The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.
For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods.
From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the creation and the flood have earlier references from older people's groups.
The evolution of monotheism was much more about keeping a large diverse people group united.
You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well.
That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them.
Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system.
You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.
Some of the parallels between the Roman and Greek pantheons are also because they derive from the common Indo-European root. e.g. Jupiter, Zeus pater and Dyaus pitr being the sky father
Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”
Many of the biblical names ending in "ah" are YHWH names. This includes many of the prophets. So Elijah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Micaiah, Isaiah, for instance are all "ah" ending names that have a meaning related to YHWH in the same way that the "el" ending names are related to El. And then Joshua (and, hence, Jesus) is also a YHWH name.
>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not?
Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.
No, those are different beings. Zeus Panhellenios who rules over all the Greeks, Zeus Apomyios who keeps flies off of spectators, Zeus Ombrios who rains on crops, and Zeus Keraunios who smites with a thunderbolt are all the same being. You address him differently depending on what you want from him.
This is no different from the concern in modern American law with whether a public official takes some action in his private capacity or officially in his public capacity. Gods have no private capacity, but the major ones have many, many different public capacities.
(The actual term for this is "aspect"; we would say something like "Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Apomyios".)
"Baal" was less a name than a title. In modern Hebrew, it just means "lord" or "husband". It was also apparently a title that could, at some stages of Israel's history, even be applied to YHWH, much like "Adonay" ("My lord"). For instance, the individuals named "Mephibosheth" and "Ish-bosheth" (two of the sons of Saul, a clear if imperfect Yahwist) were originally named "Meribaal" and "Ish-baal". Whoever put together 1 and 2 Samuel changed their names from "May Baal Contend" and "Man of Baal" to various plays on "shame" (bosheth). Their original names are preserved, oddly enough, in 1 Chronicles.
If you could go back and ask, say, Samuel or David or Saul about how many gods existed and what their names were, I suspect all of them would have been clear that YHWH was the chief of the gods, and the only one that Israelites should worship, but beyond that you would have gotten some complicated and perhaps confused answers. Even some parts of the Bible take for granted that other gods besides YHWH exist - see, for instance, Psalm 82.
Over time, "Baal" began to denote a specific agricultural deity, and it became less appropriate to use as a title for YHWH. That seems to have kicked off (or was kicked off by) the well-known conflict between Yahwism and Baal worship - see, ad infra, 1 Kings 18.
I don't want to completely refute this because I'm also an amateur and there are a lot of instabilities of consensus, but Baal was at least also the son of El in Canaanite religion which predated an Israeli kingdom.
My understanding is more that Yahvists had more nomadic origins and populated (/conquered, possibly the Levites[1]) a Canaanite cultural context and then there was religious syncreticism and interest in merging them. Depending on the specific passage's history there's either a ret-coning of "all one god" or at least the interpretation that way (including how your links translate those passages).
Like all matters concerning the gods in the ancient near east, it's complex, and every answer has to be qualified. So apparently in some traditions, Baal was the son of Dagan (another fertility god), and in some the son of El (the head of the Canaanite pantheon, often identified with Yahweh even by orthodox Yahwists).
> often identified with Yahweh even by orthodox Yahwists
This seems totally unsurprising, given that the Old Testament freely uses both terms while insisting there is only one god. What else are orthodox Yahwists supposed to think?
Have you tried googling "baal son of el"? I have no idea on who Baal is, or El, but the discussion sparked my curiosity and that's all I needed to do in order to answer for myself the question "where are you getting this from?".
There's also evidence that even the exclusive worship of YHWH is something that's written in to the history at a later date, e.g. the Elephantine papyri predate any known manuscript of the Hebrew bible, and seem to show a polytheistic community of Jews in Egypt in the fifth century BC. This community was in contact with the Jerusalem temple, and there's no suggestion in their correspondence that what they were doing was unorthodox at the time.
I don't know that I would draw that sharp of a distinction between archaeological and Biblical evidence. Pretty much every strata of the Bible that we have, from pretty much every age, assumes that even Yahweh's worshipers are aware of and frequently worshiping other gods. Rachel has her period on a pile of household idols (Gen. 31:26-35). Jacob gives up all his household's idols at God's request (Gen. 35:1-4). The Israelites in the desert worship first a golden calf (Ex. 32) and then the Baal of Peor (Numbers 25). David's wife Michal has an idol just sitting around, available to be used in a subterfuge (1 Sam. 19:11-17). And that's before we get to the prophets, whose message everywhere assumes that other gods are present in Israelite civil religion.
The question isn’t whether ancient Israelites worshiped other gods. Every single source we have, including the Bible, says that they did. The real question is how early and how consistently such behavior was objected to, and on what grounds. And there, the evidence shows that even the earliest traditions seem to expect loyalty to YHWH alone, even if they don’t always explain why. Over time, those objections become sharper, more theological, and more absolute. But there is no point in the biblical tradition, early or late, where YHWH is not a jealous God; just as there is no point where he doesn’t have cause to be.
> The real question is how early and how consistently such behavior was objected to, and on what grounds.
Yes, ok. I'm claiming that the Elephantine papyri show no direct evidence that it was objected to in the late fifth century BC.
There might be more indirect evidence which is more a matter of interpretation, e.g. some claim the other gods' names are really names of aspect of YHW, and it's noteworthy that in the letter petitioning the Jerusalem temple for support in rebuilding the Elephantine temple, no god other than YHW is mentioned. But I think it's hard to make a definitive case either way. Probably the more you look into it the more complicated it becomes, like everything
Even the 10 commandments imply the existence of other gods, just their inferiority to YHVH and forbidding their worship. E.g. King James version of Exodus 20:1-6
And God spake all these words, saying, I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." not "There are no gods but me". The original word translated as "before" is "עַל", literally "above", "over", "upon". That's not denying the other gods exist, it's forbidding the tribes of Israel from worshiping them or treating them as greater than YHVH. Modern doctrine insists that other gods aren't real, but that's not directly supported in the torah.
"The Bible" is not a single coherent text, but rather a collection of hundreds or thousands of years of oral tradition that was created and passed on by various people at various times for various purposes, and then collected and edited again by different people for different purposes.
There are layers of edits that you can tease out with careful reading, and they can be supported by archeological evidence from sites all around the near east.
It is not remotely controversial that the Hebrews/Israelites/Canaanites/Judeans were originally polytheistic, with a pantheon built around Canaanite gods (El, Ashera, etc), just like all of their neighbors and then gradually became henotheistic (our god is the best god), and then finally monotheistic (there is only one god). Pure monotheism was a very late development, and a lot of the conflicts in the bible is straightforwardly interpreted as describing a conflict between Yahwist henotheism and traditional near-eastern polytheism. Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods.
There are also completely retellings of polytheistic myths in the Bible which are basically a find-replace of Ba'al, etc, with either "El" or "Yahweh" or both.
This is all absolutely correct. To amplify this point for people unfamiliar with it, the two creation stories are:
1. God separates the light from the darkness, the earth from the water, and creates all the plants and animals and peoples of the world.
2. The LORD God creates the garden of Eden, makes Adam from mud and Eve from his rib, plants a tree of knowledge and tree of life, etc.
Already there's a divergence: Adam is supposedly the first man in the second story, but in the first story, all the peoples of the world have already been created. But the more interesting divergence is in the name of the responsible God. This often flies over the head of readers in English, but notice that the first story isn't the "LORD God", just "God". This is because in Hebrew, the name of God in the first story is "Elohim", while in the second, it's "YHVH" -- a name too holy for Jews to pronounce, so they just say "Hashem" ("the name"), although if you're naughty you can say "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" or whatever. Why the difference?
A clue is that "Elohim" is a pluralised word in Hebrew. Once Judaism became fully monotheistic, this became interpreted as something like "The Wings of God" -- a sort of abstract all-encompassing Godly aura, rather than the pointed and personified manifestation of the divine, which is YHVH. But this is a bit of a tortured post-rationalisation, and isn't explicitly supported by the text. It's much more straightforward to read "Elohim" as simply "the gods", which is probably how it was read when the text was first assembled, with a henotheistic YHVH text being appended to an earlier polytheistic text.
Even the first commandment -- "I am YHVH, your God, and you shall have no other Gods before me" -- reads better as a henotheistic rather than a monotheistic text. It doesn't say there are no other gods. It pretty strongly implies the opposite. It just says that the other gods aren't for you.
It's also worth noting - the Bible isn't a single book, and it never was. It's 66 or 73 separate books (depending on the flavor of Christianity), bound together in a single binding. Much more of an anthology than a single book. The books were separated in time, authorship, culture, and even language. Never intended to be taken together as a single document.
Obviously not the intent of the original authors or the people who decided to compile these documents into an authoritative anthology.
