Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)

Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (The first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew,” dated to around 3,000 years ago Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient fortress city overlooking the Elah Valley. And many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed around 2,500). ref, ref

“Judaism is an Abrahamic, its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Some scholars argue that modern Judaism evolved from Yahwism, the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, by the late 6th century BCE, and is thus considered to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions.” ref

“Yahwism is the name given by modern scholars to the religion of ancient Israel, essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses. Heading the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; below them were second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, all of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees, and a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal’ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yahweh, however, was not the ‘original’ god of Israel “Isra-El”; it is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name forms the basis of the name “Israel”, and none of the Old Testament patriarchs, the tribes of Israel, the Judges, or the earliest monarchs, have a Yahwistic theophoric name (i.e., one incorporating the name of Yahweh).” ref

“El is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ‘ila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ‘El or ‘Il include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. ʼĒl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, ʼĒl played a role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “ʼĒl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“. The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts, this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However, the documentary hypothesis for the Old Testament (corresponds to the Jewish Torah) developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref

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Proto-Semitic itself must have been spoken before the emergence of its daughters, so sometime before the earliest attestation of Akkadian, and sufficiently long so for the changes leading from it to Akkadian to have taken place, which would place it in the 4th millennium BCE or earlier. A Bayesian analysis performed in 2009 suggests an origin for all known Semitic languages in the Levant around 3750 BCE.” ref

4th millennium BCE (4000 to 3000 BCE or 6,022 to 5,022 years ago)

“Some of the major changes in human culture during this time included the beginning of the Bronze Age and the invention of writing, which played a major role in starting recorded history3761 BCE – Since the Middle Ages (12th century), the Hebrew calendar has been based on rabbinic calculations of the year of creation from the Hebrew Masoretic text of the bible. This calendar is used within Jewish communities for religious and other purposes. The calendar’s epoch, corresponding to the calculated date of the world’s creation, is equivalent to sunset on the Julian proleptic calendar date 6 October 3761 BCE or 5,783 years ago.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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DNA evidence expresses waves of migration from Anatolia and the Zagros mountains (today’s Turkey and Iran) to the Levant helped develop the Chalcolithic culture that existed in Israel’s Upper Galilee region some 6,500 years ago. ref

Ancient DNA from 22 Israel Late Chalcolithic  Period individuals from Peqi’in Cave, Israel. These individuals were part of a homogeneous population that can be modeled as deriving ~57% of its ancestry from groups related to those of the local Levant Neolithic, ~17% from groups related to those of the Iran Chalcolithic, and ~26% from groups related to those of the Anatolian Neolithic. The Peqi’in population also appears to have contributed differently to later Bronze Age groups, one of which we show cannot plausibly have descended from the same population as that of Peqi’in Cave. These results provide an example of how population movements propelled cultural changes in the deep past. ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Archaeology Disproves the Bible:

1. Adm and Eve 6,000-Year-Old humanity Myth:

Genetic ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ Uncovered: https://www.livescience.com/38613-genetic-adam-and-eve-uncovered.html

“Researchers believe that modern humans left Africa between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago, and that the mother of all women likely emerged from East Africa. But beyond that, the details get fuzzy.” ref

Y-chromosomal Adam or human genetics Y-DNA most recent common ancestor (160,000-300,000 years ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

Mitochondrial Eve or human genetics mt-DNA most recent common ancestor (100,000–230,000 years ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

Did a discrete event 200,000-100,000 years ago produce modern humans: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22658331/?fbclid=IwAR1BjrR4iyHHaDebdPobOJY9jhJJCF2tsAmjp-WUPjMVosvHNs0UPzgkbIU

“Scenarios for modern human origins are often predicated on the assumption that modern humans arose 200,000-100,000 years ago in Africa. This assumption implies that something ‘special’ happened at this point in time in Africa, such as the speciation that produced Homo sapiens, a severe bottleneck in human population size, or a combination of the two. The common thread is that after the divergence of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages ∼400,000 years ago, there was another discrete event near in time to the Middle-Late Pleistocene boundary that produced modern humans. Alternatively, modern human origins could have been a lengthy process that lasted from the divergence of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages to the expansion of modern humans out of Africa, and nothing out of the ordinary happened 200,000-100,000 years ago in Africa. Three pieces of biological (fossil morphology and DNA sequences) evidence are typically cited in support of discrete event models. First, living human mitochondrial DNA haplotypes coalesce ∼200,000 years ago. Second, fossil specimens that are usually classified as ‘anatomically modern’ seem to appear shortly afterward in the African fossil record. Third, it is argued that these anatomically modern fossils are morphologically quite different from the fossils that preceded them.” ref

2. The Bible flood myth:

Flood Accounts: Gilgamesh epic (4,100 years ago) Noah in Genesis (2,600 years ago)
Everyone Killed in the Bible Flood? “Nephilim” (giants)?
Was Noah’s Ark found on Mount Ararat as claimed by Ron Wyatt? No, of course not.

3. The myth of the Exodus:

Hey, Damien dude, I have a question for you regarding “the bible” Exodus.
Is there EXODUS ARCHAEOLOGY? The short answer is “no.”

4. The myth of conquering the land of Canaan; the land which the tribes of Israel supposedly conquered after the supposed Exodus from Egypt (such as the lie of Jericho):

Canaanites and Israelites?
The Jericho Conquest lie?
Bible Battle, Just More, Bible Babble

5. The bible myth about a ‘United Monarchy’ full of splendor and power – the period of Saul, David and Solomon–as presented in the biblical account.

‘United Monarchy’ full of splendor and power – Saul, David, and Solomon? Most likely not.

Archaeology disproves all the beginning of the bible and thus discredits all

Abrahamic religions are based on it, so this includes Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Mormon, etc.

Faith seems to be found among the foolish but is an imprisoned tormented fool among the wise. Faith is like the Gloryhole of bad thinking and the Champion of unsupported beliefs. I reject the notion that humans are born with the inclination for Religion. Rather, we are born with a superstitious Animism thinking mind until the age of about 7 years old and it is out of this childlike daydreaming that Religion emerges with the help of people desiring to control.

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, involves leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman who draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible—the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon’s vast empire—reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts. What they argue, in chapter after chapter, is that these books of the Bible make the most sense as coming out of a seventh-century (BC) context. A lot of the Bible is royal and elite propaganda to justify empire expanding through conquest. Overall the differing archaeology evidence and the complete lack of any confirming archaeology evidence is devastating to all the Abrahamic religions. Ref

Historians mostly agree that only the Kingdom of Israel and life in Jerusalem (roughly from King David onward) represents any actual possibility for history.

Some stories in the Bible were meant to be history, others fiction. But modernity has obscured the original distinction between the two kinds of biblical writing, depriving readers of the depth of the text. Perhaps surprisingly, this confusion lies at the heart of the History Channel’s miniseries “The Bible,” which continues the pattern of blurring history and fiction, and thereby misrepresenting the nature of the Bible to its viewers. One way to understand the difference between history and fiction in the Bible is through the Old Testament’s natural division into three parts:

  1. The world and its nature (Adam to Terah).
  2. The Israelites and their purpose (Abraham to Moses).
  3. The Kingdom of Israel and life in Jerusalem (roughly from King David onward).

Even a cursory look reveals a clear and significant pattern. In the first section, characters live many hundreds of years, and in the second, well into their second century. Only in the third section do biblical figures tend to live biologically reasonable lives. For example, Adam, in the first section, lives to the symbolic age of 930, and Noah lives even twenty years longer than that. Abraham, from the second section, lives to be 175, his son Issac to 180, and Jacob “dies young” at the age of 147. But the lifespans from King David onward, in the third section, are in line with generally accepted human biology. Furthermore, historians mostly agree that only the third section represents actual history. The reasonable ages in the third section of the Bible, and, in particular, the wildly exaggerated ages in the first, suggest that the authors of the Old Testament intended only the third part as history. Underscoring this crucial difference, some of the lifespans in the first two sections are so absurd as to defy literal interpretation. These hugely advanced ages are central clues about the point of the stories. The Old Testament contains a wide range of texts in addition to stories: laws, prayers, moral codes, and more. But even the stories come in more than one variety. Noah and the Great Flood are not in the same category as Moses and the Ten Commandments, and both are different than King David and the First Temple. History and fiction mingle throughout the Old Testament, so these divisions are just rough guides. Jeremiah’s historical description of the siege on Jerusalem is not the same as Ezekiel’s non-historical vision of the dry bones, just as there are historical elements (like the invention of fire-hardened bricks) even in the non-historical account of the Tower of Babel. The interesting point here is not that some of these stories happened and some didn’t (though that’s almost certainly true). The point is that the Bible itself portrays them differently, only presenting some of them as having happened. In other words, sometimes “believing the Bible” means believing that a story in it didn’t happen. The situation not unlike a modern newspaper, which combines news with opinion, puzzles, comics, etc. The news can be accurate even if the comics are not. The same is true for the different parts of the Bible. The New Testament similarly offers more than just stories, and, as with the Old Testament, only some of the stories in the New Testament were meant as history. Others were intended to convey things like theology and morality. The account of Jesus’ life in the Gospels is not the same as the beast in Revelation or Adam’s life in Genesis. (The issue of different categories for Jesus and Adam is a matter of fierce modern debate because of its potential theological significance and its interaction with the theory of evolution.) All of this is important for people who want to believe, for instance, that a man named Jesus was crucified in ancient Jerusalem (as described in the Gospels) even if they don’t believe that a donkey spoke aloud (Numbers); or that Jews lived in Jerusalem during the first millennium BC (Kings, for example) even if they didn’t leave Egypt 600,000 strong (Exodus). Ref

Pagan Yahwism: The Folk Religion of Ancient Israel

The Bible imagines the religion of ancient Israel as purely monotheistic. And doubtless there were Israelites, particularly those associated with the Jerusalem Temple, who were strict monotheists. But the archaeological evidence (and the Bible, too, if you read it closely enough) suggests that the monotheism of many Israelites was far from pure. For them, Yahweh (the name of the Israelite god) was not the only divinity. Some Israelites believed that Yahweh had a female consort. And many Israelites invoked the divinity with the help of images, particularly figurines. I call this Israelite religion pagan Yahwism. The archaeological evidence we will look at comes mostly from Judah in what is known in archaeological terms as the Assyrian period, the span from 721 B.C.E., when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, until 586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and brought an end to the Davidic dynasty in Judah. This period, to put it into perspective, is several centuries after King Solomon built the Jerusalem Temple in about 950 B.C.E. So the archaeological evidence we are about to discuss documents a level of Israelite paganism long after Solomon built an exclusive home for Israel’s god. While Yahweh was the god of the Israelites, other nations had their own national gods. The chief god of the Phoenicians was Ba‘al. For the Philistines, the chief god was at first Dagon and later also Ba‘al (Judges 16:23; 2 Kings 1:2). For the Ammonites it was Milkom. For the Moabites, Chemosh. For the Edomites, Qos. And for the Israelites and Judahites—Yahweh. Except for the Edomite god Qos, who appears only in the archaeological record, all of these gods are mentioned in the Bible (1 Kings 11:5, 7, 33). Interestingly, while each nation’s chief god had a distinctive name, his consort, the chief female deity, had the same name in all these cultures: Asherah or its variants Ashtoreth or Astarte. (As we shall see, this was even true of Yahweh’s consort.) Not only was the female consort the same, the various nations used the same cult objects, the same types of incense altars made of stone and clay, the same bronze and clay censers, cult stands and incense burners, the same chalices and goblets and the same bronze and ivory rods adorned with pomegranates. It was easy to take cult vessels of one deity and place them in the service of another one—and this was commonly done. Ref

How Should We Study Ancient Israelite Religion?

If we propose to study the history of the religion of ancient Israel, we must be governed by the same postulates that are the basis of modern historical method. Our task must be a historical, not a theological, enterprise. We must trace the origins and development of Israel’s religion, its emergence from its West Semitic, particularly Canaanite, past, its continuities with the past, its innovations, individual or peculiar configurations, its new emergent whole, and its subsequent changes and evolution. In the past historical questions of “origins” or “emergence” of the ancient Israelite religion could not be answered satisfactorily and indeed were rarely addressed. Today, thanks to the archaeological exploration of Israel and neighboring lands, the history of Israel has become part of the history of the ancient Near Eastern world. Israel’s ancient literature can be viewed increasingly as evolving out of the genres of kindred literatures. We possess Northwest Semitic epic literature from a century or so before Moses. The religion of Israel can now be described in its continuities with, and in its contrasts with, contemporary Near Eastern and especially West Semitic mythology and cult. Ref

Accurate Account on how did Christianity Began?

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Bronze Age migrants, the Kura-Araxes cultural 5,520 to 4,470 years ago, their DNA from the Caucasus Mountains traces to the Canaanites and then lives on in modern Arabs and Jews. A Study found most Arab and Jewish groups in the region owe more than half of their DNA to Canaanites and other peoples of the ancient Near East—an area encompassing much of the modern Levant, Caucasus, Turkey, and Iran. Before the Kura-Araxes period of cultural traditions, horse bones were not found in Transcaucasia/South Caucasus a geographical region of the southern Caucasus Mountains on the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. 

