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Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

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Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#31

Post by cogman10 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #27
cogman10 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is visible in the Bible. For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods. From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the c…

> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. How does this theory account for the overt hostility to Baal et al. in the Bible?

Unification.

The authors of the Torah are laying down what correct worship is supposed to look like. I believe (and I'm not a biblical scholar, just like learning) the theory is that the priests at the time were dealing with a mixed culture and differing beliefs. One way to handle that is "Look at these evil/dumb heathens worshiping their weak gods". Painting the gods which likely some of the population still believes in dumb is a way to undermine and discourage belief. Sort of a "We are no longer team Bears, we are team bulls. The bears are actually inferior and dumb".

Part of forming the new religion was merging concepts and powers from commonly believed in gods. A little like the early christians rebranding pagan holidays while actively purging pagans.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#32

Post by sramsay »

idoubtit wrote: post #8
wglb wrote: post #2

Source article in the journal Iraq: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002108892...

Thank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org. I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous. "Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotam…

> I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.

Well, I am a scholar, and if you mean "Noah clearly did not hide these texts," then yes. Of course, that is ridiculous.

But it's actually a crucial bit of information if you're a humanist scholar. The article doesn't say anything about it, but the question would be: Which tradition recorded this legend about these texts? Almost any answer is important, because one culture trying to legitimate its own literary traditions or those of another through its own myths or those of another is absolute gold. It helps us to understand the way literary and religious syncretism unfolded (or failed to unfold) in the ancient near east and in later epochs . . .

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#33

Post by smithkl42 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #27
cogman10 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is visible in the Bible. For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods. From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the c…

> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. How does this theory account for the overt hostility to Baal et al. in the Bible?

"Baal" was less a name than a title. In modern Hebrew, it just means "lord" or "husband". It was also apparently a title that could, at some stages of Israel's history, even be applied to YHWH, much like "Adonay" ("My lord"). For instance, the individuals named "Mephibosheth" and "Ish-bosheth" (two of the sons of Saul, a clear if imperfect Yahwist) were originally named "Meribaal" and "Ish-baal". Whoever put together 1 and 2 Samuel changed their names from "May Baal Contend" and "Man of Baal" to various plays on "shame" (bosheth). Their original names are preserved, oddly enough, in 1 Chronicles.

If you could go back and ask, say, Samuel or David or Saul about how many gods existed and what their names were, I suspect all of them would have been clear that YHWH was the chief of the gods, and the only one that Israelites should worship, but beyond that you would have gotten some complicated and perhaps confused answers. Even some parts of the Bible take for granted that other gods besides YHWH exist - see, for instance, Psalm 82.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2082&vers...

Over time, "Baal" began to denote a specific agricultural deity, and it became less appropriate to use as a title for YHWH. That seems to have kicked off (or was kicked off by) the well-known conflict between Yahwism and Baal worship - see, ad infra, 1 Kings 18.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2018&...

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#34

Post by octopoc »

dragontamer wrote: post #22
bee_rider wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.

Monotheism elevates godhood in many regards. In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok. In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims). Then we get into weird blends like Hindu…

Polytheistic religions have more room for multiple worldviews than monotheistic religions. Polytheists have internalized the fact that there can be different paths that are right for different people. That’s why you get so much division in monotheistic religions.

In polytheistic religions, you still get infighting, but it isn’t considered virtuous.

Put another way, monotheism is polytheism except with a single title, Lord of the Universe, that all the gods/theologies/denominations have to compete for in order to be legitimate. That competition of different gods/worldviews is the essential innovation that monotheism brings.

That competition, that need to justify one’s beliefs, provides a drive that monotheists have and polytheists lack. And that is why monotheism prevailed in so many areas.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#35

Post by bee_rider »

atoav wrote: post #20
bee_rider wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.

Well also in polytheism gods were displayed as incredibly flawed.

A common-sense and straightforward extrapolation of human behavior. And also an obvious solution to the “problem of evil.”

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#36

Post by bee_rider »

dragontamer wrote: post #22
bee_rider wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.

Monotheism elevates godhood in many regards. In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok. In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims). Then we get into weird blends like Hindu…

> Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.

I don’t think that’s true of polytheism at all. That the gods aren’t everywhere or all-powerful doesn’t mean they were invented by the local humans, just that they were discovered by them.

They just look made-up by humans to us because we don’t believe in them. I’m sure ancient people believed in their gods’ stories just as much as some modern ones do, and most religions don’t feature some “humans created the gods” story, right?

I’m not sure what it means to be “flawed as an organizational concept.” States that had polytheistic religions as the main one stuck around for a long time of course. It is hard to say what’s predictive and what’s a coincidence in history I guess.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#37

Post by cheese_van »

Isamu wrote: post #7
freilanzer wrote: post #3

Fascinating. I should have studied Assyriology, few areas are as impressive imo. Maybe I still can, even at LMU. Although I don't believe it's possible alongside a regular job.

I found that the languages are hard to break into as an amateur, owning to the available literature. In contrast Egyptology has many popular treatments, you just have to watch out for the junk.

Speaking of junk, I was in Syria, many years ago, when it had about 250k tourists yearly, under Hafez al-Assad . I was in the company of an Assyriologist and in a shop of a vendor I knew (who sold artifacts under the table).

The vendor proudly showed us a new acquisition, an ancient cylinder seal. The archeologist examined it and told him it was a fake, because he explained, "I can read this language, and it is gibberish."

The UCLA archeologist, then excavating at Tel Mozan with Giorgio Buccellati, had 2 dead languages under his belt, a requirement for his Phd. I was rather in awe of the fellow - 2 dead languages!

Pro-tip: never buy artifacts without an archeologist to advise you. It's likely ethically wrong anyway, and likewise stupid unless you're an expert.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#38

Post by AlotOfReading »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #28

If I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated. I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.

That would involve better funding for the humanities, which has been in notoriously short supply for the past century or so. Digitization efforts are underway in many institutions and have been for decades.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#40

Post by toasterlovin »

tiahura wrote: post #26
giraffe_lady wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well. That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully form…

Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to…

> Yet the paucity of yhwh names.

Many of the biblical names ending in "ah" are YHWH names. This includes many of the prophets. So Elijah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Micaiah, Isaiah, for instance are all "ah" ending names that have a meaning related to YHWH in the same way that the "el" ending names are related to El. And then Joshua (and, hence, Jesus) is also a YHWH name.

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