The Many Gods of the Bible

[mikeboll64]

Genesis 1:26… Then God said, “Let US make man in OUR image…

Who is the “US” and the “OUR” in the above verse?

[Lightenup]

YHVH

[GeneBalthrop]

Mike…….GOD the Father, who is Spirit, makes all things , “BY”, His Seven Spirits, the Seven Spirits “OF GOD”,   are the US,  mentioned there.  God the Father is the “word” , who sends forth his Seven Spirits into all his creation doing his work.  Remember what Jesus said,  “who soever has ears to hear, LET HIM  HEAR, “WHAT THE SPIRIT SAYS”,  IMO

Peace and love to you and yours Mike. ………..gene

[mikeboll64]

LU:  YHVH

Thanks for the response, Kathi.  The speaker of the words is identified as “God”.  And this “God” is clearly talking to at least one other person who is not the speaker who was identified as “God”.

Then in the following verse…

Genesis 1:27…  So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created them…

Here we learn that the speaker who was identified as “God” is a male, and that He alone created man in His image.

Now in your understanding, “God” is “The Yahweh Unity” of two persons who make up ONE God, right?  So not two different gods – as I always suspected from the way you teach your doctrine – but ONE single God.  Why then would it say about this one God comprised of two people that “HE” created man in “HIS” image?

Maybe you could answer the question more specifically.  Who specifically was the speaker saying the words, and who specifically was the speaker saying those words to?

[mikeboll64]

Gene:  GOD the Father, who is Spirit, makes all things , “BY”, His Seven Spirits, the Seven Spirits “OF GOD”,   are the US,  mentioned there.

Thanks for your contribution Gene.  To me, the most obvious and natural understanding is that God was talking to other heavenly beings, likely His spirit sons who were there praising him and shouting for joy as He created our world.  (Job 38:7, Prov 8:30-31)

[mikeboll64]

Moving on…

Genesis 3… 5For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

22And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, knowing good and evil…

So the serpent told Eve that eating from the tree would make her like the gods, knowing good and evil.  And then God confirmed what the serpent had told Eve by agreeing that Adam and Eve were now “as one of us, knowing good and evil”.

Who are these gods that Yahweh refers to as “one of us”?

[gadam123]

Genesis 3… 5For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

22And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, knowing good and evil…

So the serpent told Eve that eating from the tree would make her like the gods, knowing good and evil.  And then God confirmed what the serpent had told Eve by agreeing that Adam and Eve were now “as one of us, knowing good and evil”.

Who are these gods that Yahweh refers to as “one of us”?

Hi Mike, thanks for this new thread on “Many Gods of the Bible”. I always wonder how the Hebrew religion developed from the Henotheism to Monotheism. Yes the verses in Genesis like Gen 1:26; 3:22; 11:7 and so on reflect the many Gods or godly beings in the Hebrew Bible.

This is the reason why I once debated on the Polytheism or Henotheism of Hebrew religion based on Deut 32:8-10 (RSV)

8 When the Most High (Elyon) gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated the sons of men,
he fixed the bounds of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God (El).
9 For the Lord’s(Yahweh) portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.

Here the most High (God) the (El) Elyon is different from the Lord(Yahweh) who is the God of people of Jacob. The Most high is superior to Yahweh who is in the subordinate state along with other sons of God. The historians describe that the El Elyon was having 70 sons and Yahweh might be one among them. The later writers in the Hebrew Bible made Yahweh as the supreme God and Hebrew religion became Monotheism after the Babylonian Exile. This is clearly visible in Isiah 40-46 and other prophetic writings.

The God and sons of gods is clearly mentioned even in Ps 82 which talks about divine council and heavenly court.

Psalm 82 God (El) has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:

6 I say, “You are gods ( Elohim),
sons of the Most High (Elyon), all of you;
7 nevertheless, you shall die like men,
and fall like any prince.”

