It's a living

[dreamer_easy]

I assume Yahweh is referred to as "the living god" to contrast Him with lifeless idols. Now, my understanding is that the Hebrews were henotheists: their neighbours' gods existed, but were not to be worshipped, and in any case were subordinate to Yahweh. However, quick search turns up the first use of "the living god" in Deuteronomy. So now I'm wondering - did "living god" have a different meaning, for example, a deity without idols or images?

Comments

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

Neal Stephenson postulated this in Snow Crash, but there was no source given there.

The little we know of Asherah the deity associates her with Ba'al Peor, not with the Hebrew God.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

Surely the use of a title for Yahweh by Marduk would be after Yahweh's properties were adopted following the ritual slaying of Yahweh by Marduk?

Huh?

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I agree with you: similarities in these types of texts are more likely the use of a common vernacular. What is interesting to me is where the different groups place their emphases.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

The Old Testament itself offers an even more interesting theory:

1. YHWH pwns all.
2. YHWH promises Israel He will pwn all their enemies on their behalf if they worship Him and keep His commandments.
3. Israel says "w00t! kthx!" but only for about five minutes before being distracted by the pagan Shiny.
4. YHWH warns Israel x 1000, via various prophets, that they will be pwnd if they don't quit with the idolatry.
5. Israel says "LA LA LA WE CAN'T HEAR YOU".
6. Cue Enemy King: "IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DS".
7. Israel: O_O *cries* *repents*
8. YHWH: *forgives* *rescues*

Then repeat steps 3-8 for about 1500 years, getting progressively worse as you go along, until finally you get the Assyrians and the Babylonians and after that Israel finally seems to Get The Point.

And yes, the book of Isaiah in particular describes the Assyrians as being used by God to bring judgment on Israel, before going on to point out that God will in turn judge Assyria for their cruelty and bring about their ultimate defeat. But by that time, the idea of God allowing enemy nations to invade Israel in order to spur them to repentance was nothing new.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

6. Cue Enemy King: "IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DS".

This is so much more expressive than "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold."

("The pagan Shiny" should be an Ebay category.)

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

It almost certainly has its origins in the En?lish - the term daiwa comes from Sanskrit, and the practice seen throughout Mesopotamian myth, though rarely explicitly. Daiwa- has the same root as daeva- or div-, which originally meant "God" but was later used to mean "God tainted by evil".

I think the primary example is Marduk's slaying of Tiamat, which paralleled Hammurabi's rise to power. Outside of Marduk's many, many conquests, the practice is implicit rather than explicit.

Any good examination of Persian conquest and religion should discuss it. I think I first came across it in a biography of Alexander the Great, who adopted a similar practice.

Its not been used in fiction much, and its rare for me to cite Anne Rice as a source for anything, but ISTR that her stand-alone novel Servant of the Bones touched on it as well.

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

En?lish = Enuma Elish, The Babylonian Book of Creation.

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

Well the Prophet Ezra, who was responsible for codifying and writing/commissioning much of the Old Testament, does seem to have been in Babylon at the time, and it seems likely that the return of the Jews was a brokered deal that involved adopting many Mesopotamian practices that were rejected by those who had stayed behind.

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

The treatment of other gods as demons was an entirely etymological development brought about by the differentiation of the Zoroastrian asuras and the daevas. Its basically about winners and losers - the conquered gods became tainted with evil, while the victorious gods were *obviously* those worthy of worship.

Its interesting that the resurrection of a god is used repeatedly throughout ancient history as a means of reinstating a slain god - Osiris, Marduk (again) and of course Yahweh, who managed it twice.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"Then repeat steps 3-8 for about 1500 years, getting progressively worse as you go along, until finally you get the Assyrians and the Babylonians and after that Israel finally seems to Get The Point."

[NODS VIGOROUSLY]

...Until sometime later when some D00D turns up saying, "OK, well done folks for getting the hang of this stuff at the national level. You've been a beacon to the nations, shown 'em where it's at, YHWH-wise, yadda yadda. But there's personal and internal sides to all this stuff too, remember? I see, for example, that we have a slight imbalance between the poor and lowly versus the rich and powerful... " And Israel listens happily for a bit until it starts sounding, y'know, like they all might actually have to *work* at it, whereupon for the most part they say, "Oy, give us a break already!", except for few of them plus a few (Shock! Gasp!) foreigners who say, "Hang on... this sounds interesting..."

