'11-12-01, 16:09 Moses de la Montagne	Re: Akhenaten smudge wrote: We are going round in circles here and I don't have the time to do so. I think you are taking Biblical texts too much at face value. I think you are picking out vaguely plausible (but unconvincing) points mixing it with what you want to believe and are saying 'here's an argument, this works, MUST be true'. That is not the case. You've decided where you want to get to and are joining dots to get there (I think Spin said something similar earlier in the thread). I'll agree that we're going in circles. But I don't see that my eagerness to trace Jewish monotheism to Akhenaten is any more selective than those of you who want to claim it as a sloppy development culled from their neighborly influences (even though they managed to develop along some very different lines than any of their neighbors). Spin and I have come down, on one point, to the question of whether Hosea can be dated to the 8th century or not (and there are scholars on both sides). So all of us are connecting dots that we've already placed along our preferred route. Six and a half dozen, really.
'11-12-01, 16:26 spin	Re: Akhenaten Moses de la Montagne wrote: spin wrote: I don't really understand why you gotta string this out with this sort of stuff. Atenists were Atenists because Akhenaten was Atenist. When Tutankhaten closed the chapter he changed his name to Tutankhamen. His wife changed her theophoric. Aten died with Akhenaten. It died at Akhetaten which was raise to the ground and rubble used as fill. Tombs that had been sealed before Horemheb went untouched if they remained hidden. The rest were completely vandalized. We learn about both Akhenaten and the Aten from within those tombs and from the recovered fill. spin wrote: The Egyptian belief you keep coming back to was a closed affair that lasted a very short time and was not understood by anyone outside the royal household. The Persian belief was relatively public, definitely in operation at a time when the Jews had the opportunity to learn all about it. Things have impact through exposure and there was no Jewish exposure to the Aten, nor would one expect anyone to extract the concept of monotheism without anything else from the religion for it to float around for over half a millennium in vacuo for the Jewish priests to hit upon. spin wrote: This is a dead issue. "String it out" for as long as you like. It's not a dead issue, but you're beating a dead horse, because I don't deny that the cult of Aten was destroyed after Akhenaten's death. That's not quite the issue. First, it's somehow removed from Atenism. Then the disembodied notion of monotheism needs to survive somehow for half a millennium. I can't seem to get the gravity of this lack of means of transmission of the idea through to you. Moses de la Montagne wrote: spin wrote: What hasn't been established, though, is that everyone in the Atenist religion enthusiastically apostatized from it. This may the third time I say it or so, but I'm not positing the survival of Atenism in Egypt; all I'm arguing for is the transference of its monotheism to the Jews via an Atenist Moses who left the scene during Tutankhamen's restoration. Not an impossibility. An Atenist Moses is complete bullshit. The court, wherein Aten was worshiped, involved wealthy Egyptians who had a rather good reason for staying in the court, be it Amunist or whatever, for they were wealthy within the structures of the court. Everything has its context. Theorizing without considering context doesn't produce meaningful results. Moses de la Montagne wrote: spin wrote: Incidentally, Jeremiah is a little deceptive as to the exact form of its religion, having no denial of Baal's existence, when Baal's name is mentioned. Consider for example 7:9 which talks of making "offerings to Baal, and" going "after other gods that you have not known," while 11:13 says, "For your gods have become as many as your towns, O Judah; and as many as the streets of Jerusalem are the altars you have set up to shame, altars to make offerings to Baal." I don't really think there is a coherent picture to be gained out of Jeremiah. spin wrote: We've scratched Jeremiah. We haven't scratched Jeremiah. Regardless of his mentions of Ba'als and other gods, he is quite clear that he does not recognize them as such. The other gods are false gods to Jeremiah: "frauds," "worthless idols," nothing but "wood and stone." He's obligated to bring them up, though, since his whole point is to disabuse the people of their futile worship: "the customs of the people are false." It's futile because he thinks his god is the only one worth worshiping. Remember the Deuteronomic law, thou shalt have no other god than the lord thy god? There are other gods, but we shouldn't appreciate them. Yahweh is better and in 49:1-6 we learn that the land of Ammon will be defeated and its god Milcom with go into exile. It's hard for a non-existent god to go into exile. Or