Quote:
Originally Posted by GoCardinals
ALL of those prophets had one continuous message towards their nations and towards their people - Monotheism - Worship only ONE God.
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That's not monotheism.
Islam is monotheistic, because there was one god, and only one god and never any others.
Judaism and christianity are not monotheistic, they're actually monolatry, which is the worship of one god to the exclusion of other gods.
The Hebrews were polytheistic just like everyone else. And, just like everyone else, over time they shifted to henotheism. Henotheism, at least in the Middle East, was the recognition of a pantheon of gods, but elevating one god to be special.
For the Hebrews, they chose Yahweh, one of the sons of another god.
Like other cultures in the area, the Hebrews ultimately shifted to monolatry. The Amorites, the people everyone calls "Babylonians" were the first monolatrists, when they adopted Marduk as their national god. Other cultures followed suit adopting different gods as their national god, and then later the Hebrews did the same, except they adopted Yahweh.
The P author, and Jeremiah, who wrote Deuteronomy and made a lot of edits in the Tetrateuch tries to say that El Elyon, El Shaddai and El Berith are one in the same with Yahweh, when in fact those were individual deities part of pantheon worshiped by the Ugarits and Hebrews.
That pantheon was El, Ba'al, El Elyon, El Berith, El Shaddai, Mot, Yam, Asherah, Dagon, Kothar, Lothan, and Yahweh.
That pantheon corresponds to Enki, Marduk, Nergal, Gibil, Ningishiddza, Dumuzi, Enlil, Ninurta, Adad, Shamash, Sin and Ianna in the Sumerian/Akkadian pantheon.
Asherah/Ianna was Yahweh's consort.
Lothan/Enki is the serpent sea god, so naturally, Yam is "sea" in classical biblical Hebrew, as in Yam Suf, the Sea of Reeds.
Mot/Gibil is the god of death, so naturally mot in classical biblical Hebrew is one of the words for death.
The different authors of the texts often rewrote things for political and social reasons.
That's why you have two vastly different stories of Joseph going to Egypt.
The E author doesn't give a damn about Judah, so he says Joseph's brothers threw him into a well and left him to die, but a passing trade caravan heard Joseph's cries for help and rescued him, only to sell him as a slave in Egypt.
But, for the J author, Judah is a hero, so we have to spin the story so that Joseph's brothers wanted to throw him into a well, but Judah intervened and suggested they sell Joseph as a slave to a passing trade caravan.
That's why you have two, three and sometimes four versions of the same story, because they each have different spins for political and social reasons.
So, when Jeremiah is editing the texts, he's greatly offended by X-moses' name, so he simply struck the name of the Egyptian deity that prefixed X-moses' real name, because it was incompatible with Yahweh.
X-moses, Aaron, Dathan et al are exclusively Egyptian words and names, not Canaanite or Hebrew.
The word "moses" is rendered in Egyptian as
m-s-s and it means emanating from and it is always prefixed with the name of a deity, like Tutmoses, Rameses, Ptahmoses.
The real name of X-moses might have been Ptahmoses, but Jeremiah would never let that stand so he just struck it from the text and it became X-moses.
Hopefully, one day we'll find earlier texts, and there's a good chance we'll find them in the area of northern kingdom, because the E writer focused a lot on X-moses but not on Aaron (whom he thought was a bastard-jerk), and we'll know X-moses' real name.
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An irrelevant straw man to my post. 
