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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Christianity had some greek influence later on? It's probable that god (YHWH) goes partially back to an old pre-israeli weather god which grew in popularity (just called El (Lord) then). But that was long before separation into jews and islam.
Oh, absolutely. The Mediterranean region shared a lot of culture because people are quite mobile.
El was a regional father-god. El was the father of Yahweh via his consort Ashera. Yahweh was the brother of Baal and the rest of that pantheon. Yahweh became the tribal god of the people of Israel, and consolidation merged the stories of El and Yahweh until they became the same being. Ashera, who was the goddess of femininity, wisdom, and motherhood became the serpent in the garden, as her symbol was a snake coiled around a tree.
Biblical mythology is really nothing special. Every pantheon and mythology evolved over time as political and religious factions waxed and waned. We see it in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, for instance. Sol Invictus, for instance, was the Roman sun god, whose great temple was introduced on Dec 25, 274 CE (in case that date rings a bell).
Of course, there are generally few hard dividing lines in cultural history. Religious traditions are sticky, and they tend to gradually fade rather than having a sharp dividing line. Ashera was also worshiped as the consort of Yahweh as a goddess in her own right through (iirc) the 4th or 5th century CE. The religion that would become Judaism wasn’t “monotheistic” until as late as the the 2nd century BCE, and even then there was a lot of lag, as it were, in the religious culture.
The idea that there was a unified religion of Judaism that worshipped a single god Yahweh for six thousand years is purely because popular (and especially religious) history constantly gets re-written. That idea has a foundation in editorial discretion, not historical fact.
Later, yes. First he was a minor weather god. Which then got more jobs.
The guy sitting on the biggest mountain, spending water, is someone else, right?
Right, forgot that part, thanks!
I’m hesitant about the “minor” part. The father-sky-god idea is somewhat omnipresent in most proto-indo-european mythologies, with Zeus/Jupiter also being a weather god. It seems like the breakdown between sky-father and earth-mother was fairly common, with the sky-father sometimes being personified by weather, or the sun, or something similarly central, while the mother was associated with plants and growing things, and sometimes water. The reconstructed proto-indo-european word “dyeus” translates to sky-god and led to the latin cognate deus, which simply translates to “god.” Like “god,” it’s the generic word for a god that was then adopted by “monotheism” to mean a particular god, eg “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis .”
Gods, like kings and empires, rise and fall. And religious leaders, like politicians, want people to think that the current thing that they’re pushing for is the way it always was.
I know retcon is a pop culture term that hasn’t fully migrated into the mainstream, but it literally means retroactive continuity. It means rewriting or reinterpreting known “facts” (which may simply be accepted canon of stories or myths) in a way that suits the new intended interpretation. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and very much in line with Orwell’s idea of “He who controls the past controls the future.” Thus El was always Yahweh, despite the fact that Yahweh was El’s son and Ashera was El’s mother. Ashera was Yahweh’s consort for a while, too, because culture is a real time smorgasbord of stories that doesn’t need to be mutually compatible. Any inconsistency is either taken care of by the folks who edit the texts, or at worst get chalked up to “that was a misunderstanding of how things really are”.
I’m really continually amazed at the persistence of the idea that the dozens of Abrahamic religions are interpreted as being literally true given modern historical and archeological scholarship showing they’re no different than every other religion, but it does show that there’s a stickiness someplace in the individual and collective minds of humanity that we are still figuring out.