better still look at the situation in Judah: consider Jer 7:18, dealing with Jews worshiping the queen of heaven (Asherah). Both god and Jeremiah rail against this but don't allow you to claim that Asherah is not a deity. Then try Jer 9:21 Death has come through our windows and entered our palaces to cut off the children in the streets and the young men in the market places. Mot (=Death) is the name of a god, naturally the god of death. He was also the god of death at Ugarit, so he was a widespread Semitic deity, called mutu in Mesopotamia. Jeremiah sees him coming to get people, coming through windows and doors. This god seems rather tangible to Jeremiah. (And there are a number of Hebrew names with a mot theophoric: Shelomoth ("The peace of Death" - 1 Chr 24:22), Ahimoth ("My brother is death" - 1 Chr 6:10), Azmoth, written in English Azmaveth ("Strong is Death" - 2 Sam 23:31).) Isaiah talks about corrupt people who have made a covenant with Mot (28:15). Hosea also knows Mot (13:14). You are confusing his disrespect for foreign deities with monotheism. Jeremiah is a henotheist. He knows about other Hebrew deities. Moses de la Montagne wrote: spin wrote: You want the Assyrians to have left behind a bible. Didn't happen. We have nothing that is comparable. Then on what basis do you propose Assyrian henotheism was equivalent to the fanatical monolatry of Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah? That's your misconception not mine. There were other gods for these people in their own religion as Mot and Asherah indicate. Moses de la Montagne wrote: This is the crux. If, between the 8th and 6th centuries, the Hebrew prophets were writing shit-hot shrieking screeds insisting on Yahweh only, and meanwhile their pagan neighbors were blithely tolerant of a scenario where one nation has its preferred deity and other nations have theirs, then there's something peculiar in the Hebrew scheme. I don't want the Assyrians to have written a bible; I just want them to have been as zealous of Asshur only or Marduk only as the Hebrews were of Yahweh. Is there evidence of that or no? You are inventing a past and you want me to show that it was similar to other cultures. Not likely. Moses de la Montagne wrote: spin wrote: The earliest text we have is from Qumran. You have no way of knowing how much earlier any of the texts were constructed. You just use a modicum of naive literalism to make assumptions about dating. Is it "naïve literalism" to date Exodus before 150 BC, or even before the exile? I'm laboring under the assumption (which I think has some consensus) that the Moses story was pre-exilic folklore, and was formally compiled and set down later. Oh, I'd say the figure of Moses was probably known before the exile. They had to have something to hang the traditions on. Moses de la Montagne wrote: Hosea suggests this much, but then of course you'll argue against the standard dating & reading of Hosea: Sure, when the standard datings are pulled out of someone's... naive literalism. Start with the Dead Sea Scrolls and try to work backwards. See how far you can get with the understanding that the exodus never happened and the conquest never happened and the united monarchy never happened... and you start asking well, what exactly did happen in these stories and you discover that the question is exceptionally hard to answer. The text remember Hezekiah and Ahab and they are supported by Mesopotamian evidence, along with a few others. There's no trace of a state of Judah until Samaria came under assault from Assyria. It's better to start with what you have a strong case for and work to reclaim whatever else. Hosea doesn't offer too much that's reclaimable. Moses de la Montagne wrote: spin wrote: One should not be literal with Hosea and it warns the reader against doing so, for Hosea is a tool of the writer to deliver his message. The marriage between Hosea and the prostitute is a dramatic presentation of god's relationship with unfaithful Israel. You're unlikely to believe that a Hosea actually sought out a prostitute to marry. Did a Hosea really have kids with such ludicrous names? Then we come to chapter 3, which tells us that the Israelites shall remain many days without king or prince... Afterwards the Israelites shall return.... Hey, but Israel's gone. Its elite carted off and replaced by other exiles. Are we really reading a serious prophecy that the old kingdom of Samaria is going to recreate itself?? In the book "In Search of Ancient Israel", Philip R. Davies argued that the term Israel was used in three different ways in ancient history. First and most marginally, it was a people known to Merneptah circa 1210 BCE. Then it was a sometime name for a kingdom centered on Samaria. Finally it became an idealized past realm (from which Judah stems) in post-exilic times. Hosea uses a post-exilic rhetoric, which features Israel, the kingdom that once was and could be again, the kingdom of the past into whose nest Judah