“The Kura–Araxes culture, also named Kur–Araz culture, or the Early Transcaucasian culture was a civilization that existed from about 4000 BCE until about 2000 BCE or around 6,020 to 4,020 years ago, which has traditionally been regarded as the date of its end; in some locations, it may have disappeared as early as 2600 or 2700 BCE or around 4,620 to 4,720 years ago. The earliest evidence for this culture is found on the Ararat plain; it spread northward in Caucasus by 3000 BCE or around 5,020 years ago). Altogether, the early Transcaucasian culture enveloped a vast area and mostly encompassed, on modern-day territories, the Southern Caucasus (except western Georgia), northwestern Iran, the northeastern Caucasus, eastern Turkey, and as far as Syria. The name of the culture is derived from the Kura and Araxes river valleys. Kura–Araxes culture is sometimes known as Shengavitian, Karaz (Erzurum), Pulur, and Yanik Tepe (Iranian Azerbaijan, near Lake Urmia) cultures. Furthermore, it gave rise to the later Khirbet Kerak-ware culture found in Syria and Canaan after the fall of the Akkadian Empire. While it is unknown what cultures and languages were present in Kura-Araxes, the two most widespread theories suggest a connection with Hurro-Urartian and/or Anatolian languages.” ref

“The Kura-Araxes cultural tradition existed in the highlands of the South Caucasus from 3500 to 2450 BCE or 5,520 to 4,470 years ago. This tradition represented an adaptive regime and a symbolically encoded common identity spread over a broad area of patchy mountain environments. By 3000 BCE or around 5,020 years ago, groups bearing this identity had migrated southwest across a wide area from the Taurus Mountains down into the southern Levant, southeast along the Zagros Mountains, and north across the Caucasus Mountains. In these new places, they became effectively ethnic groups amid already heterogeneous societies. This paper addresses the place of migrants among local populations as ethnicities and the reasons for their disappearance in the diaspora after 2450 BCE.” ref

“DNA from the Bible’s Canaanites lives on in modern Arabs and Jews: A new study of ancient DNA traces the surprising heritage of these mysterious Bronze Age people. Tel Megiddo was an important Canaanite city-state during the Bronze Age, approximately 3500 to 1200 B.CE or 5,520 to 3,220 years ago. DNA analysis reveals that the city’s population included migrants from the distant Caucasus Mountains. They are best known as the people who lived “in a land flowing with milk and honey” until they were vanquished by the ancient Israelites and disappeared from history. But a scientific report published today reveals that the genetic heritage of the Canaanites survives in many modern-day Jews and Arabs. The study in Cell also shows that migrants from the distant Caucasus Mountains combined with the indigenous population to forge the unique Canaanite culture that dominated the area between Egypt and Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age. The team extracted ancient DNA from the bones of 73 individuals buried over the course of 1,500 years at five Canaanite sites scattered across Israel and Jordan. They also factored in data from an additional 20 individuals from four sites previously reported. “Individuals from all sites are highly genetically similar,” says co-author and molecular evolutionist Liran Carmel of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.” ref

“So while the Canaanites lived in far-flung city-states, and never coalesced into an empire, they shared genes as well as a common culture. The researchers also compared the ancient DNA with that of modern populations and found that most Arab and Jewish groups in the region owe more than half of their DNA to Canaanites and other peoples who inhabited the ancient Near East—an area encompassing much of the modern Levant, Caucasus, and Iran. The study—a collaborative effort between Carmel’s lab, the ancient DNA lab at Harvard University headed by geneticist David Reich, and other groups—was by far the largest of its type in the region. Its findings are the latest in a series of recent breakthroughs in our understanding of this mysterious people who left behind few written records. Marc Haber, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Institute in Hinxton, United Kingdom, co-led a 2017 study of five Canaanite individuals from the coastal town of Sidon. The results showed that modern Lebanese can trace more than 90 percent of their genetic ancestry to Canaanites.” ref

“As Egyptians built pyramids and Mesopotamians constructed ziggurats some 4,500 years ago, the Canaanites began to develop towns and cities between these great powers. They first appear in the historical record around 1800 B.C., when the king of the city-state of Mari in today’s eastern Syria complained about “thieves and Canaanites.” Diplomatic correspondence written five centuries later mentions several Canaanite kings, who often struggled to maintain independence from Egypt. “The land of Canaan is your land and its kings are your servants,” acknowledged one Babylonian monarch in a letter to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. Biblical texts, written many centuries later, insist that Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to the Israelites after their escape from Egypt. Jewish scripture says the newcomers eventually triumphed, but archaeological evidence doesn’t show widespread destruction of Canaanite populations. Instead, they appear to have been gradually overpowered by later invaders such as the Philistines, Greeks, and Romans.” ref

“Red and black pottery circa 2500 BCE or around 4,520 years old was found in the Caucasus Mountains, as well as at Canaanite sites far to the southwest. The Canaanites spoke a Semitic language and were long thought to derive from earlier populations that settled in the region thousands of years before. But archaeologists have puzzled over red-and-black pottery discovered at Canaanite sites that closely resembles ceramics found in the Caucasus Mountains, some 750 miles to the northwest. Historians also have noted that many Canaanite names derive from Hurrian, a non-Semitic language originating in the Caucasus. Whether this resulted from long-distance trade or migration was uncertain. The new study demonstrates that significant numbers of people, and not just goods, were moving around during humanity’s first era of cities and empires. The genes of Canaanite individuals proved to be a mix of local Neolithic people and the Caucasus migrants, who began showing up in the region around the start of the Bronze Age. Carmel adds that the migration appears to have been more than a one-time event, and “could have involved multiple waves throughout the Bronze Age.” One brother and sister who lived around 1500 B.C. in Megiddo, in what is now northern Israel, were from a family that had migrated relatively recently from the northeast. The team also noted that individuals at two coastal sites—Ashkelon in Israel and Sidon in Lebanon—show slightly more genetic diversity. That may be the result of broader trade links in Mediterranean port towns than inland settlements.” ref

“Glenn Schwartz, an archaeologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study, said that the biological data provides important insight into how Canaanites shared a notable number of genes as well as cultural traits. And Haber from the Wellcome Trust noted that the quantity of DNA results is particularly impressive, given the difficulty of extracting samples from old bones buried in such a warm climate that can quickly degrade genetic material. Both Israeli and Palestinian politicians claim the region of Israel and the Palestinian territories is the ancestral home of their people, and maintain that the other group was a late arrival. “We are the Canaanites,” asserted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last year. “This land is for its people…who were here 5,000 years ago.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, said recently that the ancestors of modern Palestinians “came from the Arabian peninsula to the Land of Israel thousands of years” after the Israelites. The new study suggests that despite tumultuous changes in the area since the Bronze Age, “the present-day inhabitants of the region are, to a large extent, descended from its ancient residents,” concludes Schwartz—although Carmel adds that there are hints of later demographic shifts. Carmel hopes to soon expand the findings by collecting DNA from the remains of those who can be identified as Judean, Moabite, Ammonite, and other groups mentioned in the Bible and other texts. “One could analyze ‘Canaanite’ as opposed to ‘Israelite’ individuals,” adds archaeologist Mary Ellen Buck, who wrote a book on the Canaanites. “The Bible claims that these are distinct and mutually antagonistic groups, yet there’s reason to believe that they were very closely related.” ref

“As reported from genome-wide DNA data for 73 individuals from five archaeological sites across the Bronze and Iron Ages Southern Levant. These individuals, who share the “Canaanite” material culture, can be modeled as descending from two sources: (1) earlier local Neolithic populations and (2) populations related to the Chalcolithic Zagros (mountain range in Iran, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey) or the Bronze Age Caucasus (mountain range in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia). The non-local contribution increased over time, as evinced by three outliers who can be modeled as descendants of recent migrants. We show evidence that different “Canaanite” groups genetically resemble each other more than other populations. We find that Levant-related modern populations typically have substantial ancestry coming from populations related to the Chalcolithic Zagros and the Bronze Age Southern Levant. These groups also harbor ancestry from sources we cannot fully model with the available data, highlighting the critical role of post-Bronze-Age migrations into the region over the past 3,000 years.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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By day the LORD went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.

  • By day the “Bible God” was in a cloud pillar.
  • By night the “Bible God” was in a fire pillar.

Volcano deity

“A volcano deity is a deification of a volcano, including:

New DNA tech traces origins of Yiddish to… Turkey

“Genetic data shows speakers of Jewish language came from ancient Silk Road crossroads and may have been traders, Israeli researcher says. DNA shows that Yiddish, the historic language of Ashkenazi Jews, may have originated in northeastern Turkey, according to a study by an Israeli-born researcher. The study by the University of Sheffield’s Dr. Eran Elhaik, which was published recently in scientific journal Genome Biology, used a Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool to locate the origins of Yiddish speakers’ DNA.” ref

“We identified 367 people who claim they have two parents who are Ashkenazic Jews and we divided them into people whose parents only speak Yiddish and then everyone else,” Elhaik told WIRED. The researchers then used the GPS algorithms to analyze participants’ DNA and predict their most likely geographical origin. The results, Elhaik said, showed that many of them came from the vicinity of four ancient villages in northern Turkey whose names are conspicuously similar to “Ashkenaz” — Askenaz, Eskenaz, Ashanaz, and Ashkuz — and which are all located near a crossroads of the ancient Silk Road trade route.” ref

“The researchers have surmised that the language may have been invented by Iranian and Slavic Jews who traded on the Silk Road around the 9th century. “We were able to predict the possible ancestral location where Yiddish originated over 1,000 years ago — a question which linguists have debated over for many years,” Elhaik said. “Northeast Turkey is the only place in the world where these place names exist — which strongly implies that Yiddish was established around the first millennium at a time when Jewish traders who were plying the Silk Road moved goods from Asia to Europe wanted to keep their monopoly on trade.” ref

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpwmqUnj7vc

“They did this by inventing Yiddish — a secret language that very few can speak or understand other than Jews. Our findings are in agreement with an alternative theory that suggests Yiddish has Iranian, Turkish, and Slavic origins and explains why Yiddish contains 251 words for the terms ‘buy’ and ‘sell’. This is what we can expect from a language of experienced merchants.” ref

The study suggests that as Jews spread throughout Europe, their language acquired words from other languages in the continent, mainly German. “Yiddish is such a wonderful and complex language, which was inappropriately called ‘bad German’ by both its native and non-native speakers because the language consists of made-up German words and a non-German grammar,” Elhaik said. “Yiddish is truly a combination of familiar and adapted German words using Slavic grammar.” Elhaik told WIRED he hoped to be able to refine and improve the technology, which can currently analyze data from the last millennium or so. “We’re probably going to do a really good job for 2,000 to 10,000 years ago due to the availability of the DNA from these time periods,” he said.” ref

Scientists reveal Jewish history’s forgotten Turkish roots

Israeli-born geneticist believes the Turkish villages of Iskenaz, Eskenaz, and Ashanaz were part of the original homeland for Ashkenazic Jews

“Research suggests that the majority of the world’s modern Jewish population is descended mainly from people from ancient Turkey, rather than predominantly from elsewhere in the Middle East. The new research suggests that most of the Jewish population of northern and eastern Europe – normally known as Ashkenazic Jews – are the descendants of Greeks, Iranians, and others who colonized what is now northern Turkey more than 2000 years ago and were then converted to Judaism, probably in the first few centuries AD by Jews from Persia. At that stage, the Persian Empire was home to the world’s largest Jewish communities. According to research carried out by the geneticist, Dr Eran Elhaik of the University of Sheffield, over 90 percent of Ashkenazic ancestors come from that converted partially Greek-originating ancient community in north-east Turkey.” ref

“His research is based on genetic, historical, and place-name evidence. For his geographic genetic research, Dr Elhaik used a Geographic Population Structure computer modeling system to convert Ashkenazic Jewish DNA data into geographical information. Dr Elhaik, an Israeli-born geneticist who gained his doctorate in molecular evolution from the University of Houston, believes that three still-surviving Turkish villages – Iskenaz, Eskenaz, and Ashanaz – on the western part of an ancient Silk Road route were part of the original Ashkenazic homeland. He believes that the word Ashkenaz originally comes from Ashguza – the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian name for the Iron Age Eurasian steppe-land people, the Scythians. Referring to the names of the three Turkish villages, Dr Elhaik points out that “north-east Turkey is the only place in the world where these place-names exist”.” ref

“From the 690s AD onwards, anti-Jewish persecution by the Christian Byzantine Empire seems to have played a part in forcing large numbers of Jews to flee across the Black Sea to a more friendly state – the Turkic-ruled Khazar Empire with its large Slav and other populations. Some analyses of Yiddish suggests that it was originally a Slavic language, and Dr Elhaik and others believe that it was developed, probably in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, by Jewish merchants trading along some of the more northerly Silk Roads linking China and Europe. By the 730s, the Khazar Empire had begun to convert to Judaism – and more people converted to the faith.” ref

“But when the Khazar Empire declined in or around the 11th century, some of the Jewish population almost certainly migrated west into Central Europe. There, as Yiddish-speaking Jewish merchants came into contact with central European, often German-speaking, peoples, they began to replace the Slav words in Yiddish with large numbers of German and German-derived words, while retaining some of its Slav-originating grammar. Many Hebrew words also appear to have been added by that stage. The genetic modeling used in the research was based on DNA data from 367 Jews of northern and eastern European origin and more than 600 non-Jewish people mainly from Europe and western Asia. Dr Elhaik says it is the largest genomic study ever carried out on Ashkenazic Jews. His research will be published in the UK-based scientific journal, Genome Biology, and Evolution. Further research is planned to try to measure the precise size of the Semitic genetic input into Jewish and non-Jewish genomes.” ref

4,000-year-Old Ritual/Religious Culture Transfer or Migration of New People to Israel and the Middle East; with Dolmens, Burials, Symbols, and a Unique Henge.

“The presence of dolmens are found in a few areas of Israel, with most dolmens known to the public found in the Golan Heights. Gamla is part of the Golan Heights and is an important dolmen site.” ref

There is a gigantic dolmenwith a 50-ton capstone over 4,000 years old with unique artistic carvings in its ceiling has been found in the Golan Heights. What makes this dolmen so unique is its huge dimensions, the structure surrounding it, and most importantly the artistic decorations engraved in its ceiling. refref

“The Galilee dolmens date from roughly the same time as other mysterious, monumental structures discovered nearby in the Golan, most notably the extraordinary circular megalithic monument called Rujm el-Hiri, in the middle of a large plateau also covered with hundreds of dolmen shown above.” ref

“Gilgal Rephaim (Hebrew for “Circle of the Giants”) is a large megalithic monument that is just three miles east of the site of Gamla in the Golan. This area is known as the land of Bashan, where King Og lived and is located east of the Jordan River, and the Sea of Galilee in what would be the land of the tribe Mannaseh.  King Og of Bashan, who according to Deuteronomy 3:11, “was the last of the Rephaim (giants), whose bed was decorated with iron and was more than nine cubits long (13 1/2 feet) and four cubits wide (six feet).” The structure has been dated by archaeologists to the Early Bronze Age (3000 – 2700 BCE), thus would have existed prior to the flood of Noah.” ref 

“There is over 42,000 tons of boulders, partly worked, and stacked up to 2 meters (nearly 7 feet) high. The outermost circle is 520 feet in diameter. In order to see the entire structure, an aerial view is required. It is possible that the ancient inhabitants of this area practiced excarnation, that is the burial practice of removing the flesh from the bones of the deceased, perhaps leaving the body exposed for scavengers such as vultures. It is interesting that just three miles from this location is the Gamla Nature Reserve, at the site of ancient Gamla, which hosts one of the world’s largest known populations of Griffon vultures, and other birds of prey. Certainly, the later inhabitants of Gamla were very familiar with this site as it is a mere 3 mile walk up the Daliyot Stream. An interesting fact about Gamla is that, although thousands were have said to have died there during the Jewish Revolt in what is called “The Masada of the North”, unlike at Masada, no bodies have ever been found.” ref

The Amorite/Amurru people’s God Amurru “Lord of the Steppe”,

relates to the Origins of the Bible God?

