The Birth of Monotheism

It seems that there was a general trend of creating single gods that arose at about the same time across the Levant and Egypt and that the transition was fairly quick, likely over a period of less than a millenium. The biggest difference was in identifying one particular god as the god of an area or people as opposed to the more common pantheon of gods that served a specific function, fertility or birth or sun or storms or seas.Probably the two most familiar to the general public would be the short lived Aten in Egypt and the Semite Yahweh, but there were many others, Chemos and Qos and Hadad and Milkom and El.The early tales of this transition seem to be reflected in the stories of the Old Testament as the characteristics of Yahweh evolved over time from being just one of many gods limited in power to just one people initially then one area, to being considered at least by the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity as the only god.This thread is meant to discuss the evolution of monotheism and the effect of becoming "State Gods".Comparative religions please.Edited by jar, : appalin spallinEdited by jar, : finish sentence, old is terrurbull

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Just curious if this is promotable or what changes might be needed to make this promotable

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Thread copied here from the The Birth of Monotheism thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

To begin the discussion let's look at the evolution of the Hebrew god Yahweh over time as seen in the Bible.The earliest identification of the god of the Bible as a unique and separate identity shows up at the end of Genesis 4.

quote:

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25 Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, "God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him." 26 Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh.
At that time men began to call on the name of the LORD.

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Then there is a list of begets and begots that ends up with Noah. At that point the story kinda ends and everything that went before gets wiped out, the system rebooted.It is in Genesis 9 that we begin to get a picture of the actual setting for the story, because there we first find the mention Canaan, in this version as the son of Ham. This is also where the first Covenant is made between the God figure and a generic commitment to all living things.The geography and political alliances continue in Genesis 10 and we see several of the societies that were in the Levant named; the Kittim and the Rodanim and Cush, Put, Egypt and Canaan itself.Next, what is modern archaeology telling us about the era and the area?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

i dunno much about the evolution of the Hebrew god and the evolution of that god, but there is lots of data on how other religions became monotheistic. Like the Egyptian god of the sun by the Pharaoh Akhenaten in essence that religion was monotheistic their god created himself from himself and he was esentialy the universe and the sunwhy did the pharaoh start this cult, the priests had too much power and he wanted more power, and what better way to do that than to make a single all powerful god and be his son and his voice on the earth.that idea also killed the religion cause the all powerful god lost his voice when the pharaoh died Edited by frako, : No reason given.

The archeological record is very complex I believe. From what we can recover it would appear that the Hebrews were simply rural southern Canaanites.Biblical Hebrew is just a Canaanite dialect, very similar to the language of Ugarit and Yahweh himself is mentioned on some of the tablets at Ugarit.So the Canaanite speaking peoples would have occupied the Levant, with the big powers of Egypt to the south and "Akkad" (catch all term for Akkadian speaking Mesopotamia) to their east. From what we know they were massively influenced by Akkad, recording their own versions of Akkadian classics. We have records of locally composed versions of the Akkadian flood myth at Ugarit intended for home consumption.So at least to me it would appear that the Akkadians would have passed along a lot of their myths quite easily to the Canaanites (they were both Semitic-language speakers) and the Hebrews who later developed out of Canaanite civilization would have automatically received most of these myths.So it's possible that Hebrew mythology is a blending of native Canaanite myth and Akkadian literary influence. So this poly-theistic Akkado-Canaanite religion would be the initial stage of the Hebrew religion.

Perhaps it may be interesting to consider what role other familiar biblical names such as Astarte, Baal, Lucifer and Molech may have played in the transition of function specific gods towards the adaptation of national gods of certain providence.What role did cultic prostitution play, if any? Why did the notion of Yahweh having a consort not find itself long lasting?It seems fair to say the monarchy played a role in the transition from functional gods to regional gods and it clearly paved the way for the logical extention of what became trancendent of the adaptation of a state god - universal monotheism.A closer look at the El epithets (Bethel, Elyon, Olam, Shaddai, etc.) found in the patriarchal tradition rooted in Genesis should turn up interesting insights regarding the effects which worshipping the Canannite god El may have offered.Along those same lines, the biblical promises concerning the patriarchs' blessed future progeny seems worthy of comparison to the similiar prospect Keret and Aqhat are engaged with by El in Ugaritic texts.Not sure where exactly to begin, yet perhaps we could start by identifying Yahweh's origins. Afaik, that name's not found among any of the Ugaritic pantheon lists, so Yahweh doesn't seem to have necessarily been a god of Canaanite origin. Edited by Bailey, : sp.

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I'm not here to mock or condemn what you believe, tho my intentions are no less than to tickle your thinker.
If those in first century CE had known what these words mean ... 'I want and desire mercy, not sacrifice'
They surely would not have murdered the innocent; why trust what I say, when you can learn for yourself?
Think for yourself.Mercy Trumps Judgement,
Love Weary

It's buried in the journals of papers on Ugaritic studies, but Yahweh is mentioned at Ugarit. The famous (well as famous as Ugaritic inscriptions can get) KTU 1.1 IV inscription on line 14 says:
The name of the son of god, Yahweh.At Ugarit, Yahweh was a son of El.Edited by Son Goku, : Qualified famous.

