Before God Was God, Transcript

Before God Was God - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kaauBP9_Dg

Transcript:

(00:08) and I would like to start with something that I found on Instagram the other day a very prominent theologian on Instagram said God never changes and that's this guy I don't know if you know him it happens to be a Canadian theologian no it says yes Justin Bieber on his Instagram feed posted this this thing and if you were wondering whether Instagram was the right thing for you I may have ruined it forever but but I thought it was very interesting because he actually or he or whoever gave him this meme is quoting here as it's telling us what the source this is and

(00:59) in fact when you go to the book of Hebrews and you check this quote it actually it pretty much conveys the opposite idea because what we hear what we read here first of all is that it's not God but as Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever but this is slightly taking out of context because here the messages do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings for it is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace not by regulations about food so on and so forth so in fact this passage of Hebrews

(01:39) is talking about change is talking about a change that is happening and that is causing a division between the Jewish community that is starting to define identify themselves as Christians and the rest of the Jewish community so I see here not a God that doesn't change but a beginning of a change now this is we had a here recent a lecture on the topic of the ontological argument so this lecture is not a theological adji or philosophy so from a theological theological or philosophical viewpoint we may argue

(02:29) that this might be right instead we'll see what my point is when I talk about a god that changes so without further ado because we have a lot of people here from our meditation group that have decided to stay because we actually word through some of the material that I'm going to present during our meditation today I will like to follow to get just to dive in the ball cycle and I don't know how many of you are already familiar with the ball cycle it's not one of the most famous mythological stories we're far more aware of the mythology that we find in

(03:18) the Hebrew Bible the Greek mythology a missile potamia mythology but not so much with the mythology of these people that we call the Canaanites and this is one of the main stories that we have from them and written by them in their own words so the story unfortunately is contained in a number of play tablets many of those are heavily damaged and many of those are simply lost so there are a lot of parts that a lot of lines that we're missing unfortunately we are missing the beginning but when we are able to start reading the story we see

(04:03) young young is the deification of the sea and it's not so much like the like Poseidon like antropomorphic kind of God but you have to think of young as as a force of nature as a primordial force of nature that is claiming supremacy over the gods and see claims bow see says that he wants to humble bow L who happens to be we learn the King and the judge and the ruler of the Assembly of the Gods decides for reasons that are not made clear decides to surrender this other God bow to the wishes of see and after a

(04:58) little bit of an adventure there's this other God whose name translates as skill and wisdom who helps bow to defeat a monster a sea monster some sometimes referred to as a serpent sometimes as a dragon it's called in some sources Lytton sometimes it's translated as lotin and after defeating this monster the sea monster sea is defeated what follows here is the gods proclaim that by all this God by all that has just defeated the primordial force of nature of the sea he's now the conqueror and he's also the writer on the clouds and

(05:48) it helps when you are by all and when you are a god that is trying to rise to supremacy to have a very violent sister and a knot is presented as bowel sister and she is a really dangerous goddess she threatens the gods she threatens to do horrible things to the other gods and the other gods have to say okay go ahead just do whatever you want and so they get away with this with their plan promoting by I'll to be the new king the new judge the new ruler of the Assembly of the gods and they build a palace to

(06:36) bow in a mountain that is on the Syrian coast that becomes that's Mount Safwan or Mountain cellphone but I'll at this point apparently once you become the new king of the gods this is something that you have to talk about with that you have to communicate to this other primordial force of nature death that you are now the new king so but I'll sends his messengers to this God that defies the concept of death and that responds to bow when you killed Layton the fleeing serpent finished off the twisting serpent the seven headed monster the heavens withered and weakened like the Falls of your role now

(07:37) you must descend into the throat of else song death into the watery depths of L's darling the hero and I want to bring your attention here to these little things that sound a little silly at first sight when we talk about else darling the hero we're always talking about death but this is very important in these mythological stories how we describe these gods or these forces of nature with all these things that we call epithets there's a very very interesting parallel to this story that we find in the Hebrew Bible in the book

(08:26) of ice on that day Yahoo will use his fierce and powerful sword to punish Leviathan that slippery snake Leviathan that twisting snake he will kill that monster which lay lives in the sea so I'm not suggesting here then I say yeah is copying the bow cycle I'm just pointing out certain commonalities between these two mythological stories that we also find in other mythological stories like many of you know the story of the anomalies the Mesopotamian story of the god Marduk defeating the sea monster the primordial sea monster Tiamat and an even in a more

(09:27) abstract way we find the same concept at the beginning of the Bible in the book of Genesis when Yahweh here.not no sorry not Yahweh Elohim I'm using when I'm using Bible passages I for the most part I'm using a translation that is called names of God for the purpose of this lecture I think is important to see what the original hebrew word is used when we talk about god because there are many many different words in the original language it's not always we sometimes in english simply translated as Lord or God but that are in fact many and we'll

(10:15) we'll get to that and here this is a different more abstract I said kind of take on the same concept and here Elohim will not defeat darkness and the sea by going and killing a monster but simply by speaking let there be light and that's how he brings order into this primordial chaos the baha cycle continues with we learned about all descends into this underworld into the realm of death that is once again thought of like something deep it's referred to as the pit as the swamp as even the filth so here I would but all must enter inside him meaning death