“Amurru and Martu are names given in Akkadian and Sumerian texts to the god of the Amorite/Amurru people, often forming part of personal names. He is sometimes called Ilu Amurru (DMAR.TU). He was the patron god of the Mesopotamian city of Ninab, whose exact location is unknown. He was occasionally called “lord of the steppe” or “lord of the mountain.” ref 

“Amurru/Martu was probably a western Semitic god originally. He is sometimes described as a ‘shepherd’ or as a storm god, and as a son of the sky-god Anu. He is sometimes called bêlu šadī or bêl šadê, ‘lord of the mountain’; dúr-hur-sag-gá sikil-a-ke, ‘He who dwells on the pure mountain’; and kur-za-gan ti-[la], ‘who inhabits the shining mountain’. In Cappadocian Zinčirli inscriptions he is called ì-li a-bi-a, ‘the god of my father‘.” ref

“Bêl Šadê could also have become the fertility-god ‘Ba’al‘, possibly adopted by the Canaanites, a rival and enemy of the Hebrew God YHWH, and famously combatted by the Hebrew prophet Elijah.” ref

“Amurru also has storm-god features. Like Adad, Amurru bears the epithet ramān ‘thunderer’, and he is even called bāriqu ‘hurler of the thunderbolt’ and Adad ša a-bu-be ‘Adad of the deluge’. Yet his iconography is distinct from that of Adad, and he sometimes appears alongside Adad with a baton of power or throwstick, while Adad bears a conventional thunderbolt.” ref

“Amurru’s wife is usually the goddess Ašratum (see Asherah) who in northwest Semitic tradition and Hittite tradition appears as wife of the god El which suggests that Amurru may indeed have been a variation of that god. If Amurru was identical with Ēl, it would explain why so few Amorite names are compounded with the name Amurru, but so many are compounded with Il; that is, with El.” ref

“Another tradition about Amurru’s wife (or one of Amurru’s wives) gives her name as Belit-Sheri, ‘Lady of the Desert’. A third tradition appears in a Sumerian poem in pastoral style, which relates how the god Martu came to marry Adg̃ar-kidug the daughter of the god Numushda of the city of Inab. It contains a speech expressing urbanite Sumerian disgust at uncivilized, nomadic Amurru life which Adg̃ar-kidug ignores, responding only: “I will marry Martu!.” ref 

“Amorite (Sumerian ???????? MAR.TU, Akkadian Tidnum or Amurrūm, Egyptian Amar, Hebrew ’emōrî אמורי) refers to a Semitic people who occupied large parts of Mesopotamia from at least the second half of the third millennium BC. The term Amurru refers to them, as well as to their principal deity.” ref

“In the earliest Sumerian sources, beginning about 2400 BC, the land of the Amorites (“the Mar.tu land”) is associated with the West, including Syria and Canaan. They appear as nomadic people in the Mesopotamian sources, and they are especially connected with the mountainous region of Jebel Bishri in Syria called as the “mountain of the Amorites”. The ethnic terms Amurru and Amar were used for them in Assyria and Egypt respectively.” ref

“From the 21st century BC and likely triggered by the 22nd century BC drought, a large-scale migration of Amorite tribes infiltrated Mesopotamia, precipitating the downfall of the Neo-Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur, and acquiring a series of powerful kingdoms, culminating in the triumph under Hammurabi of one of them, that of Babylon.” ref

“Known Amorites (mostly those of Mari) wrote in a dialect of Akkadian found on tablets dating from 1800–1750 BC showing many northwest Semitic forms and constructions. The Amorite language was presumably a northwest Semitic dialect. The main sources for our extremely limited knowledge about the language are proper names, not Akkadian in style, that are preserved in such texts.” ref

“In early inscriptions, all western lands, including Syria and Canaan, were known as “the land of the Amorites”. “The MAR.TU land” appears in the earliest Sumerian texts, such as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, as well as early tablets from Ebla; and for the Akkadian kings Mar.tu was one of the “Four Quarters” surrounding Akkad, along with Subartu, Sumer, and Elam. The Akkadian king Naram-Sin records campaigns against them in northern Syria ca. 2240 BC, and his successor Shar-Kali-Sharri followed suit.” ref

“By the time of the Neo-Sumerian Ur-III empire, immigrating Amorites had become such a force that kings such as Shu-Sin were obliged to construct a 170-mile wall from the Tigris to the Euphrates to hold them off. These Amorites appear as nomadic clans ruled by fierce tribal chiefs, who forced themselves into lands they needed to graze their herds. Some of the Akkadian literature of this era speaks disparagingly of the Amorites, and implies that the neo-Sumerians viewed their nomadic way of life with disgust and contempt, for example:

“The MAR.TU who know no grain…. The MAR.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains…. The MAR.TU who digs up truffles… who does not bend his knees (to cultivate the land), who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death…They have prepared wheat and gú-nunuz (grain) as a confection, but an Amorite will eat it without even recognizing what it contains! ref

“As the centralized structure of the neo-Sumerian empire of Ur slowly collapsed, the component regions began to reassert their former independence, and places, where Amorites resided, were no exception. Elsewhere, armies of Elam were attacking and weakening the empire, making it vulnerable. Some Amorites aggressively took advantage of the failing empire to seize power for themselves. There was not an Amorite invasion as such, but Amorites did ascend to power in many locations, especially during the reign of the last king of the Ur-III Dynasty, Ibbi-Sin. Leaders with Amorite names assumed power in various places, including Isin, Larsa, and Babylon. The Elamites finally sacked Ur in ca. 2004 BC. Sometime later, the most powerful ruler in Mesopotamia (immediately preceding the rise of Hammurabi of Babylon) was Shamshi-Adad I, another Amorite.” ref

Effects on Mesopotamia

“The rise of the Amorite kingdoms in Mesopotamia brought about deep and lasting repercussions in its political, social, and economic structure. The division into kingdoms replaced the Sumerian city-state. Men, land, and cattle ceased to belong physically to the gods or to the temples and the king. The new monarchs gave, or let out for an indefinite period, numerous parcels of royal or sacerdotal land, freed the inhabitants of several cities from taxes and forced labor, and seem to have encouraged a new society to emerge, a society of big farmers, free citizens, and enterprising merchants which was to last throughout the ages. The priest assumed the service of the gods, and cared for the welfare of his subjects, but the economic life of the country was no longer exclusively (or almost exclusively) in their hands.” ref

“In general terms, Mesopotamian civilization survived the arrival of Amorites, as it had survived the Akkadian domination and the restless period that had preceded the rise of the Third Dynasty of Ur. The religious, ethical, and artistic directions in which Mesopotamia had been developing since earliest times, were not greatly impacted by the Amorites’ hegemony. They continued to worship the Sumerian gods, and the older Sumerian myths and epic tales were piously copied, translated, or adapted, generally with only minor alterations. As for the scarce artistic production of the period, there is little to distinguish it from the preceding Ur-III era.” ref

“The era of the Amorite kingdoms, ca. 2000–1600 BC, is sometimes known as the “Amorite period” in Mesopotamian history. The principal Amorite dynasties arose in Mari, Yamkhad, Qatna, Assur (under Shamshi-Adad I), Isin, Larsa, and Babylon. This era ended with the Hittite sack of Babylon (c. 1595 BC) which brought new ethnic groups—particularly Kassites and Hurrians—to the forefront in Mesopotamia. From the 15th century BC onward, the term Amurru is usually applied to the region extending north of Canaan as far as Kadesh on the Orontes.” ref

Biblical Amorites

“The term Amorites is used in the Bible to refer to certain highland mountaineers who inhabited the land of Canaan, described in Gen. 10:16 as descendants of Canaan, son of Ham. They are described as a powerful people of great stature “like the height of the cedars,” who had occupied the land east and west of the Jordan; their king, Og, being described as the last “of the remnant of the giants” (Deut. 3:11). The terms Amorite and Canaanite seem to be used more or less interchangeably, Canaan being more general, and Amorite a specific component among the Canaanites who inhabited the land.” ref

“The Biblical Amorites seem to have originally occupied the region stretching from the heights west of the Dead Sea (Gen. 14:7) to Hebron (13:8; Deut. 3:8; 4:46-48), embracing “all Gilead and all Bashan” (Deut. 3:10), with the Jordan valley on the east of the river (4:49), the land of the “two kings of the Amorites,” Sihon and Og (Deut. 31:4; Josh. 2:10; 9:10). Both Sihon and Og were independent kings.” ref

“These Amorites seem to have been linked to the Jerusalem region, and the Jebusites may have been a subgroup of them. The southern slopes of the mountains of Judea are called the “mount of the Amorites” (Deut. 1:7, 19, 20). Five kings of the Amorites were first defeated with great slaughter by Joshua (10:10). They were said to have been utterly destroyed at the waters of Merom by Joshua (Josh. 11:8).” ref 

“It is mentioned that in the days of Samuel, there was peace between them and the Israelites (1 Sam. 7:14). The Gibeonites were said to be their descendants, being an offshoot of the Amorites that made a covenant with the Hebrews; when Saul would break that vow and kill some of the Gibeonites, God sent a famine to Israel.” ref

Indo-European Amorites

“The view that Amorites were fierce tall nomads led to an idiosyncratic theory among some writers in the 19th Century that they were a tribe of “Germanic” warriors who at one point dominated the Israelites. This was because the evidence fitted then-current models of Indo-European migrations. This theory originated with Felix von Luschan, who later abandoned it.” ref

Amorite Jesus and David

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, claimed that King David and Jesus were both Aryans of Amorite extraction. This argument was repeated by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.” ref 

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Did you know the God of the Bible once was known by bull symbolism?

· Bible God El in ancient pictographic Hebrew then in modern-day Hebrew.

· God El is seen 250 times in the Hebrew bible primarily describing the God of Israel (Isra-El).

· Bible God YHWH or Yahweh in ancient pictographic Hebrew, with upraised arms like “KA” an Egyptian (life-force or spirit after death) hieroglyph of upraised arms relating to the bull.

· Egyptian with upraised arms means High, Rejoice, or Support, which to me, is similar to both the hieroglyph KA with upraised arms and the people pictographic Hebrew symbols (meaning Lo, Behold, “The”) for Yahweh with upraised arms. 

· The KA statue, on the statue of pharaoh Awibre Hor, provided a physical place for the KA to manifest of the hieroglyph representing KA’s upraised arms. KA was sometimes depicted on top of the head of the statue to reinforce its intended purpose.

· Egyptian meaning “High, Rejoice, or Support” which to me, is similar to both the hieroglyph KA with upraised arms and the people in the pictograph Hebrew symbols for Yahewh with upraised arms.

· Sinai 357 reflects an Egyptian name to a Hurrian god “Teshub” using an inherited Northwest Semitic formula and a sacred bull was Teshub’s animal. So Canaanites payers to gods such as El in their own Proto-Sinaitic / Proto-Canaanite scripts that later inspired ancient pictographic Hebrew followed by Paleo-Hebrew. 

· 1. Egyptian Hieroglyphs 5,200 years ago 2. Proto-Sinaitic 3,850 years ago to Proto-Canaanite / Pictograph Hebrew 3,550 years ago 3. Phoenician 3,200 years ago to Paleo-Hebrew 3,000 years ago 4. Greek 2,800 years ago 5. Latin 2,700 years ago. ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

To have faith is to make a presumption of faith towards something and the most common use of faith is toward things that relate to concepts of gods such as their names. Another way to have faith would mean to understand why a god would change their name. In the Jewish and Christian religions, their god’s name was changed. In the beginning, god’s eternal name is El, Near East god is most holy, and the father of all gods. El is a Semitic word meaning “god” or may relate to multiple ancient Near Eastern deities such as Hebrew: el, Amorite: il, Arabic ilah, Akkadian and Ugaritic: ilu, Aramaic and Phoenician: l, and is the known name of the original god to the Abrahamic religions. ref, ref, ref 

In Judaism, the later Hebrew and Aramaic texts, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating around 2,408 to 1,700 years ago, used El or Elohim for the names of God and sometimes were in written paleo-Hebrew script dating about 3,000 years ago, and used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which shows that El was still treated as special. ref, ref 

In the first statement of the Muslim confession of faith in the Quran, it states that “There is no god (ilah) except God (al-Lah or Allah).” And al-ilah, “the god” relates to El and Elah, the Hebrew and Aramaic words for God. ref, ref 

Also what is interesting is that Hebrew is a Semitic language and according to a popular Israeli news source the Haaretz, the country Isra-El (Israel) expresses the relationship with the 3,300 years old Canaanite deity El who was the head of the Canaanite pantheon. ref 

However, El’s name changed in the human-made Bible to El Shaddai. El Shaddai was the Bible-God’s name as first seen in Genesis 17:1, “God appeared to Abram, saying I am El Shaddai.” Similarly, in Genesis 35:11, Bible-God says to Jacob, “I am El Shaddai.” And seen in Exodus 6:2–3, El Shaddai was God’s name known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. All must follow El and Baal whose features were absorbed into the Yahweh religion. ref  

God El, the Semitic god, and the creator have a son named Baal “The Lord,” who is the governor of all adversaries to the fake god of the Jews, Yahweh or his other name El Shaddai. Bible-God, the Abrahamic god and the creator have a son named Jesus “The Lord.” It is interesting how people say that Jesus is “Lord” because Jesus is the son of Bible-God and without realizing they seem to be referencing Baal, which can mean “Lord” and is the son of El. No? Okay, let me try again! Why would a god go and change its name anyway? Some religious scholars have stated that the early Hebrews used the names Baʿal (“Lord”) and Baʿali (“My Lord”) to refer to the Lord of Israel, who is El and Yahweh. This use of Baʿal and Baʿali occurred both directly and as the divine element of some Hebrew theophoric names, which means consisting of the name of a deity and a verb. A few names that included the element Baʿal and presumably referring to Yahweh, including Saul’s son Eshbaʿal (“The Lord is Great”), and David’s son Beeliada (“The Lord Knows”). The name Bealiah is the combination of Baal and Yahweh (“The Lord is Jah” + “Yahweh is Baʿal” = “Yahweh is Lord”). ref 

To have faith would mean you would have to believe that you already know all of your god’s different names and believe you have the right god and not some other religions’ god or a combination of gods.

El (deity)?