Not convinced "all over the world" as a fair representation. Biblical literalists treat it as a single work, and they are mostly American or follow American leadership and tradition.
They also usually pick a particular version of "the Bible". Martin Luther's version, which was the Catholic version with some bits taken out. They also usually regard the Catholics who compiled that particular version as heretics. They also usually prefer a particular 17th century translation (so missing a lot of more recent scholarship and discoveries), and sometimes even a particular late 19th century (I think?) edition of that translation.
The preference for the KJV is quite amusing given it means social conservatives who presumably vote Republican are relying on the authority of a gay monarch.
Or "the earliest copier". Someone writes a story from an oral tradition down. It gets copied. Someone else copies the copy, and adapts the story to fit his own narrative.
See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.
Presumably "and god said let us make man in our image". Although the monotheists can claim it is the pluralis majestatis, that doesn't seem to be a feature elsewhere when god talks.
compare Genesis chapter 1 with Genesis chapter 2. they are 2 pretty different creation myths. chapter 1:27 and chapter 2:21 certainly read like 2 separate creation stories for humans that have been jammed together without really fitting
The authors of the Torah are laying down what correct worship is supposed to look like. I believe (and I'm not a biblical scholar, just like learning) the theory is that the priests at the time were dealing with a mixed culture and differing beliefs. One way to handle that is "Look at these evil/dumb heathens worshiping their weak gods". Painting the gods which likely some of the population still believes in dumb is a way to undermine and discourage belief. Sort of a "We are no longer team Bears, we are team bulls. The bears are actually inferior and dumb".
Part of forming the new religion was merging concepts and powers from commonly believed in gods. A little like the early christians rebranding pagan holidays while actively purging pagans.
I'd answer a bit differently than replies so far. Later monotheist post "merging" of El and YHWH didn't really have space for El's son so they had to treat him as a lesser and then hostile God. Any worship for him was considered bad.
Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday, it just so happens Canaanites, as I understand it, celebrated the end of the storm god's season in spring ... Very similarly to how Passover is observed. With a sacrificed lamb shank bone and some other aspects.
Well the evidence is circumstantial. A bunch of Canaanites celebrate a spring festival with unleavened bread. Later they adopt a different religion that has a spring festival and an Exodus story with a new god called YHWH is glommed onto El.
I think it depends how "natural" one thinks the reason for unleavened bread is to Exodus. There's obviously plenty of mythical aspects to the story but the oldest are more focused on the river (Song of the Sea) and the battle. Why not combine rebirth/reinvention stories -- one a feast and another the beginning of "freedom"
But it's fair to say that most of Passover as a story and holiday is unrelated.
> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified.
Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god".
Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god's name is "Hadad".
(But in the general case, Freyja is just the ordinary word "lady" and has no other name that survives to us, and Adonis is the ordinary word "lord". Adonis is a special case in that his name is not the word "lord" in Greek; he is a borrowing of the Semitic deity Tammuz, and the Greeks copied his title, "lord", rather than his name.)
El was the great God and Father of all gods, YHWH was his son [1]. The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God.
There's definitely some relatable and transmitted stories like the flood, etc. However, the Levant and Egyptian gods "grew up" in different contexts than Mesopotamia. Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. "El" means mountain and Baal was a storm god -- neither of which has (to my understanding) any trace to specific cities.
That said, I agree there was some idea of a god "living" someplace specific -- e g. YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.
> Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities.
I don't think this is really accurate; you can often tell where an ancient Egyptian was from by the choice of god honored in his name. The gods very much are localized to particular places.
> "El" means mountain
"El" means "god"; this one couldn't be more clear-cut. If someone told you it means "mountain", you should dismiss anything else they might say.
This is most likely correct. I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Many scholars trace the earliest worship of Yahweh to the southern Levant, possibly Edom, Midian, or Seir which were outside of traditional Canaanite (early Hebrews) centers. Inscriptions from 800 BC refer to “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman,” implying a localized deity.
So given that Assyria is in the same geographic region as the Levant, the comment makes sense in context.
Catholicism maintains it somehow by having "patron saints" and every city picking one up. Most cities in highly Catholic countries will have their own specific saint that they will have a special relationship with.
And don't miss those that have wider use than one town. Sta Maria del Carmen, patron of mariners, is celebrated in the same day in July in many a coastal town that had a fishing industry. The statue leaves the church and is paraded around in people's shoulders, taken to the port, and often sent on a short trip on one of the boats. The locals prayed for plenty fish, and for the fishermen to avoid dying at sea. You can trace that kind of thing to a polytheistic world quite well.
One difference is that saints are not deities, even if there may be a similar psychological need (for protection, help, etc) in play. Saints do not possess power of their own accord. They function as intercessors. They are still human beings, albeit in an elevated spiritual state or plane, so to speak (a saint is anyone who is saved from hell and in heaven; canonized saints are simply those who are known to be saints and thus formally acknowledged).
Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods". They are beings like you and me, in some sense, with powers that we may not possess.
God, on the other hand, is not a personification of a force of nature or one being among many. In that sense, the distinction between monotheism and polytheism can be misleading, because it's not a matter of how many gods you believe in, but a profound difference in understanding of what divinity even means. God here is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, or self-subsisting Being; the verb "to be". This makes God prior to any particular being and the cause of the be-ing of anything and everything at all times.
Whatever the history of the development of theological ideas and beliefs, these must be distinguished from the philosophical substance of the beliefs.
> Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods".
There were all kinds of gods. The Christian conception of God is taken from "pagan" philosophers. There's also a difference between theologian's/philosopher's conception of the Divine and religion and how lay people actually understood their faith. Even early Christians were divided on how they understood God.
If I've learned anything from brief forays into different Gnostic groups it's that at some point in some place humans seem to have believed every possible variation of themes and interpretations.
If you analyze these various conceptions according to their basic metaphysical claims about the nature of the divine, that diversity collapses quickly.
This is why we can say that Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc. worship the same God, for example. Yes, they disagree about God - and these are very important and even profound differences, to be sure, pace the indifferentists - but the basic object of belief can be said to be the same.
OTOH, the basic nature of polytheistic gods is radically different. The pagan gods are fully immanent, because a truly pagan understanding of the divine lacks transcendence. You do not find a true distinction between creator and creation here. Where we do find purported "creator" gods, it is always something like mutation of some primordial chaos and not a genuine creatio ex nihilo. If you cannot draw a distinction between the creating cause and the created effect, then you do not have transcendent divinity. Divinity in such a scheme is just another part of the world.
> If you analyze these various conceptions according to their basic metaphysical claims about the nature of the divine, that diversity collapses quickly.
The word "basic" is doing a lot of lifting in that claim. Borborites believed in and practiced the sexual sacrament. Ophites believed that Christ was the serpent in the garden of Eden. Some Cathars believed that Eve's daughters copulated with Satan's demons and bore giants. These stories have been told for a long time, and some versions are literally opposite to others - with opposite meaning derived. From my perspective, the nature of human cognition, especially over deep time, results in exploring every internally representable version of an idea or in this case a theology.
It seems to me that conceptualization around the divine has evolved radically over time, and can only appear unified from the relatively limited perspective of the individual.
And if you look at all those quintessentially pagan gods of the myths, you will find that they share this in common: that they are beings among many.
> The Christian conception of God is taken from "pagan" philosophers.
I'm not sure what you're implying, but traditional Christian theology draws from both biblical sources and philosophical analysis, and yes, that includes the philosophical works of pre-Christian, pagan philosophers (note the high esteem in which theologians like Augustine and Aquinas hold Plato and Aristotle, for example; Aquinas goes so far as to honor Aristotle with the title of "the Philosopher"). And not just the pagan philosophers: you can also include the work of Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, if you like, who made contributions to the existence/essence distinction.
Here, biblical sources most strongly correspond to revealed knowledge, which is to say, knowledge that cannot be inferred through unaided reason (like the Trinitarian nature of God), while the philosophical corresponds to what can be known through unaided reason (which is the proper object of what's called natural theology).
This is completely consistent with Christian, certainly Catholic tradition and the concept of logos spermatikos (a term Justin Martyr borrows from the Stoics; note also the use of "Logos" [λόγος] in John 1:1, which has echoes in such concepts as Tao [道], Ṛta [ऋत], Maʽat [mꜣꜥt], and so on). If God is real and knowable at least partly by unaided reason, then you would expect at least some of that knowledge or some approximation to surface in a variety of cultures. In this respect, the Catholic Church claims to possess the fullness of revealed knowledge.
But the source of a truth is irrelevant.
> There's also a difference between theologian's/philosopher's conception of the Divine and religion and how lay people actually understood their faith.
What's your point? That we should treat the two as on par? Do you do that with any other field other than theology? The sciences spring from culture, but a good science deepens and refines and corrects our knowledge beyond what was given in our. We don't treat doxa and endoxa as having equal weight.