(11:15) he must go down into his mouth like a dried olive the earth produce the fruit of the trees but all the conqueror has died the prince the Lord of the earth has perished and then we get this very clear imagery farmers plowing a field and here first el and later anat remember this is an epic poem so it's very repetitive el plowed his chest like a garden raped his back like a valley l raised his voice and declared but all is that what will happen to the peoples then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of yahweh this is not the bow cycle but

(12:15) this is a parallel once again that we find in the hebrew bible women were sitting there weeping for Tammuz then he meaning yahuwah said to me have you seen this o mortal you will see still greater abomination than these Tammuz is the myths of the hebrew way up calling the mesopotamian god do mazeed and these cards here the Moosey bow and then in greece and Dhoni's and even to an extent Osiris in Egypt and in Korea we have a two knees are all gods who have mythology's that describe them as bound to the cycle of vegetation so these are sometimes called fertility gods but I

(13:14) think it's more accurate to say that they are they represent the cycle of vegetation and food and for us living in the 21st century Canada it's very easy to take food for granted because we can just go to the store or to the restaurant and find food every day no matter what day of the year is as long as you have money to pay but especially in the ancient world the vegetation cycle is very important and I'm going to tell you even today in Canada if you're a farmer you are much more aware of how much how delicate the vegetation cycle is I was at this last summer at a

(14:06) meditation retreat in Alberta and I met a farmer that was there because he was very stressed out about loosing his all his his crops because they were having a drought there and that would never occurred to me that people would be so stressed out about food it did but it's different when you actually have someone that tells you in your face this story also has echoes of a story that we explored in a previous lecture here the epic of gilgamesh and this is a we see two sides of the story we see first a hero going and doing this

(15:03) hero kind of thing of defeating a monster of fighting these forces of nature that are in a way hostile to civilization and so that's the first part but the second part is always now the hero has to go and conquer death so we see this very clearly in the epic of gilgamesh and also here in the bio cycle the epic of gilgamesh is a much older story and was a very known very well known story across the ancient Near East and in fact we have found copies of the epic of gilgamesh in the same part of the world where we found the Baal cycle we hear

(15:56) echoes of this - part of this hero's journey first conquering the forces of nature then going to the underworld to conquer death in another mythological story from Mesopotamia the Ananas descent into the underworld she first becomes the Queen of Heaven and Earth the most powerful goddess in the Mesopotamian Pantheon and after doing that she needs to also add to her dominions the underworld it doesn't go very well for her that's a story for another lecture I promise it's a very good story now back to BA all and

(16:50) that kills death apparently you can kill this grindy mom it's this part is very graphic she grinds him he cheese scatters death and then we have a few missing lines and then it reads where is Bhau the Conqueror where is the prince the lord of the earth and sun the gods torch replied I will look for about the Conqueror once again I want to bring your attention but I'll the Conqueror the Prince the lord of the earth here comes another the goddess once again a primordial goddess the Sun she is the gods torch another epithet the Sun will

(17:44) look for by all because in the mythology of the Canaanites and also it's in other peoples in this region in the ancient world the Sun goes around the earth and as you see the Sun going down the Sun goes to the underworld and emerges once again in the East the next day so the idea is the Sun goes to the realm of the Dead every night so that's why Sun has to go and find by Owl and son finds by Al and this is a happy ending so at the end the story we learn that but I'll finally defeats death that acknowledges its position as subordinate to by owl but al

(18:40) becomes in this story the new king the new supreme god the new God Most High and it ends beautifully Sun rolls the dead here the word is relief our aim or sometimes pronounced it's supposed to be pronounced at a palma sun rolls to divine ones your company are the gods see the dead are your company cult are is your magician and has seized your diviner in see it is desire and the dragon whom caught a home skillful and wise expels skillful and wise vanishes there's this beautiful German word cows come that means this motif of the

(19:40) struggle again with chaos that we find in mythology's across the world but now it's enough this comparative mythology and I just want to summarize once again who are all these characters that we learn about all these gods and goddesses and primordial forces of nature that are the protagonists of this story L is the creator of the entire universe and not only the gods but all the gods that are benevolent and beneficial to humanity but also all the forces of nature that are seen as hostile to humanity we live

(20:31) in a 21st century and we see nature as something good nature for these people is not so good it's not something you get excited about L is also wise compassionate L lives on a high mountain lives in a tent it's an old man with an old wire with a long white beard then we have although we didn't mention her but she appears in this story Asha ah Mother of God else why she is she's got other epithets I think we'll see those later here the two sons of hell young and Maude these forces of nature death and the sea and

(21:26) again the sea it is not just the water but it's representing the primordial chaos I'm not a very interesting goddess that we will talk about later because she appears here as the mistress of the people she's a maid and daughter of L but she's also by our sister however bowel is not else son in this story so we have some conflicting genealogies here and I want you to I want to bring your attention to this these inconsistencies that we find in these stories sometimes for those of you who have been here where we talked about the documentary hypothesis in the Bible

(22:17) that says that in fact this is a collection of many different sources that different editors have put together we can tell to what extent there is a similar process going on here but there seem to be inconsistencies and these things are very common as we will see in all these mythological stories or that come that extend over a very very long period of time and that are written at different places for different audiences Anat and this story in a way because this is a very patriarchal society she represents the untamed female power because she is not married

(23:07) shops ooh that's the Sun in this case it's the Sun is a goddess it's a great light and once again she has to go to the underworld every night and this interesting God skill and wisdom that it kind of parallels the Hephaestus and Vulcan in Greek and Roman mythology and I supposed to L that is wise at a more cosmological level of wisdom at a more deeper level of wisdom this is a very practical wisdom that wisdom and skill represents here for example he built the palace of bow at months upon and he says well you need a window bow and bow Allah says no I don't need a window well you'll see you'll need a window and

(24:07) eventually when the palace is finished Paul says oh yes I would like a window so this is a very practical crass craftsmanship coin of knowledge kind of wisdom but I'll finally our main protagonist the hero of the story is a storm God as to God that represents the cycle of vegetation and food bile and other gods that represent these same concepts have to die sometimes people will say that they die in the winter and they resurrect in the summer but in this particular part of the world these gods die in the summer the summer is very hot very dry and then they come back to life

(25:01) when the rains come back to the region in around November but I'll here is establishing order over chaos of our nature hostile nature and at the end he becomes the new king of the assembly which means that he's going to replace L because at the beginning of the story L is the supreme god so here once again we have a story about change in the concept of God change in how we think of maybe not God but the divine domain doesn't matter how many gods we talk about I will use the word the divine to refer to this concept

(25:56) whether or not we're talking about monotheism or polytheism so here we see a story of change we are changing the order in the divine realm before we move forward this is my approach here is academic and historical and also I will use the approach of modern comparative mythology which understands for our purposes here in the 21st century understands myths as manifestations of psychological called or societal truth rather than inaccurate historical accounts so when we talk when we read all these stories I don't want you to get caught up in whether or not

(26:50) this of course the Duvall cycle didn't happen in the real world in real history but there are other stories that involve humans I don't want you to get distracted thinking of whether or not this is a historical account I want you to focus instead on the psychological cultural and sociological aspects and my goal with this lecture and the reason why I I first suggested to John that I would I would like to be here today adding doing my first presentation on this topic is that often when I study when we started here the the Hebrew Bible and I read books from scholars

(27:47) that are really respect like Glenn s Holland I really like his book he also has several lectures on biblical history a biblical Israel available on the great courses so I often hear from scholars like him and many others a number of assumptions and for my background in systems analysis and software engineering usually we learn that assumptions lead to bad systems and when that systems crash and they don't function as expected so what are the assumptions that I want to point out and that I would like to in to see whether they're sound or not the

(28:46) Israelites we're monotheistic everyone else was polytheistic now more I would say a softer version of that assumption is to acknowledge that yes in fact the people of Israel did worship other gods but this is not their native religion they worshiped other gods because of foreign influence and one way you can have these gods introduced into the Land of Israel is with these evil Queens like Jezebel and so we learned that Jezebel is the wife of King Ahab she's acid owned Ian princess from City of Phoenicia her name actually means where

(29:43) is the prince that we we right Bell but it's Jezebel so that's the same that it's a theophoric name so it contains the name of a God in her name and it means where is the prince and that is the prayer that worshippers of vowel were crying to ritually mourn that God as the God is understood to die and go into the underworld when summer comes and all vegetation dies in the land of Canaan and what the Bible goes on to say that she was so evil that she introduced 450 prophets of Baal but also for hundreds of the goddess Asherah into the

(30:38) Land of Israel and then finally the third assumption that I would like to investigate is this idea that Canaan or Canaanite and Israelite are two different peoples so what is Canaan and who are the Canaanites so this region here in red is what we often more or less talk about when we refer refer to the land of Canaan and this is we learn from later Greek historians that is the end of him that that means the name that people in this region used to refer to themselves and to their land and that later the Greeks will call Phoenicia and Phoenicians these are a Semitic people

(31:43) and we often when we use the term Canaan and Canaanite we have to think of the second millennium BCE because after that when the Greeks appear in the scene they give names to everyone and these people become definitions and they I guess they deserve to be called Greeks by the Romans because they did the same thing to the Phoenicians to the Canaanites and we also learned that it's the most frequently used ethnic term in the Bible so the writers of the Hebrew Bible of the when in this lecture I will when

(32:20) I say the Bible I mean the Hebrew Bible the Tanakh the Old Testament and in the Christian Bible very aware of Canaanites because they're constantly talking about the Canaanites and for example this is a the story of Canaan in the Bible Cayden is the son of ham and grandson of Noah and is the one that finds Noah drunk and kind of makes fun of Noah and that's really not a good thing to do apparently Noah curses him and after this some scholar some biblical commentators assume or conclude that this is a justification for the alleged subjection and to an extent in some parts of the

(33:19) Bible a total annihilation of the Canaanites and that happens primarily in two books Joshua and judges which they are conflicting account of the entrance of the Israelites in the land of Canaan and the word Canaan in these two books referred to the land and they always use the word Canaan to refer to the land whereas Canaanite is just one of many ethnic groups that inhabit this land so from the book of Joshua this is what yahweh elohim of israel says long ago your ancestors their rock and his songs Abraham and Nahor lived on the other

(34:10) side of the afraid ease that dismissal potamia answered other gods but I took your ancestor Abraham from the other side of the Euphrates River I let him through all of Canaan and gave him many descendants Joshua continues then you cross the Jordan River and came to Jericho the citizens of Jericho the amorite parasites Canaanites Hittites girgashites he bites the judges eyes fought you but I handed them over to you so here usually are all the different ethnicities or ethnic groups our nation's that the Bible identifies and

