RE: Opinions on paganism?
August 17, 2023 at 5:10 pm
(This post was last modified: August 17, 2023 at 5:41 pm by Bucky Ball.)
The term "pagan" and "paganism" are no longer used in academia.
It's a biased word used to denote a god or gods that simply are not "your" set of gods.
One god is as good as another until you demonstrate ANY of them are real.
The origins of the Hebrew / Christian god Yahweh is the 40th son of El Elyon, the chief Babylonian god, (or was he the 70th ?), the god of war, the Lord of Hosts.
(A "host" is an army in battle formation). No one really knew where Yahweh came from, until in the late 1800s the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was discovered near Nineveh.
Yahweh is the "realized" (phonetic) form of the "tetragramaton", (ie 4 letters), (YHWH), ... YaHWeH ... which represented the Hebrew deity, commonly called the Abrahamic god, or in the West, just, .. God. Some say the shortened form, without the vowels inserted, is/was a mark of respect, and that they did not want to actually pronounce the real name. There is some evidence that may not be the whole story.
The first time the name is used in the bible is Genesis 2:4. BUT, the books of the Bible were NOT written in the order we have them today. So the naming of the god in Job is important, and I don't have that information, in terms of translational texts. I'd have to look that up, and see what they called that god. I don't remember. The first chronological use is Genesis, which in the Hebrew version, is YHWH-Elohim, (which is translated, "Lord God"), thereby loosing all it's historic meaning and context. There is a lot of controversy about what this means, but it's fairly clear that the Judean priests, (since there are so many other elements of the Sumerian myths in Genesis), took the council of gods in Samaria, (the Elohim, plural), and identified it purposely with the Yahweh god, into a singular being. So basically it's the god of the Old Testament. When the Moses stories where written, they had Moses ask the name of the god, and he self-identifies himself as Yahweh. Thus the authors created, a heretofore non connected myth, with the new one, by use of the name.
How, and why that got to be that way, is rather complicated.
In short, the idea, probably originated in the Sumerian myth system, (it was found as one of the 70 sons of El Elyon), in the Enuma Elish, (the Sumerian Creation myth), found in the Royal Library in Ashurbanipal, by archaeologists, near ancient Nineveh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal , in the mid 1800's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1
Yahweh, for much of the time had a wife, (Ashera, or Ashura).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah
How, and why THIS god got assigned to the Hebrew peoples, (or they assigned it to themselves), has to do with the fact that Yahweh was the god of the armies, (you probably have heard "Lord of Hosts"), if you are a religious/church attending person. (A "host" is an assembled army) and they wanted help in the battles with their neighbors.
So that the basics.
Watch this video, if you care to. It has some of the Yahweh history. (Some of the video is not quite correct, but the origins parts are).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZY2eeozdo8&t=116s
I group this information, in my head, as the Northern Sources, (the Babylonian/Sumerian) myth sources, as Babylonia/Assyria was to the North and East of Ancient Israel.
Actually even that name Isra-EL, retains some derivative relationship with the "EL" gods in the ancient myths, as does "Beth-EL", (Bethel), which we see all over the place today. Beth El was a site in the old Northern kingdom where Yahweh was worshiped.
There was also another god, (combo), called Javeh, which came from Southern Canaan, and the Jordan Valley. Javeh was the Edomite "mountain god", and is also thought to have origins associated with the Egyptian "volcano god". These traditions had within them the Moses stories, and so the origins of Moses, (Mosheh was a common Egyptian name), came from the South, and some from Egypt.
When the Judean priests were assembling the texts and myths, (around 550-575 BCE), of Genesis, they combined the materials .. which came from about 5 sources, in some ways, which are known, leaving many of the origins evident still in the texts. Scholars have known about this for about 150 years, and there isn't much dispute about it, except in very fundamentalist schools, who deny it all, a priori.
There is a tiny remnant that remembers this in Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy 32:8-10
"When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel.
