It’s just hard to directly translate accurately from the original Klingon texts.
I mean, there’s even other godlike characters in the Bible. Satan may not be the most powerful deity in the book but he’s canonically a deity. Same for angels and their ilk. Hell, even the later bits struggle to keep a lid on the numbers, jumping through hoops to make the claim that three deities is actually one.
Way back when, the religion that turned into Judaism was openly polytheistic, and simply held that Yahweh, the king of the pantheon and God of war and weather, was the only god worthy of worship.
Over time Yahweh merged with an adjoining religions god El, and started the transition to being the only god, instead of just the only worthy god.
This transition happened literally a thousand years after many of the earliest texts were written, so there’s a lot of verbiage where the deity explains that the other gods aren’t important, which is later clarified to them not existing, or really just being servants and not at all lower tier gods in a complex pantheon.
It’s why there’s so many weird turns of phrase, beyond it being thousands of years old and translated a lot.
“El” being a word that was used for both “a god” and “this god” didn’t help. “The high god divided the world for all the gods, and our god God the only God and creator of all was given our land as he’s the high god and father of God the only God of the sky and also that mountain”.Different parts of the world took a lot of the same root deities and went a different direction with them. There’s a degree of overlap between aspects of ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic religions because parts of each of them came from a common root. Just one mushed then together and made the grammar extra confusing. “King sky god”, “water god”, “afterlife god” being the children of mother and father cosmic creator gods. Also a big sea snakes who are up to no good. That one had legs, so to speak.
I feel the need to add some context here.
The patriarchal push to erase the pantheon started just before the Babylonian Exile under the reign of King Josiah. He ruled from 640 to 609 BCE.
His son Ellakim (or Jehoiakim) refused to pay tribute to the Neo-Babylonians which resulted in 60 years of slavery for some 7000 Judeans.
It was only in 539 BCE when the Neo-Babylonian Empire fell that they were allowed to go home.
The Judeans come home, but their temple has been sacked and most of their sacred texts burnt, so they rebuild and recreate.
This is when Noah and Moses were invented, a long with anything before Solomon, and even much of his life as well.
It was war, conflict and invasion that turned people to Yahweh to be the major god, since he was the god of war. Before then he was a minor figure. The odd part is why previous references weren’t eventually changed or edited out to reflect this turn to monotheism.
Probably wasn’t edited because it wasn’t a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.
Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
Other religions over time haven’t had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs.Wait wait wait, did Judaism invent the basic concept of a checksum?
That is… very interesting. I know numerology and the like are very popular parts of Jewish occultism.
It’s not specific to Judaism, any oral tradition relies on the length of a sentence and rhyming and repetitions to make sure you got the right phrasing. That’s how you come up with poetry and alexandrine and all that, everyone uses it.
Wouldn’t go quite that far, but given you needed to be relatively educated to qualify for the task it wouldn’t surprise me to learn there were some acceptable tricks for catching or preventing errors that we would recognize as parity checks.
The Bible itself acknowledges other gods. When God made Man “in our image” he was speaking to the pantheon of gods.
There are other examples, but I’m no scholar and my toast is almost ready.
No, he was speaking to the triune God, 3 in 1, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are the same God.
No, he was speaking about Ahura Mazda
The trinity is a post-biblical reinterpretation, from around 4th century AD.
Correct me if I’m wrong, my knowledge of this history is iffy at best,
Iirc, Early Judaism wasn’t monotheistic like it, Christianity, and Islam are now.
The people at the time had multiple gods, one of which was a minor god associated with storms. At some point this god was boosted into popularity and became the primary god of the old testament and eventually THE god of the 3 Religions.
The line being written like this could be a holdover from this extremely early culture which was initially Polytheistic.
OR it’s just a funky translation and just ment to mean “Don’t worship someone as a God like their any better than me.THE God.”
Yeah, there’s a bit of a discussion about this further down the thread. Yahweh was originally some sort of god of war (and maybe storms? See the great flood), but as his worship became more prominent he assumed the attributes (and name, even) of the chief god of the pantheon, El.
Yaweh was the “subgod” for Israelites.
Yaweh was one of the sons of El in Caananite religion, which has the same Noah myth, and the religion/people is based on one of his son’s decendants. El was accepted by Greeks as the same god as Zeus. Many other Caananite polytheistic gods had Greek equivalents.
When Moses wrote the tablets, he was basically doing a religious coup to claim the Hebrew/Israelite “subgod” was the primary god. Denouncing Idolatry, and “thou shalt not covet” was also a rebelion against the main/historical Phoenecian/Caananite religion to when Israelites war against Phoenecians “do not covet their idols, destroy them”.