(34:54) there's a few more there's like the Amer now here apparently if we believe this we believe that there was like a total conquest of the land that was handed by God because in fact God tells the people you people have no military capacity so you should know acknowledge that it's me who is doing this for you but apparently this weather without the help of God they are not completely capable of getting rid of everyone and we read you are here joshua said to the descendants of joseph the tribe of ephraim and

(35:40) manasseh that are kind of in the middle like sandwich at the middle they have really no way to expand and he says you want an important very powerful people one region is really not enough for you so the mountain region will be yours as well it is a forest so will so you will have to clear it all of it will be yours but you must force out the Canaanites even though they are strong and have chariots made of iron so tough people the Canaanites so that was Joshua now judges tell us a rather different account the tribe of Ephraim did not

(36:26) force out the Canaanite who lived in gazette so the Canaanite continued to live with them in gazette so the Canaanite state with the tribe of Ephraim the tribe of Zebulon did not force out those who lived at Kathryn or Nahal so the Canaanites continued to live with them but in this case they were made to do forced labor and even more and this is I find this very interesting when we are in these two books trying to make this distinction between Canaanites and Israelites that we read so the people of Israel lived among the Canaanite Hittites amirite parasites he bites and Jebusites the

(37:15) Israelites allow their sons and daughters to marry to these people Israel also served their gods so it doesn't look to me like after all they were so different or at least maybe they were different but they were in fact living together and marrying intermarrying and worshiping the same gods just to give you an idea of the historical context the land of canaan is really at the crossroads of the ancient world and is the passage the necessary the only route that connects Egypt what you can go but it's the most direct

(38:08) route to go from Egypt to the Missal potamia to the Hittite Empire there's another empire that is powerful that is not in this map the amount itami empire and we have Mycenaean Greece over here everyone has to go through these little neck narrow leg and neck of land to go from one place to another so this is a very disputed area by all the major powers of this time period that we call the Bronze Age that the Late Bronze Age so but the the second half of the second millennium BCE there are as I mentioned

(38:59) before the amorite the nomadic inhabitants of what would be modern-day central Syria are related people they amirite enter Babylon and the famous king Hammurabi is at this of these amirite invaders and some of you might be familiar with the story of the Hyksos that sometimes some people try to claim that the Hyksos maybe represent these the people that migrated out of Egypt that we learn about in the book of Exodus led by Moses but in fact that's it most scholars don't take that story seriously because in fact we learned that the Canaanites had settled

(39:56) in the Nile Delta from centuries before they became the 14th dynasty of Egypt so they were the rulers of northern Egypt before the Hyksos arrived so the Hyksos is another migration that might be Canaanite and other maybe amirite maybe arabian tribes they arrive later they displace a Canaanite dynasty in Egypt but later the Egyptian native dynasty expels the Hyksos around 1500 BCE around this time we get this city look at it that rises to supremacy this is a today an archaeological site where we have found all these tablets that contained

(41:03) about all cycle and other stories and it was it's hard to emphasize how important this city was at the end of the Bronze Age it was in contact with the Hittite Empire Egypt Cyprus and also other empires further east is the entrance of the and trade route to the Euphrates so it's a very very strategic location these are the ruins located today that's the gate of the palace of we'll get eaten very vast palace complex it's more ruins what happened to this city luckily we this city was burned but luckily for us not for them the city was burned to the ground in an innovation around the Year

(42:05) 1200 BC and we have a letter that has survived because it was written in clay tablet and the fire burned the tablet and preserve it very well and it says I'm gonna pee which is the same as that it is the canaanites version of Hammurabi to the king it said remember Davi it's not the same only to the king of Alessia which is Cyprus my father behold the enemy's ships came my CDs were burned and they did evil things in my country does not my father know that all my troops and areas are in the land of Hattie and all my ships are in the

(42:48) land of Lucca so these are places and what it would be modern-day Turkey thus the country is abandoned to itself may my father know it the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us he's not talking to his real father is a way of addressing another king and unfortunately for garite they did not survive this invasion but fortunately for archaeologists the city was forgotten never resettled and was only rediscovered in 1928 by accident by a farmer and we found there more than 5,000 tablets

(43:33) clay tablets with an early version like a transitional language between the Akkadian cuneiform of Mesopotamia and the later Phoenician alphabet so this is a an alphabetic language written in cuneiform script so this is the city this is the modern-day port of Latakia in Syria and I want to show you this that's it that's the archaeological site today and I want to compare this with similar scale satellite photos of Mycenae and Troy that were destroyed around the same time so these were also what Mycenae for sure an important

(44:30) Bronze Age Center destroyed around the same time but you can see the archaeological site of houla it is is quite larger and this is what is sometimes referred to as the Bronze Age collapse because Mycenae Troy the Hittite Empire all the cities of Canaan Cyprus all collapse around the same time abruptly and so these are because of Egyptian sources we call these we associate these to the sea peoples to the invasions or migrations of these sea peoples that Egyptian sources tell us about and around the same time we have

(45:27) an interesting Egyptian incursion that is part of these wars against all these sea peoples that ends in the land of Canaan we have evidence of this records in Stila that's a stone inscription it's like a billboard of the ancient world where you just put the things that you want to let people know the Merneptah stele of pharaoh Merneptah now that was the Bronze Age there's this abrupt division this just abrupt end of this era of these big empires of these world order and now we move to what we call the Iron Age one so this is period that in in Israel in the Hebrew Bible we call

