93
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Contramuffin@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I've watched a couple videos from Esoterica. His videos are wild. Who could have expected that the biblical God came from a storm-warrior god?

[-] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Sort of. One of the things I see as a common mistake in analyzing the Bible is the attempt to harmonize the different books of the Bible into a single picture of the origin and nature of a figure in it.

So yes, the storm god that shows up in Job is almost certainly coming from the ANE storm god stories which had that god defending a sea monster.

But that isn't necessarily where 'Yahweh' was originating, as much as perhaps a later syncretism with local mythos.

And ultimately, I'd argue for a case that the significance of Yahweh was mostly as consort, potentially mirroring the Shasu (the only bronze age association with Yahweh) having had a real world political marriage to a high priestess of the Queen of Heaven, which was typically Yahweh's wife in early archeology and was elsewhere in the ANE married to the storm god who slayed the sea beast.

That marriage is later overwritten and regarded as a corruption of an earlier monotheistic tradition, but such monotheism is anachronistic for that earlier period when it is archeologically evidenced as widely polytheistic.

So while I do think it's helpful with videos like that broadening people's horizons from what they might hear by modern believers in the texts, the actual picture is potentially far more complicated than a direct transmission of ANE parallels.

Even a story like Noah's Ark, which fits with a storm god, appears to be a later incorporation of Babylonian flood mythos on top of an earlier Noah story as the hero of a famine story, not a flood story (Idan Dershowitz has a compelling paper on this).

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
93 points (93.5% liked)

Asklemmy

43776 readers
987 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS