If there is only one God...

tikoo · Jun 21, 2011

father sky , mama earth . which do you choose
to forget ? don't you just love ecoJesus ? sure do .

thedope · Jun 21, 2011

Honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land

The_Phantom · Jun 21, 2011

Okiefreak said:

I don't think anybody claims that Judaism was the first religion. Anu and Enki were Sumerian deities, and yes,
there are areas of correspondence between Mesopotamian creation and flood stories in the Ennuma Elish and the Gilgamesh epic and the corresponding stories in Genesis. This could be because the Hebrews got them from the Sumerians and Babylonians or they were both reporting the same events that one or the other garbled. The god of Abraham was addressed as El, which was also the (culturally similar) Ugaritic name for the high god, chief of the council of gods, and was the "El" in Israel. He was called El until Moses encountered him on Mount Sinai, when he gave his name as Yahweh, but explained he was the same God previously known to Abraham as El-Shaddai. Some scholars believe that Yahweh was already worshiped by the Midianites in the Sinai desert around the mountain, and there is an Egyptian reference to the Shasu (Bedouins) of Yhw, who may have been the Midianites or possibly the Israelites. So what does all this mean? The secularist interpretation would be that the Hebrews simply borrowed some their religion from other people. Or maybe neighboring peoples had an inkling of the truth before the Hebrews. We're back to the same question: who is right?

As for Ashera, there's a difference between Hebrew religion, as expounded by the priests and prophets, and the popular version which included such "heresies" as Ashera worship up to the time of the Babylonian captivity. In fact the priests and prophets blamed Ashera worship for the Babylonian captivity, after which it ceased. Even before that, King Josiah sought to purge the country of Asherah:"and he boroke down the houes of the male cult prostitutes..where women wove hangings for the Aherah." (2 Kings 23:4-7) Ashera was a mother goddess identified in Ugaritic religion as the consort of El and in popular (but not priestly) Israelite religion as the consort of Yahweh. She was also worshipped by the Akkadians and Hittites.
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I'm afraid you need to go back a bit further. It seems that Anu was not the first God. In fact, the ancient texts say that Anu's father was Anshar, who was the son of Lahamu and Lahmu.

One site that might interest you is:

historel.tripod.com/orient/02mesop.htm

The Bible did not only borrow the history of the creation of the world, of the deluge, and the tower of Babel from the Mesopotamians, but it also adopted the substance and certain fundamentals, even if some stories have been altered over time. Also the names of the main characters are not the same, in these two countries that are very different from each other.
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The "King List" also goes back, if you believe the longevity of the rulers, to more than 400,000 BC. And, the Sumerian Pantheon does not start with Anu.

Amyoxl · Jun 21, 2011

Primal said:

...Then why does 'he' have a gender?
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Because man made god in his own image

Amyoxl · Jun 21, 2011

Primal said:

Surely 'he' can just make offspring at the click of a finger
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God, that is so fucking hot

Okiefreak · Jun 23, 2011

The_Phantom said:

I'm afraid you need to go back a bit further. It seems that Anu was not the first God. In fact, the ancient texts say that Anu's father was Anshar, who was the son of Lahamu and Lahmu.

One site that might interest you is:

historel.tripod.com/orient/02mesop.htm

The "King List" also goes back, if you believe the longevity of the rulers, to more than 400,000 BC. And, the Sumerian Pantheon does not start with Anu.
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I wasn't meaning to suggest that Anu was the first God. I was just responding to a post that suggested the fact that belief in him was earlier than belief in Yahweh somehow undercut the Hebrew position.

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