“Ēl (also ʼIl, Ugaritic: ????????; Phoenician: ????????; Hebrew: אֵל‎; Syriac: ܐܠ‎; Arabic: إيل‎ or إله‎; cognate to Akkadian: ????, romanized: ilu) is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ʼila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ʼEl or ʼIl include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion[4] and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period.” ref 

Linguistic forms and meanings

Cognate forms are found throughout the Semitic languages. They include Ugaritic ʾilu, pl. ʾlm; Phoenician ʾl pl. ʾlm; Hebrew ʾēl, pl. ʾēlîm; Aramaic ʾl; Akkadian ilu, pl. ilānu. In northwest Semitic use, Ēl was both a generic word for any god and the special name or title of a particular god who was distinguished from other gods as being “the god”. Ēl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, Ēl played a role as father of the gods or of creation.” ref

“However, because the word sometimes refers to a god other than the great god Ēl, it is frequently ambiguous as to whether Ēl followed by another name means the great god Ēl with a particular epithet applied or refers to another god entirely. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “Ēl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“.” ref

“The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However the documentary hypothesis developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref

“The stem ʾl is found prominently in the earliest strata of east Semitic, northwest Semitic, and south Semitic groups. Personal names including the stem ʾl are found with similar patterns in both Amorite and Sabaic – which indicates that probably already in Proto-Semitic ʾl was both a generic term for “god” and the common name or title of a single particular god.” ref

Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hittite texts

“The Egyptian god Ptah is given the title ḏū gitti ‘Lord of Gath‘ in a prism from Tel Lachish which has on its opposite face the name of Amenhotep II (c. 1435–1420 BCE). The title ḏū gitti is also found in Serābitṭ text 353. Cross (1973, p. 19) points out that Ptah is often called the Lord (or one) of eternity and thinks it may be this identification of ʼĒl with Ptah that lead to the epithet ’olam ‘eternal’ being applied to ʼĒl so early and so consistently. (However, in the Ugaritic texts, Ptah is seemingly identified rather with the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis.) Yet another connection is seen with the Mandaean angel Ptahil, whose name combines both the terms Ptah and Il.” ref

“In an inscription in the Proto-Sinaitic script, William F. Albright transcribed the phrase ʾL Ḏ ʿLM, which he translated as the appellation “El, (god) of eternity”.The name Raphael or Rapha-El, meaning ‘God has healed’ in Ugarit, is attested to in approximately 1350 BCE in one of the Amarna Letters EA333, found in Tell-el-Hesi from the ruler of Lachish to ‘The Great One’ ” ref

“A Phoenician inscribed amulet of the seventh century BCE from Arslan Tash may refer to ʼĒl. The text was translated by Rosenthal (1969, p. 658) as follows:

An eternal bond has been established for us.
Ashshur has established (it) for us,
and all the divine beings
and the majority of the group of all the holy ones,
through the bond of heaven and earth for ever, …” ref

“However, Cross (1973, p. 17) translated the text as follows:

The Eternal One (‘Olam) has made a covenant oath with us,
Asherah has made (a pact) with us.
And all the sons of El,
And the great council of all the Holy Ones.
With oaths of Heaven and Ancient Earth.” ref

“In some inscriptions, the name ’Ēl qōne ’arṣ (Punic: ???????? ???????? ???????????? ʾl qn ʾrṣ) meaning “ʼĒl creator of Earth” appears, even including a late inscription at Leptis Magna in Tripolitania dating to the second century. In Hittite texts, the expression becomes the single name Ilkunirsa, this Ilkunirsa appearing as the husband of Asherdu (Asherah) and father of 77 or 88 sons. In a Hurrian hymn to ʼĒl (published in Ugaritica V, text RS 24.278), he is called ’il brt and ’il dn, which Cross (p. 39) takes as ‘ʼĒl of the covenant’ and ‘ʼĒl the judge’ respectively.” ref

Amorite inscriptions from Sam’al refer to numerous gods, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, especially by such titles as Ilabrat ‘God of the people'(?), ʾil abīka “God of your father”, ʾil abīni “God of our father” and so forth. Various family gods are recorded, divine names listed as belonging to a particular family or clan, sometimes by title and sometimes by name, including the name ʾil “God”. In Amorite personal names, the most common divine elements are ʾil “God”, Hadad/Adad, and Dagan. It is likely that ʾil is also very often the god called in Akkadian texts Amurru or ʾil ʾamurru.” ref

Ugarit and the Levant

“For the Canaanites and the ancient Levantine region as a whole, Ēl or Il was the supreme god, the father of mankind and all creatures. He also fathered many gods, most importantly Hadad, Yam, and Mot, each sharing similar attributes to the Greco-Roman gods: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades respectively. As recorded on the clay tablets of Ugarit, El is the husband of the goddess Asherah.” ref

“Three pantheon lists found at Ugarit (modern Ras ShamrāArabic: رأس شمرا‎, Syria) begin with the four gods ’il-’ib (which according to Cross; is the name of a generic kind of deity, perhaps the divine ancestor of the people), Ēl, Dagnu (that is Dagon), and Ba’l Ṣapān (that is the god Haddu or Hadad). Though Ugarit had a large temple dedicated to Dagon and another to Hadad, there was no temple dedicated to Ēl.” ref

“Ēl is called again and again Tôru ‘Ēl (“Bull Ēl” or “the bull god”). He is bātnyu binwāti (“Creator of creatures”), ’abū banī ’ili (“father of the gods”), and ‘abū ‘adami (“father of man”). He is qāniyunu ‘ôlam (“creator eternal”), the epithet ‘ôlam appearing in Hebrew form in the Hebrew name of God ’ēl ‘ôlam “God Eternal” in Genesis 21.33. He is ḥātikuka (“your patriarch”). Ēl is the grey-bearded ancient one, full of wisdom, malku (“King”), ’abū šamīma (“Father of years”), ’El gibbōr (“Ēl the warrior”). He is also named lṭpn of unknown meaning, variously rendered as Latpan, Latipan, or Lutpani (“shroud-face” by Strong’s Hebrew Concordance).” ref

“El” (Father of Heaven / Saturn) and his major son: “Hadad” (Father of Earth / Jupiter), are symbolized both by the bull, and both wear bull horns on their headdresses. In Canaanite mythology, El builds a desert sanctuary with his children and his two wives, leading to speculation that at one point El was a desert god. The mysterious Ugaritic text Shachar and Shalim tells how (perhaps near the beginning of all things) Ēl came to shores of the sea and saw two women who bobbed up and down.” ref 

“Ēl was sexually aroused and took the two with him, killed a bird by throwing a staff at it, and roasted it over a fire. He asked the women to tell him when the bird was fully cooked, and to then address him either as husband or as father, for he would thenceforward behave to them as they called him. They saluted him as husband. He then lay with them, and they gave birth to Shachar (“Dawn”) and Shalim (“Dusk”). Again Ēl lay with his wives and the wives gave birth to “the gracious gods”, “cleavers of the sea”, “children of the sea”. The names of these wives are not explicitly provided, but some confusing rubrics at the beginning of the account mention the goddess Athirat, who is otherwise Ēl’s chief wife, and the goddess Raḥmayyu (“the one of the womb”), otherwise unknown.” ref

“In the Ugaritic Ba‘al cycle, Ēl is introduced dwelling on (or in) Mount Lel (Lel possibly meaning “Night”) at the fountains of the two rivers at the spring of the two deeps. He dwells in a tent according to some interpretations of the text which may explain why he had no temple in Ugarit. As to the rivers and the spring of the two deeps, these might refer to real streams, or to the mythological sources of the salt water ocean and the fresh water sources under the earth, or to the waters above the heavens and the waters beneath the earth.” ref

“In the episode of the “Palace of Ba‘al”, the god Ba‘al Hadad invites the “seventy sons of Athirat” to a feast in his new palace. Presumably these sons have been fathered on Athirat by Ēl; in following passages they seem to be the gods (’ilm) in general or at least a large portion of them. The only sons of Ēl named individually in the Ugaritic texts are Yamm (“Sea”), Mot (“Death”), and Ashtar, who may be the chief and leader of most of the sons of Ēl. Ba‘al Hadad is a few times called Ēl’s son rather than the son of Dagan as he is normally called, possibly because Ēl is in the position of a clan-father to all the gods.” ref

“The fragmentary text R.S. 24.258 describes a banquet to which Ēl invites the other gods and then disgraces himself by becoming outrageously drunk and passing out after confronting an otherwise unknown Hubbay, “he with the horns and tail”. The text ends with an incantation for the cure of some disease, possibly hangover.” ref

Hebrew Bible

“The Hebrew form (אל) appears in Latin letters in Standard Hebrew transcription as El and in Tiberian Hebrew transcription as ʾĒl. El is a generic word for god that could be used for any god, including Hadad, Moloch, or Yahweh. In the Tanakh, ’elōhîm is the normal word for a god or the great God (or gods, given that the ‘im’ suffix makes a word plural in Hebrew).” ref 

“But the form ’El also appears, mostly in poetic passages and in the patriarchal narratives attributed to the Priestly source of the documentary hypothesis. It occurs 217 times in the Masoretic Text: seventy-three times in the Psalms and fifty-five times in the Book of Job, and otherwise mostly in poetic passages or passages written in elevated prose. It occasionally appears with the definite article as hā’Ēl ‘the god’ (for example in 2 Samuel 22:31,33–48).” ref

“The theological position of the Tanakh is that the names Ēl and ’Ĕlōhîm, when used in the singular to mean the supreme god, refer to Yahweh, beside whom other gods are supposed to be either nonexistent or insignificant. Whether this was a long-standing belief or a relatively new one has long been the subject of inconclusive scholarly debate about the prehistory of the sources of the Tanakh and about the prehistory of Israelite religion. In the P strand, Exodus 6:3 may be translated:

I revealed myself to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as Ēl Shaddāi, but was not known to them by my name, YHVH.” ref

“However, it is said in Genesis 14:18–20 that Abraham accepted the blessing of El, when Melchizedek, the king of Salem and high priest of its deity El Elyon blessed him. One scholarly position is that the identification of Yahweh with Ēl is late, that Yahweh was earlier thought of as only one of many gods, and not normally identified with Ēl. Another is that in much of the Hebrew Bible the name El is an alternative name for Yahweh, but in the Elohist and Priestly traditions it is considered an earlier name than Yahweh. Mark Smith has argued that Yahweh and El were originally separate, but were considered synonymous from very early on. The name Yahweh is used in the Bible Tanakh in the first book of Genesis 2:4; and Genesis 4:26 says that at that time, people began to “call upon the name of the LORD”.” ref

“In some places, especially in Psalm 29, Yahweh is clearly envisioned as a storm god, something not true of Ēl so far as we know (although true of his son, Ba’al Haddad). It is Yahweh who is prophesied to one day battle Leviathan the serpent, and slay the dragon in the sea in Isaiah 27:1. The slaying of the serpent in myth is a deed attributed to both Ba’al Hadad and ‘Anat in the Ugaritic texts, but not to Ēl.” ref 

“Such mythological motifs are variously seen as late survivals from a period when Yahweh held a place in theology comparable to that of Hadad at Ugarit; or as late henotheistic/monotheistic applications to Yahweh of deeds more commonly attributed to Hadad; or simply as examples of eclectic application of the same motifs and imagery to various different gods.” ref 

“Similarly, it is argued inconclusively whether Ēl Shaddāi, Ēl ‘Ôlām, Ēl ‘Elyôn, and so forth, were originally understood as separate divinities. Albrecht Alt presented his theories on the original differences of such gods in Der Gott der Väter in 1929. But others have argued that from patriarchal times, these different names were in fact generally understood to refer to the same single great god, Ēl. This is the position of Frank Moore Cross (1973). What is certain is that the form ’El does appear in Israelite names from every period including the name Yiśrā’ēl (“Israel”), meaning “El strives”.” ref

“According to The Oxford Companion to World Mythology,

It seems almost certain that the God of the Jews evolved gradually from the Canaanite El, who was in all likelihood the “God of Abraham”… If El was the high God of Abraham—Elohim, the prototype of Yahveh—Asherah was his wife, and there are archaeological indications that she was perceived as such before she was in effect “divorced” in the context of emerging Judaism of the 7th century BCE. (See 2 Kings 23:15.)” ref

“The apparent plural form ’Ēlîm or ’Ēlim “gods” occurs only four times in the Tanakh. Psalm 29, understood as an enthronement psalm, begins:

A Psalm of David.

Ascribe to Yahweh, sons of Gods (bênê ’Ēlîm),
Ascribe to Yahweh, glory and strength” ref

Psalm 89:6 (verse 7 in Hebrew) has:

For who in the skies compares to Yahweh,
who can be likened to Yahweh among the sons of Gods (bênê ’Ēlîm).” ref

“Traditionally bênê ’ēlîm has been interpreted as ‘sons of the mighty’, ‘mighty ones’, for ’El can mean ‘mighty’, though such use may be metaphorical (compare the English expression [by] God awful). It is possible also that the expression ’ēlîm in both places descends from an archaic stock phrase in which ’lm was a singular form with the m-enclitic and therefore to be translated as ‘sons of Ēl’.” ref 

“The m-enclitic appears elsewhere in the Tanakh and in other Semitic languages. Its meaning is unknown, possibly simply emphasis. It appears in similar contexts in Ugaritic texts where the expression bn ’il alternates with bn ’ilm, but both must mean ‘sons of Ēl’. That phrase with m-enclitic also appears in Phoenician inscriptions as late as the fifth century BCE.” ref

“One of the other two occurrences in the Tanakh is in the “Song of Moses“, Exodus 15:11a:

Who is like you among the Gods (’ēlim), Yahweh?” ref

“The final occurrence is in Daniel 11:36:

And the king will do according to his pleasure; and he will exalt himself and magnify himself over every god (’ēl), and against the God of Gods (’El ’Elîm) he will speak outrageous things, and will prosper until the indignation is accomplished: for that which is decided will be done.” ref

“There are a few cases in the Tanakh where some think ’El referring to the great god Ēl is not equated with Yahweh. One is in Ezekiel 28:2, in the taunt against a man who claims to be divine, in this instance, the leader of Tyre:

Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre: “Thus says the Lord Yahweh: ‘Because your heart is proud and you have said: “I am ’ēl (god), in the seat of ’elōhîm (gods), I am enthroned in the middle of the seas.” Yet you are man and not ’El even though you have made your heart like the heart of ’elōhîm (‘gods’).” ref

“Here ’ēl might refer to a generic god, or to a highest god, Ēl. When viewed as applying to the King of Tyre specifically, the king was probably not thinking of Yahweh. When viewed as a general taunt against anyone making divine claims, it may or may not refer to Yahweh depending on the context.” ref

“In Judges 9:46 we find ’Ēl Bêrît ‘God of the Covenant’, seemingly the same as the Ba‘al Bêrît ‘Lord of the Covenant’ whose worship has been condemned a few verses earlier. See Baal for a discussion of this passage.” ref

