The relationship with gods/god has always been one of man’s oldest preoccupations, and still is till this very day. And while it’s fair to assume that Modern day man owes his advancement in philosophy and science to ancient Greece and its earliest thinkers, it’s equally fair when it comes to the development of religion and the evolution of religious thinking to give credence to the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
In fact, the earliest vestiges of human faith in God, as we know it today, are to be traced back to the valley of the river Nile and the one between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. We’re surely to find the root of our belief in a supreme creator inscribed, in hieroglyphs and cuneiform, on the pyramids and papyri of ancient Egypt and on the clay tablets of Sumer … And not within the confines of the Hebrew Bible, as many still believe.
And if we still cherish the Greek school of wisdom and science and continue to build on the teachings of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras, I wonder why we stopped honoring the ancient gods of Egypt and Sumer and Babylon. What has become of the mighty gods of the ancient Near East? What happened to Anu and Enlil, what has become of the beautiful Goddess “Inanna” Ishtar … The one god, Aten, and what happened to the omnipotent Amun/Amen of Thebes? … Amen, whose name is still echoing in every house of prayers on earth?
How come we fail to recall any of the magnificent epics of Sumer or the amazing mythology of Egypt whereas our kids know the stories of the Hebrew Bible by heart? But then again, if our kids are to be introduced to the myths of ancient Egypt and the epics of Sumer they won’t feel like they are in a strange land. The stories of Sumer and Egypt will sound so familiar.
“A lot of the stories in the Old Testament are in fact plagiarized material, particularly from the rich mythical heritage of the Sumerians – the inventors of writing. The story of Noah and the flood story, the creation of man out of clay, Cain and Abel, the gardens of Eden, the tree of knowledge, creation of Eve from Adams rib, and numerous other myths, like the throwing of Moses in the river after he was born, are all but stories found recorded on Sumerian clay tablets dating 5000 years back in time”
… This has long been common knowledge amongst the scholars of history, archeology and anthropology, but I find it extremely necessary today, in the so called information age, to drag it out of the academic realm and expose it in the open before the public eyes.
Why do we remember and celebrate legendary figures like David and Solomon who had no (actual) bearing on the human course of history, while we hardly recognize the enormous impact historical figures like Akhenaten or Hammurabi had on how we today come to define monotheism and the rule of law.
On the other hand, a religion in ancient Egypt was not a religion of comfort or beneficence. It was an all-embracing doctrine, like a harmony that was observed by all the players in a big philharmonic orchestra. It was a way of life. These Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions were Mythopoeic. Whereas our world view may be scientific or rational, so we tend to believe, these river civilizations adopted a world view based on myth.
When The Hebrew scribes began to write down parts of their old testament/chronicles, which they never imagined, nor planned to be a holy Bible, it was not an overnight job, rather it was a lengthy and interrupted process that may have started sometime after the release from Babylonian Captivity (539 BCE) and culminated around the time of the Hellenistic period (332-63 BCE). During that time all of the so called Ancient Canaan was virtually an Egyptian province
In the Bible, the Hebrew scribes unleashed the dagger of malevolence and took a stab at the superpowers of the ancient world, namely Egypt, Sumer and Babylon.
Through a prism of total prejudice and deeply seated grudge the Hebrew scribes wrote, page up and page down, not what really happened in ancient times, but rather what they wished had happened.
So, in their scrolls, the Hebrew scribes depicted Babel (Babylon) as the (hot bed of vice) with its tower in ruin, where in reality it stood 90 meters high, and Egypt as the land of slavery and tyranny, devastated by Yahweh’s gruesome plagues in the aftermath of which Egypt’s Pharaoh and his army drowned, where in fact, Egypt stood, for uninterrupted 3000 years, as one of the ancient world’s superpowers. At that time, something quite weird, that only analytical psychology could explain, started taking place in the Hebrew Bible.
Everything the Israelites desperately longed for (namely a mythology with fascinating stories like that of the Sumerians, a religion with big temples like that of the Egyptians … and yes, a piece of land they could call home like everybody else) the Hebrew scribes made damn sure it was granted to them on the pages of their bible.
Replacing Ziusudra with Noah, Enki with Adam, Sargon of Akkad with Moses, Aten with Yahweh and most importantly Faraon with the King of Egypt, the Hebrew scribes gave the world one of its most inconsistent and dangerous books ever.
