A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Which seems consistent with the idea of their god being connected to the Patriarch’s family, rather than to a place, or even the people as a whole. If this is the god of MY father then ,once he has passed away, I will represent the community before that god, the one that found my family to be special and unique.

This, I think, is going to represent a new concept in religious ideas. The idea of implicit faith in the divine.

Because apparently profane catastrophes like defeat in war will take on a sacred aspect and become acts in a divine drama.

Meaning the first description of religious practices which are more or less ignored in the stories of the patriarchs.

Placing the settlement of Jacob within the Hyksos period when Semitic speaking immigrants settled the northeastern delta, and the Exodus within the period of the Late Bronze Age Collapse is both natural and typical. It’s difficult to resist proposing such a theory. Unfortunately every such theory has fallen apart upon close scrutiny.

The picture has grown murkier, not clearer, in the years since Eliade wrote this book.

They may have originally been compared to archetypes that they matched, with greater or lesser perfection. Even if this were true these characters have since become defined entirely by those archetypes. The archetype is all that remains. In a way their historicity, and their actual unique personalities have become irrelevant. They serve now merely as examples of the archetypes that they represent, and the narrative roles they fulfill. Seems odd to think of a flesh and blood person making his way through the trivial vicissitudes of life, only to later be identified as the personification of some religion-historical force. Seems odder to be a neighbor who never got along with that guy. There had to have been some other member of the ethnic group/household led by Abraham who thought he was a jerk. What would that person think to know that the local good-old boy community leader who he thought totally full of shit is remembered 4,000 years later as the font of the most influential religious movement in history. Imagine learning that 4,000 years from now Chazz Uliano would be thought of as the key-stone of an entire civilization.

Or more likely, a person from some region to the south or of something shade of complexion. The term “negro” and it’s considerable baggage would have been entirely absent in Egypt, and no Egyptian term would have carried the same baggage as the racial terms used in the modern Western World to describe people with dark complexions whose families came, in some portion, from sub-Saharan Africa.

Now we’re getting pretty fantastical.

This is a pretty broad assertion, and assumes a great deal about a hypothetical person’s individual preferences based on nothing more than their religious background.

Only in the loosest possible sense.

I believe I remember learning that large scale settlement in the Jezreel Valley, and in the highlands of eastern Israel increased significantly during the LBC.

It’s a great name; it encapsulates this idea that the Hebrew God is a being whose existence is a product of its own will.

It never even occurred to me as an assertion that could be questioned. Did the Gnostics, or some number of Gnostics identify one of the two as true God and the other as the Demiurge?

The first is a god defined by its relationship to a group of people, the second a people defined by their relationship to God.

Why?

There worship is proscribed, but their existence is not challenged.

The struggle against polytheism is a dominant theme in much of the Old Testament, implying that it was written when polytheism was still a fairly popular religious movement at the time.

Yahweh is anthropomorphised, but he is not human. Yahweh remains fundamentally other.

The problem with omniscience and omnipotence is that they’re fundamentally inflexible.

By whom?

Hardened, made more inflexible. This presumes that the strict monotheism demanded by the prophets actually existed. Their repeated demands that it be imposed imply that it had not hardened nearly as much as they had hoped.

He needs be imagined as a being that is wholly incomprehensible. The fact that he is imagined by humans in a manner so alien to humanity and how humans think might be the most compelling argument for God’s actual existence. Had we invented God, God would be at least somewhat comprehensible by our standards.

If that was the language that the Israelites were accustomed to using when pledging their national devotion to another, it may well be the language they used in imagining the pledge of their national allegiance to a deity as well.

I don’t think very much is described except for a description of the tabernacle.

Making this, potentially, a fairly typical custom for the ancestors of the Israelites and their neighbors, or at least those who shared their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

I mean, you have a sacred space defined by the tent, and you have a sacred object, it would seem odd not to put your sacred object into your sacred space.

Though, couldn’t this imply that the Yahwistic faith of the era of the Judges was less absolute than was remembered by the chroniclers who compiled their stories in those stories’ final forms two or three (or really, up to six) centuries later?

Loathed or hated

A thing presented or offered to a god.

I always liked the idea of determining the will of the gods by seemingly random tests. If nothing else, it wonderfully encapsulates the idea that nothing is truly random, and those things which should be reveal the secret will of those who constructed the system.

Related to the Hebrew word Kohen?

These could all be reasons to suppose that the earliest forms of a Judaism emerged from Canaanite polytheism, rather than from a largely hypothetical desert religion.

A chain connecting biblical prophets to pre-historic shamans is honestly one that I had never before thought of. It seems to make sense, however.

Fatherhood being a form of creation.

Is Zeus a sky god, a storm god, or both?

But also in the sacred enclosures of the Semitic Near East and among the Sumerians, no?

I know that this was a feature of Celtic religion, I don’t know it to be universal among religions practiced by Indo-European speaking societies. In fact, I don’t know of it as a practice anywhere outside of Celtic speaking regions. Romans, Greeks, Germans, Hittites, Slavs, Hindu, Vedic and evening the Norse all left written accounts of their myths, gods and religious practices.

Meaning that if they are similar structures composed of similar parts found in distinct locales among people with common linguistic and cultural, if not biological, ancestors, then those structures likely derived from the common ancestor. It seems sound. I guess convergent evolution is a possibility, but as the number of convergences increases it seems increasingly unlikely. Further, even convergent evolution might imply the inheritance of a structure that can be easily adapted to the form that repeatedly emerges.

The whole society? That seems like a difficult thing to reconstruct out of linguistic tools.

The Brahmin, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas of traditional Hinduism (notably minus the Shudras, whom I presume Eliade believes to be the indigenous conquered inhabitants of India); or the Noble, Cleric, Commoner of medieval Europe. The Celtic tradition arguably drew distinctions between warriors, druids / priests, and farmers. While Greece and Rome had nobles, priests and commoners, the priesthood was very tightly bound in each society to the nobility.

This is a slightly different split: rather than Warrior, Priest, Farmer there is Ruler, Warrior, Farmer.

I feel like he is now just throwing these teens around at random.

We have, again, omitted the Shudras.

Actually, the use of the same divine names by Hittites and Hindu is fairly fascinating.

The sacred writings of Zoroaster.

We’re there free men who didn’t own cows? Presumably, somewhere, there was a free man who just ate his last cow.

Who are three different mythological characters from different myths.

This is more compelling.

True, though I am not certain that the division was reflected in Scandinavian society.