> Even early Christians were divided on how they understood God.
Again, I fail to see your point. People disagree about all sorts of things and fall into error all the time, and in this case, when they are working out things and their logical consequences.
And I wouldn't overstate the plurality here. Even if there were disagreements among early Christians, and even if there are disagreements between Christians and Jews and Muslims, we can still legitimately claim that any genuine monotheism has as its object the very same God apart from those disagreements (which matter, of course, but not in agreeing about the basic object about which disagreement exists). And that is part of what I was claiming easier. If you view divinity through a shallow, polytheistic lens that merely classifies based on the number of gods in the proverbial pantheon, then monotheism ends up being interpreted as merely a special or degenerate case of polytheism. But it isn't, because a robust monotheism doesn't just claim there is only one God, but that there can only be one God.
> note also the use of "Logos" [λόγος] in John 1:1, which has echoes in such concepts as Tao [道]
Well, 道 is used to translate the Biblical Word because (a) it is the native Chinese word for what is right, and also (b) it is, unrelatedly, also a verb meaning "say", but that's just a pun. The 道 of morality is not a word or anything related to a word. It's a path, the correct path through life.
Christianity is a really interesting case here since it is theoretically monotheistic, but the Trinity is basically a way to have 3 separate gods in a monotheistic religion. It's a fascinating bit of theology.
I don't know how it is in Europe but down here in Brazil they're lesser gods in all but name. I see no functional difference between their cults and the ancient pagan cults.
They're not gonna admit it because being monotheistic is kind of the whole point of Christianity. Just like they're gonna admit how the Trinity was just a cop-out to the obvious polytheism in the Bible and the traditions.
> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.
The Bible even has the example of Naaman the Aramean, who after being convinced of the might of Israel’s God, asked for a gift of two mule‐loads of Israeli earth so he could worship Him after returning home. (2 Kings 5:17)
Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.
In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok.
In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims).
Then we get into weird blends like Hindu and their many avatars of Vishnu (who'd argue that Jesus probably existed and could do those things because he probably was that time's Vishnu).
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Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.
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But yes. As the sibling comment points out: the gods of most polytheistic cultures are NOT omnipotent or omniscient. They are more powerful or smarter than humans but they are still able to be killed or destroyed.
Maybe back when cities and religions would get wiped out by warfare, it was more common to see religions die out (and thus those old gods die with those religions/cultures). It makes you wonder about the nature of human belief systems and how humans lived differently back then.
> Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.
I don’t think that’s true of polytheism at all. That the gods aren’t everywhere or all-powerful doesn’t mean they were invented by the local humans, just that they were discovered by them.
They just look made-up by humans to us because we don’t believe in them. I’m sure ancient people believed in their gods’ stories just as much as some modern ones do, and most religions don’t feature some “humans created the gods” story, right?
I’m not sure what it means to be “flawed as an organizational concept.” States that had polytheistic religions as the main one stuck around for a long time of course. It is hard to say what’s predictive and what’s a coincidence in history I guess.
> I’m not sure what it means to be “flawed as an organizational concept.” States that had polytheistic religions as the main one stuck around for a long time of course. It is hard to say what’s predictive and what’s a coincidence in history I guess.
Romans would have had to integrate and work with many pantheons due to the reach of their empire. Obviously they were cool with the Greek gods for the most part, but what happened when the Romans encountered the Egyptian gods?
Suddenly seeing gods in a new light would cast some doubt on whether or not Helios / Apollo was really pulling a chariot across the sky each morning, as it's the Sun God Ra who blessed Egypt.
I'd imagine the Egyptian gods would be a novelty to Romans and I'm deeply curious how humans in antiquity would have tried to create a multi culture that works together.
But in my eyes.... As different pantheons integrated with each other, it immediately becomes clear that the Pantheon consisting of THE God and one and only would win out.
Not only does 'One God' solve the issue of the different creation myths (ex: you misunderstand but we both believe in the same One God), it also leads to the 'Ultimate, most powerful' concept of a God above all other gods.
I presume that the simplest gods (ie: Sun God, Sky God, Sea God) would have lasted the longest as cultures met and integrated with each other, as almost everyone would worship the sun or sky or sea. But an ultimate God for everything is still a seemingly more elegant solution to the idea of worship.
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But yes, this could be modern bias and could be seen as a silly idea 1000 years from now. But it is my opinion and understanding of how cultures would interact in my mental simulation of antiquity.
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So that's where I mean with Hindus coming up with 'Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu' thing. Different cultures need to adapt and integrate with other concepts of gods and religion to sustain in the long run. So it's not impossible for a modern polytheistic religion to exist today and feel consistent with the world or other cultures, Hinduism perfectly shows that off.
But maybe I'm biased because Hinduism is the most prominent modern Polytheistic Pantheon and maybe the Pantheons 1000 or 3000 years ago made different arguments.
I don’t think they fully merged their pantheons as a logical exercise. I suspect the problem of why (from the Romans point of view) the Egyptians made different observations could be resolved in various ways; depending on how multiculturalist the Roman was, he could understand the Egyptians as being just, like, wrong about everything, or he could interpret their beliefs as observations of some other aspect of Apollo. If those multi-cultural beliefs about Apollo doing things in Egypt bounced around enough, they could be integrated into the conventional Roman belief system, but it could happen smoothly, so it needn’t cause any cognitive stress.
The ACOUP guy did a nice series about polytheism [ https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei... ]. An observation that stuck with me is that polytheist people (at least where he studied) were less focused on Orthodoxy, and more on Orthopraxy. If you have a give-and-take relationship with the gods (instead of one where the God frequently checks what you are actually are thinking inside your head and nothing is truly transactional), I wonder if you are more willing to go along with Egyptian rituals while you are in Egypt. Apparently Apollo is fine with the Egyptian rituals. In Egypt at least.
Well, you probably will be ok with doing an Egyptian farming ritual. I guess if you are a Roman, you probably are pretty confident that the gods are receptive to your pre-battle rituals, given their track record.
Anyway, if your Roman ritual was just something that your ancestors discovered through trial and error, I guess you probably won’t be too freaked out by the fact that the Egyptians’ ancestors found a different ritual. The gods are mysterious and temperamental, after all.
Good link, I'll probably read that series over time.
Yeah, I don't mean 'Merging of Pantheons' as much as how different religions interact. When I speak to Hindus about Jesus (and when they speak to me about Vishnu) we aren't really adopting each other's gods, but instead trying to find pleasantries and similarities between our ways of thought.
I also have come to the opinion that Vishnu in Hinduism adds a weird case of Monotheism in an otherwise Polytheistic religion. (Same with Buddha in Buddhism).
Shintoism might be the only religion that's classically polytheistic, and only because Japan was isolated for so long.
The Monotheistic argument of an Ultimate God above all others (be it Vishnu, Buddha or Jesus) is something that virtually all mainstream religions have today. This cannot be a coincidence.
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But yes. Applying history to historical theologies/polythists is probably a better idea than me applying modern religious concepts and pretending that people a thousand years ago had similar conversations as me and my Hindi friend. Lol. But my knowledge of the Romans and Egyptions is not quite as deep as the blog you listed there.
> Anyway, if your Roman ritual was just something that your ancestors discovered through trial and error, I guess you probably won’t be too freaked out by the fact that the Egyptians’ ancestors found a different ritual. The gods are mysterious and temperamental, after all.
Well sure. That's an argument for how polytheists talk with other polytheists.
The issue is when the Romans talks with the proto-Monotheists. The Hewbrews, Zoroastrianism, the Gnostics and the Catholics. At this point, the idea of 'God above all other Gods' is taking root.
It may take centuries before the discussion plays out, but it's started. Maybe in another universe we'd all be Zoroastrianists instead of Catholic, but it feels like the inevitable march towards a God above all gods when you have so many monotheistic religions popping up.
Besides, worship of just one god sounds a lot easier than trying to memorize the long lists of Helios / Apollo / Ra / Amaterasu (sun gods) and hoping your rituals are keeping them appeased.
As a practical manner, if you were going to try out a new Religion, it only makes sense to try out the most powerful ones. Be it El, YHWH, Jesus, Vishnu, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Gnostics 'Supreme Being's or whatever. That's the benefit of Monotheism.
Polytheistic religions have more room for multiple worldviews than monotheistic religions. Polytheists have internalized the fact that there can be different paths that are right for different people. That’s why you get so much division in monotheistic religions.
In polytheistic religions, you still get infighting, but it isn’t considered virtuous.
Put another way, monotheism is polytheism except with a single title, Lord of the Universe, that all the gods/theologies/denominations have to compete for in order to be legitimate. That competition of different gods/worldviews is the essential innovation that monotheism brings.