(46:27) the period of the judges so it's a period that as we read in the Bible is before the emergence or the development of the monarchy in both Israel and Judah and we also read in the Bible that there's this United Monarchy under David and Solomon a great Kingdom and around this time we assume that yahweh the god yahweh becomes important rises to power among the people of israel however there's god interestingly not only in the battle but in no other sources we hear about we read about Yahweh just quickly the archaeological record just to give you an idea is very thin

(47:28) when you try to look for when you try to confirm the information that we see in the Bible we just have four maybe five references to Israel in the whole archaeological record for this period until the arrival of the Persians it's much later and it will not be covered in this lecture so we rely on just a few of these steel s that looked like this where Kings boast about their campaigns and so in some of them we see references that can be translated as Israel although of course some scholars always these built these references this hypothesis is translations and oh this

(48:28) one is a very interesting one it's a very famous steel added tell damn Stila and the King has a L of Damascus is talking about his victory over King Andrei so here we have an extra biblical source for him Omri that we read in the Bible and he says and Hadad Hadad is one of the names of the god Baal in this period we're talking this is more than four hundred years after the battle cycle and Haddad went in front of me and I slew 70 Kings who harnessed thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen I killed J harem son of Ahab king of Israel and I killed ah huzzah you saw no

(49:19) chigorin king of the house of David so this is why this Stila is so famous because it's the first reference that we have an archaeological record for the house of David so we assume archaeologists assume that this is a reference to the Davidic monarchy however that doesn't prove that there was ever a United Monarchy what the only thing that this Stila is telling us is that there was a dynasty that claimed there send to a figure called David so in some four rather widely accepted references to Israel in the archaeological record of this period between the bronze age

(50:22) collapse of the sea peoples etc and the arrival of the Persians many many centuries later and this is a period where Israel arises as a nation and so that's why it's it's unfortunate that we only have just a few references it's even more unfortunate that we actually only have one reference to Yahweh we would like to know okay where does Yahweh come come from where is this God or at least the name of this God it there isn't a lot of Yahweh in the archaeological record there is no Yahweh in the canine sources the first mention

(51:13) that we have of yahuwah is in this stele and the mesh Stila that is stated around 840 BCE and was built by king misha of Moab Moab is a neighboring Kingdom of Israel and it's very very very interesting because the Stila tell us that Chemosh the god of Moab is angry because his people have committed transgressions sounds familiar Chemosh then allows them to be subjugated and oppressed by king Omri of Israel Hamas returned and assisted Misha to defeat Israel and restore the land of Moab and then we read and from the I took yahooeys vessels and I am presenting them before commercials face

(52:14) so this is a motif that has echoes in the Hebrew Bible of a god that is angry because of the transgressions of his people that God allows foreign invaders to come and teach a lesson to the Israelites the Israelites cry for help God remembers the people of Israel and then helps them once again defeat their enemies and go back to be being in a good standing with with Yahweh with God but in this case is the God is commotion and that people are the Moabites so this is a kingdom of Moab it's a very very near on the other side of the Dead Sea

(53:02) and the Iron Age we if you remember the map of Canaan we don't have a lot of information - about kingdoms it appear said we had for the most part canaanite city-states a lot of important ports in the Hebrew Bible we read all these stories about the Jebusite in the Hittites and the Canaanites etc etc and now we have a different kind of order and these all these little kingdoms of which Judah and Israel urges another two kingdoms the Philistine States and the Phoenician states are city-states for the most part but these are all similar

(53:57) sized little States and interestingly they all have their own national gods in the Canaanite period of the Bronze Age and what we as far as we can tell we impersonally only have one garite we don't have we wish we had more archaeological sites like that unfortunately all these important cities have been occupied continuously so it's really hard to do and excavations there but we have a list of gods that we discussed that we talked about there are more gods but al al Haram are not a start-up they are the main gods and goddesses but in the

(54:44) Bronze Age and sorry in the Iron Age now with the emergence of all these new little States we see the emergence of all these new gods that we never heard about before and so the kingdom here of Amman has this God there sometimes his name is translated as Moloch or Emil come Edom we think is it's not for sure but if there's a God whose name it sounds something like cost also yahuwah appears to be the god of the [  ] we know the Yahweh is the God of Israel and Judah came osh in Moab Dagon in this case this God is a Bronze Age God that we read about argon in the bottle cycle is Bob's father that's where the

(55:40) genealogy gets complicated because his sister is else daughter entire Mel cart Sidon ash moon and one complicated thing about all these gods and to try to figure out where do these gods come from is that they all mean things in their native languages for example Mel curved simply means king of the city in the local dialect tired so let's concentrate on Yahweh and see if we can what do we know what are the main leading hypothesis and opinions about the origin of the name Yahweh so one that is many of you are familiar with is that the name means I am that I

(56:34) am and this is revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai some other scholars have this theory that in fact the name comes from my name's there's an inscription another Stila that has the phrase and if you speak Hebrew you may want to cover your ears Eliyahu is about L the god L who creates the host the host that meaning that all the gods so in this case the war the word Yahweh Yahweh is to create or to bring to existence and there's another of these schemas that mentions the Shasu of yhw and that sounds suspiciously similar

