Has the Bible been redacted so that YAHWEH can be promoted to EL's position as Almighty God?

by I_love_Jeff 47 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  Etude

  vienne: I never let my students use wikipedia as a resource. It is often wrong.

  So, do you think it's wrong in this case? I don't know if it's right. But neither do you. The way to update a Wikipedia entry is to change the text and then it's examined by the panel of experts who will approve it. Yes, the "experts" are arbitrary. That means that anyone can make an entry in Wikipedia. But no all entries are approved, especially if a verification process has shown some errors. Entries need to be challenged. I don't know and probably there's no way to know how often Wikipedia is wrong. So the characterization by you of "often wrong" is really incalculable. How many times has Britannica been wrong? I don't know. But I know it has had incorrect entries (read the link). If something is wrong in Wikipedia, you must feel privileged that you have the power to make it right. Anyone can make the changes and submit for approval. If you have the truth, by all means help us all achieve it.

  Etude.
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  David_Jay

  Cobweb,

  To understand the Jewish take on God you have to abandon two concepts you kept repeating: belief and the idea that the God of Abraham is a deity.

  Christianity is a religion of belief, whereas Judaism is a religion of practice. While Jews do indeed have convictions, they act on them instead of put faith in them. A practicing Jew can be agnostic or even atheist yet at the same time pray and accept the reality of God. How?

  That has to do with the second point: YHVH is not a deity. There are no such things. Those are inventions of humans. The universe is a product or effect of a Cause. That Cause is the God of Abraham.

  Just as we adopted the names of gods that our concept "conquered," the word "God" is no different. The Cause is so great that it is ineffable, unknowable, inconceivable. And yet this Cause appears to interact with us. We are aware that the world has not always been here. It had a Beginning, and the universe is governed by laws.

  This is what Abraham came to realize and passed down to his progeny. Pagans worshipped gods, but the Hebrews felt nothing but this Cause deserved the credit that the pagans gave to deities. At the same time they wrestled with the idea of worship and blind obedience. This became seen as enlightenment. The Hebrews were not to be blind worshipers of the Cause but work in cooperation with the Cause in a partnership.

  The partnership is the covenant. The scientific laws that govern the universe is Torah. Torah has a human facet to it. Humanity suffers and causes suffering when we ignore it, just as much as when we ignore the physical laws. The Torah written in Scripture is an early attempt to understand these laws, but they are just very early and fuzzy glimpses of it. So Jews don't follow Torah as written in Scripture. They use it to see Torah clearer in each successive generation.

  Because the physical universe is real, the Cause is real. Because we can learn the scientific laws and can tap into laws that seem to benefit humanity (such as being just, honest, respecting the rights of others, etc.), Jews understand this as tapping into the "Divine," so to speak.

  Lastly, Judaism is not based on the Scriptures as an authoritative text. Scripture is a product of Judaism. The practice of Judaism is the authority.

  The above is very simplified. It can cause headaches for some. This is also very generalized as Jews don't have a central creed since we don't believe in giving mental assent to concepts (such as having "faith" in a doctrine like Christians). Some of this spells out exactly how I practice Judaism but some of it reflects that of others and not my own.

  Basically speaking, since this world, the effect, is real, thus so is the Cause. Therefore God is real. Just as I don't believe in the world as it is here and doesn't require my belief to be real (it just is real), the same can be said for my position on God.
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  dubstepped

  Wow, this is enlightening David_Jay. The following may be stupid questions, but they're sincere.

  1. So god is this Cause and is unknowable. What do Jews do at a temple worship session, for lack of a better term? All I know is going to a KH and trying to know everything there was to know about what you deem unknowable.

  2. Do Orthodox Jews see "The Cause" the same way that other variations do (I plead ignorance on the various types so I won't throw around the terms I know)? Or is that kind of the beauty of it, that "The Cause" just is and each group reads into it their own way.

  3. Were sacrifices and other forms of worship given to this abstract Cause, or was there a time when there was Jewish belief in something more personable and finite? I mean, there are recorded instances on the Bible of Jews speaking directly to God. It seems like they didn't find their God to be so abstract.

  4. Did Judaism take their God(s) from other people that existed before them, like the Sumerians? Do you see evidence of them borrowing from those pre-existing belief systems?

  I find the history of this fascinating, though admittedly I struggle to keep dates and periods straight. If I butchered anything above, my apologies, and feel free to set the record straight. My grandfather was of Jewish cultural descent, though his parents were in the Christian Science movement. I have had an interest because of him. I wish I could have picked his brain about so much, but I was a kid when he died.
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  David_Jay

  Good questions, dubstepped.

  1. While God is unknowable, this generally means that humans cannot fully conceive God. But people can interact with God and vice versa. Worshipping God is known as a "service." You can hold a service at a synagogue or at home. A service consists of a series of traditional prayers, usually chanted, and often a reading from the Scriptures. On Shabbat (Sabbath) the reading is from the Torah. However you can also do the service at home or wherever you are. Our prayer books (Siddurs) have a service for morning, evening, holy days, bedtime, etc., so not all services are meant to occur outside of home. If you've ever been to one, synagogue services are like a Catholic Mass without the kneeling and without Holy Communion as the Mass is based on the ancient synagogue services.

  2. Yes, the "Cause" term is practically universal. But again, since there are no creeds to assent to, this can (and will differ) from Jew to Jew in specific detail.