I think even the Hebrew Bible is redacted and edited by later scribes to suit their developed Monotheistic religion. But these few traces are still visible in the Hebrew Bible where most high God and his sons (gods) appearing including the verses that state “Let us”, “of us” etc.

[gadam123]

Origins of Judaism

The origins of Judaism lie in the Bronze Age amidst polytheistic ancient Semitic religions, specifically evolving out of the polytheistic ancient Canaanite religion, then co-existing with Babylonian religion, and syncretizing elements of Babylonian belief into the worship of Yahweh as reflected in the early prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible.

During the Iron Age I, the Israelite religion became distinct from the Canaanite polytheism out of which it evolved. This process began with the development of Yahwism, the monolatristic worship of Yahweh, one of the Canaanite gods, that gave acknowledgment to the existence, but suppressed the worship, of the other Canaanite gods. Later, this monolatristic belief cemented into a strict monotheistic belief and worship of Yahweh alone, with the rejection of the existence of all other gods, whether Canaanite or foreign.

During the Babylonian captivity of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE (Iron Age II), certain circles within the exiled Judahites in Babylon refined pre-existing ideas about their Yahweh-centric monolatrism, election, divine law, and Covenant into a strict monotheistic theology which came to dominate the former Kingdom of Judah in the following centuries.

From the 5th century BCE until 70 CE, Israelite religion developed into the various theological schools of Second Temple Judaism, besides Hellenistic Judaism in the diaspora. Second Temple eschatology has similarities with Zoroastrianism. The text of the Hebrew Bible was redacted into its extant form in this period and possibly also canonized as well.

Rabbinic Judaism developed during Late Antiquity, during the 3rd to 6th centuries CE; the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud were compiled in this period. The oldest manuscripts of the Masoretic tradition come from the 10th and 11th centuries CE, in the form of the Aleppo Codex of the later portions of the 10th century CE and the Leningrad Codex dated to 1008–1009 CE. Due largely to censoring and the burning of manuscripts in medieval Europe, the oldest existing manuscripts of various rabbinical works are quite late. The oldest surviving complete manuscript copy of the Babylonian Talmud is dated to 1342 CE

Iron Age Yahwism

Judaism has three essential and related elements: study of the written Torah (the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy); the recognition of Israel (defined as the descendants of Abraham through his grandson Jacob) as a people elected by God as recipients of the law at Mount Sinai, his chosen people; and the requirement that Israel live in accordance with God’s laws as given in the Torah. These have their origins in the Iron Age Kingdom of Judah and in Second Temple Judaism.

The Iron Age kingdoms of Israel (or Samaria) and Judah first appear in the 9th century BCE. The two kingdoms shared Yahweh as the national god of their respective kingdom, for which reason their religion is commonly called Yahwism.

Other neighbouring Canaanite kingdoms of the time each also had their own national god from the Canaanite pantheon of gods: Chemosh was the god of Moab, Moloch the god of the Ammonites, Qaus the god of the Edomites, and so on. In each kingdom the king was his national god’s viceroy on Earth.

The various national gods were more or less equal, reflecting the fact that kingdoms themselves were more or less equal, and within each kingdom a divine couple, made up of the national god and his consort – Yahweh and the goddess Asherah in Israel and Judah – headed a pantheon of lesser gods.

By the late 8th century both Judah and Israel had become vassals of Assyria, bound by treaties of loyalty on one side and protection on the other. Israel rebelled and was destroyed c. 722 BCE, and refugees from the former kingdom fled to Judah, bringing with them the tradition that Yahweh, already known in Judah, was not merely the most important of the gods, but the only god who should be served. This outlook was taken up by the Judahite landowning elite, who became extremely powerful in court circles in the next century when they placed the eight-year-old Josiah (reigned 641–609 BC) on the throne. During Josiah’s reign Assyrian power suddenly collapsed, and a pro-independence movement took power promoting both the independence of Judah from foreign overlords and loyalty to Yahweh as the sole god of Israel. With Josiah’s support the “Yahweh-alone” movement launched a full-scale reform of worship, including a covenant (i.e., treaty) between Judah and Yahweh, replacing that between Judah and Assyria.