Psalm 82:1 says:

’elōhîm (“god”) stands in the council of ’ēl
he judges among the gods (Elohim).” ref

“This could mean that Yahweh judges along with many other gods as one of the council of the high god Ēl. However it can also mean that Yahweh stands in the Divine Council (generally known as the Council of Ēl), as Ēl judging among the other members of the council. The following verses in which the god condemns those whom he says were previously named gods (Elohim) and sons of the Most High suggest the god here is in fact Ēl judging the lesser gods.” ref

“An archaic phrase appears in Isaiah 14:13, kôkkêbê ’ēl ‘stars of God’, referring to the circumpolar stars that never set, possibly especially to the seven stars of Ursa Major. The phrase also occurs in the Pyrgi Inscription as hkkbm ’l (preceded by the definite article h and followed by the m-enclitic). Two other apparent fossilized expressions are arzê-’ēl ‘cedars of God’ (generally translated something like ‘mighty cedars’, ‘goodly cedars’) in Psalm 80:10 (in Hebrew verse 11) and kêharrê-’ēl ‘mountains of God’ (generally translated something like ‘great mountains’, ‘mighty mountains’) in Psalm 36:7 (in Hebrew verse 6).” ref

“For the reference in some texts of Deuteronomy 32:8 to seventy sons of God corresponding to the seventy sons of Ēl in the Ugaritic texts, see `Elyôn.” ref

Sanchuniathon

Philo of Byblos (c. 64–141 AD) was a Greek writer whose account Sanchuniathon survives in quotation by Eusebius and may contain the major surviving traces of Phoenician mythology. Ēl (rendered Elus or called by his standard Greek counterpart Cronus) is not the creator god or first god. Ēl is rather the son of Sky (Uranus) and Earth (Ge). Sky and Earth are themselves children of ‘Elyôn ‘Most High’. Ēl is brother to the God Bethel, to Dagon and to an unknown god, equated with the Greek Atlas and to the goddesses Aphrodite/’Ashtart, Rhea (presumably Asherah), and Dione (equated with Ba‘alat Gebal). Ēl is the father of Persephone and of Athena (presumably the goddess ‘Anat).” ref

“Sky and Earth have separated from one another in hostility, but Sky insists on continuing to force himself on Earth and attempts to destroy the children born of such unions. At last, with the advice of his daughter Athena and the god Hermes Trismegistus (perhaps Thoth), Ēl successfully attacks his father Sky with a sickle and spear of iron. He and his military allies the Eloim gain Sky’s kingdom.” ref

“In a later passage, it is explained that Ēl castrated Sky. One of Sky’s concubines (who was given to Ēl’s brother Dagon) was already pregnant by Sky. The son who is born of the union, called Demarûs or Zeus, but once called Adodus, is obviously Hadad, the Ba‘al of the Ugaritic texts who now becomes an ally of his grandfather Sky and begins to make war on Ēl.” ref

“Ēl has three wives, his sisters or half-sisters Aphrodite/Astarte (‘Ashtart), Rhea (presumably Asherah), and Dione (identified by Sanchuniathon with Ba‘alat Gebal the tutelary goddess of Byblos, a city which Sanchuniathon says that Ēl founded).” ref

“El is depicted primarily as a warrior; in Ugaritic sources, Baal has the warrior role and El is peaceful, and it may be that the Sanchuniathon depicts an earlier tradition that was more preserved in the southern regions of Canaan.” ref

Eusebius, through whom the Sanchuniathon is preserved, is not interested in setting the work forth completely or in order. But we are told that Ēl slew his own son Sadidus (a name that some commentators think might be a corruption of Shaddai, one of the epithets of the Biblical Ēl) and that Ēl also beheaded one of his daughters.” ref 

“Later, perhaps referring to this same death of Sadidus we are told:

But on the occurrence of a pestilence and mortality Cronus offers his only begotten son as a whole burnt-offering to his father Sky and circumcises himself, compelling his allies also to do the same.” ref

“A fuller account of the sacrifice appears later:

It was a custom of the ancients in great crises of danger for the rulers of a city or nation, in order to avert the common ruin, to give up the most beloved of their children for sacrifice as a ransom to the avenging daemons; and those who were thus given up were sacrificed with mystic rites. Cronus then, whom the Phoenicians call Elus, who was king of the country and subsequently, after his decease, was deified as the star Saturn, had by a nymph of the country named Anobret an only begotten son, whom they on this account called Iedud, the only begotten being still so called among the Phoenicians; and when very great dangers from war had beset the country, he arrayed his son in royal apparel, and prepared an altar, and sacrificed him.” ref

“The account also relates that Thoth:

also devised for Cronus as insignia of royalty four eyes in front and behind … but two of them quietly closed, and upon his shoulders four wings, two as spread for flying, and two as folded. And the symbol meant that Cronus could see when asleep, and sleep while waking: and similarly in the case of the wings, that he flew while at rest, and was at rest when flying. But to each of the other gods he gave two wings upon the shoulders, as meaning that they accompanied Cronus in his flight. And to Cronus himself again he gave two wings upon his head, one representing the all-ruling mind, and one sensation.” ref

“This is the form under which Ēl/Cronus appears on coins from Byblos from the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 BCE) four spread wings and two folded wings, leaning on a staff. Such images continued to appear on coins until after the time of Augustus.” ref

Poseidon

Main article: Poseidon

“A bilingual inscription from Palmyra dated to the 1st century equates Ēl-Creator-of-the-Earth with the Greek god Poseidon. Going back to the 8th century BCE, the bilingual inscription at Karatepe in the Taurus Mountains equates Ēl-Creator-of-the-Earth to Luwian hieroglyphs read as da-a-ś, this being the Luwian form of the name of the Babylonian water god Ea, lord of the abyss of water under the earth. (This inscription lists Ēl in second place in the local pantheon, following Ba‘al Shamîm and preceding the Eternal Sun.)” ref

“Poseidon is known to have been worshipped in Beirut, his image appearing on coins from that city. Poseidon of Beirut was also worshipped at Delos where there was an association of merchants, shipmasters, and warehousemen called the Poseidoniastae of Berytus founded in 110 or 109 BCE. Three of the four chapels at its headquarters on the hill northwest of the Sacred Lake were dedicated to Poseidon, the Tyche of the city equated with Astarte (that is ‘Ashtart), and to Eshmun.” ref

“Also at Delos, that association of Tyrians, though mostly devoted to HeraclesMelqart, elected a member to bear a crown every year when sacrifices to Poseidon took place. A banker named Philostratus donated two altars, one to Palaistine Aphrodite Urania (‘Ashtart) and one to Poseidon “of Ascalon.” ref

“Though Sanchuniathon distinguishes Poseidon from his Elus/Cronus, this might be a splitting off of a particular aspect of Ēl in a euhemeristic account. Identification of an aspect of Ēl with Poseidon rather than with Cronus might have been felt to better fit with Hellenistic religious practice, if indeed this Phoenician Poseidon really is Ēl who dwells at the source of the two deeps in Ugaritic texts. More information is needed to be certain.” ref

Religious restrictions on the consumption of Pork

As New Historian reports, Richard W. Redding, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan recently published a study attempting to decipher the historical origins of this cultural trend. He writes that archeological and anthropological evidence shows that between 5,000 to 2,000 BCE or around 7,000 to 4,000 years ago or so, the domesticated animals were common in the Fertile Crescent, likely used as “a household-based protein resource”—in other words, they were kept on hand as a tasty, nutritious food source. Then, around the 1,000 BCE or around 3,000 years ago or so, the keeping and eating of pigs sharply declined.” ref

Pork is a food taboo among Jews, Muslims, and some Christian denominations. Swine were prohibited in ancient Syria and Phoenicia, and the pig and its flesh represented a taboo observed, Strabo noted, at Comana in Pontus. A lost poem of Hermesianax, reported centuries later by the traveler Pausanias, reported an etiological myth of Attis destroyed by a supernatural boar to account for the fact that “in consequence of these events the Galatians who inhabit Pessinous do not touch pork”. In Abrahamic religions, eating pig flesh is clearly forbidden by Jewish (kashrut), Islamic (halal), and Adventist (kosher animals) dietary laws. Although Christianity is also an Abrahamic religion, most of its adherents do not follow these aspects of Mosaic law and are permitted to consume pork. However, Seventh-day Adventists consider pork taboo, along with other foods forbidden by Jewish law. The Eritrean Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church do not permit pork consumption. Hebrew Roots Movement adherents also do not consume pork. According to Herodotus, the Scythians had a taboo against the pig, which was never offered in sacrifice, and apparently, the Scythians loathed so much as to even keep swine within their lands.ref

Hogging the Attention: Cuisine and Culture in Ancient Israel

The Iron Age of Ancient Israel (1200 – 586 BCE or around 3,200 to 2,600 years ago or so) includes the rise and decline of two well-known cultural groups. The interactions between Israel and their nemesis the Philistines are described in the Old Testament that emphasized the differences between their cultures, heritage, and general ways of life. One of those distinctions was the observance of consumption taboos; Israelites did not eat pork products whereas the Philistines had no such dietary restriction. Thus, pork consumption has long been thought to be a hallmark of Philistine culture while pig avoidance a practice consistent with Israelite identity. Evidence unearthed at some archaeological excavations has been cited in support this simple dichotomy. But what is the nature of this evidence? And do such data represent an accurate and reliable marker for a group’s ethnicity? And finally, are there other ways in which this evidence can be interpreted?” ref

Zooarchaeological evidence demonstrates that Philistines raised more pigs (Sus scrofa), than Israelites who seemed to have comparatively little interest in hog management. Pigs from some Philistine sites make up as much as 20-30% of the animals used. In contrast, contemporary sites occupied by non-Philistines mainly include other common domesticated stock such as sheep, goats, and cattle and many failed to produce even a single pig bone or tooth amongst the thousands of animal remains. These discoveries have been and continue to be accepted by many scholars as ironclad and irrefutable confirmation of the biblical narrative, that a presence of pig equals Philistine culture while an absence of pig reflects Israelite society. This argument even seems to gain momentum if one considers the zooarchaeological data from the preceding Bronze Age. Pigs were exploited during this earlier phase but typically on a much smaller scale. Although it is certainly possible that these culinary pursuits aligned with ethnic preferences, let us consider Philistine and Israelite spheres more closely.” ref

“Elevated pig consumption coincides with the early stages of the Philistines’ appearance in the region during the 12th and 11th century BCE or around 3,100 years ago or so. Approximately 50 years later, in the mid-11th century BCE, pigs were not used as often, a decline which continues into the 10th century BCE or around 3,000 years ago or so. In fact, the scale of Philistine swine operations never returns to that of original levels; as time progressed the Philistine diet actually trended away from pig use. By the latter stages of Philistine occupation in the 7th century BCE, pig remains comprise less than 5% of the animals used, a rate comparable to contemporary non-Philistine communities. Therefore, swine popularity amongst the Philistines was restricted to a specific period of time, lasting approximately a century.” ref

“If pigs were a staple of Philistine culture, one would expect their use to be more widespread across time. But the highest period of heightened pig exploitation occurs with the arrival of the Philistines into the southern Levant from a distant land, suggested by many scholars to be somewhere in the Aegean world. As a new emigrant population, the Philistines faced challenges typical of initial settlement. Pig husbandry would be a good strategy for new settlers, allowing them to quickly establish their animal resource base. This is not only because sows (female pigs) birth large litters of piglets, but because the pig’s omnivorous diet efficiently converts a wide range of edible materials into exploitable pork products.” ref

But what accounts for the decline in hog production and consumption? Two suggestions can be offered. One is that the initial advantage gained by pig raising was eventually lost when immigrant economies stabilized, during which time pigs were gradually and systematically replaced by animals capable of producing secondary products, for example, dairy products, sheep wool, goat hair, and cattle traction. Another reason for the decline in pig use may relate to the Philistines’ exposure to local cultures and their willingness to incorporate some of these foreign cultural elements into their own society. This process is evident in several categories of the Philistine material culture such as pottery, writing systems, figurines, architecture, and even jewelry. It is possible that cultural interaction with foreign groups eventually led to an adjustment in the Philistine animal economy. The abundance of pigs varies within and between Philistine sites. In some large Philistine cities and towns pork consumption was not evenly represented throughout the architectural units. Thus, pigs appear intended for specific members of the community with perhaps a connection to social rank. Recent work has also demonstrated that pigs are rare at Philistine villages but more common in Philistine cities. This spatial variation in Philistine pig use between urban centers and rural areas makes an ethnic linkage more problematic.” ref

In contrast, pigs are either present in very low numbers or are completely absent at Israelite sites occupied during the United Monarchy of the early Iron Age and later Iron Age sites of the Divided Monarchy. But there are reasons for the absence or lack of hogs that may be unrelated to ethnicity. For example, if a group lived in a particularly hot and dry region, pigs would not be the animal of choice because their physiology does not allow them to thrive in such conditions. Pig avoidance may also relate to concerns involving hygiene. If, as some scholars believe, the Israelites were once nomadic pastoralists, their cultural origins may explain why pigs were not used in later periods. Non-sedentary mobile groups moving from place to place with the seasonal availability of water and pasture tend not to raise pigs since they are more difficult to handle than other herd animals such as sheep, goats, or cattle. Thus, pig avoidance may represent an echo of the Israelites’ former existence before their communities became more sedentary. We may also consider the relationship between animal management and local political hierarchical arrangements. Since pigs yield few secondary products compared to other barnyard stock, their production is often discouraged by powerful external administrations that demand receipt of taxes and tribute. This is especially true when such debts are paid with pork, their primary product.” ref

“One of the goals of Iron Age research in the southern Levant is understanding cultural identities based on material remains, and extent to which archaeologists may identify a particular site with the Philistines, Israelites, Canaanites, Egyptians, Phoenicians, or others. Acknowledging the difficulty in this, some have proposed that consumption taboos involving pork represents one of the main indicators of ethnic Philistine identity. Despite a range of other factors that must be considered, as outlined above, many still cling steadfast to this argument. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing just how early Israelite food taboos were institutionalized and became part of their cultural identity. Some curious finds that complicate an easy view of Israelite food taboos are also worthy of mention. A skeleton of a nearly intact adult pig was found at Hazor, a city in the northern Kingdom of Israel. Although the catfish (Clarias gariepinus) is known at Judean Iron Age sites such as Lachish and the City of David in Jerusalem, it would normally be regarded as non-kosher because it does not possess scales.” ref

“The occasional presence of non-kosher species in Israelite contexts could reflect the gradual definition of consumption taboos. However, these discoveries may instead reflect varying adherence to cultural ideals, with some more relaxed in their observances and others were more strict, and perhaps even people somewhere in the middle. Since variations in observances of kosher laws are also evident in the modern era, it may be more realistic to consider whether similar sentiments were also practiced in antiquity. Pigs may thus remind us of the complexity of human nature and why archaeology has so much to contribute to the thoughtful study of what makes different cultures unique.” ref

Pork Prohibition in Jewish law

“The Torah (Pentateuch) contains passages in Leviticus that lists the animals people are permitted to eat. According to Leviticus 11:3, animals like cows, sheep, and deer that have divided hooves and chew their cud may be consumed. Pigs should not be eaten because they don’t chew their cud. The ban on the consumption of pork is repeated in Deuteronomy 14:8.” ref

“During the Roman period, Jewish abstinence from pork consumption became one of the most identifiable features of Jewish religion to outsiders of the faith. One example appears in Tacitus’ Histories 5.4.1-2. Because Jewish dietary restrictions on pork were well-known to non-Jews, foreign attempts of oppression and assimilation of Jewish populations into Hellenistic and Roman custom often involved attempting to force Jewish populations into consuming pork.” ref

“According to 2 Maccabees 6:18-7:48, the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted to force Jews in his realm to consuming pork as a part of his attempted restrictions on the practice of Judaism. In addition, Philo of Alexandria records that during the Alexandrian riots (38) against Jewish communities in the city of Alexandria, some Alexandrian mobs also attempted to force Jews into consuming pork. Some forms of Jewish Christianity also adopted these restrictions on the consumption of pork, as is noted in the Didascalia Apostolorum.” ref

What Does a Pig Skeleton Discovered in Jerusalem Say

About First Temple Era Jews?