has put itself as a cuckoo, the kingdom that the descendants of the returnees yearn for, with its idealized David as king. Later in Hosea, 9:13, there is a "prophecy" foretelling that Israel or Ephraim will return to Egypt. But look at a similar passage in Deut 28:28, "the lord will bring you back in ships to Egypt, by a route that I promised you would never see again." According to Genesis Israel entered Egypt by land. This is not the exodus or a reflection on it. This was when Israelites entered Egypt by ship as slaves. Judah's biggest export was people. This slave trade which shipped people by sea was still going on in the 3rd c. BCE, the time of the Zenon Archive. That's one theory, but readings (and datings) of Hosea vary, as you doubtless know. You may not like that, but there it is. If you're here at ratskeps it should mean you lean towards the notion of ratskep. Evidence is the most important raw material for discussion. To get at a working date for a text like Hosea, given that it is a part of the bible, do you start by treating it as a literally correct text or do you start with the fact that the earliest text we have is circa 150 BCE? It's your choice. Moses de la Montagne wrote: The Wikipedia entry (which perhaps you'll want to edit) places Hosea in the 8th century. I'm tired of editing in christian cadre territory. Moses de la Montagne wrote: There are also some fun quotes from "feminists" and "scholars" about covenantal theology. Personally, I'm content to never mind that business: If the material is important to you, then you can't afford to mind your own business. When christian and Jewish experts own the field you get texts that represent a compromise between christians and Jews. The christians want to replicate their religion and many of the Jews, who lean toward Israeli politics, replicate a philo-Israeli retrojection. In both cases the texts fall victim. Moses de la Montagne wrote: the important thing is that an arguably pre-exilic Hosea uses "out of Egypt" as a reference to the Hebrew's past, and I see no reason why I have to take this usage, at your insistence, as figuratively as I do his more patently metaphorical marriage to Gomer. It's most likely a reference to Exodus. But you know there was no exodus, no conquest, and there was no knowledge of the arrival of the Philistines. When do you imagine the exodus and conquest traditions were developed and why? For me it's simple: it's related to the return from Babylon and the takeover of power by the returnees from the people of the land, the Jewish population that stayed in Judah when the elite were skimmed off to Babylon. Nehemiah tells a slightly different version of this "conquest", but there was an exodus from Babylon and a conquest of the Jews' rightful land. Moses de la Montagne wrote: spin wrote: Do you know? Does it matter? It matters if it's a unique characteristic of Hebrew religion. If they developed these things where their henotheistic neighbors or their Persian mentors did not, then it suggests the Hebrews had monotheistic tendencies from beforehand. Akhenaten himself tolerated no images of Aten save for the solar disc. You're hell-bent in making the Jewish religion somehow very different but at the same time influenced by monotheism ultimately derived from the Aten. The Jews were still Henotheistic, whether you want to admit it or not. They still had other gods. There is no reason to contemplate wild speculations about Akhenaten. It involves accepting status quo notions of datings when those providing the datings you don't believe in many other cases. Do you think that's reasonable?
'11-12-01, 19:46 Destroyer	Re: Akhenaten spin wrote: The Jews were still Henotheistic, whether you want to admit it or not. They still had other gods. There is no reason to contemplate wild speculations about Akhenaten. Yes. But the whole point, and claim, is that the Jews were being disobedient and unfaithful to their covenant whislt still adhering to these other gods.
'11-12-01, 20:30 Oldskeptic	Re: Akhenaten I haven't seen much focus on the priests of Yahweh in this thread, and I'd like to propose a very simple idea: Yahweh was a tribal god worshiped as a war god. Yahweh's priests got the upper hand and began killing people that worshiped other gods, and over time Yahweh evolved from the biggest baddest god to the only god. A god responsible for everything including creation. I submit that the Hebrew, one and only, god may have been created by priests of a certain caste or tribe or family over time for the simple reason of making their caste/tribe/family more powerful/affluent/influential. They wouldn't have needed Akhenaten for this nor Babylonian captivity, or any other influence. Just simple human greed for power/affluence/influence. And I'd like to suggest that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua were products of reverse engineering in a way to justify belief in the priests' one and only god that they were creating.