That competition, that need to justify one’s beliefs, provides a drive that monotheists have and polytheists lack. And that is why monotheism prevailed in so many areas.
As far as I know the history, the Roman religion was pluralistic in the sense that you could worship whatever gods you wanted, but you also had to pay respects to the Empire's gods. The monotheists refused to do that for the obvious reason, and that was the primary cause of conflict
Early Christians seemed weird to a lot of the people of the Roman Empire. Sort of how Christians now think of gay and trans people. It was deviant and socially upsetting. Modern Christians would probably not get along with early Christians.
I have vague memories from college about China having something similar during the dynasties.
The hierarchical government on earth, with the emperor on top down through layers of bureaucracy down to officials in villages was a mirror of the organization of the heavens. Villages would have their own deities and might go so far as to replace them after bad years of flooding or other weather. That was more of an outlier, though, as usually the emperor or government got the blame first.
> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.
This was pretty common in the polytheistic world I think. In the time of the Roman empire (pre-Christianity of course) there was a similar idea. And although Roman gods might be imported, they were often identified with the local gods, rather than replacing them.
I can recommend this episode as well. If I don't mix things up they gave some very good examples of how everyday life wasn't that much different from what it is now. Amazing how stuff like that can be communicated through identations on pieces of clay.
I was wondering about the headline date "missing for a millennium", as this Babylon is much older than 1000 years. From the article it seems like "two millenia" is more accurate: "The text survives in 20 manuscripts, from the 7th to the 2nd/1st centuries BCE"
I don’t think that necessarily follows. The age of the surviving fragments today isn’t the whole story.
We could presumably infer it still wasn’t “missing” as recently as a thousand years ago from later sources referring to it, even if the specific text (or oral tradition) those authors knew of hasn’t survived.
Like how we know about some of now lost Greek plays, originally written in the 5th century BC, because they were still being performed in Imperial Rome and writers of that time described them, even the details of how they were staged.
Thank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org.
I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
"Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells.
"The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
They did cite the source at the bottom of the phys.org page (The source article and the link)
"More information: Anmar A. Fadhil et al, Literary Texts From The Sippar Library V: A Hymn In Praise Of Babylon And The Babylonians, Iraq (2025). DOI: 10.1017/irq.2024.23"
the "Hymm's of Innana" are more than a bit interesting, as it shows(clearly) that Innana was the original riot girl goddess who gets whatever she wants...daddy made the universe and none of the "rules" apply to her, well except, that she does get pensive when her latest boy toy wanders.
Not that suddenly catesrophic things dont then happen to said boy, previously praised for bieng "like a young bull".
Especialy interesting are the number of occasions where she breaks into songs of praise for her "galla".........
quite clear that the tavern culture of the times was much like our own
> I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
Well, I am a scholar, and if you mean "Noah clearly did not hide these texts," then yes. Of course, that is ridiculous.
But it's actually a crucial bit of information if you're a humanist scholar. The article doesn't say anything about it, but the question would be: Which tradition recorded this legend about these texts? Almost any answer is important, because one culture trying to legitimate its own literary traditions or those of another through its own myths or those of another is absolute gold. It helps us to understand the way literary and religious syncretism unfolded (or failed to unfold) in the ancient near east and in later epochs . . .
Somewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
Interesting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.
You're skipping a lot of context here. Ancient Babylonian scribal schools were for a small elite—hardly universal childhood education. Medieval Europe's "regression" had a bit to do with the collapse of the Roman state, plagues, and centuries of instability, not just a lack of ambition. Comparing literacy rates across millennia without mentioning population size, language complexity, or what “schoolchildren” even means is a stretch.
"Progress" and "enlightenment" are neither uniform, linear, upwards, or continuous. All it takes is one absurdly corrupt regime to burn down the "Library of Alexandria", and with it, thousands of years of history and accomplishment.
It's known as the Dark Ages for a reason. Society regressed in most ways. Maybe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Europe only started finding their feet
during the Reneissance.
I wouldn't pay too much attention to answers from this respectable subreddit when they express more what is a historiographic opinion than a fact. And when at the same time they are fighting strawmen.
The European Dark Ages narrative was indeed overblown and needed correction. But this correction went too far. It seems to be now at the stage of explicit and vigorous denial of any downfall of fortune in the Western ex-Roman provinces. I'd posit that such a denial is even more overblown than the initial myth it aimed to correct.
I understand the point and personally regard "the dark ages" (500 - 1,000 CE) as a period lacking in scrolls, commentary, and stonework compared to the Roman Empire .. but largely life as it was for those that were never an integral part of the Roman Empire workings .. eg: those that delivered food to the Romans in the UK never wrote or built much in stone themselves and once the empire faded in half to the east they carried on without record.
Regardless, your link is an interesting argument that doesn't provide anything especially compelling to the contrary .. a void, here a void in the record, is easily filled with speculation.
I was being facetious. But the crusades and the inquisition are actually really dark stains on the history of spain and the church. As for the French i meant it in jest, but really their abysmal military record speaks for itself. Also the actions of Vichy France shouldn't be glossed over, even though the overwhelming majority of France were against the Nazis and the Free French fought with distinction and bravery.
As to your last point, i view myself largely as an unaffected observer, who likes to poke holes in certain liberal narratives.
If I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated.
I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.
That would involve better funding for the humanities, which has been in notoriously short supply for the past century or so. Digitization efforts are underway in many institutions and have been for decades.
Fascinating. I should have studied Assyriology, few areas are as impressive imo. Maybe I still can, even at LMU. Although I don't believe it's possible alongside a regular job.
I found that the languages are hard to break into as an amateur, owning to the available literature. In contrast Egyptology has many popular treatments, you just have to watch out for the junk.
Speaking of junk, I was in Syria, many years ago, when it had about 250k tourists yearly, under Hafez al-Assad . I was in the company of an Assyriologist and in a shop of a vendor I knew (who sold artifacts under the table).
The vendor proudly showed us a new acquisition, an ancient cylinder seal. The archeologist examined it and told him it was a fake, because he explained, "I can read this language, and it is gibberish."
The UCLA archeologist, then excavating at Tel Mozan with Giorgio Buccellati, had 2 dead languages under his belt, a requirement for his Phd. I was rather in awe of the fellow - 2 dead languages!
Pro-tip: never buy artifacts without an archeologist to advise you. It's likely ethically wrong anyway, and likewise stupid unless you're an expert.
Damn. I'm the opposite. When learning a language I'm careful to pick languages which are culturally influencial and have a prospect of continuing to be - it's not enough that they're alive. Ironically, last new language I learned was Russian, and then Putin goes and invades Ukraine. Fuck my life.
All this to say I have infinite respect for someone who'd learn a dead language, let alone two. I'm glad someone is doing this work, and fortunately it's not me.
I think just because it's 2,000 years old doesn't mean it's been missing for 2,000 years? There could be references to a fragment as recently as 1,000 years ago, even if the contents of it were not recorded at that time.
Or bad copy-editing.
The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.
Some of this is visible in the Bible.
For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods.
From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the creation and the flood have earlier references from older people's groups.
The evolution of monotheism was much more about keeping a large diverse people group united.
You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well.
That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them.
Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system.
You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.
Some of the parallels between the Roman and Greek pantheons are also because they derive from the common Indo-European root. e.g. Jupiter, Zeus pater and Dyaus pitr being the sky father
Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”
> Yet the paucity of yhwh names.
Many of the biblical names ending in "ah" are YHWH names. This includes many of the prophets. So Elijah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Micaiah, Isaiah, for instance are all "ah" ending names that have a meaning related to YHWH in the same way that the "el" ending names are related to El. And then Joshua (and, hence, Jesus) is also a YHWH name.
>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not?
Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.
Iron Man (Earth-626), Iron Man (Earth-25519), Iron Man (Earth 42069 Prime)
No, those are different beings. Zeus Panhellenios who rules over all the Greeks, Zeus Apomyios who keeps flies off of spectators, Zeus Ombrios who rains on crops, and Zeus Keraunios who smites with a thunderbolt are all the same being. You address him differently depending on what you want from him.
This is no different from the concern in modern American law with whether a public official takes some action in his private capacity or officially in his public capacity. Gods have no private capacity, but the major ones have many, many different public capacities.
(The actual term for this is "aspect"; we would say something like "Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Apomyios".)
> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified.
How does this theory account for the overt hostility to Baal et al. in the Bible?
"Baal" was less a name than a title. In modern Hebrew, it just means "lord" or "husband". It was also apparently a title that could, at some stages of Israel's history, even be applied to YHWH, much like "Adonay" ("My lord"). For instance, the individuals named "Mephibosheth" and "Ish-bosheth" (two of the sons of Saul, a clear if imperfect Yahwist) were originally named "Meribaal" and "Ish-baal". Whoever put together 1 and 2 Samuel changed their names from "May Baal Contend" and "Man of Baal" to various plays on "shame" (bosheth). Their original names are preserved, oddly enough, in 1 Chronicles.
