How the God of Israel Was Born

andsoitis

There are 3 major strands of monotheism: a) Atenism in Egypt (c. 1350 BCE) b) Israelite / Hebrew c) Zoroastrianism in Persia While some scholars (like Freud) have proposed a link between (a) and (b), it remains contested and unproven. What is, however, likely, is a link between (c) and (b), specifically that Zoroastrianism likely influenced Second Temple Judaism during the period of Persian rule over Judea, particularly ideas about cosmic dualism, angels, demons, and eschatology.

everdrive

I've done a lot of reading on this topic lately. What originally grabbed my interest was reading R. Crumb's "The Book of Genesis Illustrated." It's a comic that attempts in a relatively flat way to draw the events of Genesis without any interpretation. Of course, some interpretation and error is inevitable, but it's not a book that attempts to paint things aggressively in one light or another, and people expecting an interesting satire will probably just find themselves bored. I did not have a Christian upbringing, and outside of a few verses here and there I had really never read the Book of Genesis and could not have described it accurately to anyone. Having initially read R. Crumb's Book of Genesis Illustrated, I was baffled more than anything. This was really my first introduction to ancient writing, so a lot of things which are expected for ancient writing were very, very confusing for me. The story made no sense. It's not so much that I disagreed with the story, but rather I could not have told you what a reader was supposed to get from the story. If I had read and disliked (as a real example) "The Scarlet Letter" I could have easily conveyed the themes of the book and the intent of the author, at least at a level of moderate competence. But what the hell was going on in the Book of Genesis? I had no idea. Why were all the best stories just a few sentences long? The Tower of Babel is an amazing visual and allegory in a conceptual sense ... but the actual story in Genesis is a mere 8 sentences. And what does it have to do with the rest of the story? It's not coherent at all. And why did people live really long previously? Why was Adam some 800-900 years old? Why is this never explained? If Adam could live to 900 years, but you'd never met anyone who lived past 80, wouldn't you want some explanation for this behavior, if even it was just something hand-wavy such as "we lived longer before the fall?" etc .. Now, there are answers to a lot of the these questions. Most of the answers (if you ignore the ridiculousness of the apologetics) is simply that the Bible is not one book, but a huge collection of stories with different authors, telling stories for different reasons, for different audiences, and at different times. Genesis in particular is almost certainly an adaption and conglomeration of many previous myths, and many of these would have been familiar to the audience of the time. As a rough example, if you wanted to write a vampire movie in 2026, you would not need to explain to the audience what a vampire is. The audience already knows and you waste words and waste realism by explaining it. Ultimately, these questions led me to want to read more on the topic. To me, it was impossible to understand how the Book of Genesis could possibly form the foundation of the three major Abrahamic religions, and captivate much of the population of the entire world, for much of recorded history. And again, I don't mean in some sanctimonious fedora-tipping sort of way. I just couldn't make sense of the stories whatever. They were deeply confusing to me. Ultimately, this sort of sat around in my mind until I bumped into the inscriptions from Kuntillet Arjud ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuntillet_Ajrud_inscriptions ) of Yaheh and his Asherah. The visual, of a weird iron-age deity with a weird iron-age consort reignited my interest. From there, I read Mark S. Smith, Thomas Romer, and more. I think my curiosity has been roughly satisfied, even though there are a lot of unanswered (and potentially unanswerable) questions: for instance, is the Kennite hypothesis correct? What I found is in hindsight what anyone should have expected: the Israelite religion changed significantly over time, is full of its own myth-making and navel-gazing, and of course, was heavily influenced by the local cultures and religions it coexisted and intermixed with.

throw0101d

See also perhaps "RLST 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)" (originally recorded in 2006): * https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145

red_admiral

For more on this topic, the book Fields of Blood ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_of_Blood ) has a couple of chapters on this. It's a fascinating history.

Brendinooo

This tweet thread was pretty formative to me: makes one remember that textual criticism of the sort that’s linked here is by no means the final word on these matters. https://x.com/omnologos/status/1870847422454280672