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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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

bee_rider wrote: post #36
dragontamer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

[deleted]

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

#52

Post by hibikir »

mlinhares wrote: post #15
jschveibinz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is most likely correct. I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Many scholars trace the earliest worship of Yahweh to the southern Levant, possibly Edom, Midian, or Seir which were outside of traditional Canaanite (early Hebrews) centers. Inscriptions from 800 BC refer to “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman,” implying a localized deity. So given that Assyria is in the same geographic region as the Levant, the…

Catholicism maintains it somehow by having "patron saints" and every city picking one up. Most cities in highly Catholic countries will have their own specific saint that they will have a special relationship with.

And don't miss those that have wider use than one town. Sta Maria del Carmen, patron of mariners, is celebrated in the same day in July in many a coastal town that had a fishing industry. The statue leaves the church and is paraded around in people's shoulders, taken to the port, and often sent on a short trip on one of the boats. The locals prayed for plenty fish, and for the fishermen to avoid dying at sea. You can trace that kind of thing to a polytheistic world quite well.

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

#53

Post by Eupolemos »

cjs_ac wrote: post #39

Somewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I

Dr. Finkel is just plain amazing.

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

#54

Post by johnnyApplePRNG »

yayitswei wrote: post #49

Interesting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks. If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex l…

You're skipping a lot of context here. Ancient Babylonian scribal schools were for a small elite—hardly universal childhood education. Medieval Europe's "regression" had a bit to do with the collapse of the Roman state, plagues, and centuries of instability, not just a lack of ambition. Comparing literacy rates across millennia without mentioning population size, language complexity, or what “schoolchildren” even means is a stretch.

History isn't exponential—it's bumpy.

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

#55

Post by empath75 »

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?

"The Bible" is not a single coherent text, but rather a collection of hundreds or thousands of years of oral tradition that was created and passed on by various people at various times for various purposes, and then collected and edited again by different people for different purposes.

There are layers of edits that you can tease out with careful reading, and they can be supported by archeological evidence from sites all around the near east.

It is not remotely controversial that the Hebrews/Israelites/Canaanites/Judeans were originally polytheistic, with a pantheon built around Canaanite gods (El, Ashera, etc), just like all of their neighbors and then gradually became henotheistic (our god is the best god), and then finally monotheistic (there is only one god). Pure monotheism was a very late development, and a lot of the conflicts in the bible is straightforwardly interpreted as describing a conflict between Yahwist henotheism and traditional near-eastern polytheism. Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods.

There are also completely retellings of polytheistic myths in the Bible which are basically a find-replace of Ba'al, etc, with either "El" or "Yahweh" or both.

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

#56

Post by empath75 »

schuyler2d wrote: post #47
ARandomerDude wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I'd answer a bit differently than replies so far. Later monotheist post "merging" of El and YHWH didn't really have space for El's son so they had to treat him as a lesser and then hostile God. Any worship for him was considered bad. Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday, it just so happens Canaanites, as I understand it, celebrated the end of the storm god's season in spring ... Very similarly to…

> Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday

(This is commonly repeated, but there is very little evidence for this)

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

#57

Post by marcellus23 »

octopoc wrote: post #5

The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.

> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.

This was pretty common in the polytheistic world I think. In the time of the Roman empire (pre-Christianity of course) there was a similar idea. And although Roman gods might be imported, they were often identified with the local gods, rather than replacing them.

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

#58

Post by AStonesThrow »

empath75 wrote: post #56
schuyler2d wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd answer a bit differently than replies so far. Later monotheist post "merging" of El and YHWH didn't really have space for El's son so they had to treat him as a lesser and then hostile God. Any worship for him was considered bad. Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday, it just so happens Canaanites, as I understand it, celebrated the end of the storm god's season in spring ... Very similarly to…

> Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday (This is commonly repeated, but there is very little evidence for this)

[dead]

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

#59

Post by schuyler2d »

empath75 wrote: post #56
schuyler2d wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd answer a bit differently than replies so far. Later monotheist post "merging" of El and YHWH didn't really have space for El's son so they had to treat him as a lesser and then hostile God. Any worship for him was considered bad. Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday, it just so happens Canaanites, as I understand it, celebrated the end of the storm god's season in spring ... Very similarly to…

> Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday (This is commonly repeated, but there is very little evidence for this)

Well the evidence is circumstantial. A bunch of Canaanites celebrate a spring festival with unleavened bread. Later they adopt a different religion that has a spring festival and an Exodus story with a new god called YHWH is glommed onto El.

I think it depends how "natural" one thinks the reason for unleavened bread is to Exodus. There's obviously plenty of mythical aspects to the story but the oldest are more focused on the river (Song of the Sea) and the battle. Why not combine rebirth/reinvention stories -- one a feast and another the beginning of "freedom"

But it's fair to say that most of Passover as a story and holiday is unrelated.

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

#60

Post by timschmidt »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #48
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference is that saints are not deities, even if there may be a similar psychological need (for protection, help, etc) in play. Saints do not possess power of their own accord. They function as intercessors. They are still human beings, albeit in an elevated spiritual state or plane, so to speak (a saint is anyone who is saved from hell and in heaven; canonized saints are simply those who are known to be saints…

> Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods". There were all kinds of gods. The Christian conception of God is taken from "pagan" philosophers. There's also a difference between theologian's/philosopher's conception of the Divine and religion and how lay people actually understood their faith. Even early Christians were divided on how they understo…

If I've learned anything from brief forays into different Gnostic groups it's that at some point in some place humans seem to have believed every possible variation of themes and interpretations.
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