If you could go back and ask, say, Samuel or David or Saul about how many gods existed and what their names were, I suspect all of them would have been clear that YHWH was the chief of the gods, and the only one that Israelites should worship, but beyond that you would have gotten some complicated and perhaps confused answers. Even some parts of the Bible take for granted that other gods besides YHWH exist - see, for instance, Psalm 82.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2082&vers...
Over time, "Baal" began to denote a specific agricultural deity, and it became less appropriate to use as a title for YHWH. That seems to have kicked off (or was kicked off by) the well-known conflict between Yahwism and Baal worship - see, ad infra, 1 Kings 18.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2018&...
I don't want to completely refute this because I'm also an amateur and there are a lot of instabilities of consensus, but Baal was at least also the son of El in Canaanite religion which predated an Israeli kingdom.
My understanding is more that Yahvists had more nomadic origins and populated (/conquered, possibly the Levites[1]) a Canaanite cultural context and then there was religious syncreticism and interest in merging them. Depending on the specific passage's history there's either a ret-coning of "all one god" or at least the interpretation that way (including how your links translate those passages).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/00...
> Baal was at least also the son of El in Canaanite religion which predated an Israeli kingdom
Where are you getting this from?
The Wikipedia article is a good place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal
Like all matters concerning the gods in the ancient near east, it's complex, and every answer has to be qualified. So apparently in some traditions, Baal was the son of Dagan (another fertility god), and in some the son of El (the head of the Canaanite pantheon, often identified with Yahweh even by orthodox Yahwists).
> often identified with Yahweh even by orthodox Yahwists
This seems totally unsurprising, given that the Old Testament freely uses both terms while insisting there is only one god. What else are orthodox Yahwists supposed to think?
Have you tried googling "baal son of el"? I have no idea on who Baal is, or El, but the discussion sparked my curiosity and that's all I needed to do in order to answer for myself the question "where are you getting this from?".
There's also evidence that even the exclusive worship of YHWH is something that's written in to the history at a later date, e.g. the Elephantine papyri predate any known manuscript of the Hebrew bible, and seem to show a polytheistic community of Jews in Egypt in the fifth century BC. This community was in contact with the Jerusalem temple, and there's no suggestion in their correspondence that what they were doing was unorthodox at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyri_and_ostraca
I don't know that I would draw that sharp of a distinction between archaeological and Biblical evidence. Pretty much every strata of the Bible that we have, from pretty much every age, assumes that even Yahweh's worshipers are aware of and frequently worshiping other gods. Rachel has her period on a pile of household idols (Gen. 31:26-35). Jacob gives up all his household's idols at God's request (Gen. 35:1-4). The Israelites in the desert worship first a golden calf (Ex. 32) and then the Baal of Peor (Numbers 25). David's wife Michal has an idol just sitting around, available to be used in a subterfuge (1 Sam. 19:11-17). And that's before we get to the prophets, whose message everywhere assumes that other gods are present in Israelite civil religion.
The question isn’t whether ancient Israelites worshiped other gods. Every single source we have, including the Bible, says that they did. The real question is how early and how consistently such behavior was objected to, and on what grounds. And there, the evidence shows that even the earliest traditions seem to expect loyalty to YHWH alone, even if they don’t always explain why. Over time, those objections become sharper, more theological, and more absolute. But there is no point in the biblical tradition, early or late, where YHWH is not a jealous God; just as there is no point where he doesn’t have cause to be.
> The real question is how early and how consistently such behavior was objected to, and on what grounds.
Yes, ok. I'm claiming that the Elephantine papyri show no direct evidence that it was objected to in the late fifth century BC.
There might be more indirect evidence which is more a matter of interpretation, e.g. some claim the other gods' names are really names of aspect of YHW, and it's noteworthy that in the letter petitioning the Jerusalem temple for support in rebuilding the Elephantine temple, no god other than YHW is mentioned. But I think it's hard to make a definitive case either way. Probably the more you look into it the more complicated it becomes, like everything
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Even the 10 commandments imply the existence of other gods, just their inferiority to YHVH and forbidding their worship. E.g. King James version of Exodus 20:1-6
And God spake all these words, saying, I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." not "There are no gods but me". The original word translated as "before" is "עַל", literally "above", "over", "upon". That's not denying the other gods exist, it's forbidding the tribes of Israel from worshiping them or treating them as greater than YHVH. Modern doctrine insists that other gods aren't real, but that's not directly supported in the torah.
"The Bible" is not a single coherent text, but rather a collection of hundreds or thousands of years of oral tradition that was created and passed on by various people at various times for various purposes, and then collected and edited again by different people for different purposes.
There are layers of edits that you can tease out with careful reading, and they can be supported by archeological evidence from sites all around the near east.
It is not remotely controversial that the Hebrews/Israelites/Canaanites/Judeans were originally polytheistic, with a pantheon built around Canaanite gods (El, Ashera, etc), just like all of their neighbors and then gradually became henotheistic (our god is the best god), and then finally monotheistic (there is only one god). Pure monotheism was a very late development, and a lot of the conflicts in the bible is straightforwardly interpreted as describing a conflict between Yahwist henotheism and traditional near-eastern polytheism. Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods.
There are also completely retellings of polytheistic myths in the Bible which are basically a find-replace of Ba'al, etc, with either "El" or "Yahweh" or both.
This is all absolutely correct. To amplify this point for people unfamiliar with it, the two creation stories are:
1. God separates the light from the darkness, the earth from the water, and creates all the plants and animals and peoples of the world.
2. The LORD God creates the garden of Eden, makes Adam from mud and Eve from his rib, plants a tree of knowledge and tree of life, etc.
Already there's a divergence: Adam is supposedly the first man in the second story, but in the first story, all the peoples of the world have already been created. But the more interesting divergence is in the name of the responsible God. This often flies over the head of readers in English, but notice that the first story isn't the "LORD God", just "God". This is because in Hebrew, the name of God in the first story is "Elohim", while in the second, it's "YHVH" -- a name too holy for Jews to pronounce, so they just say "Hashem" ("the name"), although if you're naughty you can say "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" or whatever. Why the difference?
A clue is that "Elohim" is a pluralised word in Hebrew. Once Judaism became fully monotheistic, this became interpreted as something like "The Wings of God" -- a sort of abstract all-encompassing Godly aura, rather than the pointed and personified manifestation of the divine, which is YHVH. But this is a bit of a tortured post-rationalisation, and isn't explicitly supported by the text. It's much more straightforward to read "Elohim" as simply "the gods", which is probably how it was read when the text was first assembled, with a henotheistic YHVH text being appended to an earlier polytheistic text.
Even the first commandment -- "I am YHVH, your God, and you shall have no other Gods before me" -- reads better as a henotheistic rather than a monotheistic text. It doesn't say there are no other gods. It pretty strongly implies the opposite. It just says that the other gods aren't for you.
It's also worth noting - the Bible isn't a single book, and it never was. It's 66 or 73 separate books (depending on the flavor of Christianity), bound together in a single binding. Much more of an anthology than a single book. The books were separated in time, authorship, culture, and even language. Never intended to be taken together as a single document.
> Never intended to be taken together as a single document.
Well, that's clearly untrue. People all over the world intend for you to do that right now.
Obviously not the intent of the original authors or the people who decided to compile these documents into an authoritative anthology.
Not convinced "all over the world" as a fair representation. Biblical literalists treat it as a single work, and they are mostly American or follow American leadership and tradition.
They also usually pick a particular version of "the Bible". Martin Luther's version, which was the Catholic version with some bits taken out. They also usually regard the Catholics who compiled that particular version as heretics. They also usually prefer a particular 17th century translation (so missing a lot of more recent scholarship and discoveries), and sometimes even a particular late 19th century (I think?) edition of that translation.
The preference for the KJV is quite amusing given it means social conservatives who presumably vote Republican are relying on the authority of a gay monarch.
The original author/copier intends.
The original copier?
Or "the earliest copier". Someone writes a story from an oral tradition down. It gets copied. Someone else copies the copy, and adapts the story to fit his own narrative.
The concept of authorship is a highly modern one.
>Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods.
What do you mean by this? I can think of signs of a pantheon in general but not particularly in the creation myths.
See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.
Presumably "and god said let us make man in our image". Although the monotheists can claim it is the pluralis majestatis, that doesn't seem to be a feature elsewhere when god talks.
compare Genesis chapter 1 with Genesis chapter 2. they are 2 pretty different creation myths. chapter 1:27 and chapter 2:21 certainly read like 2 separate creation stories for humans that have been jammed together without really fitting
Unification.
