How the God of Israel Was Born | Hacker News Reader

How the God of Israel Was Born

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There are 3 major strands of monotheism:

a) Atenism in Egypt (c. 1350 BCE)

b) Israelite / Hebrew

c) Zoroastrianism in Persia

While some scholars (like Freud) have proposed a link between (a) and (b), it remains contested and unproven.

What is, however, likely, is a link between (c) and (b), specifically that Zoroastrianism likely influenced Second Temple Judaism during the period of Persian rule over Judea, particularly ideas about cosmic dualism, angels, demons, and eschatology.

Fair point and thanks.

On Persian influence: Demons are probably more directly Babylonian than Persian. Judah got that exposure during the Exile itself, not under Persian rule. Lilith (Isaiah 34:14) is the Mesopotamian Lilitu, and Babylonian demonology (Lamashtu, Pazuzu, the utukku) was already rich on its own. Where Zoroastrian influence is a stronger case is angels as named individuals with defined roles (Michael, Gabriel, hierarchies), which show up for the first time in post-exilic texts like Daniel, plausibly modeled on the Amesha Spentas and Yazatas after contact with Achaemenid Persia. Same goes for full cosmic dualism, a Satan as an independent adversarial being rather than a role in the divine court (as in Job or Zechariah, where "satan" is a title, not a name).

It's a big topic on its own, deserving separate treatment. I deliberately scoped this piece to the older, pre-exilic layer (the El/YHWH merger through Josiah's reform).

For what it's worth, the piece isn't arguing for a single external source anyway: Canaanite (El, Baal, Asherah), Mesopotamian (the Flood mirrors Atrahasis/Gilgamesh, the creation account echoes the Enuma Elish, plus the exile-era demonology above), Egyptian, and later Persian and Hellenistic layers all leave fingerprints at different points. Judaism's formation looks less like one merger and more like several centuries of absorbing and reworking whatever was around.

That conclusion come from unknowingly defining monotheism as a religious tradition that is close or can be related to the israelite tradition. It's tautological.

In reality many human societies throughout the ages have been monotheists.

What are some of the other ones?

[1] Dinka: History, Religious Systems, and Rituals https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-94-024-2068-5_104

[2] Perspectives on Lozi traditions. https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstreams/cca7ee20-46fa-4585-b1...

Ancient China had a monotheistic religion where they worshiped Shang Di, a monotheistic God without idols, who could not be drawn, and they made yearly sacrifices to at a single Temple.

There are schools that say Hinduism is monotheistic, where Para Brahma is God, and the different "Gods" like Shiva and Vishnu are different avatars of Para Brahma. But there are a lot of schools/philosophies of Hinduism and I only have a surface level understanding.

Also, Christianity at least has never been truly monotheistic. For example the Second Council of Constantinople (I think that was the one) had to go in and weed out the great mass of pre-Christian cruft that had been snuck back in, old Babylonian and Hebrew supernatural entities cunningly disguised as "angels", and then more recently you've got the global veneration of Mary and, although this has mostly faded in the last 100 years, saints, also serving the role that lesser gods served in other religions but carefully fitted up to not make it heresy.

Islam, from my limited knowledge, does seem to be purely monotheistic despite at least one attempt to reconcile with followers of the goddesses Lat, Uzza, and Manat.

Somewhere on /r/academicbiblical there is some refutation of a link between (c) and (b) but I can't find it while I'm at work right now. I can try to dig it up tonight if you're interesting. I'm not claiming it's strictly correct, just that there is at least serious argument against the possibility that Zoarastrianism was the main driver behind the development of Israelite monotheism.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I’m interested if you could find that link later.

Here you are! Whether or not you find them compelling is up to you :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xrynt2/why_i...

-- linked from /r/academicbiblical in this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/1j1qx7q/v...

Thank you! I don’t know much about Zoroastrianism, and that discussion jumps right into the deep end, but I’ll see what I can get from it. :-)

It's arguable that - pre-Exile - the majority of the vague coalition we today refer to[0] as "Israelites" did not practice monotheism outside of rural cult centers[1], if then.

Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Qumran/LXX) Elyon apportions nations among divine sons, with Yahweh receiving Jacob - Yahweh one of El's sons (Masoretic fixes this). Kuntillet ʿAjrud, c. 800 BCE, blesses by "Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah" and "Yahweh of Teman and his asherah" -- i.e. plural localized Yahwehs, exactly how Near Eastern polytheism works. Psalm 82, God sentencing other gods to die like men.A flat denial of other gods arrives only with Deutero-Isaiah (44:6, 45:5–7), i.e., post-Persia.