(57:34) to the tetragram that we often pronounced as yahweh and it's been suggested that it means he blows and that it means that is a deity associated with the wind and the storms and that may have been introduced by nomadic tribes of Arabia that were laboring of the land of Canaan just quickly and we will discuss this in another lecture because we can go a whole 90 minutes just on this topic there's like an interesting hypothesis that is called the Kay night hypothesis that says that Israel adopts the cult of

(58:21) yahuwah from these people that were nomadic herders in northwest arabia that are called the Midianites sometimes they can night's the land of media was is thought to be just I think we have a map no just southeast of Canaan and according to judges the K nights were media nights that first rated and eventually settled the land of Canaan and we read and judges like swarms of locusts they came with their livestock and their tents they and their camels could not be counted they came into the land only to ruin it so the Israelites became very poor because of median and cried out to

(59:18) Yahweh for help we're not gonna go into details but I would like to point out this idea of Israel already settled in the land and new people coming in and bringing with them their own Colts their own gods finally another element that adds they come against the story a little bit is we discuss this idea of the epithets or these little titles descriptive phrases or even metaphors that appear that follow or precede the name of the gods in all these sources and so for L we have the bull the compassionate the creator of creatures father of time

(1:00:14) father of humanity the king the holy one so for just room I don't know those of you who watch Game of Thrones but all these kings and queens when they try to be important they have a sidekick there that it's going to remind everyone else what all his or her titles are so this is once again all these gods have all these titles that describe them that say something about them Asha ROM the mother of gods the holy and most blessed one we said a knot is the mistress of the people and by all the Conqueror writer dove on the clouds the prime Lord of the earth

(1:01:03) God changes or God doesn't change l the God L the word L in the Canaanite language becomes in the Iron Age a generic term that means simply means God so it comes from its start as the name of a deity in the Bronze Age now is simply means God and we have like we see this in the Bible and sometimes it's the words that the names of the God like el shaddai are translated as God Almighty or god of the mountain we see El Elyon God Most High el beneath god of the Covenant by all in the Iron Age his name increasingly simply means more and so we see it as a sign to the other words like

(1:02:11) a dad a dad isn't Mesopotamian god of storms so by al-haddad by all of mountains upon but al Haman but al she mean all names that appear in the archaeological record and the Phoenicians so these people that the Greeks are called are calling Phoenicians they the people that are the Canaanites that lived on the coast on cities like Biblos like Beirut like tyre they increasingly identify bow with L and as we mentioned before like the god Mel cart of Tyre which is the most prominent most important Phoenician city Mel cart simply means Lord of Tyre Lord of the city and when

(1:03:04) the Tyrion's found carthage in north africa they bring with them the cult of mel cart when they go to spain they bring with them they called mel Kurt and interestingly the same thing is happening among the people of Israel but in this case this new God in this case we only have the Goths that we always had in this case we have this new name this new God I think we call Yahweh and Yahweh increasingly is associated with these two older gods now the association with el is assumed that happens very early it happens before people sit down and start writing the

(1:04:01) books like Joshua and judges because we never see a conflict between Yahweh and el it simply happens all these little epithets all these little titles and powers that el has simply are passed on to Yahweh however it's only in this time period of the the monarchy in Israel and Judah that the association between Yahweh and BA all starts to develop and this is why is suggested that there's so much conflict and so much condemnation of the god Baal but we never hear anything wrong any problem with with el so yeah we had already have soared el or

(1:04:54) the attributes of el by the time people started writing the Bible want some of the interesting epithets of bowel or titles of bowel that increasingly appear with the name of Yahweh are the writer of the class upon the clouds so lift a song to him who write upon the clouds from the Psalms from Deuteronomy there's known like your Elohim Yeshu doom he writes through the heavens to help you in majesty he writes through the clouds he subdued the ancient gods shatters the forces of old he drove out the enemy before you and said destroy I

(1:05:49) think we're coming close to the end of the lecture and at this point I would like to go back to these assumptions that we often make one of those that I didn't mention is this idea that there's something that is very unique about the religion of Israel and I'm not saying that there isn't but we don't really see it in this period the uniqueness I will argue wool is about to come and this is not material for this lecture but in this time period when Israel is still living in the land this period that we

(1:06:36) call the first Temple period the pre-exilic period Israel is in at least more like its neighbors than it is different from its neighbors and so this process of granting titles epithets powers and names on your National God is not unique and the most the closest example of this that happens a little earlier is with the god Marduk in Mesopotamia when we read the Gilgamesh stories matter dog doesn't appear all these very old Mesopotamian stories Marduk is simply not there it only appears with the rise of power of Hammurabi and

(1:07:35) simply starts as a god of vegetation god of storm and slowly starts to acquire all the attributes and titles of older gods that we do see in all their stories like the stories of the flood Mesopotamia like a like n little and in the same way it seems like the associations with a are specific it just happens naturally whereas the associations with Enlil happen by force and ultimately Murdoch indian ummah ilish it's a mythological story that is much newer than the older creation stories and flood stories Missa potamia

(1:08:28) here Marduk becomes the Creator God the God that brings order over chaos over the primordial forces of nature that are ultimately in their eyes hostile to humanity into civilization now to end the this presentation today I often when we study all these ancient peoples and the way they think about the divine they think about God or their gods it sounds or it feels very alien to us and I would like to suggest just to make sure that we don't walk into the trap of the Protestant bias that we have here I am originally from a Catholic country and so that is a

