeb itself. they hadn't even moved away from the mount, and the memory of god himself burning as a pillar in fire leading the way through the desert was fresh on their retinas.that is quite a degree of confusion.edit: quote gone horribly wrong.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 05-03-2006 03:19 AM

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It is SO bizarre that people say things like this. How many people do you know who actually see God in such natural phenomena? Very very few in my personal experience. None really. Those who do, already believe in God to some extent from some religious background, from the book learning that this Nature Writing supposedly puts to shame according to you two sentimentalists.If the "writing" of God in Nature isn't recognized by people, what sense does it make to speak of it as any form of communication at all, and compare it to BOOKS of all things, which are transparent to us because we know their language? You guys just aren't thinking. If we didn't have books we wouldn't have a clue to God.People ignore the books too of course.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 10:44 AM

The Matthew Henry option is the one that occurred to me first so it naturally is most convincing to me, but I don't have a problem with the idea that they lost their memory of the God of Abraham either. The idea that the Egyptian pantheon entered into any of it has no support from anywhere that I know of -- though I suppose there is no reason to insist it didn't, you'd just have to make good connections to demonstrate it. We extrapolate backwards on the basis of our KNOWLEDGE OF THE BIBLE I would hope, not "preconceived notions." We put the whole thing together, the knowledge of demonic activity in Jesus' time for instance, and His revelation that they are part of Satan's kingdom (if Satan cast out Satan...), and that Satan is "the prince of this world," with the picture of the erring Saul being tormented by a demon, with the statement in Deuteronomy that those who worship idols worship demons, with Revelation where we are informed that the serpent in Eden was in fact Satan, and Paul's saying that we are all members of Satan's kingdom by nature, oh and our knowledge, particularly gathered by missionaries, that all tribes of the world have had some version of "gods" they have to placate, or whose favors they cultivate, etc., and all the carved idols found by archaeologists everywhere, all this in the context of the Fall of man and Satan's earned right to rule over us --- and by all this we know that Satan's demonic hordes became the "gods" that humanity worshiped in the place of the one true God after the Fall, because of their loss of communication with the true God and Satan's determination to take possession of humanity and ruin God's creation. Exactly how this all came about, the timing of it, is not given in the Bible. All we know is that it is always there in the background of the major events of God's deliverance of His own people FROM idolatry into true worship. I don't get the question. Why would you expect them to? What henotheisitc traditions are you talking about? Huh? Job was a worshiper of the one true God. I see nothing else there. Trinity. Insist all you like with the Mormons that that is polytheism, it's not. Where is Ishmael called a bastard? Abraham owned him as his own and wanted him to be his heir. The twelve patriarchs of Israel had four different mothers, two of them the maids of the wives. They are not considered bastards. Ishmael was not denied the birthright because of his "illegitimacy" that I've ever heard, but because God chose Isaac, period. Isaac was promised to Abraham well before Abraham got the bright idea to father a child by Hagar and fulfill God's promise himself instead of waiting for God. I see no fight about the land in Genesis myself. God blesses Ishmael and promises him many sons and he goes and settles somewhere. There's no conflict over the land that I see. Where do you see that? The calling of Isaac was only incidentally about the land. {ABE: Correction, I shouldn't trivialize this, of course it was about the land, but there was no fight over the land that I see here} It was about the heritage of the Jews as God's own people, to be trained in God's ways, to be the seed of the Messiah. I thought Israel fought at the specific command of God in those early days, to drive out the tribes that occupied the land. Where do you see Israel on their own deciding to do any of this? And as a matter of fact Israel hardly ever did it as completely as God commanded. What are you referring to? The Chosen People were hardly in existence at all in Genesis. It wasn't a very big family that went into Egypt at the end of Genesis. Not that I know whether or not this is even relevant since I still don't get what point you are trying to make. I wasn't talking about the Hebrews. I was talking about the human race after Adam. The Jews blame the golden calf incident on the aliens who had come with them out of Egypt, by the way. Are you familiar with that? I don't think that is supported in scripture myself. I would just assume that the state of their knowledge of God at that point left a lot to be desired and they easily reverted -- as all believers are susceptible to as a matter of fact. Yes, and Christians usually take these incidents as illustrative of the brokenness and fickleness of fallen nature, and as inspiration to feed the spirit in order to keep the knowledge of God fresh.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-03-2006 12:48 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 05-03-2006 12:59 PM

So the idea here was to discuss what beliefs the jewish people (who may have been called something else at the time) held before they adopted the jewish faith and began to follow the bible. Also, to discuss where their concept of god came from and where some of the ideas in the bible originated.This isn't a discussion about the bible as history, but more a history of how the bible and the beliefs in it came about and what beliefs preceeded them.

