miggidy & Heresy :
The quotes on the different subjects are from a man is a professor of ancient history and mythology , they are not mine therefore there will be some time before I can respond to your arguments. In the meantime read this :
A Brief History of God
We can, with fair ease track the development of the Judeo-Christian belief system. An examination which, though it does not "disprove" religion, Judaism, or Christianity as it were, raises serious substantive questions about the nature of the worship, and the validity of many modern practices. Yahweh (Later known by mistranslation as Jehovah to the western world) was originally known just as Yah, possibly Yeh. It was written in ancient Hebrew as YH because ancient Hebrew did not write vowels; the language simply let the reader fill them in. Yahweh (As I will refer to the deity in the rest of this treatise) evolved out of the native Canaanite pantheon of gods.
While the bible does claim that the Jews came to Canaan and conquered the region, notably in the Hebrew Bible in the books of Judges and Joshua. Archaeological evidence suggests otherwise. It is extremely likely, considering the archeological evidence, that Jews were in fact native to the area. The Books of Judges and Joshua themselves contradict one another, quite irreproachably. The Book of Judges claims that the conquest of Canaan took an extended period of time, in which the Hebrews faced many set backs, but over time various local groups pushed the boundaries outwards. Joshua however, claims that the Jews stormed the area, conquering it within five years, another prospect entirely.
The archeological evidence however, is not sufficient for many. For some, the evidence is but secondary to the written word of the bible. That is why it is necessary to again look to the Bible and archeology, as well as other groups in the region. Religion, like all social institutions, does not develop in a vacuum, and it is subject to interference by the factors of the day. The Jews came to Canaan, in what is generally considered the defining event of Jewish history, still celebrated by Passover, the Jewish exodus from Egypt. Evidence outside the bible is quite contradictory. Though the writing of the story itself does not contain many inconsistencies, certainly the originator of the story had some travels in Egypt. For one, in all the vast hieroglyphic inscriptions left by the Egyptians, in which they detail, painfully sometimes, the people they come in contact with, there is only one mention of the Jews. There is but one mention of a group of people named the Israelites in an inscription on a monument by the Pharaoh Sheshonk (the biblical Shishak). This is in fact strange indeed, if the Jews were enslaved as they bible claims, it is amazing that the Egyptians did not mention them in any meaningful way. However a vacuum of evidence is not disproof.
What is perhaps more important is that we have records of the story an exodus from Egypt. We have numerous records of this story, what is important about that is that we have these records from other peoples in the area. In fact, a story about an exodus from Egypt by a defining character akin to Moses was in other cultures before the Jews long before we ever have a written record of the story in Jewish circles. By the time the Jews adopted it into their belief system the story was an incredibly popular myth circulating around the Levant in a number of belief systems, all believing that they had been exiled.
This is not the only story to have been borrowed. The most obvious one is the story of Noah and the Ark. Long have people pointed to the Epic of Gilgamesh and its story of a flood that wiped out most of humanity except for one man as proof that there was some flood. The similarity, it turns out, is not coincidental. In the original Sumerian version, the sky god Enlil was angered with humanity and decided to punish them with a flood, sparing only the most righteous man, a man by the name of Ziusudra. By the time of the Epic of Gilgamesh the man's name had changed to Utnapishtim, to reflect the language change of the day. However, this myth was popular and spread to the Hurrians, and eventually later found its way into the Hebrew belief system. This process is known as syncretism, a borrowing of one religion to another. The ancient world did not look down upon this.
So, it is highly unlikely that the Jews ever fled Egypt, or that they were ever there at all. Most likely the only contact they had with them directly was during Egypt's days of trading in ancient Syria. This view is supported by archeological evidence, which places them as native inhabitants of Canaan, one that took part of Canaan culture, originally fully believed in the Canaan religion, but was an ethnic subgroup.
So where then, is the proof that Yahweh, and Jewish beliefs stemmed from Canaanite religion, since Judaism is so different? The evidence is quite numerous, that chronicles a slow change from the Canaanite mainstream, to an offshoot, to an eventual establishment of a religion in its own right. The Jews were originally, as were all Canaanites, a polytheistic religion. The Canaanites worshiped El as the supreme god, but El was a distant an uninvolved god. Most commonly they worshiped Baal who was an active god in the world, and a storm and sky god. The Canaanites believed that there were a number of divine manifestations of Baal, collectively called the Baalim. One of these Baalim was Yah (Yahweh). It should be noted that all this is taking place before the writing of any of the passages in the Hebrew Bible. Among the Hebrews over time Yah took on stronger and stronger powers and gained more worship. This process is not uncommon; something that happens in many polytheistic religions is that one god gains favoritism and possibly eventually gets worshipped by itself.
The name Yah itself is a reflection of its Baalim origins. The word Yah is not a name, but a title. It comes from the Aramaic word meaning to blow, as in a storm god's wind. The original Jews, even after Yahweh took primacy, were polytheistic. The Jews continued to worship the old Canaanite gods alongside Yahweh, only worshipping Yahweh as supreme. There is ample evidence to support this. Ashtarte (also known as Ishtar, or Inanna) was worshipped as Yahweh's divine consort. There are numerous remains left by the Jews to testify this. For one there was a shrine to Ashtarte within the Temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem. Moreover pottery has been found depicting Yahweh in the center of the piece, and Ashtarte next to him, represented as consorts often are in ancient near eastern art. The Decalogue itself, part of the book of Deuteronomy one of the earlier books to be written reflects this. The commandment states that, "Thou shalt hold no god before me, for I am a jealous god." It does not however, say that there are no other gods. And the Jewish practice reflected this. They worshipped other gods, but never on the level as Yahweh.
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