They have molded it into a tribal thing; the universal nature of the Egyptian gods, e.g., Amun, Aten, had been twisted and refashioned to function only as the Hebrews’ own exclusive god, and hence the Hebrews as his own chosen people. And in a way this dominating concept of favoritism/nepotism has, and for the first time in the history of mankind, introduced/nurtured the idea of religious extremism.
“The literature created by the Sumerians left its deep impress on the Hebrews. To be sure, the Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly, for they had ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians had deeply influenced the Canaanites, who preceded the Hebrews in the land that later came to be known as Palestine” pp.143-4, “History Begins at Sumer” Samuel Noah Kramer.
First of all the Israelites had never been in Canaan, North Yemen and south Ancient Arabia is where Israelites’ tribe and their Patriarchs’ stories took place.
And even if by time, the Sumerian and Egyptian myths had probably turned into anecdotal tales of the distant past, how could we explain the reason/motive why the names of the main characters were extracted out and replaced by Hebrew counterfeits. … Moreover, with all the previous overlooked, how could we forgive the Hebrews’ wickedness of ascribing all this wisdom to their tribal god?
As their scribes were tampering with the history and the mythology of the ancient Near East, and through their ignorance/deceit the Israelites messed up not only with the great stories of Egypt and Sumer but they also damaged the concept of universalism and pluralism that for centuries characterized the religious thinking of the ancient Near East.
As the Hebrew scribes were tramping over the history of the ancient Near East they rewrote/invented a mythical table of nations (sons of Noah) that, at the end, and through a long cycle of selective favoritism, came down and as expected to favoring the sons of Shem (founding myth of modern day Semitism). And hence, the world through the tribal lens of the Israelites was only conceivable as Jews vs. Gentiles. This lingering duality complex that denied the Jews, till this very day, the ability to assimilate anywhere outside the psychological orbit of the tribe.
“Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf…There are two life forces in the world: Jewish and Gentile…I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable…” – You Gentiles, page 9, by Maurice Samuel
Contrary to what many may believe the Hebrew bible did invent/create the idea of monotheism, the Egyptian king Akhenaten did that and centuries before Judaism, and as a matter of fact YHWH, the Israelites’ one god had a consort by the name ‘Asherah’ On the other hand, the Sumerian and Egyptian pantheon of gods were pyramidal/hierarchical in a way that was feeding into the concept of one and supreme god presiding over the pantheon – aka Henotheism.
In his famous book, Moses and monotheism, Sigmund Freud concluded that monotheism was not a Jewish but an Egyptian invention, descending from the cult of the Egyptian sun god Aten. Moreover, upon applying his psychoanalysis to the myths/stories of the Hebrew bible, Freud not only argued that Moses was an Egyptian priest but he was also perplexed by how the whole story of Moses/Exodus, according to the oedipal pattern of analysis, was inverted and didn’t make sense the way it had been told. In other words the Hebrew myths/stories didn’t seem original.
What Judaism actually added to the world’s religious thinking is something totally different and, at the same time, inherently harmful. Through their tribal and somehow shallow collective mentality, the Hebrews had planted the root of religious dogmatism and fanaticism when they allowed for the absurd idea of God’s chosen people to flourish and permeate the religious thinking from then on.
Unfortunately that religious extremism passed on to Christianity, which was supposed to act as a counterbalance to Judaism’s tribal vulgarity, until it reached its worst case in Islam. What good is this kind of monotheism when its adherents, be it Jews, Christians or Muslims, are soaked to the skin in their fundamental belief/illusion that their god is the only true god and hence they are the true sons/believers … and that the others are just deluded people who somehow got lost along the way to salvation.
Dividing the world into Jews and Goyim is simply the Jewish idea of monotheism, or in other words, the Jewish defacement of monotheism which we today and most unfortunately still endure through its long term fallouts. What kind of god, who would favor a particular son and detest/abandon his others.