By the time this occurred, Yahweh had already been absorbing or superseding the positive characteristics of the other gods and goddesses of the pantheon, a process of appropriation that was an essential step in the subsequent emergence of one of Judaism’s most notable features, its uncompromising monotheism. The people of ancient Israel and Judah, however, were not followers of Judaism: they were practitioners of a polytheistic culture worshiping multiple gods, concerned with fertility and local shrines and legends, and not with a written Torah, elaborate laws governing ritual purity, or an exclusive covenant and national god.

Second Temple Judaism

In 586 BCE Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Judean elite – the royal family, the priests, the scribes and other members of the elite – were taken to Babylon in captivity. They represented only a minority of the population, and Judah, after recovering from the immediate impact of war, continued to have a life not much different from what had gone before. In 539 BCE, Babylon fell to the Persians; the Babylonian exile ended and a number of the exiles, but by no means all and probably a minority, returned to Jerusalem. They were the descendants of the original exiles, and had never lived in Judah; nevertheless, in the view of the authors of the Biblical literature, they, and not those who had remained in the land, were “Israel”. Judah, now called Yehud, was a Persian province, and the returnees, with their Persian connections in Babylon, were in control of it. They represented also the descendants of the old “Yahweh-alone” movement, but the religion they instituted was significantly different from both monarchic Yahwism and modern Judaism. These differences include new concepts of priesthood, a new focus on written law and thus on scripture, and a concern with preserving purity by prohibiting intermarriage outside the community of this new “Israel”.

The Yahweh-alone party returned to Jerusalem after the Persian conquest of Babylon and became the ruling elite of Yehud. Much of the Hebrew Bible was assembled, revised and edited by them in the 5th century BCE, including the Torah (the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the historical works, and much of the prophetic and Wisdom literature. The Bible narrates the discovery of a legal book in the Temple in the seventh century BCE, which the majority of scholars see as some form of Deuteronomy and regard as pivotal to the development of the scripture. The growing collection of scriptures was translated into Greek in the Hellenistic period by the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora, while the Babylonian Jews produced the court tales of the Book of Daniel (chapters 1–6 of Daniel – chapters 7–12 were a later addition), and the books of Tobit and Esther.

Second Temple Judaism was divided into theological factions, notably the Pharisees and the Sadducees, besides numerous smaller sects such as the Essenes, messianic movements such as Early Christianity, and closely related traditions such as Samaritanism (which gives us the Samaritan Pentateuch, an important witness of the text of the Torah independent of the Masoretic Text)…….(taken from Wikipedia)

[GeneBalthrop]

Mike……Not knowing the exact definition of the “WORD” GOD is the most important thing , which you have ignored and acted like it not important to this topic.  But in fact if you are going to talk about God or as you believe God’s,  then first establish what the  word actually means is vital to this descussion.   I said God is not a person at all,  but a Word that describes a “RELATIONSHIP” and can apply to “ANYTHING”.  do you agree with that, or NOT? 

Even Satan knows who His God singular is,  it is the LORD “Yeheovah” ,  now notice carefully how Gen 3 is worded, and how you totally miss applied the text.

GEN 3:4….”and the serpent said unto the women, (first lie), you shall not surely die; for GOD,  (his God and their God),  knows that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be open (truth) and you (her and Adam)  shall “be “AS” Gods,  ( he’s was not saying,  there are other God’s , but that the two of (them)  would be “AS” or  “LIKE”  God’s,  because they like God would know, and  (comprehend through personal relationship with Good and Evil),   what God knows. But he wasen’t telling them the would actually be a God’s,  as you missapply that scripture to mean.

They as well as Satan himself, knew that would never be possible.  Therefore Satan used the word “AS’ which means “like” , but not never, really it.  That is why when the women saw that the fruit of the tree was good to make “one wise” (not make her a God) she ate of it, and so did Adam. 