I'd add a few things to your a-b-c list.

First, Mesopotamian and Egyptian summodeism: Marduk in Enūma Elish, the Ramesside Amun hymns. Akhenaten radicalized this trend.

Second, and this is unappreciated, soooooooo much of the faith passes through Greek[2] - Xenophanes "one god, greatest among gods and men," then Plato, Aristotle's unmoved mover, Stoics. Divine simplicity, immutability, omniscience, creation ex nihilo. Philo fuses all this crap, and Origen, Maimonides, Aquinas all run through Philo.

[0] "Refer to" aka with all the late-19th Century European baggage of what a "people" or a "nation" actually is.

[1] Note that even in the Bible, many centuries later, the prophets always come down from the hills into the cities, and once in the population center they generally yell at people and get yelled at. Solomon, as in biblical Solomon, built loads of temples to other gods, and it's extremely likely that the big temple - THE Temple, capitalized - was a multi-cult site. Good luck studyin any of this in the academy - I've known professional archaeologists who have changed their university rather than dip a little toe in biblical archaeology, due to how fraught everything is, and how nasty it gets very quickly.

[2] Unsurprising, since the foundational texts actually get written down in the Hellenic period. But I would argue even further than that, and would posit that the Hellenic period is the birth of the faith proper, where all the threads come together. Judaism and Christianity aren't parent and child, but more like a pair of siblings, with the latter child being something of a caboose baby. Although one could argue Islam would be the true caboose baby.

For more on this topic, the book Fields of Blood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_of_Blood) has a couple of chapters on this. It's a fascinating history.

See also perhaps "RLST 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)" (originally recorded in 2006):

* https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145

I've done a lot of reading on this topic lately. What originally grabbed my interest was reading R. Crumb's "The Book of Genesis Illustrated." It's a comic that attempts in a relatively flat way to draw the events of Genesis without any interpretation. Of course, some interpretation and error is inevitable, but it's not a book that attempts to paint things aggressively in one light or another, and people expecting an interesting satire will probably just find themselves bored.

I did not have a Christian upbringing, and outside of a few verses here and there I had really never read the Book of Genesis and could not have described it accurately to anyone. Having initially read R. Crumb's Book of Genesis Illustrated, I was baffled more than anything. This was really my first introduction to ancient writing, so a lot of things which are expected for ancient writing were very, very confusing for me.

The story made no sense. It's not so much that I disagreed with the story, but rather I could not have told you what a reader was supposed to get from the story. If I had read and disliked (as a real example) "The Scarlet Letter" I could have easily conveyed the themes of the book and the intent of the author, at least at a level of moderate competence. But what the hell was going on in the Book of Genesis? I had no idea. Why were all the best stories just a few sentences long? The Tower of Babel is an amazing visual and allegory in a conceptual sense ... but the actual story in Genesis is a mere 8 sentences. And what does it have to do with the rest of the story? It's not coherent at all. And why did people live really long previously? Why was Adam some 800-900 years old? Why is this never explained? If Adam could live to 900 years, but you'd never met anyone who lived past 80, wouldn't you want some explanation for this behavior, if even it was just something hand-wavy such as "we lived longer before the fall?" etc ..

Now, there are answers to a lot of the these questions. Most of the answers (if you ignore the ridiculousness of the apologetics) is simply that the Bible is not one book, but a huge collection of stories with different authors, telling stories for different reasons, for different audiences, and at different times. Genesis in particular is almost certainly an adaption and conglomeration of many previous myths, and many of these would have been familiar to the audience of the time. As a rough example, if you wanted to write a vampire movie in 2026, you would not need to explain to the audience what a vampire is. The audience already knows and you waste words and waste realism by explaining it.

Ultimately, these questions led me to want to read more on the topic. To me, it was impossible to understand how the Book of Genesis could possibly form the foundation of the three major Abrahamic religions, and captivate much of the population of the entire world, for much of recorded history. And again, I don't mean in some sanctimonious fedora-tipping sort of way. I just couldn't make sense of the stories whatever. They were deeply confusing to me.

Ultimately, this sort of sat around in my mind until I bumped into the inscriptions from Kuntillet Arjud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuntillet_Ajrud_inscriptions) of Yaheh and his Asherah. The visual, of a weird iron-age deity with a weird iron-age consort reignited my interest. From there, I read Mark S. Smith, Thomas Romer, and more.