“Remains of piglet from 2,700 years ago support the theory that ancient Israelites occasionally did eat pork, and the biblical taboo on this animal was only first observed in Second Temple era, Israeli archaeologists say. Israeli archaeologists have unearthed the complete skeleton of a piglet in a place and time where you wouldn’t expect to find pork remains: a Jerusalem home dating to the First Temple period. The 2,700-year-old porcine remains were found crushed by large pottery vessels and a collapsed wall during excavations in the so-called City of David, the original nucleus of ancient Jerusalem. The team of archaeologists behind the discovery reported their find in a study published in the June edition of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology. The find of swine adds to previous research showing that pork was occasionally on the menu for the ancient Israelites and that biblical taboos on this and other prohibited foods only came to be observed centuries later, in the Second Temple period.” ref

“It also ties in to broader questions about when the Bible was written and when Judaism as we know it was born. The excavation also yielded an elegantly carved bone pendant and a human figurine. Together with the great variety of animals found alongside the pig, all of this indicates the house was occupied by an upper class family, the archaeologist says. The importance and central location of the house suggest that pig husbandry and pork consumption may have been a rare treat, but still very much part of “mainstream” food habits, he says. In other words, it doesn’t look like this was something done secretively by, say, a poorer household that may have been desperately in need of a quick meal. While domesticated pig bones are rarely found in Jerusalem and in most of the Levant, they are not entirely absent, Sapir-Hen notes. In excavations from the First Temple period in Jerusalem and in other sites from the Kingdom of Judah, swine bones constitute up to 2 percent of the animal remains unearthed, she says. Already back in the 1990s, archaeologists also observed that pig bones were much more frequent in the coastal strip that was inhabited by the Philistines. Scholars thus concluded that a dearth of pig bones identified a site as Israelite, and that the biblical ban on partaking in pork was already known and observed in the First Temple period (1200-586 BCE or 3,200-2,586 years ago or so).” ref

The Story of Pig As Taboo

“According to bible scholar Jacob Milgrom, the abhorrence of the pig was widespread in the ancient Near East and predated the Torah. Many cultures considered it an impure animal, fit only for sacrifice to the gods of the netherworld. Archeological evidence from Canaan suggests that while the Philistines, detested by Israel, used the pig for cultic purposes, the raising of pigs ended abruptly when Israel gained control of the country. A maxim from the book of Proverbs conveys the sense of revulsion for the pig missing in Leviticus: “Like a gold ring in the snout of a pig is a beautiful woman bereft of sense (Proverbs 11:22).” In fact, Milgrom conjectures that the second criterion for an edible quadruped, chewing the cud, was specifically added by Leviticus to exclude the pig. The absence of a hoof was enough to eliminate the others.” ref

B”y the time we come to the Second Book of Maccabees, authored perhaps as late as the first century C.E., the eating of pork was deemed to be a betrayal of Judaism at the deepest level. Second Maccabees recounts the earliest recorded instances of religious martyrdom. One of the martyrs is an elderly, respected scribe by the name of Eleazar, who refuses the command of the Syrian soldiers to eat swine’s flesh in public. “He welcomed death with glory rather than life with pollution, and of his own free will went to the rack.” In other words, the consumption of pork was equivalent to adopting the modes of the Greeks, which is the religious reformation the Syrians sought to impose on Judea by force.” ref

“The destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans transformed the pig in the Rabbinic mind into a symbol for Rome. The emblem of the Tenth Legion which occupied the ruins of Jerusalem after 70 C.E. was a boar. After the defeat of Bar Kochba in 135, the emperor Hadrian turned Jerusalem into a Roman city and, according to the Latin Church Father Jerome, who lived in Bethlehem for the last 30 years of his life, “In front of the gate which led to Bethlehem, he [Hadrian] placed a pig carved in marble signifying that the Jews were subject to the Romans.” ref

“The memory of these facts may well have inspired a later midrash that associated the pig with Rome and its biblical progenitor, Esau. What linked them all was the appearance of propriety. The Midrash connects the marriage of Esau at age 40 (Genesis 26:34) with a verse in Psalms that portrays Jerusalem as abandoned by God, its walls breached, and being ravaged by wild boars. (Psalms 80:14). Why should the psalmist alight upon the image of a boar? Because it is a master of deception. It puts out its cloven hoofs to make you think that it is kosher. Similarly, the Romans who oppress and plunder behind a facade of legality and justice are like Esau who indulged in adultery for years, according to the Midrash, only to take a wife at age 40 like his saintly father, Isaac, as if he had suddenly found religion. The symbol of the pig warns us against being taken in by surface civility and sudden conversions.” ref

“For Ashkenazic Jews in the Middle Ages, the pig continued to serve as the symbol of Daniel’s fourth and final kingdom in the famous prophecy by which Jews calculated the hoped-for coming of the messiah. Christendom with its seat in Rome was but an extension of the unrelieved cruelty of Roman dominion. At the same time, however, it was in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire that the pig as symbol was thrown back at the Jews in the form of an obscene anti-Jewish motif. From the 13th to the 16th century, Christian iconography adorned churches and public buildings with the scatological representation of Jews sucking at the teats of a sow. The one on the church in Wittenberg gained national notoriety when Martin Luther in 1543 in one of his two virulently anti-Jewish tracts fixed on it to prove that the pig is the source of the Jews’ uncanny wisdom and power. By transforming an object of revulsion into an object of veneration (much as the infamous “blood libel” did with blood), the Judensau (the Jews’ sow), as it was called, made Jews less than human, accomplices of the devil and masters of black magic. We have come full circle: from reviling the pig because it was sacrificed to the gods of the underworld to reviling Jews for their demonic otherness which is rooted in their worship of the pig.” ref

Money may relate to Rings, but no, it does not relate to Circumcision

Here is a response I received on a video of mine on YouTube: Show #3: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Uruk and the First Cities)

Eric Occcams5: “this from a book i will be getting in 5 days Psychoanalytical Notes on the Origin of Money By Fabio Benini · 2020 In the ancient world, (1) “many units of measurement were based, approximately, on some parts of the human body: arm, cubit, span, inch, foot; or on their functions: pace, half hour, league….” (2) “I wondered if there might be some parts of the body, which weighed 4.25g: in other words, half a siqlum or half a giĝ. And I identified, albeit with wide variations, these parts in the foreskin” (3) “which Abraham/Hammurabi cuts off as a symbol of a new faith” (4),” reviving -I cannot say how consciously – an ancient, now forgotten tradition which stands at the base of that antique unit of measurement with an abstract value and the form of a Ring to be worn as a bracelet or anklet on or in one’s own body (eg. nose rings, called nezem in Hebrew, and still in use as ornaments in many populations, in India for example; and earrings). These rings would therefore have had a weight and a composition of precious material equivalent to a coin. Such coin could be connected to the Pukku, ring, belonged to Gilgamesh, which could have been the non-Indoeuropean root PKK from which Benveniste derived the word Pecunia (money), as being therefore much older than the term Pecus (herd, flock). “In my work, this is the origin of the coin: round, empty, portable, also deriving from the discarded foreskin” (5), thereby generating symbolic rings long before the Lydia of Croesus. It certainly does not arise from a non-existent god of the underworld who would defecate gold: in other words, that so often cited Mammon who has persecuted us for 2,000 years.”

My quick response, Yes, rings/ornaments, or the like, made from shell, stone, teeth/bone, and metal relate to value as a type of money. This is not related to circumcision but prestige items, likely beginning in shell jewelry.

“A 50,000-Year-Old Fashion Statement Could Be One of the World’s Oldest Social Networks. Nearly identical beads carved from ostrich eggshells, found over a large region of Africa, might have been a first in cool trends.” ref 

The term wampum among Indigenous tribes in North America is a shortening of wampumpeag, which is derived from the Massachusett or Narragansett word meaning “white strings of shell beads”.  Wampum was used as Record-keeping and memory aids were also used as a kind of money/currency as well.” ref

My longer response, Now let me first break down what was said to show the many issues I see:

(1) “In the ancient world” (this is an undefined time and undefined place or cultural reference, thus not very useful to me)

(2) “many units of measurement parts of the human body” (not all and the genitals or parts thereof are not used, thus not very useful to make a link to circumcision)

“The earliest known uniform systems of weights and measures seem all to have been created at some time in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC among the ancient peoples of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, and perhaps also Elam (in Iran) as well. Early Babylonian and Egyptian records and the Hebrew Bible indicate that length was first measured with the forearm, hand, or finger and that time was measured by the periods of the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies. When it was necessary to compare the capacities of containers such as gourds or clay or metal vessels, they were filled with plant seeds which were then counted to measure the volumes. When means for weighing were invented, seeds and stones served as standards. For instance, the carat, still used as a unit for gems, was derived from the carob seed.” ref

“Shell money from Sumer, c. 3,000 BCE or 5,022 years ago” ref

“The earliest development of commodity money in prehistoric Central Europe Early Bronze Age” – Plos article 2021 ref 

An Ancient Form of European Money: Bronze Rings, Ribs and Blades, which scientists suggest they were a form of currency used some 3,500 years ago.” ref

Banking Before Money: Bronze Age people set up a system of banking long before the invention of coins. Temples in Egypt and Mesopotamia would allow people to deposit valuables to keep safe, or deposit livestock and produce to be traded. The temples even created a system of loans and interest.” ref 

Celtic bronze ring money dates from approximately 800 to 50 BCE or 2,822-2,072 years ago.” ref

True coinage began soon after 650 BCE or 2,672 years ago. The 6th-century Greek poet Xenophanes, quoted by the historian Herodotus, ascribed its invention to the Lydians, “the first to strike and use coins of gold and silver.” ref

“Circumcision likely has ancient roots among several ethnic groups in sub-equatorial Africa, Egypt, and Arabia” not Ancient Babylon, nor all Semites, just mainly Jews or those close to Africa and related with them. Archaeological or further literary records do not support that circumcision was truly widespread among Semites.” ref 

Sixth Dynasty (2345–2181 BCE) tomb artwork in Egypt has been thought to be the oldest documentary evidence of circumcision, the most ancient depiction being a bas-relief from the necropolis at Saqqara (c. 2400 BCE or 4,422 years ago) with the inscriptions reading: “The ointment is to make it acceptable.” ref

“According to Genesis, God told Abraham to circumcise himself, his household, and his slaves as an everlasting covenant in their flesh, see also Abrahamic Covenant.” ref  (thus circumcise parts had no money relation, but was for a religious ritual, to claim otherwise would need some proof or the like, and I don’t see any) 

(3) 1/2 “I wondered if there might be some parts of the body, which weighed 4.25g half a siqlum or half a giĝ. (this starts with wondered/speculation: guessing) “then” 2/2 And I identified, albeit with wide variations, these parts in the foreskin” (this ends with identified/established: claim of proof or knowledge)

(4) 1/2 Abraham/Hammurabi (this is problematic, to say the least, “Abraham” is an unestablished likely fictional character, only mentioned in a history erroring book the bible, and Hammurabi is an established historical figure) first 2/2 cuts off as a symbol of a new faith (there is no evidence Hammurabi believed in some new faith that is pushing the bible thinking on other figures as a large pantheon of gods and goddesses were worshiped by Babylonian kings such as Hammurabi) ref

(5) You claim: “In my work, this is the origin of the coin: round, empty, portable, also deriving from the discarded foreskin.” (what source do you have that establishes a link with discarded foreskin?)

“The brit milah “covenant of circumcision” is a Jewish religious male circumcision ceremony. The original version in Judaic history was either a ritual nick or cut done by a father to the acroposthion, the part of the foreskin that overhangs the glans penis. This form of genital nicking or cutting, known as simply milah, became adopted among Jews by the Second Temple period and was the predominant form until the second century CE. The notion of milah being linked to a biblical covenant is generally believed to have originated in the 6th century BCE or 2,622 years ago, as a product of the Babylonian captivity; the practice likely lacked this significance among Jews before the period.” ref 

My ending response, I see more issues but I think you get my point. And I do appreciate your comments and I tried to address them as thoughtfully as I could. Take care.

Conjectures disproven through counterexample are sometimes referred to as false conjectures. Conjecture is related to hypothesis, which in science refers to a testable conjecture.” ref

Speculative reason, sometimes called theoretical reason or pure reason, is theoretical (or logical, deductive) thought, as opposed to practical (active, willing) thought. The distinction between the two goes at least as far back as the ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle.” ref 

Unsupported assertion can be assumed when there is no evidence that such a Conjecture/Unsupported assertion is correct.” ref

My point is that I strive for reasoned speculations on prehistory, from logical jumps, related to supporting evidence, not wild conjectures or unsupported assertions/assumptions thus likely false conjectures/unreasoned speculations found in pseudo-history or pseudo-science in general.

