What's the ISBN?
Mustang
Jehovah Unmasked!!
by Gill 23 Replies latest watchtower scandals
-
-
-
mustang
The reviews mentioned "Pretender Gods"; there are others who discuss this, such as Past Shock: The Origin of Religion and Its Impact on the Human Soul
(ISBN 1-885395-08-6) by Jack Barranger. Probably Barranger coined that phrase; I'm not sure.
(Other books or pamphlets by Barragner & co. include one called "Jumpin' Jehovah". Barranger writes with others, such as Tice and has a confusing list of publications, many of which are small pamphlets or booklets of limited circulation.)
Similar to this is Bramley's discussion of "Custodians" (The Gods Of Eden, by William Bramley, ISBN:0-380-71807-3) and Zechariah Sitchin's discussion of Anunnaki in his many books.
The pretender god business from these and other such books leads to the thought that "Star Trek" may not be far from wrong. Cap'n Kirk and crew may out there and messing around like "gods".
Oh, but they have the "Prime Directive" and are prohibited from doing that; hmmm, well others before them could mess around with lesser civilizations in that fashion. And maybe they did!!!
Many of the star Trek episode's deal with such faux paux. So, some Kirk-like critter starts a "Jehovah business" on this far flung planet at the end of the galaxy. Then the lot of them get "recalled" and that's the end of that incident.
But somebody comes back and tries the "Jesus business"; that gets off to a false start because the Jerusalem Church becomes overrun by James and his "Modified Judaism" version of things (the Nazarean Church, look up Desposyni for some insight).
So the space critters strike down Paul on the road to Damascus and he starts the competing Pauline version of things. They "take this on the road" and make it to Rome. In about two centuries, Constantine hits these guys up and voila: the Roman Catholic Church!!!
Oh, and don't forget that the Orthodox or "Eastern Church" is still in the running. Expect to hear a lot more about that in the near future.
But, somebody up there doesn't like the way things are going. I think the Trinity, for one, pissed "someone upstairs" off. So, now the "Islam business" is kicked off to run counter to the RCC. And don’t forget the Eastern Church is still out there ticking.
And so it goes, until modern days. The Adventist (First, Second & Last) get kicked off; Master Smith and the Angel get the Mormons on the road;
and lest we forget, CTR launches his thing and goes to Brooklyn.
(and you can’t get rid of those pesky "conspiracy theorists" that insist on dragging the Masons into the act; for my money, Rutherford put the end to that with purging Russellisms. But that's another story.)
and on and on it goes...
Ironically, maybe the JW's were on to something: this whole thing is a big Science Fiction gig, that "just keeps on giving". But JW's got too rigid and strict and can't see past their noses any more. Maybe the Mormons are closer to getting the clue: they have their sci-fi like thoughts on the matter.
Mustang
-
Narkissos
you may be correct on the usage of the divine name in it's fullest form being of Israelite origin.
That's not exactly what I meant. For instance Yhw3 is attested as either a toponym or an ethnical name in the Se`ir area (Edom) in Egyptian lists dating back to the 14th or 13th century BC, whereas Yhwh is only attested in Israelite names from the 9th century onward. One Kuntillet `Ajrud inscription mentions a yhwh tmn (Yhwh of Teman), pointing again to Edom (cf. Habakkuk 3:3; other indications point to Sinai, in the same general Southern area (zeh sinay in Judges 5:5 and Psalm 68:9 may describe Yhwh as "the one from Sinai"). All such indications point to a direction opposite to Ugarit (Ras Shamra, North of Palestine). So the hypothesis that the worship of Yhwh might have been introduced into Judah by the Southern tribes of Qenites/Qenizzites (E. Lipinskí) makes some sense. Funnily enough that would make Yhwh originally the god of Cain (Qayin, the eponym ancestor of the Qenites).
As far as Moses being the first to know of the name in it's fullest sense a Catholic encyclopedia said this,
"Perhaps it is preferable to say that the sacred name, though perhaps in a somewhat modified form, had been in use in the patriarchal family before the time of Moses. On Mt. Horeb God revealed and explained the accurate form of His name, Jahveh.
- The sacred name occurs in Genesis about 156 times; this frequent occurrence can hardly be a mere prolepsis.
- Gen., iv, 26, states that Enos "began to call upon the name of the Lord [Jahveh]", or as the Hebrew text suggests, "began to call himself after the name of Jahveh".
- Jochabed, the mother of Moses, has in her name an abbreviated form Jo (Yo) of Jahveh. The pre-Mosaic existence of the Divine name among the Hebrews accounts for this fact more easily than the supposition that the Divine element was introduced after the revelation of the name.
- Among the 163 proper names which bear an element of the sacred name in their composition, 48 have yeho or yo at the beginning, and 115 have yahu or yah and the end, while the form Jahveh never occurs in any such composition. Perhaps it might be assumed that these shortened forms yeho, yo, yahu, yah, represent the Divine name as it existed among the Isralites before the full name Jahveh was revealed on Mt. Horeb. On the other hand, Driver (Studia biblica, I, 5) has shown that these short forms are the regular abbreviations of the full name. At any rate, while it is not certain that God revealed His sacred name to Moses for the first time, He surely revealed on Mt. Horeb that Jahveh is His incommunicable name, and explained its meaning".
The problem is we have very little historical information about "Israel" prior to the 9th century BC. Most if not all that we have "learnt" about the Patriarchs, Moses etc., down to the so-called "United monarchy" belongs to later legend. The text of Genesis is definitely post-exilic (which doesn't mean that some stories are not older).