The authors of the Torah are laying down what correct worship is supposed to look like. I believe (and I'm not a biblical scholar, just like learning) the theory is that the priests at the time were dealing with a mixed culture and differing beliefs. One way to handle that is "Look at these evil/dumb heathens worshiping their weak gods". Painting the gods which likely some of the population still believes in dumb is a way to undermine and discourage belief. Sort of a "We are no longer team Bears, we are team bulls. The bears are actually inferior and dumb".
Part of forming the new religion was merging concepts and powers from commonly believed in gods. A little like the early christians rebranding pagan holidays while actively purging pagans.
Also similarly: The Orange Catholic Bible
Awww, I was hoping for more Orange Order and Catholicism trivia
I'd answer a bit differently than replies so far. Later monotheist post "merging" of El and YHWH didn't really have space for El's son so they had to treat him as a lesser and then hostile God. Any worship for him was considered bad.
Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday, it just so happens Canaanites, as I understand it, celebrated the end of the storm god's season in spring ... Very similarly to how Passover is observed. With a sacrificed lamb shank bone and some other aspects.
> Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday
(This is commonly repeated, but there is very little evidence for this)
Well the evidence is circumstantial. A bunch of Canaanites celebrate a spring festival with unleavened bread. Later they adopt a different religion that has a spring festival and an Exodus story with a new god called YHWH is glommed onto El.
I think it depends how "natural" one thinks the reason for unleavened bread is to Exodus. There's obviously plenty of mythical aspects to the story but the oldest are more focused on the river (Song of the Sea) and the battle. Why not combine rebirth/reinvention stories -- one a feast and another the beginning of "freedom"
But it's fair to say that most of Passover as a story and holiday is unrelated.
Pretty much every culture had (has) social events for solstices and equinoxes. I'd rather find it harder to believe there was no such a holiday.
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> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified.
Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god".
Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god's name is "Hadad".
(But in the general case, Freyja is just the ordinary word "lady" and has no other name that survives to us, and Adonis is the ordinary word "lord". Adonis is a special case in that his name is not the word "lord" in Greek; he is a borrowing of the Semitic deity Tammuz, and the Greeks copied his title, "lord", rather than his name.)
El was the great God and Father of all gods, YHWH was his son [1]. The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%28deity%29?wprov=sfla1
> The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God.
That is not correct; the word simply meant "god" long, long before there is any attestation of a god that might use it as a name.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ilum#Akkadian
There's definitely some relatable and transmitted stories like the flood, etc. However, the Levant and Egyptian gods "grew up" in different contexts than Mesopotamia. Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. "El" means mountain and Baal was a storm god -- neither of which has (to my understanding) any trace to specific cities.
That said, I agree there was some idea of a god "living" someplace specific -- e g. YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.
> Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities.
I don't think this is really accurate; you can often tell where an ancient Egyptian was from by the choice of god honored in his name. The gods very much are localized to particular places.
> "El" means mountain
"El" means "god"; this one couldn't be more clear-cut. If someone told you it means "mountain", you should dismiss anything else they might say.
> YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.
What story do you refer to?
https://biblehub.com/topical/ttt/a/ark_of_the_covenant_was_c...
The Hebrew view may not have been so different [0] and in turn this view is congruent with Christian teaching, depending on the theology.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Council#Hebrew/Israelit...
This is most likely correct. I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Many scholars trace the earliest worship of Yahweh to the southern Levant, possibly Edom, Midian, or Seir which were outside of traditional Canaanite (early Hebrews) centers. Inscriptions from 800 BC refer to “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman,” implying a localized deity.
So given that Assyria is in the same geographic region as the Levant, the comment makes sense in context.
Catholicism maintains it somehow by having "patron saints" and every city picking one up. Most cities in highly Catholic countries will have their own specific saint that they will have a special relationship with.
And don't miss those that have wider use than one town. Sta Maria del Carmen, patron of mariners, is celebrated in the same day in July in many a coastal town that had a fishing industry. The statue leaves the church and is paraded around in people's shoulders, taken to the port, and often sent on a short trip on one of the boats. The locals prayed for plenty fish, and for the fishermen to avoid dying at sea. You can trace that kind of thing to a polytheistic world quite well.
One difference is that saints are not deities, even if there may be a similar psychological need (for protection, help, etc) in play. Saints do not possess power of their own accord. They function as intercessors. They are still human beings, albeit in an elevated spiritual state or plane, so to speak (a saint is anyone who is saved from hell and in heaven; canonized saints are simply those who are known to be saints and thus formally acknowledged).
Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods". They are beings like you and me, in some sense, with powers that we may not possess.
God, on the other hand, is not a personification of a force of nature or one being among many. In that sense, the distinction between monotheism and polytheism can be misleading, because it's not a matter of how many gods you believe in, but a profound difference in understanding of what divinity even means. God here is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, or self-subsisting Being; the verb "to be". This makes God prior to any particular being and the cause of the be-ing of anything and everything at all times.
Whatever the history of the development of theological ideas and beliefs, these must be distinguished from the philosophical substance of the beliefs.
> Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods".
There were all kinds of gods. The Christian conception of God is taken from "pagan" philosophers. There's also a difference between theologian's/philosopher's conception of the Divine and religion and how lay people actually understood their faith. Even early Christians were divided on how they understood God.
If I've learned anything from brief forays into different Gnostic groups it's that at some point in some place humans seem to have believed every possible variation of themes and interpretations.
If you analyze these various conceptions according to their basic metaphysical claims about the nature of the divine, that diversity collapses quickly.
This is why we can say that Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc. worship the same God, for example. Yes, they disagree about God - and these are very important and even profound differences, to be sure, pace the indifferentists - but the basic object of belief can be said to be the same.
OTOH, the basic nature of polytheistic gods is radically different. The pagan gods are fully immanent, because a truly pagan understanding of the divine lacks transcendence. You do not find a true distinction between creator and creation here. Where we do find purported "creator" gods, it is always something like mutation of some primordial chaos and not a genuine creatio ex nihilo. If you cannot draw a distinction between the creating cause and the created effect, then you do not have transcendent divinity. Divinity in such a scheme is just another part of the world.
> If you analyze these various conceptions according to their basic metaphysical claims about the nature of the divine, that diversity collapses quickly.
The word "basic" is doing a lot of lifting in that claim. Borborites believed in and practiced the sexual sacrament. Ophites believed that Christ was the serpent in the garden of Eden. Some Cathars believed that Eve's daughters copulated with Satan's demons and bore giants. These stories have been told for a long time, and some versions are literally opposite to others - with opposite meaning derived. From my perspective, the nature of human cognition, especially over deep time, results in exploring every internally representable version of an idea or in this case a theology.
It seems to me that conceptualization around the divine has evolved radically over time, and can only appear unified from the relatively limited perspective of the individual.
> There were all kinds of gods.
And if you look at all those quintessentially pagan gods of the myths, you will find that they share this in common: that they are beings among many.
> The Christian conception of God is taken from "pagan" philosophers.
I'm not sure what you're implying, but traditional Christian theology draws from both biblical sources and philosophical analysis, and yes, that includes the philosophical works of pre-Christian, pagan philosophers (note the high esteem in which theologians like Augustine and Aquinas hold Plato and Aristotle, for example; Aquinas goes so far as to honor Aristotle with the title of "the Philosopher"). And not just the pagan philosophers: you can also include the work of Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, if you like, who made contributions to the existence/essence distinction.
Here, biblical sources most strongly correspond to revealed knowledge, which is to say, knowledge that cannot be inferred through unaided reason (like the Trinitarian nature of God), while the philosophical corresponds to what can be known through unaided reason (which is the proper object of what's called natural theology).
This is completely consistent with Christian, certainly Catholic tradition and the concept of logos spermatikos (a term Justin Martyr borrows from the Stoics; note also the use of "Logos" [λόγος] in John 1:1, which has echoes in such concepts as Tao [道], Ṛta [ऋत], Maʽat [mꜣꜥt], and so on). If God is real and knowable at least partly by unaided reason, then you would expect at least some of that knowledge or some approximation to surface in a variety of cultures. In this respect, the Catholic Church claims to possess the fullness of revealed knowledge.
But the source of a truth is irrelevant.
> There's also a difference between theologian's/philosopher's conception of the Divine and religion and how lay people actually understood their faith.
What's your point? That we should treat the two as on par? Do you do that with any other field other than theology? The sciences spring from culture, but a good science deepens and refines and corrects our knowledge beyond what was given in our. We don't treat doxa and endoxa as having equal weight.
> Even early Christians were divided on how they understood God.
Again, I fail to see your point. People disagree about all sorts of things and fall into error all the time, and in this case, when they are working out things and their logical consequences.