Pseudohistory ignores empirical or logical evidence and is not to be compared on such traditional academic standards as accuracy, empirical probability, logical consistency, relevancy, completeness, reasoned fairness, or unbiased honesty.” ref

My thoughts on speculations/conjectures:

Unreasoned speculations/conjectures

Wild speculations/conjectures

Lose speculations/conjectures

Justified speculations/conjectures

Reasoned speculations/conjectures

Sound/proven speculations/conjectures

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref

Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey

“How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.” ref

My thoughts on Religion Evolution with external links for more info:

“Religion is an Evolved Product” and Yes, Religion is Like Fear Given Wings…

Atheists talk about gods and religions for the same reason doctors talk about cancer, they are looking for a cure, or a firefighter talks about fires because they burn people and they care to stop them. We atheists too often feel a need to help the victims of mental slavery, held in the bondage that is the false beliefs of gods and the conspiracy theories of reality found in religions.

“Understanding Religion Evolution: Animism, Totemism, Shamanism, Paganism & Progressed organized religion”

Understanding Religion Evolution:

“An Archaeological/Anthropological Understanding of Religion Evolution”

It seems ancient peoples had to survived amazing threats in a “dangerous universe (by superstition perceived as good and evil),” and human “immorality or imperfection of the soul” which was thought to affect the still living, leading to ancestor worship. This ancestor worship presumably led to the belief in supernatural beings, and then some of these were turned into the belief in gods. This feeble myth called gods were just a human conceived “made from nothing into something over and over, changing, again and again, taking on more as they evolve, all the while they are thought to be special,” but it is just supernatural animistic spirit-belief perceived as sacred.

 

Quick Evolution of Religion?

Pre-Animism (at least 300,000 years ago) pre-religion is a beginning that evolves into later Animism. So, Religion as we think of it, to me, all starts in a general way with Animism (Africa: 100,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in supernatural powers/spirits), then this is physically expressed in or with Totemism (Europe: 50,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in mythical relationship with powers/spirits through a totem item), which then enlists a full-time specific person to do this worship and believed interacting Shamanism (Siberia/Russia: 30,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in access and influence with spirits through ritual), and then there is the further employment of myths and gods added to all the above giving you Paganism (Turkey: 12,000 years ago) (often a lot more nature-based than most current top world religions, thus hinting to their close link to more ancient religious thinking it stems from). My hypothesis is expressed with an explanation of the building of a theatrical house (modern religions development). Progressed organized religion (Egypt: 5,000 years ago)  with CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS (after 4,000 years ago).

Historically, in large city-state societies (such as Egypt or Iraq) starting around 5,000 years ago culminated to make religion something kind of new, a sociocultural-governmental-religious monarchy, where all or at least many of the people of such large city-state societies seem familiar with and committed to the existence of “religion” as the integrated life identity package of control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine, but this juggernaut integrated religion identity package of Dogmatic-Propaganda certainly did not exist or if developed to an extent it was highly limited in most smaller prehistoric societies as they seem to lack most of the strong control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine (magical beliefs could be at times be added or removed). Many people just want to see developed religious dynamics everywhere even if it is not. Instead, all that is found is largely fragments until the domestication of religion.

Religions, as we think of them today, are a new fad, even if they go back to around 6,000 years in the timeline of human existence, this amounts to almost nothing when seen in the long slow evolution of religion at least around 70,000 years ago with one of the oldest ritual worship. Stone Snake of South Africa: “first human worship” 70,000 years ago. This message of how religion and gods among them are clearly a man-made thing that was developed slowly as it was invented and then implemented peace by peace discrediting them all. Which seems to be a simple point some are just not grasping how devastating to any claims of truth when we can see the lie clearly in the archeological sites.

I wish people fought as hard for the actual values as they fight for the group/clan names political or otherwise they think support values. Every amount spent on war is theft to children in need of food or the homeless kept from shelter.

Here are several of my blog posts on history:

I am not an academic. I am a revolutionary that teaches in public, in places like social media, and in the streets. I am not a leader by some title given but from my commanding leadership style of simply to start teaching everywhere to everyone, all manner of positive education. 

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

Low Gods “Earth” or Tutelary deity and High Gods “Sky” or Supreme deity

“An Earth goddess is a deification of the Earth. Earth goddesses are often associated with the “chthonic” deities of the underworldKi and Ninhursag are Mesopotamian earth goddesses. In Greek mythology, the Earth is personified as Gaia, corresponding to Roman Terra, Indic Prithvi/Bhūmi, etc. traced to an “Earth Mother” complementary to the “Sky Father” in Proto-Indo-European religionEgyptian mythology exceptionally has a sky goddess and an Earth god.” ref

“A mother goddess is a goddess who represents or is a personification of naturemotherhoodfertilitycreationdestruction or who embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world, such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother. In some religious traditions or movements, Heavenly Mother (also referred to as Mother in Heaven or Sky Mother) is the wife or feminine counterpart of the Sky father or God the Father.” ref

Any masculine sky god is often also king of the gods, taking the position of patriarch within a pantheon. Such king gods are collectively categorized as “sky father” deities, with a polarity between sky and earth often being expressed by pairing a “sky father” god with an “earth mother” goddess (pairings of a sky mother with an earth father are less frequent). A main sky goddess is often the queen of the gods and may be an air/sky goddess in her own right, though she usually has other functions as well with “sky” not being her main. In antiquity, several sky goddesses in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Near East were called Queen of Heaven. Neopagans often apply it with impunity to sky goddesses from other regions who were never associated with the term historically. The sky often has important religious significance. Many religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic, have deities associated with the sky.” ref

“In comparative mythology, sky father is a term for a recurring concept in polytheistic religions of a sky god who is addressed as a “father”, often the father of a pantheon and is often either a reigning or former King of the Gods. The concept of “sky father” may also be taken to include Sun gods with similar characteristics, such as Ra. The concept is complementary to an “earth mother“. “Sky Father” is a direct translation of the Vedic Dyaus Pita, etymologically descended from the same Proto-Indo-European deity name as the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter and Germanic Týr, Tir or Tiwaz, all of which are reflexes of the same Proto-Indo-European deity’s name, *Dyēus Ph₂tḗr. While there are numerous parallels adduced from outside of Indo-European mythology, there are exceptions (e.g. In Egyptian mythology, Nut is the sky mother and Geb is the earth father).” ref

Tutelary deity

“A tutelary (also tutelar) is a deity or spirit who is a guardian, patron, or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture, or occupation. The etymology of “tutelary” expresses the concept of safety and thus of guardianship. In late Greek and Roman religion, one type of tutelary deity, the genius, functions as the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death. Another form of personal tutelary spirit is the familiar spirit of European folklore.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) iKorean shamanismjangseung and sotdae were placed at the edge of villages to frighten off demons. They were also worshiped as deities. Seonangshin is the patron deity of the village in Korean tradition and was believed to embody the SeonangdangIn Philippine animism, Diwata or Lambana are deities or spirits that inhabit sacred places like mountains and mounds and serve as guardians. Such as: Maria Makiling is the deity who guards Mt. Makiling and Maria Cacao and Maria Sinukuan. In Shinto, the spirits, or kami, which give life to human bodies come from nature and return to it after death. Ancestors are therefore themselves tutelaries to be worshiped. And similarly, Native American beliefs such as Tonás, tutelary animal spirit among the Zapotec and Totems, familial or clan spirits among the Ojibwe, can be animals.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Austronesian beliefs such as: Atua (gods and spirits of the Polynesian peoples such as the Māori or the Hawaiians), Hanitu (Bunun of Taiwan‘s term for spirit), Hyang (KawiSundaneseJavanese, and Balinese Supreme Being, in ancient Java and Bali mythology and this spiritual entity, can be either divine or ancestral), Kaitiaki (New Zealand Māori term used for the concept of guardianship, for the sky, the sea, and the land), Kawas (mythology) (divided into 6 groups: gods, ancestors, souls of the living, spirits of living things, spirits of lifeless objects, and ghosts), Tiki (Māori mythologyTiki is the first man created by either Tūmatauenga or Tāne and represents deified ancestors found in most Polynesian cultures). ” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

Mesopotamian Tutelary Deities can be seen as ones related to City-States 

“Historical city-states included Sumerian cities such as Uruk and UrAncient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician cities (such as Tyre and Sidon); the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes; the city-states of ancient Greece (the poleis such as AthensSpartaThebes, and Corinth); the Roman Republic (which grew from a city-state into a vast empire); the Italian city-states from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, such as FlorenceSienaFerraraMilan (which as they grew in power began to dominate neighboring cities) and Genoa and Venice, which became powerful thalassocracies; the Mayan and other cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (including cities such as Chichen ItzaTikalCopán and Monte Albán); the central Asian cities along the Silk Road; the city-states of the Swahili coastRagusa; states of the medieval Russian lands such as Novgorod and Pskov; and many others.” ref

“The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE; also known as Protoliterate period) of Mesopotamia, named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization. City-States like Uruk and others had a patron tutelary City Deity along with a Priest-King.” ref

Chinese folk religion, both past, and present, includes myriad tutelary deities. Exceptional individuals, highly cultivated sages, and prominent ancestors can be deified and honored after death. Lord Guan is the patron of military personnel and police, while Mazu is the patron of fishermen and sailors. Such as Tu Di Gong (Earth Deity) is the tutelary deity of a locality, and each individual locality has its own Earth Deity and Cheng Huang Gong (City God) is the guardian deity of an individual city, worshipped by local officials and locals since imperial times.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Hinduism, personal tutelary deities are known as ishta-devata, while family tutelary deities are known as Kuladevata. Gramadevata are guardian deities of villages. Devas can also be seen as tutelary. Shiva is the patron of yogis and renunciants. City goddesses include: Mumbadevi (Mumbai), Sachchika (Osian); Kuladevis include: Ambika (Porwad), and Mahalakshmi. In NorthEast India Meitei mythology and religion (Sanamahism) of Manipur, there are various types of tutelary deities, among which Lam Lais are the most predominant ones. Tibetan Buddhism has Yidam as a tutelary deity. Dakini is the patron of those who seek knowledge.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) The Greeks also thought deities guarded specific places: for instance, Athena was the patron goddess of the city of Athens. Socrates spoke of hearing the voice of his personal spirit or daimonion:

You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me … . This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.” ref

“Tutelary deities who guard and preserve a place or a person are fundamental to ancient Roman religion. The tutelary deity of a man was his Genius, that of a woman her Juno. In the Imperial era, the Genius of the Emperor was a focus of Imperial cult. An emperor might also adopt a major deity as his personal patron or tutelary, as Augustus did Apollo. Precedents for claiming the personal protection of a deity were established in the Republican era, when for instance the Roman dictator Sulla advertised the goddess Victory as his tutelary by holding public games (ludi) in her honor.” ref

“Each town or city had one or more tutelary deities, whose protection was considered particularly vital in time of war and siege. Rome itself was protected by a goddess whose name was to be kept ritually secret on pain of death (for a supposed case, see Quintus Valerius Soranus). The Capitoline Triad of Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva were also tutelaries of Rome. The Italic towns had their own tutelary deities. Juno often had this function, as at the Latin town of Lanuvium and the Etruscan city of Veii, and was often housed in an especially grand temple on the arx (citadel) or other prominent or central location. The tutelary deity of Praeneste was Fortuna, whose oracle was renowned.” ref

“The Roman ritual of evocatio was premised on the belief that a town could be made vulnerable to military defeat if the power of its tutelary deity were diverted outside the city, perhaps by the offer of superior cult at Rome. The depiction of some goddesses such as the Magna Mater (Great Mother, or Cybele) as “tower-crowned” represents their capacity to preserve the city. A town in the provinces might adopt a deity from within the Roman religious sphere to serve as its guardian, or syncretize its own tutelary with such; for instance, a community within the civitas of the Remi in Gaul adopted Apollo as its tutelary, and at the capital of the Remi (present-day Rheims), the tutelary was Mars Camulus.” ref 

Household deity (a kind of or related to a Tutelary deity)

“A household deity is a deity or spirit that protects the home, looking after the entire household or certain key members. It has been a common belief in paganism as well as in folklore across many parts of the world. Household deities fit into two types; firstly, a specific deity – typically a goddess – often referred to as a hearth goddess or domestic goddess who is associated with the home and hearth, such as the ancient Greek Hestia.” ref

“The second type of household deities are those that are not one singular deity, but a type, or species of animistic deity, who usually have lesser powers than major deities. This type was common in the religions of antiquity, such as the Lares of ancient Roman religion, the Gashin of Korean shamanism, and Cofgodas of Anglo-Saxon paganism. These survived Christianisation as fairy-like creatures existing in folklore, such as the Anglo-Scottish Brownie and Slavic Domovoy.” ref

“Household deities were usually worshipped not in temples but in the home, where they would be represented by small idols (such as the teraphim of the Bible, often translated as “household gods” in Genesis 31:19 for example), amulets, paintings, or reliefs. They could also be found on domestic objects, such as cosmetic articles in the case of Tawaret. The more prosperous houses might have a small shrine to the household god(s); the lararium served this purpose in the case of the Romans. The gods would be treated as members of the family and invited to join in meals, or be given offerings of food and drink.” ref

“In many religions, both ancient and modern, a god would preside over the home. Certain species, or types, of household deities, existed. An example of this was the Roman Lares. Many European cultures retained house spirits into the modern period. Some examples of these include:

“Although the cosmic status of household deities was not as lofty as that of the Twelve Olympians or the Aesir, they were also jealous of their dignity and also had to be appeased with shrines and offerings, however humble. Because of their immediacy they had arguably more influence on the day-to-day affairs of men than the remote gods did. Vestiges of their worship persisted long after Christianity and other major religions extirpated nearly every trace of the major pagan pantheons. Elements of the practice can be seen even today, with Christian accretions, where statues to various saints (such as St. Francis) protect gardens and grottos. Even the gargoyles found on older churches, could be viewed as guardians partitioning a sacred space.” ref

“For centuries, Christianity fought a mop-up war against these lingering minor pagan deities, but they proved tenacious. For example, Martin Luther‘s Tischreden have numerous – quite serious – references to dealing with kobolds. Eventually, rationalism and the Industrial Revolution threatened to erase most of these minor deities, until the advent of romantic nationalism rehabilitated them and embellished them into objects of literary curiosity in the 19th century. Since the 20th century this literature has been mined for characters for role-playing games, video games, and other fantasy personae, not infrequently invested with invented traits and hierarchies somewhat different from their mythological and folkloric roots.” ref

“In contradistinction to both Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, who defended theories of animistic origins of ancestor worship, Émile Durkheim saw its origin in totemism. In reality, this distinction is somewhat academic, since totemism may be regarded as a particularized manifestation of animism, and something of a synthesis of the two positions was attempted by Sigmund Freud. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, both totem and taboo are outward expressions or manifestations of the same psychological tendency, a concept which is complementary to, or which rather reconciles, the apparent conflict. Freud preferred to emphasize the psychoanalytic implications of the reification of metaphysical forces, but with particular emphasis on its familial nature. This emphasis underscores, rather than weakens, the ancestral component.” ref

