Origins of YHWH (page 2)

jayhawk1

Dansk, pretty cool. There is so much about our world that is lost on people who choose to stay within the safe confines of their religion. My father-in-law, who travels the world as part of his job and has gone to just about every type of religious service there is, once told me after attending so many different religious services that there is no doubt if we go back far enough all religions of the world have one common beginning.

Gill

With the nature of the world being cyclical, it's hardly surprising then that we just keep recycling the same 'stuff' over and over, with it all evolving one generation after the next, but still with its roots at the beginnings of human existence.

yaddayadda

Madame Blavatsky on the tetragrammaton? LOL. Are you kidding?

daystar

YaddaYadda

LOL! I'm glad someone got the joke!

Narkissos

Offline, there's a good article "Yahweh" by Karel Van der Toorn in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (DDD), sifting through most of the data alluded to in Ian's post, and more. I think it can be found in most big libraries.

Gill

With the nature of the world being cyclical...

Quite an assumption...

Annie Over

Did any of those gods claim to sit above the circle of the earth as our God did, showing that he knew the Earth was round before man ever discovered it. Did any of those gods ever say they would pull people down from the sky or up from the depths of the ocean as our God did... showing that he knew Men would have planes spaceships and submarines?

Annie

PrimateDave

Hey Ian, that's some great stuff! I have read similar information at infidels.org (Is It God's Word? by Joseph Wheless).

And where is God's throne?

The Shape Of The Earth

"In Science To The Rescue, we learned of several supporting examples for how the ancient Hebrews commonly believed that a solid firmament, separating the sky ocean from the land ocean, covered the earth. Within the proposed firmament are the sun, moon, and stars. The throne of God could potentially be found on top of the earth’s [sky] dome. When a group of people tried to ascend into Heaven by building a tower, God confused them to cease its construction because he was afraid of people seeing him.

"[T]here’s a singular instance found in Isaiah that Christians often flaunt to promote an imagined harmony between the Bible and the true configuration of the earth. All the while, previously mentioned scriptures authored by Isaiah and his colleagues go completely ignored. Isaiah 40:22 says, “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.” The word in question here is “circle.” A circle is a flat two-dimensional object, while a sphere, the approximate shape of the earth, is a three-dimensional object. The original Hebrew term used in this verse is chug, meaning circle. The same word is used twice in the book of Job to describe Heaven and the sea, two areas that we have no reason to believe anyone ever considered spherical. Furthermore, Isaiah does not use the actual Hebrew word for sphere, kadur, in 40:22 even though this utilization would have been much more appropriate if Isaiah intended to convey a spherical planet. In addition to this logical analysis of the verse, historians have long determined that a disc-shaped earth was a popular belief not only in the Middle East, but also in Greece before the time of Aristotle. We even have ancient maps of Babylon and Egypt containing illustrations of a circular sea surrounding circular land. When you combine this tangible evidence with other biblical comments regarding the shape of the earth, the likelihood of Isaiah 40:22 referring to a sphere is extremely remote."

From Biblical Nonsense by Dr. Jason Long (http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/)

behemot

Try this:

http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-03192004-135203/

It's a PhD thesis at the Old Testament Science Department at the Pretoria University, titled "Does Yahweh exist? A philosophical-critical reconstruction of the case against realism in Old Testament Theology"

The various chapters can be downloaded as PDF files.

I found it very interesting.

Behemot

PrimateDave

Thanks, Behemot. Downloaded the whole thing. Looks very interesting.

Dave

Origins of YHWH

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