This was something totally new to the Ancient Near East. May be the Egyptians had their own gods, but that did not prevent them from respecting Babylonian gods like Ishtar or acknowledging their power. Even when Alexander the great or the Greeks, known as Ptolemies, invaded Egypt, they continued to worship the ancient Egyptian gods alongside theirs. And sometimes the ancient gods of the two cultures were combined in one divinity, as in the brilliant example of the syncretized god, Serapis (half Greek, half Egyptian), who stood in glory for hundreds of years inside the ancient temples of Alexandria and at the gate of its legendary library (later burned down by a mob of early extremist Christians)
Compared to the monotheism of Akhenaten and his god Aten, the prejudiced monotheism of Judaism- based mainly on the principle of nepotism/favoritism- was such a dangerous setback for the ancient religious thinking.
The Aten, contrary to the tribal version of Yahew, was a universal god, a sun disk that stretched out its rays all over the earth and blessed everybody, not just the Egyptians. The Hebrew scribes, in a cheap bid to grant a piece of land to the Israelites, and by default or design, had stripped the mythology of ancient Sumer and the theology of Egypt of its mysticism, universalism and wisdom.
The Talmudic/tribal influence of Judaism on later religions (Christianity and Islam) weighed heavily on world religious evolution and thinking. The former has been since paralyzed and frozen (beyond hope) in medieval times and the latter immersed in dogmatism and violence (beyond redemption)
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Pharisee is a Persian name or term….I read an article a while back claiming that the Persians actually created the term Jew…you don’t read about it until late in 2nd Kings prior to that the term Jew never was introduced in the OT…could Jews be from Babylon…Plus the teachings of Christ follows along the same ideology of the Zoroastrian religion and that was Persian
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we read they are the only chosen nation by the One and only True and Living God (YAHWEH/YAHWAH). The God that performed miraculous acts on their behalf and gave them a land where they built cities and temples. But the bible also depicts them as a disobedient, disloyal, unapreciative people. A people that even after their God would bless them, deliver them out of bondage, give there enemies into their hand, they would still turn there backs on Him and chase after other nations mythological Gods
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The Hebrew book was a local book of tribal tales aimed at an audience of the same tribes. The dissemination of its stories came after the Greek Septuagint forgery that falsely established the king of Egypt as Pharaoh of Moses (the very first steps of globalizing the local Arabian tale based on mass deception)
In the book documents from renowned classical Arabic geographers depicting a whole Arabic landscape in South Arabia and North Yemen founded on the place names the Bible generously offer as a Biblical road map.
A body of high profile anthropologists and historians trace the Israelite tribe back to their Arabian origin in Northen Yemen. One of their amazing evidence-based findings is that Jerusalem is originally called Dar Salam/ safe house that is located near mountain Zion in Northern Yemen.
Have you ever wondered why Sheba -Solomon’s mistress- was a Yemenite queen?
a raid led by Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III 729 – 727 BC, and later on another military campaign conducted by the Assyrian king Sharrukin II (Sargon II) 710 – 705 BC.
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king Nebuchadnezzar did not target the Israelites in specific like the distorted history books and Hebrew Bible will tell you, but he besieged and captured many Arabian tribal strongholds. The Israelite tribe and their DarSalam (Yemeni Jerusalem) just happened to be one of them (as documented by Classical Arabic historians, e.g. Al Tabari, Al-Masudi and Al- Hamadani)
Nebuchadnezzar might have never heard of the Israelites or their cult before he embarked on his military raids. The Israelite tribe was indeed not the biggest nor the most connected tribe in ancient Arabia. As a matter of fact the Adnan tribe of western Arabia was the key adversary to reckon with in Nebuchadnezzar’s raid.
After the Great Cyrus’s pardon most of the Arabian tribes preferred to continue in Babylon. The only tribes that couldn’t assimilate into the new urban culture of Babylon are the Israelites.
But on the other hand the captivity in Babylon has given the Israelites the golden opportunity to discover a wealth of Sumerian and Babylonian culture and mythology. Feeling the inferiority of their cult, the Israelite scribes embarked on writing down a new book for their tribe.
In the book, later known as the Hebrew Bible, loads of copycatted Sumerian and Babylonian profound myths were intertwined with the tribal and shallow stories of the Israelite tribes. (Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge, and the Noah flood are but ancient Assyrian/Sumerian myths)
https://ashraf62.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/hebrew-bible-plagiarized-mythology-and-defaced-monotheism/
Michael Ruark 