'11-12-01, 22:47 Moses de la Montagne	Re: Akhenaten spin wrote: An Atenist Moses is complete bullshit. The court, wherein Aten was worshiped, involved wealthy Egyptians who had a rather good reason for staying in the court, be it Amunist or whatever, for they were wealthy within the structures of the court. Everything has its context. Theorizing without considering context doesn't produce meaningful results. Then the disembodied notion of monotheism needs to survive somehow for half a millennium. I can't seem to get the gravity of this lack of means of transmission of the idea through to you. You're trafficking in a generalization as if it's a certainty. The network of people associated with the pharaonic court and its goings-on had to have been more than just a dozen or so, and these people had children and relatives. It's nice to be in the upper class I'm sure, but the tedium of privilege isn't for everyone. The Buddha, according to legend, was of noble birth—but after a while he just wasn't feeling it, and took off for less earthly pursuits. Moses, according to Exodus, had a place in the palace until he committed a murder and had to sneak off to avoid the consequences. Wanderlust happens. The "disembodied notion of monotheism" is only there because you want to deny that the Hebrews were ever nomads before settling in Canaan. This comes down to whether they were a Shasu tribe or not—another bone of contention. spin wrote: Moses de la Montagne wrote: We haven't scratched Jeremiah. Regardless of his mentions of Ba'als and other gods, he is quite clear that he does not recognize them as such. The other gods are false gods to Jeremiah: "frauds," "worthless idols," nothing but "wood and stone." He's obligated to bring them up, though, since his whole point is to disabuse the people of their futile worship: "the customs of the people are false." It's futile because he thinks his god is the only one worth worshiping. Remember the Deuteronomic law, thou shalt have no other god than the lord thy god? There are other gods, but we shouldn't appreciate them. Yahweh is better and in 49:1-6 we learn that the land of Ammon will be defeated and its god Milcom with go into exile. It's hard for a non-existent god to go into exile. Or better still look at the situation in Judah: consider Jer 7:18, dealing with Jews worshiping the queen of heaven (Asherah). Both god and Jeremiah rail against this but don't allow you to claim that Asherah is not a deity. Then try Jer 9:21 Death has come through our windows and entered our palaces to cut off the children in the streets and the young men in the market places. Mot (=Death) is the name of a god, naturally the god of death. He was also the god of death at Ugarit, so he was a widespread Semitic deity, called mutu in Mesopotamia. Jeremiah sees him coming to get people, coming through windows and doors. This god seems rather tangible to Jeremiah. (And there are a number of Hebrew names with a mot theophoric: Shelomoth ("The peace of Death" - 1 Chr 24:22), Ahimoth ("My brother is death" - 1 Chr 6:10), Azmoth, written in English Azmaveth ("Strong is Death" - 2 Sam 23:31).) Isaiah talks about corrupt people who have made a covenant with Mot (28:15). Hosea also knows Mot (13:14). You are confusing his disrespect for foreign deities with monotheism. Jeremiah is a henotheist. He knows about other Hebrew deities. But this is just the thing. Earlier you insisted I take Hosea less literally. Now I'm supposed to take Jeremiah's mention of a god's exile to mean that the god himself will be deposed? Or that his poetic use of "death" is a literal description of a god who sneaks through windows and creeps along the alleyways? Given all his invective against every false god but Yahweh, there is no reason to assume that his mention of Moloch's exile isn't a triumphalist hope for the decline of Moloch's cult ("together with his priests and officials")—or that his mention of death is anything but a prevailing colloquialism. John Lennon did not let slip a Christian belief in Jesus when he said that the Beatles were beating Christ in a popularity contest; and if someone remarks that "Ann Coulter is the spawn of Satan," we do not take it to mean that the person believes in a demonic lord of hell with horns and a pitchfork. Figures of speech still persist that seem to personify death, but we generally don't infer a grim reaper or an apocalyptic horseman from them. You impute henotheism to Jeremiah because it helps your case. Which is fair enough, of course, but this variety of readings leaves things up for speculation—both ways. spin wrote: If you're here at ratskeps it should mean you lean towards the notion of ratskep. Evidence is the most important raw material for discussion. To get at a working date for a text like Hosea, given that it is a part of the bible, do you start by treating it as a literally correct text or do you start with the fact that the earliest text we have is circa 150 BCE? It's your choice. spin wrote: If the material is important to you, then you can't afford to mind your own business. When christian and Jewish experts own the field you get texts that represent a compromise between christians and Jews. The christians want to replicate their religion and many of the Jews, who lean toward Israeli politics, replicate a philo-Israeli retrojection. In both cases the texts fall victim. I took my dating of Hosea from Robin Lane Fox, who advertises himself as an atheist. If you see his failure to reject mainstream biblical scholarship as letting down the side, or becoming a useful idiot for the Jewish-Christian cadre that also poisons Wikipedia, so be it. Anyway, the primary argument regarding Hosea was that his "out of Egypt" references Exodus. Is it your contention that the Moses story was not known to Hosea, and that it was not even in existence until the exile? I guess so: spin wrote: When do you imagine the exodus and conquest traditions were developed and why? For me it's simple: it's related to the return from Babylon and the takeover of power by the returnees from the people of the land, the Jewish population that stayed in Judah when the elite were skimmed off to Babylon. Nehemiah tells a slightly different version of this "conquest", but there was an exodus from Babylon and a conquest of the Jews' rightful land. spin wrote: There is no reason to contemplate wild speculations about Akhenaten. It involves accepting status quo notions of datings when those providing the datings you don't believe in many other cases. Do you think that's reasonable? Well, if anything, it cuts out a lot of the fancy dancing that a person has to do in order to convince a believer to stop hugging their precious timeline of Mosaic monotheism (and obviously, I think the texts can support such a timeline even when read critically. I also, obviously, think the "post-exilic concoction" scenario fails for a number of reasons that we've already done to death on this thread). Freud's ingenuity lay in pointing out that where it was unlikely for a tribe of goat herders to have suddenly lit upon monotheism all by themselves, it was already established that monotheism had been devised regionally from a much more cultivated source. Christians, even by their own account, place the Hebrews in Egypt roughly around the time of Akhenaten. I suppose it's a matter of which tack you want to take. Good luck.