If Satan was meaning they would actually be God’s , he would not have used th we word “AS” would he?, He simple would have  said  , you would be Gods. If that is what he meant. He was saying they would have an atrubit of God,  and even God confirmed that buy say “” look the man has become “AS” we are knowing good and Evil.” , so even God agreed with what Satan said,  that they would be “like” him.

The “LIE” was Satan saying they would not Die,    but they did die in the Day (1000 years),  in God’s time from the day  they a (took to themselve) to produce,  from themselves good and evil.

So bottom line Genesis 3 : 1-22,  in no way says,  there are more then one God.  FACT IS,  We all can become like God , even God commandes us to , saying this, “be you holy,  for I am holy,  be you perfect, for I am perfect,  but nowhere does any of that,  make us a God.   We are commanded (you) true believers this  ,You,  shall have no God besides me.  That is not saying people don’the have other Gods in there lives they have made as I said you can make anything your God, but they are not the,  only “true” God. 

That also explains why the “word God” alone  is not a person  of anykind, but a relationship you have with something “anything.”   So to preach there are many other “true” God’s,  is a “lie”   to all (true) believers. 

Peace and love to you and yours Mike. ……….gene

 

[mikeboll64]

Adam:  Hi Mike, thanks for this new thread on “Many Gods of the Bible”. I always wonder how the Hebrew religion developed from the Henotheism to Monotheism.

I know that the Bible is full of all kinds of different gods – just from a straightforward reading of it – and it has always baffled me why people who read the Bible think it only talks about one god.  I hope this thread will help some of those people, and allow me to delve into it more deeply and learn more.

But the Hebrew/Jewish culture was never monotheistic – not even in the NT.  And they are called “gods” in scripture, so no need to sugar-coat it by saying “godly beings”.  Let’s just call it like the Bible calls it. 👍

Adam:  Here [Deut 32:8-10] the most High (God) the (El) Elyon is different from the Lord(Yahweh) who is the God of people of Jacob. The Most high is superior to Yahweh who is in the subordinate state along with other sons of God.

That’s an odd claim that isn’t supported by any scripture.  Yahweh is called by all kinds of names, el, elohim, elyon, etc.  For example…

Genesis 14:22… But Abram said to the king of Sodom, “With raised hand I have sworn an oath to the LORD (Yahweh), God Most High (Elyon), Creator of heaven and earth…

Abram clearly believes that Yahweh IS Elyon, Creator of heaven and earth.  And Psalm 82 is no different.  By the way, the first “god” mentioned in 82 is “elohim”, not “el”.  It says “elohim” (Yahweh) presides in the Assembly of “el” (Yahweh’s own assembly hall or whatever) and judges the “elohim” (other gods).

I personally think it should be:  The gods (elohim) take their stand in the Assembly of God (el), and amongst the gods (elohim) He renders judgement.

But in either case, Ps 82 describes a time when other gods (heavenly sons of Yahweh) were assembled before Yahweh (as they are also in Job 1:6 and 2:1).

There are a lot of unsubstantiated (not to mention unscriptural) claims in the document you posted – like the Hebrews ever thinking Yahweh had a female cohort named Asherah, and claims of a so-called “iron age”. (Enoch says Azazyel taught men to make swords, knives, shields, breastplates, the fabrication of mirrors, and the workmanship of bracelets and ornaments long before these gods produced children with human women… ie: before the flood.)

But we can get to some of that stuff later.  Right now, I’m trying to take it slowly – scripture by scripture – so those who have been duped into believing that the Hebrew/Jewish culture was ever monotheistic can learn that this is simply not the case.

Thanks for your input, and I look forward to seeing more of it.

[mikeboll64]

Gene:  Mike……if you are going to talk about God or as you believe God’s,  then first establish what the  word actually means is vital to this descussion.   I said God is not a person at all,  but a Word that describes a “RELATIONSHIP” and can apply to “ANYTHING”.  do you agree with that, or NOT?

