kmt_sesh, on 04 January 2012 - 06:44 PM, said:
I'd have to agree with questionmark but with the caveat that the precise origins of Yahweh do not seem clear. In my own research I've seen him described originally as a sky or weather god in Levantine (Canaanite) cults, but I've also seen researchers propose that through time Yahweh became an amalgamation of several Levantine and Mesopotamian deities. This would not be unusual: Near Eastern deities often developed this way. However, I have never seen Yahweh described as a war god.
The Hebrews developed into a kingdom only because of the collapse of the main regional powers at the end of the Bronze Age (e.g., Egypt, Hatti, Babylon). By all appearances the Hebrews arose as a disaffected people leaving their Canaanite kin on the Levantine coast and moving inland to occupy the highlands of Judah. There, they built a unique culture for themselves, but it was a very long process of cultural transformation and evolution. In other words there's no evidence for people coming in from without and conquering all of the Canaanites who were living in the Levant. Warfare certainly occurred between the Hebrews and others in their immediate area, but it's quite unlikely ever to have been anything epic. The Kingdom of Judah was never the power-sweeping hegemon as the Old Testament tends to portray. Israel Finkelstein has an interesting and plausible theory, in fact, that the historical David was probably not much more than a powerful regional warlord who managed to build something better for himself.
In any case it's true that Judaism did not begin as a form of monotheism. In fact I would argue that the religion was first a henotheism, where one god is preferred but the worship of other gods is acknowledged as equally valid. By all accounts this is what was happening in the Early Iron Age in Judah, when the Hebrews were a nascent kingdom. William Dever (2005) presents the convincing case that the original Old Testament, when first written down in its earliest form, was a kind of "book religion" designed by the ruling elite of Jerusalem to codify, develop, and maintain their power base. To be sure, based on the material culture and the sum total of archaeological evidence from this early period, the average farmer living out in the sticks was venerating Yahweh but other deities, too. For example, it's likely that originally in the Hebrew culture Yahweh had a consort, the Canaanite goddess Asherah. Some early Hebraic vessels bear inscriptions stating "Yahweh and his Asherah."
Monolatrism is how the religion would soon develop, but in all likelihood Judaism did not become true monotheism until the post-exilic period.
From what I've heard and read this is about what I think is true also. I've a devout Christian, but I follow the Message of Jesus, not the Laws of the Old Testiment. The message is more important then the source.
I've never heard of Yahweh described as a War God either. Middle Eastern War God usually carried weapons and Yahweh never carried a weapon that I know of. If we was described, as in the Adam and Eve story, he only wears a robe, if anything.
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