SNC, there was no such thing as the Jews -- or the Hebrews -- before the Bible. There was no "Jewish faith" and no "Jewish people." There was no time "before they adopted the Jewish faith and began to follow the Bible."In a sense they ARE the Bible. The Bible is the story of the Jewish people as a single family descended from one man, Abraham, who was called by God to father a nation. You can read about him in Genesis 12.THERE IS NO OTHER SOURCE OF INFORMATION ABOUT ABRAHAM AND THE HISTORY OF HIS DESCENDANTS.He had lived in Ur in the area of Babylon and heard God call him to leave for a new land. He and his family were some kind of polytheists but this is not described. Later on, his grandson Jacob has to deal with members of his family continuing to keep the household gods of whatever religion they had followed."The Jewish faith" is the worship of the one God who called Abraham and his sons after him, that developed among his descendants over the following centuries. There is no way to know anything at all about Abraham and his descendants and their religion EXCEPT from the Bible. The whole Bible is their story and the story of the development of the religion that became Judaism and ultimately Christianity over the next two millennia.I suppose archaeologists know something about what religions existed in Ur about 1900 BC when Abraham left, if that's what you want to know.Edit to correct 2000 BC to 1900 BC and add the link to Genesis 12This message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 12:25 AM

One key thing to remember is that there is no one defining moment when the Judaic and Christian God suddenly appears. It is a long evolution taking place over thousands of years.The stories leading up to Abram are very generic epic myths. They also set the stage with general geographic and political pictures of the world as seen by a people, most likely from the viewpoint of nomads living in the plain between the two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. The stories are a combination of Just So stories that explain why things are the way they are, some of the local folk tales such as the flood (and there actually are indications of major floods in that area, some leaving layers more than 10 feet deep) and geopolitical lessons. For example, the geneologies of Noah outline the basic peoples of the area and break them down by language family and their location.The nature of the God also changes throughout the Old Testament. In the oldest tales, for example the second part of Genesis beginning after Genesis 2:4 we see a God that is entirely different than the far more sophisticated but also far later tale found in Genesis 1. In the former stories, we see the remnants of a God that is but one God of some group. For example when that God chases Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden it is so they will not become immortal and like "one of us".We first find something that could be an actual history in the tale of Abram. To learn more of the origins of that story you need to look at the era and locations that he lived in and traveled through.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I'd like to point this out, hebrews = sons of eber, they could have believed they were the sons of eber long before yehwah, like a lot of cultual heroes and origanators.
also they were never called jews until after the kingdoms split and they really never called them selves it, outsiders called them jews, or judes of judea first you really need to calm down, if you get this angry, maybe you should find a different hobby there is history from other cultures that talk about judeaism and thier practices, no thier is no evidence outside the bible for abraham or any of the people, but say a few kings, which really gives it less authority as anything but a religious text
by the way it took quite a long time for the jews to worship only one god, heck he is found to be depicted with a wife on some items found

The population that became the jewish people existed before the bible did. In fact these people existed before the jewish faith did. These are undeniable facts. Irrelevant. Who said anything about characters in a book? I'm talking about the history of a group of people and their beliefs. I'm NOT talking about characters in a book who may or may not have existed. We have learned plenty from researchers about ancient peoples like these. Including people who lived long before anyone had ever heard of yahweh or the bible. You need to stop making ignorant assertions. Just because you are unable to learn or understand things does not mean others are. You are also off topic The subject is what beliefs the "jewish people" (and yes, they may have been called a different name) held before the advent of the bible and rise of the mono/heno - theistic jewish faith. In other words; how did these beliefs evolve?Is there something you don't understand about this topic? You keep spouting nonsense about how we can't learn anything except through the bible when this is clearly not the case. If you can't contribute anything on topic you should probably give this thread a rest.

MY CAPS IN THAT POST HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY EMOTIONS. They were there as a sort of headline, to make the point stand out. The source of the name "Hebrew" is disputed. Eber was one of Abraham's ancestors, but many generations back, and nothing at all is said about him in the Bible beyond his being named in the genealogy, in Genesis 11:15 for instance. There are at least a couple other theories about where the name originated, and the Bible itself doesn't say. The first use of the term "Jews" in the Bible is about the time of Jeremiah. It seems to be connected with the exile in Babylon. Anyone who knows the Old Testament knows that the Israelites (Hebrews, Jews) were always committing idolatry and falling away from the true worship of the true God.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-04-2006 01:05 AM