William Edward Hearn, a noted classicist, and jurist, traced the origin of domestic deities from the earliest stages as an expression of animism, a belief system thought to have existed also in the neolithic, and the forerunner of Indo-European religion. In his analysis of the Indo-European household, in Chapter II “The House Spirit”, Section 1, he states:

The belief which guided the conduct of our forefathers was … the spirit rule of dead ancestors.” ref

“In Section 2 he proceeds to elaborate:

It is thus certain that the worship of deceased ancestors is a vera causa, and not a mere hypothesis. …

In the other European nations, the Slavs, the Teutons, and the Kelts, the House Spirit appears with no less distinctness. … [T]he existence of that worship does not admit of doubt. … The House Spirits had a multitude of other names which it is needless here to enumerate, but all of which are more or less expressive of their friendly relations with man. … In [England] … [h]e is the Brownie. … In Scotland this same Brownie is well known. He is usually described as attached to particular families, with whom he has been known to reside for centuries, threshing the corn, cleaning the house, and performing similar household tasks. His favorite gratification was milk and honey.” ref

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ref, ref

Hinduism around 3,700 to 3,500 years old. ref

 Judaism around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (The first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew” dated to around 3,000 years ago Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient fortress city overlooking the Elah Valley. And many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed around 2,500) ref, ref

Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)

“Judaism is an Abrahamic, its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Some scholars argue that modern Judaism evolved from Yahwism, the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, by the late 6th century BCE, and is thus considered to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions.” ref

“Yahwism is the name given by modern scholars to the religion of ancient Israel, essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses. Heading the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; below them were second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, all of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees, and a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal’ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yahweh, however, was not the ‘original’ god of Israel “Isra-El”; it is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name forms the basis of the name “Israel”, and none of the Old Testament patriarchs, the tribes of Israel, the Judges, or the earliest monarchs, have a Yahwistic theophoric name (i.e., one incorporating the name of Yahweh).” ref

“El is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ‘ila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ‘El or ‘Il include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. ʼĒl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, ʼĒl played a role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “ʼĒl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“. The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However the documentary hypothesis for the Old Testament (corresponds to the Jewish Torah) developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref

 

Jainism around 2,599 – 2,527 years old. ref

Confucianism around 2,600 – 2,551 years old. ref

Buddhism around 2,563/2,480 – 2,483/2,400 years old. ref

Christianity around 2,o00 years old. ref

Shinto around 1,305 years old. ref

Islam around 1407–1385 years old. ref

Sikhism around 548–478 years old. ref

Bahá’í around 200–125 years old. ref

Knowledge to Ponder: 

Stars/Astrology:

  • Possibly, around 30,000 years ago (in simpler form) to 6,000 years ago, Stars/Astrology are connected to Ancestors, Spirit Animals, and Deities.
  • The star also seems to be a possible proto-star for Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna, or Star of Venus.
  • Around 7,000 to 6,000 years ago, Star Constellations/Astrology have connections to the “Kurgan phenomenon” of below-ground “mound” stone/wood burial structures and “Dolmen phenomenon” of above-ground stone burial structures.
  • Around 6,500–5,800 years ago, The Northern Levant migrations into Jordon and Israel in the Southern Levant brought new cultural and religious transfer from Turkey and Iran.
  • “The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan may have connections to the European paganstic kurgan/dolmens phenomenon.

“Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Most, if not all, cultures have attached importance to what they observed in the sky, and some—such as the HindusChinese, and the Maya—developed elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations. Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in use, can trace its roots to 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it spread to Ancient GreeceRome, the Islamicate world and eventually Central and Western Europe. Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person’s personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects; the majority of professional astrologers rely on such systems.” ref 

Around 5,500 years ago, Science evolves, The first evidence of science was 5,500 years ago and was demonstrated by a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world. ref

Around 5,000 years ago, Origin of Logics is a Naturalistic Observation (principles of valid reasoning, inference, & demonstration) ref

Around 4,150 to 4,000 years ago: The earliest surviving versions of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was originally titled “He who Saw the Deep” (Sha naqba īmuru) or “Surpassing All Other Kings” (Shūtur eli sharrī) were written. ref

Hinduism:

  • 3,700 years ago or so, the oldest of the Hindu Vedas (scriptures), the Rig Veda was composed.
  • 3,500 years ago or so, the Vedic Age began in India after the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization.

Judaism:

  • around 3,000 years ago, the first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew”
  • around 2,500 years ago, many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed

Myths: The bible inspired religion is not just one religion or one myth but a grouping of several religions and myths

  • Around 3,450 or 3,250 years ago, according to legend, is the traditionally accepted period in which the Israelite lawgiver, Moses, provided the Ten Commandments.
  • Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, a collection of ancient religious writings by the Israelites based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh, or Old Testament is the first part of Christianity’s bible.
  • Around 2,400 years ago, the most accepted hypothesis is that the canon was formed in stages, first the Pentateuch (Torah).
  • Around 2,140 to 2,116 years ago, the Prophets was written during the Hasmonean dynasty, and finally the remaining books.
  • Christians traditionally divide the Old Testament into four sections:
  • The first five books or Pentateuch (Torah).
  • The proposed history books telling the history of the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon.
  • The poetic and proposed “Wisdom books” dealing, in various forms, with questions of good and evil in the world.
  • The books of the biblical prophets, warning of the consequences of turning away from God:
  • Henotheism:
  • Exodus 20:23 “You shall not make other gods besides Me (not saying there are no other gods just not to worship them); gods of silver or gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves.”
  • Polytheism:
  • Judges 10:6 “Then the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the LORD, served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the sons of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; thus they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him.”
  • 1 Corinthians 8:5 “For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords.”
  • Monotheism:
  • Isaiah 43:10 “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.

Around 2,570 to 2,270 Years Ago, there is a confirmation of atheistic doubting as well as atheistic thinking, mainly by Greek philosophers. However, doubting gods is likely as old as the invention of gods and should destroy the thinking that belief in god(s) is the “default belief”. The Greek word is apistos (a “not” and pistos “faithful,”), thus not faithful or faithless because one is unpersuaded and unconvinced by a god(s) claim. Short Definition: unbelieving, unbeliever, or unbelief.

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Expressions of Atheistic Thinking:

  • Around 2,600 years ago, Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian philosopher, who is the first known proponent of Indian materialism. ref
  • Around 2,535 to 2,475 years ago, Heraclitus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor or modern Turkey. ref
  • Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, according to The Story of Civilization book series certain African pygmy tribes have no identifiable gods, spirits, or religious beliefs or rituals, and even what burials accrue are without ceremony. ref
  • Around 2,490 to 2,430 years ago, Empedocles, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. ref
  • Around 2,460 to 2,370 years ago, Democritus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher considered to be the “father of modern science” possibly had some disbelief amounting to atheism. ref
  • Around 2,399 years ago or so, Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher was tried for sinfulness by teaching doubt of state gods. ref
  • Around 2,341 to 2,270 years ago, Epicurus, a Greek philosopher known for composing atheistic critics and famously stated, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?” ref

This last expression by Epicurus, seems to be an expression of Axiological Atheism. To understand and utilize value or actually possess “Value Conscious/Consciousness” to both give a strong moral “axiological” argument (the problem of evil) as well as use it to fortify humanism and positive ethical persuasion of human helping and care responsibilities. Because value-blindness gives rise to sociopathic/psychopathic evil.

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

While hallucinogens are associated with shamanism, it is alcohol that is associated with paganism.

The Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries Shows in the prehistory series:

Show one: Prehistory: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” the division of labor, power, rights, and recourses.

Show two: Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”

Show tree: Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”

Show four: Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”

Show five: Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”

Show six: Emergence of hierarchy, sexism, slavery, and the new male god dominance: Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves!

Show seven: Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State)

Show eight: Paganism 4,000 years old: Moralistic gods after the rise of Statism and often support Statism/Kings: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism)

Prehistory: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” the division of labor, power, rights, and recourses: VIDEO

Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO

Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO

Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO

Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Pre-Capitalism): VIDEO

Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves: VIEDO

Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State): VIEDO

Paganism 4,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism): VIEDO

I do not hate simply because I challenge and expose myths or lies any more than others being thought of as loving simply because of the protection and hiding from challenge their favored myths or lies.

The truth is best championed in the sunlight of challenge.

An archaeologist once said to me “Damien religion and culture are very different”

My response, So are you saying that was always that way, such as would you say Native Americans’ cultures are separate from their religions? And do you think it always was the way you believe?

I had said that religion was a cultural product. That is still how I see it and there are other archaeologists that think close to me as well. Gods too are the myths of cultures that did not understand science or the world around them, seeing magic/supernatural everywhere.

I personally think there is a goddess and not enough evidence to support a male god at Çatalhöyük but if there was both a male and female god and goddess then I know the kind of gods they were like Proto-Indo-European mythology.

This series idea was addressed in, Anarchist Teaching as Free Public Education or Free Education in the Public: VIDEO

Our 12 video series: Organized Oppression: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of power (9,000-4,000 years ago), is adapted from: The Complete and Concise History of the Sumerians and Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia (7000-2000 BC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szFjxmY7jQA by “History with Cy

Show #1: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Samarra, Halaf, Ubaid)

Show #2: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Eridu: First City of Power)

Show #3: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Uruk and the First Cities)

Show #4: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (First Kings)

Show #5: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Early Dynastic Period)

Show #6: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (King Lugalzagesi and the First Empire)

Show #7: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Sargon and Akkadian Rule)

Show #8: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Naram-Sin, Post-Akkadian Rule, and the Gutians)

Show #9: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Gudea of Lagash and Utu-hegal)

Show #10: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Third Dynasty of Ur / Neo-Sumerian Empire)

Show #11: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Amorites, Elamites, and the End of an Era)

Show #12: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Aftermath and Legacy of Sumer)

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

The “Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries”

Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ Atheist Leftist @Skepticallefty & I (Damien Marie AtHope) @AthopeMarie (my YouTube & related blog) are working jointly in atheist, antitheist, antireligionist, antifascist, anarchist, socialist, and humanist endeavors in our videos together, generally, every other Saturday.

Why Does Power Bring Responsibility?

Think, how often is it the powerless that start wars, oppress others, or commit genocide? So, I guess the question is to us all, to ask, how can power not carry responsibility in a humanity concept? I know I see the deep ethical responsibility that if there is power their must be a humanistic responsibility of ethical and empathic stewardship of that power. Will I be brave enough to be kind? Will I possess enough courage to be compassionate? Will my valor reach its height of empathy? I as everyone, earns our justified respect by our actions, that are good, ethical, just, protecting, and kind. Do I have enough self-respect to put my love for humanity’s flushing, over being brought down by some of its bad actors? May we all be the ones doing good actions in the world, to help human flourishing.

I create the world I want to live in, striving for flourishing. Which is not a place but a positive potential involvement and promotion; a life of humanist goal precision. To master oneself, also means mastering positive prosocial behaviors needed for human flourishing. I may have lost a god myth as an atheist, but I am happy to tell you, my friend, it is exactly because of that, leaving the mental terrorizer, god belief, that I truly regained my connected ethical as well as kind humanity.

Cory and I will talk about prehistory and theism, addressing the relevance to atheism, anarchism, and socialism.

At the same time as the rise of the male god, 7,000 years ago, there was also the very time there was the rise of violence, war, and clans to kingdoms, then empires, then states. It is all connected back to 7,000 years ago, and it moved across the world.

Cory Johnston: https://damienmarieathope.com/2021/04/cory-johnston-mind-of-a-skeptical-leftist/?v=32aec8db952d  

The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist (YouTube)

Cory Johnston: Mind of a Skeptical Leftist @Skepticallefty

The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist By Cory Johnston: “Promoting critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics by covering current events and talking to a variety of people. Cory Johnston has been thoughtfully talking to people and attempting to promote critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics.” http://anchor.fm/skepticalleft

Cory needs our support. We rise by helping each other.

Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ @Skepticallefty Evidence-based atheist leftist (he/him) Producer, host, and co-host of 4 podcasts @skeptarchy @skpoliticspod and @AthopeMarie

Damien Marie AtHope (“At Hope”) Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist. Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Poet, Philosopher, Advocate, Activist, Psychology, and Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Historian.

Damien is interested in: Freedom, Liberty, Justice, Equality, Ethics, Humanism, Science, Atheism, Antiteism, Antireligionism, Ignosticism, Left-Libertarianism, Anarchism, Socialism, Mutualism, Axiology, Metaphysics, LGBTQI, Philosophy, Advocacy, Activism, Mental Health, Psychology, Archaeology, Social Work, Sexual Rights, Marriage Rights, Woman’s Rights, Gender Rights, Child Rights, Secular Rights, Race Equality, Ageism/Disability Equality, Etc. And a far-leftist, “Anarcho-Humanist.”

I am not a good fit in the atheist movement that is mostly pro-capitalist, I am anti-capitalist. Mostly pro-skeptic, I am a rationalist not valuing skepticism. Mostly pro-agnostic, I am anti-agnostic. Mostly limited to anti-Abrahamic religions, I am an anti-religionist. 

To me, the “male god” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 7,000 years ago, whereas the now favored monotheism “male god” is more like 4,000 years ago or so. To me, the “female goddess” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 11,000-10,000 years ago or so, losing the majority of its once prominence around 2,000 years ago due largely to the now favored monotheism “male god” that grow in prominence after 4,000 years ago or so. 

My Thought on the Evolution of Gods?

Animal protector deities from old totems/spirit animal beliefs come first to me, 13,000/12,000 years ago, then women as deities 11,000/10,000 years ago, then male gods around 7,000/8,000 years ago. Moralistic gods around 5,000/4,000 years ago, and monotheistic gods around 4,000/3,000 years ago. 

Gods?
 
“Animism” is needed to begin supernatural thinking.
“Totemism” is needed for supernatural thinking connecting human actions & related to clan/tribe.
“Shamanism” is needed for supernatural thinking to be controllable/changeable by special persons.
 
Together = Gods/paganism

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):

Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist, Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Jeweler, Poet, “autodidact” Philosopher, schooled in Psychology, and “autodidact” Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Pre-Historian (Knowledgeable in the range of: 1 million to 5,000/4,000 years ago). I am an anarchist socialist politically. Reasons for or Types of Atheism

My Website, My Blog, & Short-writing or QuotesMy YouTube, Twitter: @AthopeMarie, and My Email: damien.marie.athope@gmail.com

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