Hi Gene,

I use the words “god” and “gods” (NOT God’s with a capital G and an apostrophe that would be used for speaking about something that belongs to God) the same way their Hebrew and Greek equivalents are used all throughout scripture.  The word never means “relationship” in the Bible.

Gene:  …you (her and Adam)  shall “be “AS” Gods… But he wasen’t telling them the would actually be a God’s…

Correct.  The serpent never told Eve that she and Adam would actually BE gods.  He said they would be LIKE gods in one way only… knowing good and evil.

Gene:  …he’s was not saying,  there are other God’s…

Yes Gene, he was.  If the serpent told Eve they would be “like gods”, then there are obviously “gods” that they would be like.  It’d be like telling a kid they’d grow up big and strong like a horse… but there was no such thing as horses.

Also, the serpent didn’t tell Eve that they would be like “a relationship”, right?  So that shoots down that argument.

Gene:  If Satan was meaning they would actually be God’s , he would not have used the word “AS” would he?, He simple would have  said  , you would be Gods.

Correct.  I don’t know anyone on earth who has ever claimed that the serpent told Eve they would BE gods.  He clearly said that they’d be LIKE gods in one aspect only – knowing good from evil.  I’m really not sure who you’re arguing against here, Gene – because I never said they’d BE gods.

Gene:  He was saying they would have an atrubit of God,  and even God confirmed that buy say “” look the man has become “AS” we are knowing good and Evil.” , so even God agreed with what Satan said,  that they would be “like” him.

Now you’re getting closer to what I actually asked.  Yes, the serpent said they’d have one attribute that the gods have: the knowledge of good and evil.  But I’m asking you who these gods are, Gene.  You admit that God confirmed what the serpent said by saying the man has become “as WE are”.  Who is the WE, Gene?  Who was Yahweh saying, “They have become as WE are” to?

Do you believe Yahweh is a “WE”, Gene?  If not, then Yahweh was clearly talking to someone else when He said “they have become as WE are”, right?

Gene, who is the “WE”?  That is, after all, the actual question that I asked in the first place.

[Lightenup]

Mike,

You said:

Maybe you could answer the question more specifically.  Who specifically was the speaker saying the words, and who specifically was the speaker saying those words to?

1 Cor 8:6 yet for us there is only one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.

Gen 1:26

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Then the Father (the God no one has seen of John 1:18) said to the Son (the only begotten God of John 1:18), “Let Us make man in Our image (the only begotten God who is the image of the God no one has seen, Col 1:15), according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

 

 

[mikeboll64]

Adam, that passage you quoted – plus Psalm 82, Luke 4:6, and the Book of Enoch sum up the entirety of the Bible from the spirit realm aspect….

Deuteronomy 32:8-9… When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is His people, Jacob His allotted inheritance.

Yahweh created spirit sons before creating the heaven and the earth.  God placed His spirit sons over the affairs of the earth and mankind – just like He gave man dominion over the beasts.  Lucifer was the head Watcher, and he ruled over subordinate gods.  As mankind began to fill the earth, various gods under Lucifer were assigned to various nations (Deut 32:8-9), but Lucifer was the “King of the World”, so to speak – overseeing all of the gods of the various nations. (Luke 4:6)  Most nations had many different gods who took care of many different things for them, ie: “the gods of Egypt”.

These gods were supposed to teach mankind to do good works and love Yahweh – but instead they taught man to do evil and worship them instead of Yahweh.  Some of these gods even mated with human woman, and produced the Nephilim.  The Nephilim proceeded to ravage the earth, taking all the food for themselves, and even going as far as eating people.

