Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

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"The Bible" is not a single coherent text, but rather a collection of hundreds or thousands of years of oral tradition that was created and passed on by various people at various times for various purposes, and then collected and edited again by different people for different purposes.

There are layers of edits that you can tease out with careful reading, and they can be supported by archeological evidence from sites all around the near east.

It is not remotely controversial that the Hebrews/Israelites/Canaanites/Judeans were originally polytheistic, with a pantheon built around Canaanite gods (El, Ashera, etc), just like all of their neighbors and then gradually became henotheistic (our god is the best god), and then finally monotheistic (there is only one god). Pure monotheism was a very late development, and a lot of the conflicts in the bible is straightforwardly interpreted as describing a conflict between Yahwist henotheism and traditional near-eastern polytheism. Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods.

There are also completely retellings of polytheistic myths in the Bible which are basically a find-replace of Ba'al, etc, with either "El" or "Yahweh" or both.

This is all absolutely correct. To amplify this point for people unfamiliar with it, the two creation stories are:

1. God separates the light from the darkness, the earth from the water, and creates all the plants and animals and peoples of the world.

2. The LORD God creates the garden of Eden, makes Adam from mud and Eve from his rib, plants a tree of knowledge and tree of life, etc.

Already there's a divergence: Adam is supposedly the first man in the second story, but in the first story, all the peoples of the world have already been created. But the more interesting divergence is in the name of the responsible God. This often flies over the head of readers in English, but notice that the first story isn't the "LORD God", just "God". This is because in Hebrew, the name of God in the first story is "Elohim", while in the second, it's "YHVH" -- a name too holy for Jews to pronounce, so they just say "Hashem" ("the name"), although if you're naughty you can say "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" or whatever. Why the difference?

A clue is that "Elohim" is a pluralised word in Hebrew. Once Judaism became fully monotheistic, this became interpreted as something like "The Wings of God" -- a sort of abstract all-encompassing Godly aura, rather than the pointed and personified manifestation of the divine, which is YHVH. But this is a bit of a tortured post-rationalisation, and isn't explicitly supported by the text. It's much more straightforward to read "Elohim" as simply "the gods", which is probably how it was read when the text was first assembled, with a henotheistic YHVH text being appended to an earlier polytheistic text.

Even the first commandment -- "I am YHVH, your God, and you shall have no other Gods before me" -- reads better as a henotheistic rather than a monotheistic text. It doesn't say there are no other gods. It pretty strongly implies the opposite. It just says that the other gods aren't for you.

It's also worth noting - the Bible isn't a single book, and it never was. It's 66 or 73 separate books (depending on the flavor of Christianity), bound together in a single binding. Much more of an anthology than a single book. The books were separated in time, authorship, culture, and even language. Never intended to be taken together as a single document.

> Never intended to be taken together as a single document.

Well, that's clearly untrue. People all over the world intend for you to do that right now.

The original author/copier intends.

The original copier?

Or "the earliest copier". Someone writes a story from an oral tradition down. It gets copied. Someone else copies the copy, and adapts the story to fit his own narrative.

The concept of authorship is a highly modern one.

Obviously not the intent of the original authors or the people who decided to compile these documents into an authoritative anthology.

Not convinced "all over the world" as a fair representation. Biblical literalists treat it as a single work, and they are mostly American or follow American leadership and tradition.

They also usually pick a particular version of "the Bible". Martin Luther's version, which was the Catholic version with some bits taken out. They also usually regard the Catholics who compiled that particular version as heretics. They also usually prefer a particular 17th century translation (so missing a lot of more recent scholarship and discoveries), and sometimes even a particular late 19th century (I think?) edition of that translation.

The preference for the KJV is quite amusing given it means social conservatives who presumably vote Republican are relying on the authority of a gay monarch.

>Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods.

What do you mean by this? I can think of signs of a pantheon in general but not particularly in the creation myths.

Presumably "and god said let us make man in our image". Although the monotheists can claim it is the pluralis majestatis, that doesn't seem to be a feature elsewhere when god talks.

compare Genesis chapter 1 with Genesis chapter 2. they are 2 pretty different creation myths. chapter 1:27 and chapter 2:21 certainly read like 2 separate creation stories for humans that have been jammed together without really fitting

See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.

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