  3. The Temple sacrifice system was universal in the ancient Mesopotamian world. People believed the gods gave food, so they would give a little back to the deities through their priests at their shrines to say thanks. There was also the universal belief that blood literally had life in it, so that animals had to be slaughtered via a worship ceremony in which the blood was offered back to the gods. Torah has God allowing this system to remain among the Jews with some changes: blood can be offered along with acts of repentance to cover sins, and no image of God could ever exist there. These systems basically were the butcher shops of the ancient world, even in Judaism. The Prophets would later tell the Jews that God doesn't really demand sacrifices.

  As to narratives where God speaks in the Scriptures, remember these are stories. The animals in Aesop's fables speak too, but no one takes these literally. However, even atheists will sometimes say "I think the universe is trying to tell me something." This, in Judaism, is God talking. These moments of "clarity" were merely dramatized in the Bible as speech between the characters and God.

  4. No, the monotheistic Hebrew God concept seems to have co-existed with other gods. Eventually the monotheistic system won out. Now most of the world claims it as their own. Christians claim they are now the "keepers" of this concept and so do Muslims, both often declaring that they respectively superseded Judaism. But we did borrow the names and some of the customs in some areas from paganism. Many Jews see this as evidence that paganism is merely the universal struggle to recognize the divine and Torah, and thus "truth" cannot be said to be limited to Judaism.
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  Anony Mous

  I'm wondering if this entire thread is satire or if that's really what David_Jay believes and how he got from JW to this form of Judaism.

  The entire old testament is revisionist history. The Kingdom of Israel had a 200 year reign that was subsequently wiped out. Jerusalem was a small village but grew rapidly, the stories were mostly to legitimize the rulers and local cults which borrowed heavily from oral traditions and Egyptian influences.

  Prior to Jeroboam (yeah, thats pretty late) there is very little evidence that the region was even consistently inhabited, Judaism is considered to be coming out of Canaanites and various nomadic clans that settled in the region with Yahweh (or El) the result of melding of the Canaanite pantheon with heavy influence from Egyptian traders.

  The emergence of Yahweh being El comes on early in Exodus and reappears throughout the scriptures and language (isra-el, Dani-el, El-ohim) with Yahweh being a replacement for various gods in stories from the Canaanite set such as the crossing of the red sea where he is a god of wind. The reason is considered to be political and practical, Canaanites and nomadic tribes had tribal gods, trade gods, messenger gods. El was the overarching maker/father but left most of the deity duties to his children. If you are an emerging king wanting to rule over independent cities, you want to unify the people, you erase their gods and replace them with a single one: yours, thus Yahweh, probably initially one of El's children became El himself and replaced Baal (warrior god), the wind god, his wife Asherah as the fertility/rain god in all the oral and some written traditions.

  You can still spot this in the stories because in most Yahweh has a rather one-dimensional aspect, he never really affects multiple things at once like polytheistic origin stories that highlight multiple gods and their individual qualities or strifes, all the stories deal with one issue (whether it is farming or war) which is resolved in a way not necessarily consistent with how things are resolved in other stories (sometimes you get angry warrior god, other times you get ignorant, compassionate, "couldn't care less about my people" or even depictions of feminine god)
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  Witness My Fury

  @ the OP, yes it appears so.
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  smiddy

  So Jehovahs Witnesses are witnesses of a a God who was never named Jehovah ,yeah that makes sense.

  The name Jehovah only being given to the four Hebrew letters by a Spanish monk in the 13th Century of our common era no less.

  I wonder how many JW`s are aware of that fact.
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  cobweb

  Thank you for taking the time to explain all of that David Jay. It is certainly a very different approach to the literalist Christianity that those used to the JW religion are used to and it requires a bit of mental expansion to grasp it.

  I do have a binary mindset and want to pin things down to determine if things are true or not. I have rejected religion & God altogether. Your belief system seems to operate on a higher layer to this and therefore facts & debates about the evolution of man's conception of God don't really touch upon this.

  What you describe of the Jewish understanding of God seems in some ways closer to something like Taoism than Christian literalism. I had not appreciated how different Jewish belief was.
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  David_Jay

  Thanks cobweb and everyone else who has allowed me to share these things. The main objective is to show people how far Jehovah's Witnesses are from the reality of Scripture and the concept of the God of Abraham.

  I also want people to know that religion in itself is not considered a requisite for the world by Judaism. As long as people avoid worshipping false gods and live lives that are just and work to bring healing where and how they can into the world, people can find ways to give their lives purpose and real meaning. If there is an afterlife, that's all it takes to get there: being honest with yourself and the world.

  Remember, Jews can differ on how they explain and build upon these concepts I've explained. There is room for that in Judaism which is why you have people who make it all mystical, like with Kabbalah, and people who trim it down to its very logical premises, like Humanistic Jews...and everything in between (even some Buddhist Jews, if you can imagine that).

  The Jewish approach is not perfect. We have people who get radical with it and have used it to excuse their acts of hatred (like the Orthodox Jew who ran through gay pride parades in Israel stabbing LGBT people), and there are Hasidic movements which are cousins to Christian Fundamentalists. And Orthodox and (a few) Conservatives still like to go around deciding who are Jews and who aren't, not to mention the problems in Israel which currently stem from a government that leans toward and gets support from the radical right and suffers from corruption. Even some of the more liberal Jews might not be as caring enough about our culture as they should be.

  No one's religion or culture is perfect or has an exclusive claim on "the Truth." Ours surely doesn't. But one thing's for sure: Jehovah's Witnesses can sure screw up the Bible and its intended purpose.
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  Fairlane

  @ David jay-...." jehovahs witnesses can sure screw up the bible and its intended purpose " ...'intended purpose ' now there's a can of worms, who indeed decides the purpose of a conglomeration of ancient writings written over millenniums ago, having been added to, subtracted from, argued over, authenticity questioned...any purpose extracted has got to be dubious at best !