That’s when God pronounced judgment upon some of these gods (as detailed in the Book of Enoch), and brought the flood.  The wicked men died in the flood, and the spirits of the dead Nephilim remain on earth to this day.  According to Enoch, God said that they would be known as evil spirits, and roam the earth until the final judgment day – always being hungry and thirsty, but with no way to satisfy their hunger or thirst.  Disembodied spirits are also considered as gods in the Bible (1 Samuel 28:13), and these evil spirits are also called demons.

After the flood, everything else went back to normal – with Satan ruling over the entire earth through his subordinate gods as before.  And these gods kept doing the bad things that they were doing before the flood.  Instead of flooding the earth again, God let these gods and their nations go on in their wicked ways, but chose one man out of the world from whom He would make a nation unto Himself.  And so it has been since Abram.  The gods of the nations keep leading mankind astray and away from Yahweh, and Yahweh’s own nation (although geographically dispersed right now) rejects those other gods and worships and serves only Yahweh.

Psalm 82 is about a judgement against these current gods, and is different than the judgment against only a few of them in Enoch.  And just like in Enoch, Yahweh tells these gods that they were supposed to be doing certain good stuff, but instead they taught men to do bad stuff.  And the judgment (as in Enoch) is that although they were created as immortal gods and immune from natural death, they will nevertheless die like men die on the final judgement day.

[mikeboll64]

LU:  Then the Father (the God no one has seen of John 1:18) said to the Son (the only begotten God of John 1:18), “Let Us make man in Our image (the only begotten God who is the image of the God no one has seen, Col 1:15)…

How do you know?  Why couldn’t it have been the Son saying, “Let us make man in our image”?

And which one of them was the “HE” who made man?  (Please include how you know.)

[gadam123]

But we can get to some of that stuff later.  Right now, I’m trying to take it slowly – scripture by scripture – so those who have been duped into believing that the Hebrew/Jewish culture was ever monotheistic can learn that this is simply not the case.

Hi Mike, thanks for your detailed replies to my two posts on this new thread on “Many Gods of the Bible”. In fact I am much interested to know the evolution of Hebrew religion from its primitive stage in the midst of Polytheistic environment in Canaan. You know the so called Mosaic Torah, the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but by number of authors such as JEDPR as per the historians. This is the reason why we find different titles for God in the Pentateuch starting from Genesis 1. The Hebrew Bible is filled with these titles in different books and texts. Also there are plenty of redactions and editions in these books by the later scribes to suit their full blown Monotheism of the Hebrew religion. This is the reason why I don’t agree with Jewish or Christian apologists who depend their Monotheistic religion.

In fact I find the Hebrew God Yahweh as a tribal god like any Canaanite gods. Yahweh was the national god of ancient Israel and Judah. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age. In the oldest biblical literature, he is a storm-and-warrior deity who fructifies the land and leads the heavenly army against Israel’s enemies; at that time the Israelites worshipped him alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal; in later centuries, El and Yahweh became conflated and El-linked epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, and other gods and goddesses such as Baal and Asherah were absorbed into Yahwist religion.

Scholars disagree as to the origins of the worship of the god Yahweh. The oldest plausible occurrence of his name is in the phrase “Shasu of Yhw” (Egyptian: 𓇌𓉔𓍯𓅱 yhwꜣw) in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE), the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia and Yhw being a place-name. The current consensus is therefore that Yahweh was a “divine warrior from the southern region associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman”. This raises the question of how Yahweh came to be worshipped further north. An answer many scholars consider plausible is the Kenite hypothesis, which holds that traders brought Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan. This ties together various points of data, such as the absence of Yahweh from Canaan, his links with Edom and Midian in the biblical stories, and the Kenite or Midianite ties of Moses, but its major weaknesses are that the majority of Israelites were firmly rooted in Canaan, and doubts as to the historicity of Moses. If the Kenite hypothesis is to be maintained without accepting some form of the Moses tradition, then it must be assumed that the Israelites encountered Yahweh (and the Midianites/Kenites) inside Israel.