'11-12-02, 05:23 Moses de la Montagne	Re: Akhenaten Oldskeptic wrote: I haven't seen much focus on the priests of Yahweh in this thread, and I'd like to propose a very simple idea: Yahweh was a tribal god worshiped as a war god. Yahweh's priests got the upper hand and began killing people that worshiped other gods, and over time Yahweh evolved from the biggest baddest god to the only god. A god responsible for everything including creation. I submit that the Hebrew, one and only, god may have been created by priests of a certain caste or tribe or family over time for the simple reason of making their caste/tribe/family more powerful/affluent/influential. They wouldn't have needed Akhenaten for this nor Babylonian captivity, or any other influence. Just simple human greed for power/affluence/influence. And I'd like to suggest that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua were products of reverse engineering in a way to justify belief in the priests' one and only god that they were creating. There's definitely something to that. Almost the whole of the Hebrew religion is soaked in violence, wrath, strictures, and commands. There's hardly any mystical element in Semitic monotheism until it morphs into Christianity and Islam. It is, in that respect, a control freak cult with Yahweh at the head. But I don't know. The priestly caste, at least, in Judaism doesn't scale the heights of control that would later be reached by the Catholic Church. The ancient Jewish priests propped themselves up a great deal, but they never called themselves direct intermediaries between God and man, with necessary sacraments that only they alone could dispense. And the Hebrew priesthood felt an obligation to demonstrate their own righteousness: their legitimacy depended in part on their own outward piety (why would they set on such a high bar for themselves?)—whereas the Christian clergy, when it rejected Donatism, insisted that even their own wickedness & depravity did not compromise their sacerdotal powers. Surely any priestly hierarchy is concerned with control, but if the Hebrews had been all about control, I suspect they would've very quickly evolved something similar to what the Church (that top-down religious government nonpareil) eventually did.
'11-12-02, 05:25 Agrippina	Re: Akhenaten Oldskeptic wrote: I haven't seen much focus on the priests of Yahweh in this thread, and I'd like to propose a very simple idea: Yahweh was a tribal god worshiped as a war god. Yahweh's priests got the upper hand and began killing people that worshiped other gods, and over time Yahweh evolved from the biggest baddest god to the only god. A god responsible for everything including creation. I submit that the Hebrew, one and only, god may have been created by priests of a certain caste or tribe or family over time for the simple reason of making their caste/tribe/family more powerful/affluent/influential. They wouldn't have needed Akhenaten for this nor Babylonian captivity, or any other influence. Just simple human greed for power/affluence/influence. And I'd like to suggest that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua were products of reverse engineering in a way to justify belief in the priests' one and only god that they were creating. I agree with you. I've been saying this all along. While it's completely possible that someone heard about the Egyptians having had a crazy king who worshipped the sun disc and who built a whole new city in a completely illogical place where he worshipped this thing, and that it was all buried in history, it's more likely that when all the gods the settlers in "Israel" were formulating their religion, they decided to make one god bigger and better than all the other gods. Which is why the first commandment says "thou shalt have no other gods before me." It might simply have been that "mine is bigger than yours" was the motivation and nothing more than that.
'11-12-02, 05:33 Agrippina	Re: Akhenaten Moses de la Montagne wrote: <snip OS post quoted in my last post <snip> There's definitely something to that. Almost the whole of the Hebrew religion is soaked in violence, wrath, strictures, and commands. There's hardly any mystical element in Semitic monotheism until it morphs into Christianity and Islam. It is, in that respect, a control freak cult with Yahweh at the head. That's why it's more likely that they reduced their religion to the worship of the single god. It was to make them more powerful. Akhenaten and his silly sun disc worship didn't really achieve very much except to make himself unpopular with people who worshipped more than 100 gods previously. But I don't know. The priestly caste, at least, in Judaism doesn't scale the heights of control that would later be reached by the Catholic Church. The ancient Jewish priests propped themselves up a great deal, but they never called themselves direct intermediaries between God and man, with necessary sacraments that only they alone could dispense. And the Hebrew priesthood felt an obligation to demonstrate their own righteousness: their legitimacy depended in part on their own outward piety (why would they set on such a high bar for themselves?)—whereas the Christian clergy, when it rejected Donatism, insisted that even their own wickedness & depravity did not compromise their sacerdotal powers. Surely any priestly hierarchy is concerned with control, but if the Hebrews had been all about control, I suspect they would've very quickly evolved something similar to what the Church (that top-down religious government nonpareil) eventually did. They were pretty powerful. They interpreted the law, actually wrote it and appointed the judges. They were responsible for anointing the king, so they were pretty powerful. Also they got to eat all the best meat that was offered to their god as sacrifice and didn't have to work very hard. The high priest was the one who kept the myth of the "Ark of the Covenant" alive. They were the ultimate authority on whether someone had committed a crime against the law that warranted being stoned to death. The judges weren't judges as we understand them, they were basically priests.
