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March 4 - June 28, 2020
At the mouth of the Orontes River near the border of modern day Turkey and Syria.
The theory being that, having been castrated, El is metaphorically as well as literally impotent.
El can no longer rule, because he’s got no dick, but he can still try to elevate his favorite over the usurper.
Yam is also the god of the sea. I did not remember that from back at his introduction.
Much like Athena.
I feel like deification of death is pretty common in other religions. I had not realized that it is so rare in the near East.
Sounds lovely
Not unlike Innana
It’s a bit odd how many other gods preceded Jesus into hell.
Seems a shame, sounds like he would make such a nice king.
Anath is 100% Baal’s muscle
And the lion shall lie with the lamb?
Is that a feature of Levantine climate?
Especially those which personify the crops themselves.
Because their deaths are all horrible and, in some manner, traumatizing?
Imagine how heavily influenced they would have been were they actually an indigenous group whose religion began within and then diverged from the religion of the canaanites?
So the beginning was added most recently?
Perhaps more so than they did his contemporaries.
As in other creation myths, the chaos that preceded creation was imagined as a sea or “waters.”
Light being the beginning of order in the universe.
Ostensibly man is the product of his own works in a bad way, we have caused our own fall from paradise. However, even if we use the power we hold over our own destiny in a manner that is harmful, the mere use of that power demonstrates our strength. For good or ill, we control our own fate.
It does not contradict, but is totally alien to, the religious sentiments of the Elohim myth.
I would think it more likely near a desert region than in one. The actual inhabitants of the desert would likely not look on it so hostilely. The people who lived next to it might.
Apparently one of his ribs was feminine.
Each gender has been reduced by the loss of the other.
Dillmun, the guardian where Upanitishtim dwelled.
So, these traditions do not recognize a local temple or holy city as the center of the world. They do, however, continue to envision the center of the world as important to creation, or at least, to the creation of man.
Interesting. Our curse is to know too much.
By protecting the tree of life and its fruits from the grubby hands of humanity?
Not disobedience, but hubris.
I’ve always wondered about the preference for shepherds over farmers. It is reminiscent of a dispute that runs continuously right through the A Fistful of Dollars, but it’s odd that the Hebrew Bible comes down so thoroughly on one side.
Interesting, it can be a story about how artisans abandoned farming and took up a trade. They did so as penance for their sins.
The first murderer is also a creator of weapons. “The blade itself” and all that.
Was there a heroic tradition among the Ancient Hebrews similar to that of the Greeks?
The stories were important to keep even if they implicitly undermined the dominant theme of an omniscient and omnipotent God.
At least it was not because we made too much noise.
In the same region (the Taurus Mountains in Southern Turkey) where the Ugaritic tradition placed the abode of El. Is this significant? Maybe not. Presumably most of the rivers in the Levant run south out of the Taurus Mountains, that and the distance of those mountains, may just make them a good setting for legends, and a good place to imagine events that occurred “far away.”
In Judaism, even in those myths and stories that undermine God’s omnipotence, regret seems to be outside of the range of emotions attributed to God. The Hebrew God does NOT regret, it seems contrary to God’s nature to even consider regret an option.
The same sin that brought down Adam and Eve, right? Hubris. Also the sin that brought down Tydeus, Odysseus (when he shouted his name to the Cyclops), the guy who was blasted out of the air leaping the walls of Thebes, Bellerophon, and Icarus (who literally flew too close to the sun).
It always sounded to me a little like Hod is actually afraid of us.
Which is being reimagined hear not as communion, but as trespass.
They follow the pattern and norms of any creation myth.
This is when we shift from the cosmology and fantastical mythology described above to the history and mythology of the birth of Israel, I am guessing.
Does it? I guess there’s Utnapishtum and there’s the guy who married Innana. Are there many others? Are Gilgamesh and other heroes “chosen?”
And Islam
Or at least that they represent mythologized stories that due date back to a society made up primarily of herders who travelled between regular locales in the near East, and that those stories may have used names of actual leaders of the community and certain archetypal traits (the dutiful servant, the ill-suited favorite son, the wily and ambitious innovator) that were perceived as being associated with those rulers.
What’s a “lesser cattle?” Is this a term for a combination of sheep, goats and other smaller livestock? Were there smaller or less useful / inferior cows in the near East or in parts of the near East?
The god is connected to a people, not to a place.
It is fairly common to portray our ancestors as practicing idealized versions of our own religion, and holding idealized versions of our own beliefs.
Who, likewise, lived primarily as herders.