Cue 2000-ish years (so far) of Christians following the exact same cycle (steps 3-8), individually or in small groups, and mostly out of synch with each other. =:o}

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

[NODS VIGOROUSLY] I want my next Bible to be the translation. =:o}

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

what?

Editing / codifying I'll give you, but do you have evidence for "writing/commissioning much of the [Hebrew Bible]"? ("Old Testament" presumes that there is a another Testament which has superceeded the first, and thus I eschew using the phrase).

Do you have any evidence or a source which posits the idea that the Mesopotamian practices were adopted by Jews as part of a brokered deal?

I believe you're well into the realm of speculative history here...

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

This may have been a feature of Persian religion, but I've never come across it in Sumerian or Babylonian religion, explicitly or implicitly. Enuma Elish postdates Hammurabi by a millennium. If Tiamat had a cult anywhere, AFAIK no record of it has been found. I'm not aware of any other god said to have been killed by Marduk - rather, the rest of the pantheon elect him as their leader.

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

All ancient history is speculative, and I'm paraphrasing a book whose title I forget - if I still have it I'll try and track it down.

I perhaps should have been more specific, pinning it down to the Ketuvim - the third part of the Tanakh which includes Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah. Curse my use of generalised terms.

There is little doubt that there some strong political drivers to the content of these books - from Ezra and later Nehemiah's point-of-view it was to establish a claim on the lands occupied by the Samaritans who were - arguably - the true sons of Abraham and Moses. From the Persian point of view there was a need to impose stability, and to ensure that religious belief wasn't a cause for rebellion. Aligning the religions of vassal cities and states to those of the Shahr's own religion could well explain the Book of Esther, which essentially tells the Jews that the Achaemenid court is sympathetic to them. Whether true or not, there are records of many Samaritan petitions the the Persian king which tended to favour the Jews.

If the Shahr of Ezra is Xerxes, then the return of the Jews would be in 478 BC, less than two years after Battle of Salamis. This would make it a very bad time to release hostile settlers into the Levant, and a very good time to grant gifts to loyal subjects. Given the nature of Mesopotamian politics, there is no way that the worship of an independent religion would have been overlooked. So either Ezra and his successors worked to undermine the Shahr under his own nose when everything was working in their favour, or else there was some element of collusion. There are certainly traces of direct borrowing from Babylonian influences may be discerned, and things like the psalms and Hebrew apocalyptic literature display some very strong similarities.

Even the structure of worship is mirrored - the God of Jerusalem resides in a holy-of-holies at the centre of a city-state, and is seen as the creator god and a local god of local people at the same time. Mesopotamian culture strongly identified gods with cities, and their myths and legends strongly reflect the political travails experienced by the city.

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

Well the Seven Tablets are subject to a lot of interpretation. During the course of the story Marduk doesn't just get *elected* as leader, he *becomes* the other gods. The fifty names of Marduk emphasise his ascendance to become Lord of the Gods through "acquisition".

The evidence of Marduk's conquests lies in the evidence of Hammurabi's. Cities were synonymous with gods, and Marduk was Hammurabi's patron, and was attributed with the foundation of Edridu. Thus every conquered city represented a god whose attributes were assumed by Marduk. By 1000BC Marduk was a supreme god, having subsumed every cult in the Eurphrates - only Asshur in Assyria could rival him. Indeed, many of the representations of Marduk show him with the weapons and symbols of other gods, including Tishpak's snake-dragon and a spade.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

We must be reading radically different books.

Judea was a vassal state of the Persian Empire (much as it later was to the Roman Empire, just without the persecution). Cyrus the Great was the Persian King who released the Jews from captivity in Persia, and is explicitly named in Ezra as the one who did so. Of all of the assorted concordances between Biblical history and external history, the identification of Koresh with Cyrus is one of the most firmly established.

Cyrus was either personally a Zoroastrian or a person who allowed Zoroastrianism to become the state religion of Persia. Zoroastrianism is non-conversionary, and most of the Zoroastrian rulers were relatively tolerant.

The geopolitical intrigue you're speaking of is irrelevant to whether or not there was a religious quid-pro-quo. There is no positive evidence of this in any case with which I am familiar (I minored in Near East religious history), and if anything, the arguments are much stronger for either syncretism due to spread of ideas or to common ideas sprouting in multiple places at similar times (like how Newton and Leibnitz both thought of Calculus at the same time).

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

That is the most hilarious version of Jewish history ever. Thank you

related joke: the story of most Jewish holidays: "They tried to kill us; we won. Let's eat." :)

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

"They tried to kill us; we won. Let's eat."

