Download or read book Yahweh before Israel written by Daniel E. Fleming and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a ground-breaking new interpretation with which to consider and contextualize the name Yahweh before its relationship with Israel.
Download or read book The Early History of God written by Mark S. Smith and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2002-08-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is still much disagreement over the origins and development of Israelite religion. Mark Smith sets himself the task of reconstructing the cult of Yahweh, the most important deity in Israel's early religion, and tracing the transformation of that deity into the sole god - the development of monotheism.
Download or read book The Early History of God written by Mark S. Smith and published by Harper San Francisco. This book was released on 1990 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this history of the development of monotheism, the author explains how Israel's religion evolved from a cult of Yahweh as a primary deity among many to a fully defined monotheism with Yahweh as sole god. Repudiating the traditional scholarly premise that Israel was fundamentally different in culture and religion from its Canaanite neighbors, he shows that the two cultures were fundamentally similar.
Download or read book Yahweh Origin of a Desert God written by Robert D. Miller II and published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahweh-worshiping Midianites of the Early Iron Age brought their deity along with metallurgy into ancient Palestine and the Israelite people.
Download or read book Yahweh s Coming of Age written by Jason Bembry and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011-07-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the deity Yahweh is often portrayed as an old man. One of the epithets used of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, the Ancient of Days, is a source for this depiction of God as elderly. However, when we look closely at the early traditions of biblical Israel, we see a different picture: God is relatively youthful, a warrior who defends his people. This book is an examination of the question How did God become old? To answer this question, Bembry examines the way that aging and elderly human beings are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Then he makes a similar foray into the texts written in Ugaritic (a language quite close to ancient Hebrew), which provide a window into the ancient culture just north of Israel during the Late Bronze Age. He finds that Israel’s God shared attributes with the Ugaritic deities Baal and El. One prominent aspect of the similar attributes was that Yahweh’s depiction as a youthful warrior paralleled the way Baal was portrayed. The transformation from young deity to Ancient of Days took place at the intersection of two trajectories in the traditions of Israel. One trajectory is reflected in the way that apocalyptic traditions found in the book of Daniel recast the old Canaanite mythic imagery seen in the Ugaritic and early biblical texts. This trajectory allows Yahweh to take on qualities, such as old age, that were not associated with him during most of Israel’s history but were associated with El in the Canaanite traditions. The second trajectory, a depiction of Israel’s God as elderly, is connected with the development of the idea of Yahweh as father. The more comfortable the biblical tradents became with portraying Yahweh as a father—a metaphor that was not embraced in the early traditions—the easier it became for the people of Israel to think of Yahweh as occupying a stage of the human life cycle. These two trajectories came together in the 2nd century B.C.E., the chronological backdrop for Daniel 7, and found expression in a new epithet for Yahweh: Ancient of Days.
Download or read book Yahweh and the Sun written by J. Glen Taylor and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1993-11-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This challenging provocative book argues that there was in ancient Israel a considerable degree of overlap between the worship of the sun and of Yahweh-even that Yahweh was worshipped as the sun in some contexts. As an object created not by humankind but by God himself, the sun as an object of veneration lay outside the bounds of the second commandment and was considered by many to be an appropriate 'icon' of Yahweh of Hosts. Through its ivestigation of 'solar Yahwism', this book offers fresh insight into several passages (e.g.Genesis 1;32.23-33; Joshua 10.12-14; 1 Kings 8.12; Ezekiel 8.16-18; Psalms 19;104) and archaeological data regarding the orientations of Yawistic temples, the "lmlk" jar handles ,horse figurines, and the Taanach cult stand. The book argues that the struggle between Yahweh and other deities in ancint Israel took place within the context of the development of Yahwism itself.
Download or read book Tribes of Yahweh written by Norman Gottwald and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 967 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A twentieth-anniversary reprint of the landmark book that launched the current explosion of social-scientific studies in the biblical field. It sets forth a cultural-material methodology for reconstructing the origins of ancient Israel and offers the hypothesis that Israel emerged as an indigenous social revolutionary peasant movement. In a new preface, written for this edition, Gottwald takes account of the 'sea change' in biblical studies since 1979 as he reviews the impact of his work on church and academy, assesses its merits and limitations, indicates his present thinking on the subject, and points toward future directions in the social-critical study of ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible.
