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

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Sounds like the book I need.

FWIW, while there are fascinating parallels between the Babylonian creation story involving Marduk and the creation story in Genesis, they're extremely different. (Where there are word-for-word correspondences is elsewhere, in the Flood story.)

To me it seems very natural that Hebrew religious writing would share some imagery and concepts with their neighbours, though I'm not convinced that the Hebrews just "copied" stuff - there's too much in there that's unique.

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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).

[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]

I must be way off then. My Biblical Timeline (Thos. Robinson) puts Ezra's mission to Jerusalem in 458 BC, but says the date is disputed, with alternatives of 428 or even 398 BC.

Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BC, and his edicts granting the Temple vessels confiscated by Nebuchadnezzar and allwing Shesh-Bezzar to return to Jerusalem were made the following year.

That's a gap of at least 80 years, and possibly as much as 141 years. I can't see how Ezra could possibly have led an influx under Cyrus.