*sporfles*

The thing about reading the history of Israel, though (I'm on my latest re-read of Exodus right now) is that it is so very much the history of human nature in general and my own heart toward God in particular. Fearfulness, unbelief, complaining, idolatry... it all hits just a little too uncomfortably close to home. And then there's the incredible patience and mercy of God in the face of all this appalling misbehaviour ("All day long I have stretched out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people").

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Actually, "working at it" is what most people in Israel (particularly the Pharisees) were happy to do, at least as far as their understanding of the Law was concerned. It was the humiliating news that God's standards of holiness were even higher than they had imagined, too high for even the most scrupulously pious human beings to meet, that made (and makes) Jesus's teaching so unpopular. After all, as long as you are even theoretically capable of working your way into God's favor by diligent effort, there's a chance for you to feel good about yourself. But if there's no way to heaven but a narrow gate labelled REPENT, and the line in front of it seems to be made up of prostitutes and tax collectors and other despicable "sinners"... now that's humiliating.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I agree - it sure is a good thing God is so forgiving, because human weakness is so prevalent...

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Ah, but for some of us, the instinct to work at things is so strong that *not* working at it is hard work! =;o}

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

That's an intriguing interpretation of the fifty names. (Can you give me any references so I can pursue it?)

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

I thought there were two waves of returns to Jerusalem - the return by Shesh-bazzar and a "small company" of Jews allowed back by Cyrus in 538 BC and who completed the Temple in 516 BC and the considerably larger company of religious reformers led by Ezra during the reign of Xerxes or possibly Artaxerxes. My possibly erroneous assumption was that the major influx of Jews happened in the years following Ezra's return leading up to Nehemiah's appointment as Governor of Judaea.

I'm not in a position to push one argument over another, although I'm not particularly keen on the simultaneous evolution of common ideas. Sue, there are plenty of syncretic gods in the period, but the relevant factor (in my view) is the adoption of the city-state as the basis for religious culture. There is a clear difference between Yahweh the god who appeared in deserts, burning bushes and atop mountains, and the Elohim that dwelt at the heart of the Temple of Jerusalem. Once Jerusalem is re-established the next century or two see a clear policy of displacement as Aramaic replaced Hebrew as the popular language and the Samaritans are sidelined and ultimately destroyed.

I certainly agree with what you say about Zoroastrianism as a religion, but in the context of the Kings who promoted it, its surely a different story. Didn't both Cambyses and Darius use their military campaigns to promote Zoroastrianism?

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

Ezra was the one who lead the major influx of Jews back to Judea under Cyrus - others dribbled back and forth, and certainly Persia remained hugely important (basically until the Sassanid empire fell to the Caliphate) in Jewish thought and religion - the main stream of Jewish law follows the Babylonian Talmud (and not the Jerusalem Talmud) after all...

Cambyses and Darius were guided more by their own megalomania than by religious fervor - they would tend to set up Zoroastrianism as a state religion of the newly conquered vassals, but they weren't exactly trying to stomp out the other religions.

The city-state model for religions tends to be more accurate as a descriptor for those worldviews which posit a pantheon. The Pre-Zoroastrian Mesopotamians, non-Abrahamic Canaanites and the Greeks are more alike in this than they are different (although there are some substantial differences in societal organization).

As for simultaneous development, it certainly is possible that multiple people experience the same singular transformative event, and then go on to process it in different ways - consider that the monotheistic Amon-worship in Egypt roughly dates to about the same time period as the Exodus... Was there a cross-fertilization? Sounds likely to me, although we'll never know for certain.

Now, I do challenge the differentiation between E and J worship - that's based on the Documentary Hypothesis, which is not a particularly effective one (see the scholarly challenges to it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis#Debates_on_the_hypothesis) for instance) - there's no external evidence for these hypothesized groups, and given that there IS a tremendous record of the various splinter groups (like essenes etc), the lack of external evidence should be viewed as determinative.

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

Sorry, as a casual reader I rarely check references unless its really important to me at the time, and its been a while (at least five years) since I read up on this.

I do recall it was an annotation of the Enuma Elish that pointed out that although the fifty names were conferred by the Igigi, some were also the names of cities (eg. Nibiru, I think), and the listing was similar to the practice of Kings listing their military conquests. While the Igigi could have given up their attributes and divine portfolios voluntarily, it would be unique (Except in the case of Ea passing on his own name in addition to the fifty, thus bestowing absolute rulership to Marduk).

I've gone through what books I still have, but can't find anything on Daiwadana, so that part is entirely reliant on my memory.