Interesting video:
The History Of Yahweh ..(The Hebrew God Of The Bible)
by opusdei1972 4 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Doug Mason
"Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan", by John Day (Sheffield Academic Pess)
"The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel", by Mark S. Smith (William Eerdmans Publishing)
Doug
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opusdei1972
Doug Mason Thanks for the reference.
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Crazyguy
It looks as though El Of the Canaanites was the original god of the Hebrews since they to were canaanites originally and there are many writings from the city of Ugarit that confirm this. But this god also owes its origins to the Sumerian pantheons of gods like the ones listed in the video. Somewhere along came the cult of Yahweh or Yah probably a moon god. The Babylonians were worshiping the moon god as their high god near the end of their empire at least the leaders were anyway, and this may be where they the Hebrews got the idea. They were also introduced to these Sumerian gods surely sometime early in their history as well as the Sumerian and Babylonian stories like the original flood story, Story of the Garden of Edin the Creations stories etc. Its interesting and challenging trying to put together the timelines of the evolution of their god from El to Baal to Yah and others in between.
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Phizzy
We really have to read between the lines of the heavily redacted/edited Bible books we have in our possesion today to get an understanding of what is really going on. When you do this with the O.T , from the beginning you can see evidence of Pantheism, this develops in to Henotheism, and eventually a brave battle is fought to establish Monotheism.
I am pretty sure the main motive for the latter was to keep together the "nation" of Jewish returnees from the Babylonian exile rather than a strong belief in one god, but that is just my thought.
I also think that though the Priestly Class adopted the idea, and edited their Holy Writings as much as they could to suit, the ordinary rural people, "Sons of the Soil", were reluctant and slow so to do, gods who helped them along (seemingly) in their agricultural work would be more appealing than the petulant, jealous Yahweh who was more intereseted in the worship of himself than the worshippers themselves.
I think the rural based worship of other god's may well have continued down to the time of ther Maccabees, again, just an idea I have, may be wrong.
For sure, the information hinted at in the video above, and contained in the excellent books recommended by Doug should be compulsory for JW's to study, but of course that would only happen if they were to free themselves from the rigid Information Control of the WT/JW Org that keeps them in ignorance.