The inscription's an isolated, if not interesting, instance and while this view holds an audience, it doesn’t appear to be a conclusive one among scholars. As far as I can tell the arrangement of the name ‘Yahweh’ doesn't find parallel among non-biblical sources, with the exception of its mention in the moabite stele of King Mesha. Even there, Yahweh isn’t presented as a moabite deity though, but is rather told to have been punked by Mesha - with the spoils going to Chemosh.Remember, when considering the root of YHWH we see the hebrew forms hwh?/hyh/hyw and without Yahweh finding an actual counterpart in ugarit, the latter then gets us close as yam/yaw (which often leaves neither as triumphalist apparently, though I vote the former by these criteria). Anyway, the lines your referring to roughly translate as .. It seems interesting to note the verbal play of sorts as the ugaritic text is read, between the evident similarity of yw and ym - Yam being the god of rivers and sea and one of the much more definitive sons of El from among the Levantine pantheon. However, from what I understand, many scholars - though not all, consider the ugaritic form yw is unlikely to have actually been derivative of yhw citing an issue with the timeline concerning the linguistics.Either way, Yahweh is seldom mentioned in non-Yisraeli texts after twelve hundred bce and it’s realizations of this nature which cast further shadows on an assertion Yahweh was worshipped four hundred years later as a major god (in North Syria). That said, while I think it’s fair to champion what has been termed an ‘essential otherness’ of Yahweh from the Canaanite gods at the outset of Yisrael's history, I find little reason to entirely discount Yahweh worship as an emergent tradition from a west semitic, Canaanite background.If we can actually isolate and record a cult of Yahweh (or even Yahu) somewhere within the northern Levant or Syria dating before the establishment of the ancient kingdoms of Yisrael and Yuhdea, that view would seem less speculative.One Love

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I'm not here to mock or condemn what you believe, tho my intentions are no less than to tickle your thinker.
If those in first century CE had known what these words mean ... 'I want and desire mercy, not sacrifice'
They surely would not have murdered the innocent; why trust what I say, when you can learn for yourself?
Think for yourself.Mercy Trumps Judgement,
Love Weary

Yahweh is really not that important when it comes to the origin of Monotheism itself.The question really involves around the creation and evolution of the idea of what a god is.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Aten was a mono cult, but it was torn down as soon as Ahkenaten died. The people rejected the idea.Judaism/Christianity/Islam claim to be monotheistic, but are they? No. As soon as the Jews proclaimed their god was the one and only, they quickly had to tackle the philosophical debate: "Our god is the source of ALL GOOD and ALL EVIL?"And immediately we end up with the talking snake, the devil, demons, etc.Any mythological entity which is supernatural in nature and immortal is a god and negates monotheism.People can't claim that Satan exists and that God battles him without acknowledging that Satan is a deity. Maybe a lesser deity, but then wasn't Hermes a "lesser deity" to Zeus?And the saints? Are they anything less than demi-gods?Humans don't seem capable of maintaining a monotheism at all.I wonder if you cornered a few "strict Christians" and asked them about four leaf clovers, or lucky numbers, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, what would they say?NONE of that is consistent at all with true monotheism.

Interesting opinion, although when one considers how the identity of Yahweh - having potentially absorbed the functions, epithets and achievements of variant and sundry earlier gods and goddesses, appears to have resulted in an amalgam of sorts and a progressive conflation or fusion of the former, it becomes clearer the adaptation and evolution of monotheism and Yahwism may have been concurrent. In this regard, Yahwism is seen as central to the birth of eastern monotheism. Is that what it 'really' involves, or is that more or less simply part of the equation? Perhaps we could shed some light onto the creation and evolution of the idea of what a god is by speculating as to what mechanism Yahweh came to absorb the earlier gods and goddesses of the Levant pantheon, along with their feats, epithets, titles, and glories.Wanna take a guess?One Love

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I'm not here to mock or condemn what you believe, tho my intentions are no less than to tickle your thinker.
If those in first century CE had known what these words mean ... 'I want and desire mercy, not sacrifice'
They surely would not have murdered the innocent; why trust what I say, when you can learn for yourself?
Think for yourself.Mercy Trumps Judgement,
Love Weary

You can, but it seems irrelevant to the topic.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Fair enough.However, the mechanism employed to accomodate the respective amalgamation of a monotheistic Yahwism seems much more relevant to character and culture, and so the idea of what a god is, than region. That said, it's an interesting topic.I'd assume not further derail it's discussion for you, so I digress ..One LoveEdited by Bailey, : abe ..

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I'm not here to mock or condemn what you believe, tho my intentions are no less than to tickle your thinker.
If those in first century CE had known what these words mean ... 'I want and desire mercy, not sacrifice'
They surely would not have murdered the innocent; why trust what I say, when you can learn for yourself?
Think for yourself.Mercy Trumps Judgement,
Love Weary

The idea of monotheism seems to have either been developed repeatedly or imported beginning around the 1700s BCE, evolving and developing over the next thousand years. As mentioned in the OP, quite a few Monotheistic Gods were worshiped over that period, all mostly in the area of the fertile crescent and extending down to Egypt.The Migdol Temple at Pella in Jordan helps record those changes. During its life it was destroyed and rebuilt many times as different Great Powers rose and fell and lasted all the way through the Small Local Kingdoms period.It is during the period of the Small Local Kingdoms (two familiar ones would be Judah and Israel) that we see the rise of Henotheism, the 'official' recognition of multiple gods but the 'official' emphasis being placed on the local deity.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!