I think my curiosity has been roughly satisfied, even though there are a lot of unanswered (and potentially unanswerable) questions: for instance, is the Kennite hypothesis correct? What I found is in hindsight what anyone should have expected: the Israelite religion changed significantly over time, is full of its own myth-making and navel-gazing, and of course, was heavily influenced by the local cultures and religions it coexisted and intermixed with.

Genesis is the prologue for the rest of the Torah, which is about the Hebrews. It's not supposed to be read in isolation to everything else.

"impossible to understand how the Book of Genesis could possibly form the foundation of the three major Abrahamic religions"

Maybe because it is the thing introduces Abraham? lol

I was trying to paint a picture of what it looked like from the eyes of someone with no background and no context. I'm not saying that my conclusions were correct, but instead attempting to argue that a lot of the story is propped up by cultural context, different interpretations, etc. For instance, Milton's Paradise lost interprets Satan's fall from heaven in a way that the original authors of Isaiah almost certainly never intended. To someone who was both unaware of the cultural context with which both Isaiahs were writing, and also was unfamiliar with Milton's interpretations, I would also suggest that much of Isaiah would also make no sense.

Compare this to something like a Stephen King novel. A reader can pick it up, read it without any prep or study, and understand it readily.

I'm not saying that the Bible has no cohesion or anything like that -- but that a totally unprepared modern reader probably cannot make sense of the text. And also that until recently, most Americans would have been prepared with quite a bit of cultural context for the Bible via church and other things which laid out the colloquial interpretations of the text for people from an early age.

Catholic here.

We don't actually place that much emphasis on Genesis or the Bible in general. A lot of Catholic traditions are outside of the books: the sacraments, the assumption of Mary, the Apostles and their connection to the Bishops (and Bishop of Rome/The Pope), etc. etc.

Some Christians overemphasize the written word of the Bible. But just gonna toss this out: Biblical Literalism is not part of the Catholic tradition. It simply cannot be, as many important traditions were never written down at that time.

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The importance of the Torah is that Jesus was born as a Hebrew, so understanding his religion helps us understand the life he lived. As well as the prophesies he fulfilled.

But in terms of story? It's all an allegory or metaphor. Catholics are generally comfortable with saying that, ex evolution exists, even if it's not part of the book of Genesis.

Except that original sin thing is pure Genesis. It's what introduces the entire need for salvation throughout all Nicene Christianity.

The Gnostic Christians who rejected the Old Testament entirety had to insert some other reason to require Christ. My favorite mechanism is how Marcion handled it, purely because his was more interesting than "everyone starts broken."

But yes, generally Catholics are not sola scriptura while most Protestants are.

I'll admit that my only understanding of Gnostics are the random anime references to the Demiurge or other Gnostic concepts (and nearby Wikipedia pages). It is an utterly fascinating viewpoint of the early church and the different ideas circa the 1st and 2nd century AD.

It's important for any Catholic to study that IMO, and what led us towards the Nicene Creed / council of Nicaea. So it's definitely on my todo list of historical facts to look up.

And point on the Genesis ideas like original sin. We do take from Genesis just not as much as some other churches.

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The debate and back and forth of the Gnostics with regards to the nature of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are hugely important and the very reason why the Creed was created in the first place.

So much Catholic tradition is a continuation of the decisions of our early leaders recorded in the 300s AD and onward. (And the big gap between 30 AD when Jesus likely died and 300ish AD is simply oral traditions and barely written down outside of the Gospel and Paul's letters.)

Yes, it is a shame the Bible became "a book", taken to be homogenous, when it should be approached as it is, a large collection of books which should be considered individually.

hey, if you really are interested in the tower of babel story and what it is doing in there, I highly recommend this podcast:

https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-001-the-tower-of-ba...

Scholarly work, not preachy.

by "Doug Metzger finished his Ph.D. in literature in 2011. His chief scholarly interest, following his dissertation work, continues to be 19th-century realism and postbellum American philosophy."

Thanks, I'll check this out -- it looks really interesting.

This tweet thread was pretty formative to me: makes one remember that textual criticism of the sort that’s linked here is by no means the final word on these matters.

https://x.com/omnologos/status/1870847422454280672

This tweet is written as parody, but it seems self-evident from reading Trump's tweets that they do not all come directly from the president himself. Most political offices delegate social media to an internal team, presenting as if from a unified "source" when really they speak for an organization. Given the fierce competing factions within the administration - and the sort of kreminology political reporting has been reduced to in the current environment - this is precisely the kind of modern situation where textual analysis is helpful in determining who is speaking.

I mean...don't overcomplicate it, the President is the one who is speaking.

Is he influenced by people in the room? Sure. But to say that with the intent of it being a rebuttal to what I offered completely misses the point.

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