'11-12-02, 06:47 Oldskeptic	Re: Akhenaten Agrippina wrote: Moses de la Montagne wrote: <snip OS post quoted in my last post <snip> There's definitely something to that. Almost the whole of the Hebrew religion is soaked in violence, wrath, strictures, and commands. There's hardly any mystical element in Semitic monotheism until it morphs into Christianity and Islam. It is, in that respect, a control freak cult with Yahweh at the head. That's why it's more likely that they reduced their religion to the worship of the single god. It was to make them more powerful. Akhenaten and his silly sun disc worship didn't really achieve very much except to make himself unpopular with people who worshipped more than 100 gods previously. But I don't know. The priestly caste, at least, in Judaism doesn't scale the heights of control that would later be reached by the Catholic Church. The ancient Jewish priests propped themselves up a great deal, but they never called themselves direct intermediaries between God and man, with necessary sacraments that only they alone could dispense. And the Hebrew priesthood felt an obligation to demonstrate their own righteousness: their legitimacy depended in part on their own outward piety (why would they set on such a high bar for themselves?)—whereas the Christian clergy, when it rejected Donatism, insisted that even their own wickedness & depravity did not compromise their sacerdotal powers. Surely any priestly hierarchy is concerned with control, but if the Hebrews had been all about control, I suspect they would've very quickly evolved something similar to what the Church (that top-down religious government nonpareil) eventually did. They were pretty powerful. They interpreted the law, actually wrote it and appointed the judges. They were responsible for anointing the king, so they were pretty powerful. Also they got to eat all the best meat that was offered to their god as sacrifice and didn't have to work very hard. The high priest was the one who kept the myth of the "Ark of the Covenant" alive. They were the ultimate authority on whether someone had committed a crime against the law that warranted being stoned to death. The judges weren't judges as we understand them, they were basically priests. And Let us not forget that the the position of priest/s was hereditary and reserved for the tribe of Levi. Somewhat of a caste system going on here I would think. It is not a stretch of imagination to see a powerful ruling class of priests refining their war god into the only god. A god that controls everything. It would be what the priests wanted. Total fucking control, from what you can eat to how to make sacrifices to their made up god, and just about everything in between.
'11-12-02, 07:39 smudge	Re: Akhenaten Oldskeptic wrote: I haven't seen much focus on the priests of Yahweh in this thread, and I'd like to propose a very simple idea: Yahweh was a tribal god worshiped as a war god. Yahweh's priests got the upper hand and began killing people that worshiped other gods, and over time Yahweh evolved from the biggest baddest god to the only god. A god responsible for everything including creation. I submit that the Hebrew, one and only, god may have been created by priests of a certain caste or tribe or family over time for the simple reason of making their caste/tribe/family more powerful/affluent/influential. They wouldn't have needed Akhenaten for this nor Babylonian captivity, or any other influence. Just simple human greed for power/affluence/influence. And I'd like to suggest that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua were products of reverse engineering in a way to justify belief in the priests' one and only god that they were creating. Yes. All very reasonable. I have suggested 'control' as a probable motivator for the 'apparent' hard line on 'other peoples gods/ways of worship' in certain texts. Some way back I said; "For 'whoring with false gods' read 'not doing as priest tells you'".
'11-12-02, 08:07 Agrippina	Re: Akhenaten Both of you are right. To imagine that the priests of ancient Judah had less power than the priests of the RCC is just fooling yourself. If anything they had more power. Even today the rabbi is the ultimate authority on everything. Even if just for the entertainment value, take a look at the movie "Fiddler on the Roof" the rabbi is called to pronounce a blessing on a sewing machine FFS. That's about the amount of it. They teach the law to boys and the girls learn it from their mothers, who teach them basically what is and what isn't allowed to be eaten or worn together and how to bless the Sabbath table. Rabbis, especially in strict orthodox societies control every aspect of their lives and are able to pronounce that they've broken the law and to blame them for the latest rainstorm if they so much as light a candle after sunset on Friday.
