Many today ask me why, do I bother with the stories of the Hebrew Testament they are old stories of the past, of peoples whose cultural norms are not relevant anymore in this day and age so much has changed and so much new information is available.
For me its like asking why do still you read the epic of Homer? His epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, writing about the ancient Greeks, being a very anthropocentric people who worshipped the power and ability of humans, who had an enormous effect on Western culture and so has the Hebrew writings good or bad.
No, neither is it a book of historic or scientific facts, nor do I believe it was written by god or a book of doctrine, rules or set of beliefs to live by, but for me it is something that raises and inspire many questions moreover, often it is a collection of writings on how NOT to do things as opposed how to do things.
The point is for me, it is a story about the early development of ideas and yes, we have moved on today, but many forgot the basics why people reasoned in a certain way and why they abandoned such ideas. This is important because in a roundabout more modern way people seem to make the same mistakes today, many made in the past although they may not realise it.
I certainly do not want to rebuild a temple and burn animals in front of it, I think it is primitive to do so and I believe any god that need such “offerings” is a primitive god indeed.
I do not wish to do so no more than I would want to do a Homeric Sacrifice wearing special clothing, engaging in symbolic actions, such as scattering barley grains, doing a ritualistic animal sacrifice, having a shared meal after the ceremony that often served the function of providing food for the participants, and then elaborate the ceremony in a play that the marked nature of the event as an expression of mortal relations with gods.
As interesting as it may be to reconstruct such ancient cultural events, the idea of burning animals do not appeal to me, it leaves me with smoke filled eyes.
I start with this example because I do believe that when the first temple was razed to the ground and those engaging in cultic worship exiled to Babylon they should have realised there is a deeper message: Do not try to please supernatural powers with primitive rituals.
According to the Hebrew Scriptures, Solomon’s Temple, also known as the First Temple or in Hebrew the Holy Temple ( בֵּית־הַמִּקְדָּשׁ: Beit HaMikdash) was built in ancient Jerusalem, where, according to rabbinic sources it stood for about 410 years and was destroyed by the army of Nebuchadnezzar II after the Siege of Jerusalem of 587 BCE. It was subsequently replaced with the Second Temple in the 6th century BCE.
The Second Temple ( בֵּית־הַמִּקְדָּשׁ הַשֵּׁנִי, Beit HaMikdash HaSheni) was the Temple which stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period, between 516 BCE and 70 CE Traditional rabbinic literature state that the Second Temple stood for 420 years. The destruction of the second Temple really, sealed the fate of the Temple idea and dispersed the Jewish diaspora into the world.
Heaven is My Throne
Isaiah 66
1: This is what the LORD says: “Heaven is My throne,
and earth is My footstool.
What kind of house will you build for Me?
Or where will be My place of repose?
2: Has not My hand made all these things?
And so they came into being,
declares the LORD.
This is the one I will esteem:
he who is humble and contrite in spirit,
who trembles at My word.
3: Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who slays a man;
whoever sacrifices a lamb is like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
whoever presents a grain offering is like one who offers pig’s blood;
whoever offers incense is like one who praises an idol.
Indeed, they have chosen their own ways
and delighted in their abominations.
4: So I will choose their punishment
and I will bring terror upon them,
because I called and no one answered,
I spoke and no one listened.
But they did what was evil in My sight
and chose that in which I did not delight.”
From the above scripture it seems pretty clear that sacrifices and a temple does not suit a deity who cannot be limited or boxed in by a Temple or manipulated with offerings.
Even though Religion has been dismissed as the opium of the people by Karl Marx, studies by Anthropologists suggests that belief in all-powerful Gods was absolutely vital for human development.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have long held that it was the advent of agriculture which allowed large communities to live together and form cooperative societies. Archaeologists have found that large ceremonial monuments, such as the buried megaliths at Gobekli tepe, in Turkey, seem to precede big farming communities, and must have been built by communities working together under one belief system.
Anthropologist and social scientists proved that religious people are more likely to be cooperative, because they sense the watchful eye of an all-powerful deity monitoring their actions and conclude that a large part of the success of humanity lies in the ‘hands of the gods – whether they are real or not.’
The question does god exist or not does not matter when one look at past development. Yes, there was a lot a conflict and wars, but many successful societies be they Egyptians or Babylonians, they structured their societies around the idea of a gods or goddesses.
Often it is not the promises and rewards that shaped societies but the threats and punishment if they did not please the gods. A belief in divine retribution or supernatural punishment may have fostered ‘good’ behaviour which promoted trust, cooperation and fairness in dealings with others. This was often true within a closed society as well as other satellite societies that developed around it that adopted the same belief systems.