The earliest known reference to Israel is a stele of the pharaoh Merneptah dated to 1208 BCE. Although the Biblical account draws a clear distinction between Israelites and Canaanites in this period, and this was followed in early scholarship, the modern consensus is that there was no distinction in language or material culture between these groups and scholars accordingly define Israelite culture as a subset of Canaanite culture.

With the notable exception of Yahweh himself, the deities worshipped by Israel were also Canaanite. These included El, the ruler of the pantheon, Asherah, his consort, and Baal. El and his seventy sons, who included Baal and Yahweh, made up the Assembly of the Gods, each member of which had a human nation under his care; a textual variant of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes Yahweh receiving Israel when El divided the nations of the world among his sons:

When the Most High (‘elyôn) gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated humanity,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of divine beings.
For Yahweh’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.

The etymology of the name Israel is unclear, but a plausible suggestion is “El rules”. This implies the original deity of Israel was El, but from some early date Yahweh was understood as Israel’s god, as reflected in the quotation above, which refers to El having allotted Israel to Yahweh. El and Yahweh were subsequently identified and the name of El became a generic noun meaning “god”. Yahweh is expressly identified with El Shadday in Exodus 6:2–3. During Iron I, Yahweh acquired characteristics of El, such as compassion, being bearded, and commanding the divine council.

In the earliest Biblical literature Yahweh is a storm-god typical of ancient Near Eastern myths, marching out from a region to the south or south-east of Israel with the heavenly host of stars and planets that make up his army to do battle with the enemies of his people Israel:

Yahweh, when you went out of Seir,
when you marched out of the field of Edom,
the earth trembled, the sky also dropped.
Yes, the clouds dropped water.
The mountains quaked at Yahweh’s presence,
even Sinai at the presence of Yahweh, the God of Israel…..

From the sky the stars fought.
From their courses, they fought against Sisera (Judges 5:4-5,20)

Iron II saw the emergence of nation-states in the Southern Levant including Israel, Judah, Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Edom and Phoenicia. Each kingdom had its own national god: Chemosh was the god of the Moabites, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qaus the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh the god of Israel. In each kingdom the king was also the head of the national religion and thus the viceroy on Earth of the national god.

Yahweh filled the role of national god in the kingdom of Israel (Samaria), which emerged in the 10th century BCE; and also in Judah, which emerged probably a century later (no “God of Judah” is mentioned anywhere in the Bible). During the reign of Ahab (c. 871–852 BCE), and particularly following his marriage to Jezebel, Baal may have briefly replaced Yahweh as the national god of Israel (but not Judah).

In 9th century, the Yahweh-religion began to separate itself from its Canaanite heritage, with the rejection of Baal worship (associated with the prophets Elijah and Elisha). This process continued over the period 800–500 BCE with legal and prophetic condemnations of the asherim, sun-worship and worship on the high places, along with practices pertaining to the dead and other aspects of the old religion. Features of Baal, El, and Asherah were absorbed into Yahweh, El (or ‘el) (Hebrew: אל) became a generic term meaning “god” as opposed to the name of a specific god, and epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone. In this atmosphere a struggle emerged between those who believed that Yahweh alone should be worshipped, and those who worshipped him within a larger group of gods. The Yahweh-alone party, the party of the prophets and Deuteronomists, ultimately triumphed, and their victory lies behind the biblical narrative of an Israel vacillating between periods of “following other gods” and periods of fidelity to Yahweh. When Judah became an Assyrian vassal-state after the destruction of Israel in 722 BCE, the relationship between the king and dynastic god Yahweh in Judah came to be thought of in terms of Assyrian vassal treaties.

In 587/6 BCE Jerusalem fell to the Neo-Babylonians, the Temple was destroyed, and the leadership of the community were deported. The next 50 years, the Babylonian exile, were of pivotal importance to the history of Israelite religion. As the traditional sacrifices to Yahweh could not be performed outside Israel, other practices including sabbath observance and circumcision gained new significance. In the writing of second Isaiah, Yahweh was no longer seen as exclusive to Israel but as extending his promise to all who would keep the sabbath and observe his covenant. In 539 BCE Babylon in turn fell to the Persian conqueror Cyrus the Great, the exiles were given permission to return (although only a minority did so), and by about 500 BCE the Temple was rebuilt…..(taken from Wikipedia).

