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]

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.