(1:09:23) Christian country if you ask people are you monotheistic are you polytheistic everyone is gonna say ah monotheistic we know that and yet certain aspects and certain behaviors that we were discussing that we see in these very ancient myths and the idea of associating gods with other gods and granting titles are very still present so this is my Our Lady of Lourdes that is the national version of memory that is the patron of the country Argentina and so we we know this is Mary this is also married but in a different garment in a different capacity here is she is

(1:10:19) in the capacity of the patron of my hometown looks more humble now if you look at these two statues we see two different things we understand geologically or intellectually that we're talking about the same Mary and yet in a very practical way this is not to say Mary you cannot ask the things that you ask to this Mary you don't ask to this one the way you ask to this Mary it's not the way you ask to this one this one has her own prayers this one has different prayers the pilgrimage to this one doesn't happen in the same what this one

(1:11:03) doesn't even have pilgrimage sites and finally that other one is not even a Mary and yeah that's st. Rita and that's my local neighborhood Church and once again the imagery their prayers that comes up how we worship this Saint Rita it's very similar and she becomes in a way her titles become also our lady the titles of these other two that who are married so back to our Justin Bieber and once again this is not a discussion on ontology this is a historical discussion this is a discussion about mythology and about how we how people how cultures understand

(1:12:05) the concept of the divine how in that light we behave how we worship what we expect after divine and what we think the divine expects from us so I'll leave the question on whether God changes are not up to you and we'll have another lecture two months from now that I'll have time to do a little bit more research on on how we develop this separate identity between the Canaanites and the Israelites in the period that we discussed that would have been too long to include in this lecture what are your questions how close have you taken us in this

(1:12:56) progression to the unification of all these God's into one God yeah so the period that I'm discussing here it's pretty much so we're writing it the the writers the writers of Joshua and judges are assumed are believed to just write years later they're not writing as these events are happening but they're writing when already we have a monarchy and we we think that it's the case because there is a monarchic bias in this writing so they are saying all these horrible things happen when we didn't have King's big or because we don't have

(1:13:47) King I think is is how the story goes so we're talking about just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE that we are having here a process that is undergoing that has started we don't know exactly when that only becomes clear to us through these writings but interestingly if we I think it's second chronicles where we learn about the reforms of Josiah and Josiah there's only one generation before the destruction of Jerusalem by nebuchadrezzar Josiah undergoes this massive religious reform where he goes down all the cities of Judah and cuts

(1:14:47) down all the vile statues or idols he cuts down all the poles that people used to worship that goddess Asherah so that this is a process that is still happening when the people of Israel or the people of Judah are exiled to Babylon it only ends in Babylon so it's only when when people come back after this experience in Babylon is when we can probably begin to see that this is already that the process is coming to its completion but we continue to hear about but I'll even in the New Testament and think of and the New Testament is by

(1:15:36) all is more becomes like a force of evil already so that can tell you that but all has been degraded to not a God that you worry about and then you condemn your people if they worship it but it's it's some kind of demon and for those of you who are familiar with the New Testament there's the story of bowel movement and belzebub was a demon that Jesus had to fight against and it's a pun on a title about that is Bell bells Abul which means simply Lord Prince and because the Jewish writers apparently loved tons they translate they write that as bells and Boo and that becomes

(1:16:32) Lord Lord Prince becomes Lord of flies and so if you ask me I would say this process of assimilation of all these different gods of absorb absorption of all these qualities and titles and capacities of all these ancient gods into Yahweh it is probably completed by the time we we get to the writings of the the Christian writings in the first century AD totally completed this is Ollie this is the only time the first writings where we see by owl not as a god the people are that people can them or whose worship people

(1:17:25) condemned but as some kind of demoted demon or lesser kind of divine or supernatural being so that if I had to guess I would say somewhere in between the last books the Tanakh and the first Christian writings and that bill said boop story is one of my favorites Bassam it's only a pun right and then some people use that to just theorize that maybe al was a god of pestilence but it's just a pun so just a side note do you find it interesting that in the Hebrew Bible all of the or some of the names like Elohim there's a there's one that starts with an S I

(1:18:25) can't remember the name now should I should I like is it interesting that they kept those names in there as opposed to just having the one name Yahweh well yes I think it's interesting I'm glad they made that decision because it's beautiful and it's very entertaining too just to follow in just one sentence sometimes we use three different words or three different names of God I think that may have to do with all these different sources that we hypothesize come together to make the Bible as we know it but some of these

(1:19:10) writings writings come from different periods and they reflect stories that were all people already knew especially all these Psalms the Psalms are the part of the Bible that from a literary perspective most resemble all these stories that that we read in in okay it's not only the Baal cycle but other stories about other heroes of the Canaanites of the people of hygge reeds and so in these stories perhaps because this is a literary style that people have been doing in in this culture for many centuries they continue to use all these different descriptions when

(1:20:04) the dis different ways of describing the gods and its qualities and other questions I'm sure it does it's by no means this was a super comprehensive review of all the

(1:21:37) archaeological record that we have for the land of Canaan I'm only talking about specifically the appearances of the word of the word Israel yeah but there's a lot of CDs that had bow or in particular but all the same way that my hometown has a particular Mary a particularly D each city had a particular bow but because remember that then this word bow in this time period after the sea peoples becomes just more and so and it's a it's a common theophoric suffix or prefix that people use not only for naming CDs but also for naming