Israel emerges into the historical record in the last decades of the 13th century BCE, at the very end of the Late Bronze Age when the Canaanite city-state system was ending. The milieu from which Israelite religion emerged was accordingly Canaanite.
According to Exodus 6:2–3: YHWH says “ I revealed myself to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as Ēl Shaddāi, but was not known to them by my name, YHVH.” So name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had a name of a Canaanite god, El.
El, “the kind, the compassionate,” “the creator of creatures,” was the chief of the Canaanite gods, and he, not Yahweh, was the original “God of Israel”—the word “Israel” is based on the name El rather than Yahweh. El was also the supreme god of the Mesopotamian Semites in the pre-Sargonic period.
El lived in a tent on a mountain from whose base originated all the fresh waters of the world, with the goddess Asherah as his consort. This pair made up the top tier of the Canaanite pantheon. According to The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, It seems almost certain that the God of the Jews evolved gradually from the Canaanite El, who was in all likelihood the “God of Abraham”… If El was the high God of Abraham—Elohim, the prototype of Yahweh—Asherah was his wife, and there are archaeological indications that she was perceived as such before she was in effect “divorced” in the context of emerging Judaism of the 7th century BCE.
After evolving from its monolatristic roots, the belief in the existence of many gods but with the consistent worship of only one deity, Judaism became strictly monotheistic. No consensus has been reached by academics on the origins of monotheism in ancient Israel, but Yahweh “clearly came out of the world of the gods of the Ancient Near East.”
Yahweh, a typical ancient Near Eastern “divine warrior”, who leads the heavenly army against Israel’s enemies was the national god of the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel namely Samaria and Judah. His exact origins are disputed, although they reach back to the early Iron Age and even the Late Bronze. His name may have begun as an epithet of El, head of the Bronze Age Canaanite pantheon, but the earliest plausible mentions are in Egyptian texts that place him among the nomads of the southern Transjordan.
Polytheism, the worship of multiple gods and the concept of God having multiple persons, such as the Christian doctrine of Trinity, are equally unimaginable in Judaism. The idea of God as a duality or trinity is heretical in Judaism – it is considered akin to polytheism.
So, we see in Judaism, God has been conceived in a variety of ways. According to the rationalist stream of Judaism articulated by Maimonides (known as the RAMBAM), which later came to dominate much of official traditional Jewish thought, God is understood as the absolute one, indivisible, and
All this above is just part of my interest in the development of god that scholars can gather from analysing the Hebrew scriptures, but it is not just the development of god or religion that interest me but the development or morality and ideas of good and bad. This is a very complex subject and I rely a lot on the work done by Maimonides.
In Judaism, evil is not real, it is per se not part of God’s creation, but comes into existence through man’s bad actions. Humankind’s inner inclination Yetzer hara (יֵצֶר הַרַע, “the evil inclination”), or yetzer ra יֵצֶר רַע, “an evil inclination”) refers to the congenital inclination to do evil, by violating the will of God. Human beings are responsible for their choices.
However, Jews and non-Jews have the free will to choose good (life in olam haba) or bad (death in heaven). (Deuteronomy 28:20) Judaism stresses obedience to God’s 613 commandments of the Written Torah (see also Tanakh) and the collective body of Jewish religious laws expounded in the Oral Torah and Shulchan Aruch (see also Mishnah and the Talmud). In Judaism, there is no prejudice in one’s becoming good or evil at the time of birth, since full responsibility comes with Bar and Bat Mitzvah, when Jewish boys become 13, and girls become 12 years old.
As for the Devil or Satan most Jews do not believe in the existence of a supernatural omnimalevolent figure. Traditionalists and philosophers in medieval Judaism adhered to rational theology, rejecting any belief in rebel or fallen angels, and viewing evil as abstract. The Rabbis usually interpreted the word satan as it is used in the Tanakh as referring strictly to human adversaries and rejected all of the Enochian writings mentioning Satan as a literal, heavenly figure from the Biblical canon, making every attempt to root them out.
Nonetheless, the word satan has occasionally been metaphorically applied to evil influences, such as the Jewish exegesis of the yetzer hara (“evil inclination”) mentioned in Genesis 6:5. Rabbinical scholarship on the Book of Job generally follows the Talmud and Maimonides in identifying “the satan” from the prologue as a metaphor for the yetzer hara and not an actual entity. Satan is rarely mentioned in Tannaitic literature but is found in Babylonian aggadah.
So, again for me it is interesting how ideas of good or bad or of a supernatural deity developed through many centuries I believe these ideas is still developing and being refined. Many Christians refer to the writings as the Old Testament believing that Christ is the “New Testament” but that is just a matter of perspective from a certain belief system for many others who do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, be they followers of Judaism or people like me who are purely interested in the development of ideas in literature or many others, the story has not ended yet.
Phil in Motion 