And I wouldn't overstate the plurality here. Even if there were disagreements among early Christians, and even if there are disagreements between Christians and Jews and Muslims, we can still legitimately claim that any genuine monotheism has as its object the very same God apart from those disagreements (which matter, of course, but not in agreeing about the basic object about which disagreement exists). And that is part of what I was claiming easier. If you view divinity through a shallow, polytheistic lens that merely classifies based on the number of gods in the proverbial pantheon, then monotheism ends up being interpreted as merely a special or degenerate case of polytheism. But it isn't, because a robust monotheism doesn't just claim there is only one God, but that there can only be one God.
> note also the use of "Logos" [λόγος] in John 1:1, which has echoes in such concepts as Tao [道]
Well, 道 is used to translate the Biblical Word because (a) it is the native Chinese word for what is right, and also (b) it is, unrelatedly, also a verb meaning "say", but that's just a pun. The 道 of morality is not a word or anything related to a word. It's a path, the correct path through life.
Christianity is a really interesting case here since it is theoretically monotheistic, but the Trinity is basically a way to have 3 separate gods in a monotheistic religion. It's a fascinating bit of theology.
Logos it's like eval/apply under Lisp.
I don't know how it is in Europe but down here in Brazil they're lesser gods in all but name. I see no functional difference between their cults and the ancient pagan cults.
They're not gonna admit it because being monotheistic is kind of the whole point of Christianity. Just like they're gonna admit how the Trinity was just a cop-out to the obvious polytheism in the Bible and the traditions.
Can't have a power vacuum on the Divine Council, gotta put one of your guys in when you take over!
> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.
The Bible even has the example of Naaman the Aramean, who after being convinced of the might of Israel’s God, asked for a gift of two mule‐loads of Israeli earth so he could worship Him after returning home. (2 Kings 5:17)
Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.
Monotheism elevates godhood in many regards.
In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok.
In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims).
Then we get into weird blends like Hindu and their many avatars of Vishnu (who'd argue that Jesus probably existed and could do those things because he probably was that time's Vishnu).
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Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.
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But yes. As the sibling comment points out: the gods of most polytheistic cultures are NOT omnipotent or omniscient. They are more powerful or smarter than humans but they are still able to be killed or destroyed.
Maybe back when cities and religions would get wiped out by warfare, it was more common to see religions die out (and thus those old gods die with those religions/cultures). It makes you wonder about the nature of human belief systems and how humans lived differently back then.
> Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.
I don’t think that’s true of polytheism at all. That the gods aren’t everywhere or all-powerful doesn’t mean they were invented by the local humans, just that they were discovered by them.
They just look made-up by humans to us because we don’t believe in them. I’m sure ancient people believed in their gods’ stories just as much as some modern ones do, and most religions don’t feature some “humans created the gods” story, right?
I’m not sure what it means to be “flawed as an organizational concept.” States that had polytheistic religions as the main one stuck around for a long time of course. It is hard to say what’s predictive and what’s a coincidence in history I guess.
> I’m not sure what it means to be “flawed as an organizational concept.” States that had polytheistic religions as the main one stuck around for a long time of course. It is hard to say what’s predictive and what’s a coincidence in history I guess.
Romans would have had to integrate and work with many pantheons due to the reach of their empire. Obviously they were cool with the Greek gods for the most part, but what happened when the Romans encountered the Egyptian gods?
Suddenly seeing gods in a new light would cast some doubt on whether or not Helios / Apollo was really pulling a chariot across the sky each morning, as it's the Sun God Ra who blessed Egypt.
I'd imagine the Egyptian gods would be a novelty to Romans and I'm deeply curious how humans in antiquity would have tried to create a multi culture that works together.
But in my eyes.... As different pantheons integrated with each other, it immediately becomes clear that the Pantheon consisting of THE God and one and only would win out.
Not only does 'One God' solve the issue of the different creation myths (ex: you misunderstand but we both believe in the same One God), it also leads to the 'Ultimate, most powerful' concept of a God above all other gods.
I presume that the simplest gods (ie: Sun God, Sky God, Sea God) would have lasted the longest as cultures met and integrated with each other, as almost everyone would worship the sun or sky or sea. But an ultimate God for everything is still a seemingly more elegant solution to the idea of worship.
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But yes, this could be modern bias and could be seen as a silly idea 1000 years from now. But it is my opinion and understanding of how cultures would interact in my mental simulation of antiquity.
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So that's where I mean with Hindus coming up with 'Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu' thing. Different cultures need to adapt and integrate with other concepts of gods and religion to sustain in the long run. So it's not impossible for a modern polytheistic religion to exist today and feel consistent with the world or other cultures, Hinduism perfectly shows that off.
But maybe I'm biased because Hinduism is the most prominent modern Polytheistic Pantheon and maybe the Pantheons 1000 or 3000 years ago made different arguments.
I don’t think they fully merged their pantheons as a logical exercise. I suspect the problem of why (from the Romans point of view) the Egyptians made different observations could be resolved in various ways; depending on how multiculturalist the Roman was, he could understand the Egyptians as being just, like, wrong about everything, or he could interpret their beliefs as observations of some other aspect of Apollo. If those multi-cultural beliefs about Apollo doing things in Egypt bounced around enough, they could be integrated into the conventional Roman belief system, but it could happen smoothly, so it needn’t cause any cognitive stress.
The ACOUP guy did a nice series about polytheism [ https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei... ]. An observation that stuck with me is that polytheist people (at least where he studied) were less focused on Orthodoxy, and more on Orthopraxy. If you have a give-and-take relationship with the gods (instead of one where the God frequently checks what you are actually are thinking inside your head and nothing is truly transactional), I wonder if you are more willing to go along with Egyptian rituals while you are in Egypt. Apparently Apollo is fine with the Egyptian rituals. In Egypt at least.
Well, you probably will be ok with doing an Egyptian farming ritual. I guess if you are a Roman, you probably are pretty confident that the gods are receptive to your pre-battle rituals, given their track record.
Anyway, if your Roman ritual was just something that your ancestors discovered through trial and error, I guess you probably won’t be too freaked out by the fact that the Egyptians’ ancestors found a different ritual. The gods are mysterious and temperamental, after all.
Good link, I'll probably read that series over time.
Yeah, I don't mean 'Merging of Pantheons' as much as how different religions interact. When I speak to Hindus about Jesus (and when they speak to me about Vishnu) we aren't really adopting each other's gods, but instead trying to find pleasantries and similarities between our ways of thought.
I also have come to the opinion that Vishnu in Hinduism adds a weird case of Monotheism in an otherwise Polytheistic religion. (Same with Buddha in Buddhism).
Shintoism might be the only religion that's classically polytheistic, and only because Japan was isolated for so long.
The Monotheistic argument of an Ultimate God above all others (be it Vishnu, Buddha or Jesus) is something that virtually all mainstream religions have today. This cannot be a coincidence.
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But yes. Applying history to historical theologies/polythists is probably a better idea than me applying modern religious concepts and pretending that people a thousand years ago had similar conversations as me and my Hindi friend. Lol. But my knowledge of the Romans and Egyptions is not quite as deep as the blog you listed there.
> Anyway, if your Roman ritual was just something that your ancestors discovered through trial and error, I guess you probably won’t be too freaked out by the fact that the Egyptians’ ancestors found a different ritual. The gods are mysterious and temperamental, after all.
Well sure. That's an argument for how polytheists talk with other polytheists.
The issue is when the Romans talks with the proto-Monotheists. The Hewbrews, Zoroastrianism, the Gnostics and the Catholics. At this point, the idea of 'God above all other Gods' is taking root.
It may take centuries before the discussion plays out, but it's started. Maybe in another universe we'd all be Zoroastrianists instead of Catholic, but it feels like the inevitable march towards a God above all gods when you have so many monotheistic religions popping up.
Besides, worship of just one god sounds a lot easier than trying to memorize the long lists of Helios / Apollo / Ra / Amaterasu (sun gods) and hoping your rituals are keeping them appeased.
As a practical manner, if you were going to try out a new Religion, it only makes sense to try out the most powerful ones. Be it El, YHWH, Jesus, Vishnu, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Gnostics 'Supreme Being's or whatever. That's the benefit of Monotheism.
Polytheistic religions have more room for multiple worldviews than monotheistic religions. Polytheists have internalized the fact that there can be different paths that are right for different people. That’s why you get so much division in monotheistic religions.
In polytheistic religions, you still get infighting, but it isn’t considered virtuous.
Put another way, monotheism is polytheism except with a single title, Lord of the Universe, that all the gods/theologies/denominations have to compete for in order to be legitimate. That competition of different gods/worldviews is the essential innovation that monotheism brings.
That competition, that need to justify one’s beliefs, provides a drive that monotheists have and polytheists lack. And that is why monotheism prevailed in so many areas.