“when Moses wrote the tablets”
The historical context here is really interesting, but this line is a head scratcher. A) god didn’t write the tablets, Moses did it himself, B) tacit support for historicity of Moses. It’s like not the religious viewpoint, but not the secular one either. Though I may be splitting hairs about a nonessential clause here.
In the Bible story God made the first set, but they were destroyed by Moses in a meltdown. Moses had to carve the rewritten replacements which are the ones that get written down.
Regardless of whether someone thinks Moses is historical, the story itself is a coup of sorts.
Unrelated, but has anyone else noticed the ten commandments read like a bad AI prompt?
Ah yeah forgot that part. Been awhile since Sunday school.
- religion is capable of inventing a god that doesn’t exist.
- Israelites needed a propaganda boost to rebel against Phoenecians, and offshoot religion helps.
- Elders that went up to the mountaintop with Moses can unanimously be on board with Hasbara to fuel war against Phoenicians. Ends justify the lie.
- Yaweh becomes supreme god, and Phoenicians deserve death for failing to accept all commandments. Including/especially the very weird idolatry one, that gods would typically accept as narcissistic reverence. Thou shalt kill all heretics.
Iirc the Bible never says there is only one god. Only that the Israelites should only worship Yahweh.
Yahweh was just one of many gods worshipped at that time. Which is why like 1/3 of the ten comandments are related to his own insecurities
Fun fact: In the Old Testament, God first calls himself as El Shaddai, which many scholars translate as “God of the Shaddai people”. So, even He doesn’t see Himself as the universal gods, just one of many.
A common misconception, it actually means alphabetically as god’s true name is A. Aardvark.
A faithful representation of God.
Blessed be!
You people are the best.
I’m gonna make my own god named A. Aaardvark.
Start from the beginning. The text makes it absolutely clear that there “are other gods”.
God: An Anatomy is a great book that goes more into this if you want to read more about the ancient conception of the Abrahamic god. Very little of it has survived into Christianity.
A tablet written in the very early Bronze Age, when Semites were surrounded by (and often participating in) all sorts of alternative cults and pagan pantheons would naturally mention other gods.
It would be weirder if the early biblical texts didn’t mention any other gods.
It wasn’t just other cultural groups that had other gods – proto-Judaism was polytheistic.
Considering 3 major world religions claim the text was inspired by their god, the discrepancies make it at least highly suspicious.
I’m into decolonization of Christianity, and one thing that’s really interesting is how saints were used by conquered peoples to preserve their gods and cultural practices i.e. syncretism. That’s one of the reasons Catholicism has remained more prominent than Protestantism in Latin America.
Catholicism outside of the Vatican is peganism and animism and ancestor worship with the labels scratched off.
And I’m mature enough in my atheism (really, post-atheist) to think that’s actually really cool.
My Filipino wife gave me a whole different view of their Catholicism. She has a rosary in the car and rubs it for protection, believes in Jesus and heaven, all that, but isn’t familiar with even the most well-known Bible stories and I have no idea if she’s even been to Mass. To her, the bible simply isn’t important in any way, and neither are the practices of the church. All very strange to my American senses, having been raised in a white-bread Presbyterian church.
I’m not a practitioner, but I’ve done a lot of reading on Voodoo.
African, Haitian, and New Orleans.
Often, at least in Haiti and New Orleans, Catholic saints are matched with a particular Loa (spirit, god, whatever you wanna call it)
This was due to Voodoo practitioners being killed for not being Christians in Haiti. Thus, they could worship Saint whoever visually, while still interacting with their own faith. It just traveled to the new world as people did.
The process is called Syncretism, and Voodoo is hardly the first or last instance of it happening.
As you mentioned, the church has done this too.
Easter? Eostre was a fertility deity associated with spring and rabbits.
Christmas? Yule.
It goes on.
What is “post-atheism”?
Recognizing that religion had an important place in the historical development of society (culture, government, labor, ownership, law, family, etc) and that being religious has a material basis that exists outside of our own ability to choose our beliefs.
Atheism isn’t a choice. Theism isn’t a choice. They are just products of our material conditions.
So, I don’t try to convince anyone about atheism; I’m honestly somewhat jealous that religious people can still believe in anything.
This is my first wife Yahweh, and my second wife Amen-Ra.
This take is actually pretty close to the original reading. In the ancient near east it was a given that there were many deities. It’s not that the worldview of the Bible is a strict monotheism but taht YHWH is the supreme God and the source of all.
If Cthulhu is your number 2 you immediately need to check for hemmorhoids.
Nothing cleans you put better than a tablespoon of incomprehensible, mind shattering horror in your morning coffee.
Back in the day you would pick and choose the gods you worshipped, like from the greek or roman pantheon. But if you chose to worship God you would have to put him literally before the other gods.