'11-12-03, 04:42 Moses de la Montagne	Re: Akhenaten Agrippina wrote: Moses de la Montagne wrote: <snip OS post quoted in my last post <snip> There's definitely something to that. Almost the whole of the Hebrew religion is soaked in violence, wrath, strictures, and commands. There's hardly any mystical element in Semitic monotheism until it morphs into Christianity and Islam. It is, in that respect, a control freak cult with Yahweh at the head. That's why it's more likely that they reduced their religion to the worship of the single god. It was to make them more powerful. Akhenaten and his silly sun disc worship didn't really achieve very much except to make himself unpopular with people who worshipped more than 100 gods previously. Akhenaten, then, shows that power can precede theology—and that monotheism doesn't necessarily do much for your power, either. To insist on only one god is to put all your money on one horse, and that makes your "power trip" a high-stakes gamble. It might not be something you'd want to devise. Freud's theory starts with the notion that the Old Testament's internal history is neurotic and hysterical; it's not as sleek and streamlined as you'd expect the willful evolution of a priestly caste to be. All the discomfort can just as easily be attributed to the early introduction of monotheism before the Hebrews were ready for it, and the resultant back-and-forth before they managed to make it workable. Again, though, take your pick. Agrippina wrote: To imagine that the priests of ancient Judah had less power than the priests of the RCC is just fooling yourself. If anything they had more power. Even today the rabbi is the ultimate authority on everything. Even if just for the entertainment value, take a look at the movie "Fiddler on the Roof" the rabbi is called to pronounce a blessing on a sewing machine FFS. That's about the amount of it. They teach the law to boys and the girls learn it from their mothers, who teach them basically what is and what isn't allowed to be eaten or worn together and how to bless the Sabbath table. Nonsense, Madame. The Jewish high priests indeed aggregated to themselves a good deal of power, but to contend that they ever exceeded the Catholic Church is absurd. In the Hebrew scheme, the priest is a surrogate for the people: he performs the rites and sacrifices on their behalf in order to appease & propitiate God. The Catholic scheme, however, goes much much further: the priest acts as a surrogate for God, dispensing the sacraments as a living conduit of God's grace. And the pope, of course, is God's infallible viceroy on earth, elocuting without scruple or embarrassment what comes down from on high. Even the Jewish prophets who claimed to have been instructed by God still trembled at their calling, and gave breathless accounts of visions and terrors that accompanied their message. The Christians just took their heavenly mandate to speak for God in stride. Plus they brought most of an entire continent to its knees, whereas the Hebrews never managed to claim a kingdom that amounted to anything more than the size of a football field by comparison. I can assure you that Catholic priests have blessed as many (if not more) sewing machines as rabbis have, and that's because it's taken for granted in Catholicism that priestly blessings count for something. And anyway, what kind of enviable power is it for a rabbi to make sure that Sabbath tables are set properly and that light switches don't get flipped on Saturdays? Why all the fussing and farting around? The Christians made haste to ditch all that pointless Pharisaical micro-managing: they were well on their way to popes & Christendom & the easy subjugation of a populace with the carrot of heaven and the spectre of hell. Whereas the ancient Hebrew leaders had had to keep whining about how their people kept backsliding into neglecting their own God. And why did the Hebrew priesthood make their marital arrangements so mundane? What good is power without sexual decadence? The priestly celibacy mandate in the Catholic Church, on the other hand, not only kept property within the ecclesial fold, but allowed for the unfettered bachelors to engage in all manner of concubinage and lechery without compromising the integrity of their office, which could not be besmirched by their own peccadilloes. See, now that's a smart arrangement.
'11-12-03, 09:13 Agrippina	Re: Akhenaten In the modern world perhaps the Catholic high priest has the power of life or death over members of his religion, but the original popes were only imitating the power of the emperors and those were based on the power of ancient eastern emperors. The Hebrew high priests modeled their power on the power of all priests in all versions of ancient religion at the time of the formulation of their religion. By comparison, I give you the idea that there are more Catholics today than there are Jews. If the numbers were switched and there were more Jews than Catholics, then Jerusalem would be the Vatican and the pope would be a mere priest. It's simply the evolution of religious beliefs. This evolution is moving now towards the power of the Ayatollahs and Imams of Islam.
'11-12-03, 12:01 smudge	Re: Akhenaten Moses de la Montagne wrote: Akhenaten, then, shows that power can precede theology—and that monotheism doesn't necessarily do much for your power, either. To insist on only one god is to put all your money on one horse, and that makes your "power trip" a high-stakes gamble. It might not be something you'd want to devise. (My bold.) Indeed. As Akhenaten's reign ended in total disaster it rather scuppers the concept of anyone imitating the 'one God' gamble based on his example don't you think? Akhenaten lost the 'gamble'. His people payed the price. This would be the memory of his monotheism. Not a road down which others would be in a hurry to follow. Moses de la Montagne wrote: Nonsense, Madame. The Jewish high priests indeed aggregated to themselves a good deal of power, but to contend that they ever exceeded the Catholic Church is absurd. It matters not a jot who was nastier, who abused power most, who was more violent or which 'holy men' did best from pedalling superstition. The point is that Catholicism was built on the back of previous Biblical bullshit, power abuse, violence, manipulation and superstition. The details of which were worse in any given situation or time period would be dictated by circumstance. The motivations and essential flaws and moral failings are/were similarly reprehensible.
