Monotheism in the middle east

[Clair B]

This is the first in a series of post based on my notes (mostly) from  Cassuto, Umberto., "A Commentary on the Book of Genesis: Part 1, from Adam to Noah (Genesis 1-6:8) translated form Hebrew by Israel Abrahams" , Jerusalem, The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1944.  I'll refer to this as "[UC]" below.

Monotheism

• Monotheism is the idea that there is one, single God.  Polytheism is the idea that many gods exist.  Most primitive are polytheist. 
• Some early middle eastern religions began to approach monotheism, such as Amenhotep IV [UC 8], who attributed the creation to one of the gods, the sun-god Aten.  It appears that some of his predecessors held the same idea. 
• Most Middle Eastern polytheistic religious texts begin with a theogeny, or the story of the origin of the gods, couched in epic poems [UC 7].  There is evidence of the bible responding to these earlier texts, and that knowledge of these texts were common at the time Genesis, Isaiah, Psalms & Job were written. 
  
• Yahweh is not included in a theogeny -- because he always existed, a key concept of monotheism.  Nor do the Israelites have festivals commemorating events in Yahweh's life -- because he is non-changing, so there is nothing to commemorate.  Festivals are about historic events of Israel

[Geoffrey Green]

Didn't know abt the last bullet point.  Thanks for sharing.

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From: Clair B <cla...@gmail.com>
To: ol...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, February 12, 2010 3:06:27 PM
Subject: [OT] Monotheism in the middle east