> that need to justify one’s beliefs, provides a drive that monotheists have and polytheists lack
FYI, before the monotheists fully suppressed the polytheists in the Roman Empire, it was the polytheists who were suppressing the monotheists.
As far as I know the history, the Roman religion was pluralistic in the sense that you could worship whatever gods you wanted, but you also had to pay respects to the Empire's gods. The monotheists refused to do that for the obvious reason, and that was the primary cause of conflict
Early Christians seemed weird to a lot of the people of the Roman Empire. Sort of how Christians now think of gay and trans people. It was deviant and socially upsetting. Modern Christians would probably not get along with early Christians.
I don't know enough to argue the merits of your point, so instead I'll just point to Hindu nationalism in present day India.
Well also in polytheism gods were displayed as incredibly flawed.
A common-sense and straightforward extrapolation of human behavior. And also an obvious solution to the “problem of evil.”
I have vague memories from college about China having something similar during the dynasties.
The hierarchical government on earth, with the emperor on top down through layers of bureaucracy down to officials in villages was a mirror of the organization of the heavens. Villages would have their own deities and might go so far as to replace them after bad years of flooding or other weather. That was more of an outlier, though, as usually the emperor or government got the blame first.
> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.
This was pretty common in the polytheistic world I think. In the time of the Roman empire (pre-Christianity of course) there was a similar idea. And although Roman gods might be imported, they were often identified with the local gods, rather than replacing them.
I can recommend this episode as well. If I don't mix things up they gave some very good examples of how everyday life wasn't that much different from what it is now. Amazing how stuff like that can be communicated through identations on pieces of clay.
Thought it was more an ancestral teams. Each city marveling at the founding families.
That was a great episode; the ending was haunting.
The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpAphcaVJIs
Source article in the journal Iraq: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002108892...
I was wondering about the headline date "missing for a millennium", as this Babylon is much older than 1000 years. From the article it seems like "two millenia" is more accurate: "The text survives in 20 manuscripts, from the 7th to the 2nd/1st centuries BCE"
I don’t think that necessarily follows. The age of the surviving fragments today isn’t the whole story.
We could presumably infer it still wasn’t “missing” as recently as a thousand years ago from later sources referring to it, even if the specific text (or oral tradition) those authors knew of hasn’t survived.
Like how we know about some of now lost Greek plays, originally written in the 5th century BC, because they were still being performed in Imperial Rome and writers of that time described them, even the details of how they were staged.
This is great! Thank you.
Thank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org.
I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
"Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells.
"The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
Legend has a specific meaning:
> A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.
Even though it's BS I think it's still interesting to read how people relate to the story.
They did cite the source at the bottom of the phys.org page (The source article and the link)
"More information: Anmar A. Fadhil et al, Literary Texts From The Sippar Library V: A Hymn In Praise Of Babylon And The Babylonians, Iraq (2025). DOI: 10.1017/irq.2024.23"
the "Hymm's of Innana" are more than a bit interesting, as it shows(clearly) that Innana was the original riot girl goddess who gets whatever she wants...daddy made the universe and none of the "rules" apply to her, well except, that she does get pensive when her latest boy toy wanders. Not that suddenly catesrophic things dont then happen to said boy, previously praised for bieng "like a young bull". Especialy interesting are the number of occasions where she breaks into songs of praise for her "galla"......... quite clear that the tavern culture of the times was much like our own
You might enjoy Emily Wilson’s take on the Gilgamesh/Innana stories, though I went in blind and was mostly ignorant.
> I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
Well, I am a scholar, and if you mean "Noah clearly did not hide these texts," then yes. Of course, that is ridiculous.
But it's actually a crucial bit of information if you're a humanist scholar. The article doesn't say anything about it, but the question would be: Which tradition recorded this legend about these texts? Almost any answer is important, because one culture trying to legitimate its own literary traditions or those of another through its own myths or those of another is absolute gold. It helps us to understand the way literary and religious syncretism unfolded (or failed to unfold) in the ancient near east and in later epochs . . .
Somewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
Dr. Finkel is just plain amazing.
Interesting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.
You're skipping a lot of context here. Ancient Babylonian scribal schools were for a small elite—hardly universal childhood education. Medieval Europe's "regression" had a bit to do with the collapse of the Roman state, plagues, and centuries of instability, not just a lack of ambition. Comparing literacy rates across millennia without mentioning population size, language complexity, or what “schoolchildren” even means is a stretch.
History isn't exponential—it's bumpy.
"Progress" and "enlightenment" are neither uniform, linear, upwards, or continuous. All it takes is one absurdly corrupt regime to burn down the "Library of Alexandria", and with it, thousands of years of history and accomplishment.
It's known as the Dark Ages for a reason. Society regressed in most ways. Maybe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Europe only started finding their feet during the Reneissance.
Why are the European "Dark Ages" considered a misnomer?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/why_a...
I wouldn't pay too much attention to answers from this respectable subreddit when they express more what is a historiographic opinion than a fact. And when at the same time they are fighting strawmen.
The European Dark Ages narrative was indeed overblown and needed correction. But this correction went too far. It seems to be now at the stage of explicit and vigorous denial of any downfall of fortune in the Western ex-Roman provinces. I'd posit that such a denial is even more overblown than the initial myth it aimed to correct.
I can offer you a link to an author arguing for this position: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
I understand the point and personally regard "the dark ages" (500 - 1,000 CE) as a period lacking in scrolls, commentary, and stonework compared to the Roman Empire .. but largely life as it was for those that were never an integral part of the Roman Empire workings .. eg: those that delivered food to the Romans in the UK never wrote or built much in stone themselves and once the empire faded in half to the east they carried on without record.
Regardless, your link is an interesting argument that doesn't provide anything especially compelling to the contrary .. a void, here a void in the record, is easily filled with speculation.
Beware Hollywood and English literature propaganda: Catholics were morons; pirates are cool; French and Spaniards are dumb, evil, and cowards.
Yes, pirates were not cool. The rest of the list though...
> The rest of the list though...
Please read some unbiased history books.
Catholics: Copernicus, Mendel, Pascal, Ampere, Fermat, ... And The Renaissance is always skipped by them for some reason.
Figures like Napoleon or The Catholic Monarchs were cowards and stupid?
But I think I'm wasting my time answering you. You seem quite closed minded, blue team, read team.
I was being facetious. But the crusades and the inquisition are actually really dark stains on the history of spain and the church. As for the French i meant it in jest, but really their abysmal military record speaks for itself. Also the actions of Vichy France shouldn't be glossed over, even though the overwhelming majority of France were against the Nazis and the Free French fought with distinction and bravery.
As to your last point, i view myself largely as an unaffected observer, who likes to poke holes in certain liberal narratives.
If I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated.
I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.
That would involve better funding for the humanities, which has been in notoriously short supply for the past century or so. Digitization efforts are underway in many institutions and have been for decades.
Fascinating. I should have studied Assyriology, few areas are as impressive imo. Maybe I still can, even at LMU. Although I don't believe it's possible alongside a regular job.
I found that the languages are hard to break into as an amateur, owning to the available literature. In contrast Egyptology has many popular treatments, you just have to watch out for the junk.
Speaking of junk, I was in Syria, many years ago, when it had about 250k tourists yearly, under Hafez al-Assad . I was in the company of an Assyriologist and in a shop of a vendor I knew (who sold artifacts under the table).
The vendor proudly showed us a new acquisition, an ancient cylinder seal. The archeologist examined it and told him it was a fake, because he explained, "I can read this language, and it is gibberish."
The UCLA archeologist, then excavating at Tel Mozan with Giorgio Buccellati, had 2 dead languages under his belt, a requirement for his Phd. I was rather in awe of the fellow - 2 dead languages!
Pro-tip: never buy artifacts without an archeologist to advise you. It's likely ethically wrong anyway, and likewise stupid unless you're an expert.
Damn. I'm the opposite. When learning a language I'm careful to pick languages which are culturally influencial and have a prospect of continuing to be - it's not enough that they're alive. Ironically, last new language I learned was Russian, and then Putin goes and invades Ukraine. Fuck my life.
All this to say I have infinite respect for someone who'd learn a dead language, let alone two. I'm glad someone is doing this work, and fortunately it's not me.
"Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered"
Oh great, just in time for the passage of an interstellar object and the Dalai Lama's reincarnation day.
I would like to hear the music, we're notes part of the find?
"missing for a millennium" - according to both the article and the journal piece, the most recent of these fragments is nearly two millennia old.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/literar...
I think just because it's 2,000 years old doesn't mean it's been missing for 2,000 years? There could be references to a fragment as recently as 1,000 years ago, even if the contents of it were not recorded at that time. Or bad copy-editing.