Download or read book Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan written by William Foxwell Albright and published by Eisenbrauns. This book was released on 1994 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Albright speaks to a new generation of scholars through this reprint of his classic work contrasting Israelite and Canaanite religions. The five chapters were originally presented as seven lectures and discuss Poetry and Prose, the Patriarchal Background, Canaanite Religion in the Early Bronze Age, the Struggle between Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, and the Religious Cultures of Israel and Phoenicia.
Download or read book Divine Doppelg ngers written by Collin Cornell and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible says that YHWH alone is God and that there is none like him—but texts and artwork from antiquity show that many gods looked very similar. In this volume, scholars of the Hebrew Bible and its historical contexts address the problem of YHWH’s ancient look-alikes, providing recommendations for how Jews and Christians can think theologically about this challenge. Sooner or later, whether in a religion class or a seminary course, students bump up against the fact that God—the biblical God—was one among other, comparable gods. The ancient world was full of gods, including great gods of conquering empires, dynastic gods of petty kingdoms, goddesses of fertility, and personal spirit guardians. And in various ways, these gods look like the biblical God. Like the God of the Bible, they, too, controlled the fates of nations, chose kings, bestowed fecundity and blessing, and cared for their individual human charges. They spoke and acted. They experienced wrath and delight. They inspired praise. All of this leaves Jews and Christians in a bind: how can they confess that the God named YHWH was (and is) the true and living God, in view of this God’s profound similarities to all these others? The essays in this volume address the theological challenge these parallels create, providing reflections on how Jews and Christians can keep faith in YHWH as God while acknowledging the reality of YHWH’s divine doppelgängers. It will be welcomed by undergraduates studying religion; seminarians and graduate students of Bible, theology, and the ancient world; and adult education classes.
Download or read book The Invention of God written by Thomas Römer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms—Yhwh, God, or Allah—by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE. That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe—the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah—that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism. A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world’s leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered.
Download or read book The Memoirs of God written by Mark S. Smith and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful work examines the variety of ways that collective memory, oral tradition, history, and history writing intersect. Integral to all this are the ways in which ancient Israel was shaped by the monarchy, the Babylonian exile, and the dispersions of Judeans and the ways in which Israel conceptualized and interacted with the divine-Yahweh as well as other deities.
Download or read book Yahweh Versus Baal written by Norman C. Habel and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1929, scholars have been concerned with the interpretation of certain Canaanite literary materials found at Ras Shamra in North Syria, known as Ugarit in ancient times. Attention has been paid, primarily, to certain linguistic and cultural parallels between this corpus of literature and sections of the Old Testament. But despite the numerous treatments of the isolated points of contact between Ugaritic and biblical thought, one major question has not received an adequate answer. How and to what extent are the Ugaritic texts, and especially the Baal texts, relevant for an appreciation of the fundamentals of the Israelite religion? Professor Habel seeks to answer at least part of this question by translating pertinent segments of the Baal texts, according to the sequence of G. R. Driver, summarizing their context, and considering their import, thought sequence, and basic ideas in relation to appropriate materials from the early faith of Israel. The succinct results of this comparison are provocative, to say the least. The author begins by isolating the major features of an underlying “conflict tradition.” The conflict between Israel’s beliefs and the religious forces of its environment was a vital influence in the formulation of Israel’s earliest religious faith and experience. The content of this faith as summarized in the concise wording of Exodus 19:3–6 is shown to be virtually identical with that of Israel’s earliest poetic heritage where a lively polemic against the Canaanite religious is discernible. One of the highlights of Professor Habel’s comparison of the Baal texts with Israel’s archaic poetic traditions is his contribution to the understanding of Exodus 15. In this connection he discovers a clearly defined sequence of ideas common to certain Baal texts and Exodus 15:1–18. By skillfully utilizing the work of other scholars the author sheds additional light on the polemical and theological import of several passages depicting theophanies of Yahweh. A similar evaluation of the relevance of the Ugaritic texts for the cultic practices of Israel is made possible by a sober evaluation of the pertinent texts.