(1:22:29) people so yeah I'm gonna have to look into that one thank you did the maps we seen up there did they come from those books there on the table or did they come from Google okay no they don't I don't think they had maps I'm not sure they they had figured out map oh you mean like these books oh okay no I thought you were asking whether we find in these stone tablet in this clay tablets if we have if I maps them but no no they don't come because these these are kind of kind of black and white boring maps you can find a lot better

(1:23:20) things on Google s1 Gus you don't have I guess we're streaming but no one has complained so far about copyright so we're actually talking 2,000 years before Christ the a thousand the 1515 to 1200 years okay so this is a history I've never known the boat so it's pretty comprehensive to say hearing that wasn't too overwhelming no wait it's just a huge I know you don't like too much information sometimes thank you thank you the scriptural versus the archaeological evidence yes this scriptural evidence is that God has

(1:24:21) multiple attributes hence different names that there is an assumption in Scripture of monotheism although God's is referred to early there is extensive text which makes it clear that the Israelite peoples welcomed others into their midst we have terrible sin jacob's tent we have the Exodus which had probably more non Jews than Jews we have extensive scriptural evidence that Jewish practice while having one main God had ancestor worship and incorporated the religions around of that Scripture in terms of archaeological evidence there's fairly

(1:25:07) extensive material which talks about a significant number of synagogues in which the records of the donors and the records of the attendees were both Jews deviant Hebrew Christians and pagans and so my reading and my understanding of both the actual text of the Hebrew and the archaeological evidence is that while there is an assumption of monotheism in the actual Jewish practice and Jesus was a good Orthodox rabbi he died a good Jewish Orthodox rabbi thanks to salt your copy or Paul he became a very different meeting and you had a different religion but he wasn't any different than any other Jewish rabbi

(1:26:00) but my said my question to you is does not the scriptural record and the archaeological record suggest that your unification of practice of Judaism being exclusively monotheistic doesn't hold up in either realm so first of all when you talk about synagogues and the people the Jewish people accepting these as you deviants I choose that would be the Christians and pagans into the their worship that we're talking about a very different period so what I cover here pretty much ends before the destruction of Jerusalem and at 587 and you're

(1:26:51) talking about many centuries later now in terms of archaeological record versus scriptural record as I said and at the almost the beginning of of this lecture I I'm using here a historical approach and so I cannot use I cannot take scripture for granted to justify a position and so this is the difference that we have here is like pretty much the difference between the Bible archaeology and Middle Eastern archaeology since we're talking about archaeology Bible archaeology was the first attempt archaeology's in this area

(1:27:47) the Holy Land trying to prove that all these stories that we read about in the Bible are true so they would go with the Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other hand and read something in the Bible and when they find something like for example when they found that there was in fact a wall that had collapsed at Jericho then there you prove this is proof that in fact this passage of the Book of Joshua in fact is historical but with further archaeological analysis and with the modern discipline of Near Eastern

(1:28:29) ecology we realized that in fact that our serious problems with our hypothesis because it just thought that the wall collapse centuries before this period that we're talking about so there's different problems that make it so that for this research I cannot assume that what's in the Bible has the same weight or from a scientific from a historical viewpoint then what we read in the Bible and this is why another thing that I mentioned is that I'm using these stories that I called myth not because I I say means because I think that they're

(1:29:21) they're not true that they don't tell us the truth about what happened but because I want to know how these people understood their journey towards figuring out their relationship with God figuring out their identity among their neighbors I'm not sure that answers your question but so these are the like the the reason I started this I thought about this lecture is that when we read the Bible the Bible take those things for granted and this presentation is not trying to destroy that position that assumes that

(1:30:08) Israel was monotheistic and simply Israel welcome there nicely their neighbors views sometimes not very nicely I'm simply just trying to explore and trying to figure out if maybe in reality that the story is not quite as we read it in the Bible and at the end of the day you have to come to and this is once again the the systems analyst and me you have to keep going until the very very very first line of code and see okay if the Bible tells us that that the truth then how did this happen how did these people

(1:30:59) become so different from everyone else why it where does that come from well how do you think that people with all of a sudden out of nowhere just come up with this innovation and if that happened when did that happen and how sir I'm pretty much getting finished yes oh yeah so to go to the point of you know the gods were you're talking about how all these other names and epithets were adopted it's something that we see in other and it occurs in the Egyptian Pantheon so the priests of different gods in different cities what at times when they were associated with powerful

(1:31:55) dynasty make their God the most powerful one and then adopt all the best epithets for that God so for a time that was a cyrus for a time that was a moon and it just depended on which priests you know were attached to the ruling dynasty and they would then take the best epithets and their God would suddenly become the most ascendant and the most powerful one in the pantheon I was just wondering it might not be entirely related to the whole story of God and Yahweh especially but just wondering since you brought up

(1:32:37) the story of El and Baal and his transition to a more powerful position is there anything in terms of action that may have happened historically to trigger that particular change in theology I so from the viewpoint of modern the modern study of philosophy that emphasizes psychology as if that were the only thing that people were writing about that is a motif that we see in pretty much not all that in many mythologies that we know like the Greeks like Mesopotamia so we see it in in Greece with this struggle between Uranus

(1:33:24) with Kronos with Zeus so this idea that the younger generation is going to displace the older general that the young male has to fight against the older male the mother will side with the the Sun to this place they all that the patriarch and Liz this cycle continues and we it's it's a motif and it I wouldn't say that it reflects a particular historical event but is perhaps trying to tell us something that happens in general in all families even though there's

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