'11-12-03, 12:27 Agrippina	Re: Akhenaten Exactly.
'11-12-03, 15:04 Destroyer	Re: Akhenaten smudge wrote: As Akhenaten's reign ended in total disaster it rather scuppers the concept of anyone imitating the 'one God' gamble based on his example don't you think? Akhenaten lost the 'gamble'. His people payed the price. This would be the memory of his monotheism. Not a road down which others would be in a hurry to follow. You are absolutely correct about this: The concept was a failure to convert others. But, for one individual with the courage of his convictions to transfer that monotheism from belief in the Sun to belief in One Conscious God, is all that was required for the Hebrews. It only required One human being to adhere to that concept. This is precisely why the concept would have been so overwhelmingly rejected in favour of the polytheism that was endemic and traditionally familiar to the society. It required centuries of experience before it would ever gain public support. I have no interest whatsoever regarding how this belief may or may not have been politically advanced for one's own advantage. The fact is, that belief in One, of any kind, was completely alien to the day, and would have necessitated tremendous courage to oppose what was generally accepted and adhered to: Initial rejection was inevitable!
'11-12-03, 18:12 Blood	Re: Akhenaten So is it pretty much agreed among most on this thread that Akhenaten did not influence Jewish monotheism? If Moses had been a renegade from Akhenaten's court, then the Hebrew scriptures would have been unambiguously monotheistic from the start. And yet they are not. Jeremiah laughing at the Babylonians worshipping "wooden idols" is echoed in Daniel's "Bel and the Dragon" episode in the LXX. Cyrus leaves food and wine at the temple of Marduk to prove to Daniel that Marduk is a "living" god. Daniel responds by saying the Hebrew god is the only "living" god; the Marduk shrine is just clay and brass and the priests secretly consume the food left for the god without Cyrus's knowledge. It seems to me that monotheism could have been born out of such scepticism toward the "idols" of other religions. Yahweh thus is the only "living" god because he is not worshipped as a brass, clay or wooden idol like the Babylonian gods.
'11-12-03, 18:24 Agrippina	Re: Akhenaten Something like that.
'11-12-03, 18:28 Destroyer	Re: Akhenaten Blood wrote: So is it pretty much agreed among most on this thread that Akhenaten did not influence Jewish monotheism? If Moses had been a renegade from Akhenaten's court, then the Hebrew scriptures would have been unambiguously monotheistic from the start. And yet they are not. Jeremiah laughing at the Babylonians worshipping "wooden idols" is echoed in Daniel's "Bel and the Dragon" episode in the LXX. Cyrus leaves food and wine at the temple of Marduk to prove to Daniel that Marduk is a "living" god. Daniel responds by saying the Hebrew god is the only "living" god; the Marduk shrine is just clay and brass and the priests secretly consume the food left for the god without Cyrus's knowledge. It seems to me that monotheism could have been born out of such scepticism toward the "idols" of other religions. Yahweh thus is the only "living" god because he is not worshipped as a brass, clay or wooden idol like the Babylonian gods. I really don't think that it matters much how anyone interprets ancient history and beliefs. There will always be room for interpretations that suit one's own bias. We just go with the flow that suits us; and if there is no Arbiter/God who can conclusively demonstrate what actually happened, then we simply continue to go with our separate convictions.
'11-12-03, 20:37 Oldskeptic	Re: Akhenaten In the story of Job what is Satan other than another God that opposes Yahweh? What are the Angels in the story of Lot other than demi-gods? Who were Gabriel and Michael other that lessor gods obedient to a more powerful god? I propose that there are/were very few if any truly monotheistic religions, and this includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. If they have angels and demons or ascended saints then they have a plethora of gods. What happened in Judaism is that one particular god was promoted to the top position, but still he/it is not all powerful; just the most powerful. There is no such thing as monotheism (One god), just gods of different strengths and abilities. Even Akhenaten didn't deny other gods existed, only that his god was the most powerful and that other gods should not be worshiped. According to the Old Testament Yahweh describes himself as a jealous god that does not want other gods worshiped. This does not imply that this god is the only god. In fact it implies that there are other gods, but this would not stop a priestly class from trying to promote their god as the ultimate god. There is nothing profound or enlightening in "monotheism" especially considering that it doesn't actually exist.