For the LORD’s (mistranslated) portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.
In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye,"
It's a biased word used to denote a god or gods that simply are not "your" set of gods.
One god is as good as another until you demonstrate ANY of them are real.
The origins of the Hebrew / Christian god Yahweh is the 40th son of El Elyon, the chief Babylonian god, (or was he the 70th ?), the god of war, the Lord of Hosts.
(A "host" is an army in battle formation). No one really knew where Yahweh came from, until in the late 1800s the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was discovered near Nineveh.
Yahweh is the "realized" (phonetic) form of the "tetragramaton", (ie 4 letters), (YHWH), ... YaHWeH ... which represented the Hebrew deity, commonly called the Abrahamic god, or in the West, just, .. God. Some say the shortened form, without the vowels inserted, is/was a mark of respect, and that they did not want to actually pronounce the real name. There is some evidence that may not be the whole story.
The first time the name is used in the bible is Genesis 2:4. BUT, the books of the Bible were NOT written in the order we have them today. So the naming of the god in Job is important, and I don't have that information, in terms of translational texts. I'd have to look that up, and see what they called that god. I don't remember. The first chronological use is Genesis, which in the Hebrew version, is YHWH-Elohim, (which is translated, "Lord God"), thereby loosing all it's historic meaning and context. There is a lot of controversy about what this means, but it's fairly clear that the Judean priests, (since there are so many other elements of the Sumerian myths in Genesis), took the council of gods in Samaria, (the Elohim, plural), and identified it purposely with the Yahweh god, into a singular being. So basically it's the god of the Old Testament. When the Moses stories where written, they had Moses ask the name of the god, and he self-identifies himself as Yahweh. Thus the authors created, a heretofore non connected myth, with the new one, by use of the name.
How, and why that got to be that way, is rather complicated.
In short, the idea, probably originated in the Sumerian myth system, (it was found as one of the 70 sons of El Elyon), in the Enuma Elish, (the Sumerian Creation myth), found in the Royal Library in Ashurbanipal, by archaeologists, near ancient Nineveh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal , in the mid 1800's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1
Yahweh, for much of the time had a wife, (Ashera, or Ashura).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah
How, and why THIS god got assigned to the Hebrew peoples, (or they assigned it to themselves), has to do with the fact that Yahweh was the god of the armies, (you probably have heard "Lord of Hosts"), if you are a religious/church attending person. (A "host" is an assembled army) and they wanted help in the battles with their neighbors.
So that the basics.
Watch this video, if you care to. It has some of the Yahweh history. (Some of the video is not quite correct, but the origins parts are).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZY2eeozdo8&t=116s
I group this information, in my head, as the Northern Sources, (the Babylonian/Sumerian) myth sources, as Babylonia/Assyria was to the North and East of Ancient Israel.
Actually even that name Isra-EL, retains some derivative relationship with the "EL" gods in the ancient myths, as does "Beth-EL", (Bethel), which we see all over the place today. Beth El was a site in the old Northern kingdom where Yahweh was worshiped.
There was also another god, (combo), called Javeh, which came from Southern Canaan, and the Jordan Valley. Javeh was the Edomite "mountain god", and is also thought to have origins associated with the Egyptian "volcano god". These traditions had within them the Moses stories, and so the origins of Moses, (Mosheh was a common Egyptian name), came from the South, and some from Egypt.
When the Judean priests were assembling the texts and myths, (around 550-575 BCE), of Genesis, they combined the materials .. which came from about 5 sources, in some ways, which are known, leaving many of the origins evident still in the texts. Scholars have known about this for about 150 years, and there isn't much dispute about it, except in very fundamentalist schools, who deny it all, a priori.
There is a tiny remnant that remembers this in Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy 32:8-10
"When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel.
For the LORD’s (mistranslated) portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.
In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye,"
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. - Joseph Campbell 
Militant Atheist Commie Evolutionist
Militant Atheist Commie Evolutionist