This is the reason why I can’t agree with you on Deut 32:8-9 and Ps 82.

[Lightenup]

Hi Adam,

Have I asked you if you have read the Jewish Targums? Do you know about them?

[Lightenup]

Mike,

Regarding this post:

LU:  Then the Father (the God no one has seen of John 1:18) said to the Son (the only begotten God of John 1:18), “Let Us make man in Our image (the only begotten God who is the image of the God no one has seen, Col 1:15)…
How do you know?  Why couldn’t it have been the Son saying, “Let us make man in our image”?

And which one of them was the “HE” who made man?  (Please include how you know.)

I believe that the Father gives the vision and the Son does what He has seen in the vision. The Son formed man. All things are made by the only begotten God, apart from the only begotten God, nothing has been made that has been made. John 1:3, even the heavens and the earth ;).

[GeneBalthrop]

Mike…….by God saying the man would become as “we are”, does not mean the,  “WE”, are other Gods, or he would have said , as we “God’s are”.  You have inserted the word God’s there, but scripture does not say “we God’s”  now does it?, so that is a assumption on you part,  but consider this,  that simply “knowing” or experiencing ,  Good and evil,  is not just a God thing even the Angel’s know good and evil,  the actual word to “Know”,  is more then to just have a knowledge about something , it means to actually experience it yourself. 

To know in scripture carries more then jut a knowledge about something, it carries the meaning HAVING  an “experience”  with it, like Adam “knew” Eve, that was more then an acquaintance,  it was an INMATE relationship with her. 

Anyway liminating the idea of knowing  good and evil to only a God thing is just a assumption on your Part , It indeed is an atribute of God, but just that only, a true,  God has many, many,  more atributes,  then just knowing good and evil,  

There are many more atributes that can make us more like God that is given us, like the Spirit of Truth,  the cognisity of knowing the truth when you hear it, for instance,   that is an atribute of God , but even that does not make you  a God,  but if you were a God you would certainly have to have that atribute and many, many more, like his power to perform miracles for instance.

Jesus SAID, ” he could do “NOTHING “OF” HIMSELF”,  BUT also said “All things were possible “WITH” God.   SO in saying that he was deny he was ever a God, or he could do all thing himself right?  

Mike no matter how you want to cut it, there is “only one “TRUE GOD” , even though there are many , “so-called” God’s .  The reason people can apply the word God to anything is because the word God means their relationship with it,  and that relationship, has to be what you “trust in and you lean on for you true power in your life”,  it can be any thing yes even a Stone idol can be your God just as it was to the pagans,  but none of those thing made those thing a “true” God,  because they can’t do what THE,  “ONLY” TRUE GOD CAN DO.  

Peace and love to you and yours Mike. ………gene

 

[gadam123]

Hi Adam,

Have I asked you if you have read the Jewish Targums? Do you know about them?

Hi sis Kathi, yes you had asked on Targums in other thread  “Jewish Messiah”.

Ok, what do you want from them on this new thread on “Many Gods of the Bible”?

[GeneBalthrop]

Mike another thing playing the upper case GOD, and the lower case god thing,  is not true because there no little god’s   ALL OF OUR SCRIPTURES WERE WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN “UPPER” CASE LETTERS ,  UNTIL about 900 years ago, as I recall. 

You have not yet come to the true MEANING of the word GOD.   READ , “THE MACHANICAL TRANSLATION OF Genesis,  by Jeff Beener  and you may understanding what I am saying,  He is a Hebrew scholar, on the original Hebrew written language. Check it out.

Peace and love to you and yours Mike. ……….gene

[Author]

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