Download or read book Yahweh before Israel written by Daniel E. Fleming and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yahweh is the proper name of the biblical God. His early character is central to understanding the foundations of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheism. As a deity, the name appears only in connection with the peoples of the Hebrew Bible, but long before Israel, the name is found in an Egyptian list as one group in the land of tent-dwellers, the Shasu. This is the starting-point for Daniel E. Fleming's sharply new approach to the god Yahweh. In his analysis, the Bible's 'people of Yahweh' serve as a clue to how one of the Bronze Age herding peoples of the inland Levant gave its name to a deity, initially outside of any relationship to Israel. For 150 years, the dominant paradigm for Yahweh's origin has envisioned borrowing from peoples of the desert south of Israel. Fleming argues in contrast that Yahweh was not taken from outsiders. Rather, this divine name is evidence for the diverse background of Israel itself.
Download or read book Yahweh Versus Yahweh written by Jay Y. Gonen and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yahweh versus Yahweh is a vivid description of how the founding myths of Judaism have conditioned Jewish expectations from history. Jay L. Gonen unveils the collective psychology that underlies Jewish psychohistory. The enigmatic God of Gonen’s study brings to the Jewish people periods of construction and bounty but also periods of destruction and hopelessness. This duality, according to the Gonen, runs throughout Jewish lore, literature, morality, the Kabbala, and Hassidism. It serves as the unifying factor in Jewish history—as it informed and influenced the establishment of the State of Israel, the history and future of Zionism, the debate over the Holocaust, the belief in the coming of the Messiah, and the current conflict in the Middle East. Gonen is at his best when portraying the intricate and highly dialectical interactions within the Jewish psyche among the themes of Messianism, Zionism, and the Holocaust. His penetrating analysis of how shared group fantasies molded Jewish responses to ongoing events is a must read for all persons who are interested in the intersection of religion, politics, and psychology in history.
Download or read book YHWH is King written by Shawn W. Flynn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst various methodologies for the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible, at times the opportunity arises to improve on a method recently introduced into the field. In YHWH is King, Flynn uses the anthropological method of cultural translation to study diachronic change in YHWH’s kingship. Here, such change is compared to a similar Babylonian development to Marduk’s kingship. Based on that comparison and informed by cultural translation, Flynn discovers that Judahite scribes suppressed the earlier YHWH warrior king and promoted a creator/universal king in order to combat the increasing threat of Neo-Assyrian imperialism. Flynn thus opens the possibility, that Judahite scribes engaged in a cultural translation of Marduk to YHWH, in order to respond to the mounting Neo-Assyrian presence.
Download or read book Did God Have a Wife written by William G. Dever and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2008-07-23 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly illustrated, non-technical reconstruction of "folk religion" in ancient Israel is based largely on recent archaeological evidence, but also incorporates biblical texts where possible.
Download or read book The Religion of Ancient Israel written by Patrick D. Miller and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical and literary questions about ancient Israel that traditionally have preoccupied biblical scholars have often overlooked the social realities of life experienced by the vast majority of the population of ancient Israel. Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple disciplines -- such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism -- to illumine the everyday realities and social subtleties these ancient cultures experienced. This series employs sophisticated methods resulting in original contributions that depict the reality of the people behind the Hebrew Bible and interprets these scholarly insights for a wide variety of readers. Individually and collectively, these books will expand our vision of the culture and society of ancient Israel, thereby generating new appreciation for its impact up to the present.Patrick Miller investigates the role religion played in an expanding circle of influences in ancient Israel: the family, village, tribe, and nation-state. He situates Israel's religion in context where a variety of social forces affected beliefs, and where popular cults openly competed with the "official" religion. Miller makes extensive use of both epigraphic and artefactual evidence as he deftly probes the complexities of Iron Age culture and society and their enduring significance for people today.
