Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

phys.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 121 posts

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

#91

Post by nkoren »

torben-friis wrote: post #73
empath75 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods. What do you mean by this? I can think of signs of a pantheon in general but not particularly in the creation myths.

See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.

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

#92

Post by petesergeant »

xeonmc wrote: post #80
cogman10 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 believe…

Also similarly: The Orange Catholic Bible

Awww, I was hoping for more Orange Order and Catholicism trivia

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

#93

Post by thaumasiotes »

exceptione wrote: post #86
thaumasiotes wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never intended to be taken together as a single document. Well, that's clearly untrue. People all over the world intend for you to do that right now.

The original author/copier intends.

The original copier?

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

#94

Post by alecco »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #71
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…

It's known as the Dark Ages for a reason. Society regressed in most ways. Maybe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Europe only started finding their feet during the Reneissance.

Beware Hollywood and English literature propaganda: Catholics were morons; pirates are cool; French and Spaniards are dumb, evil, and cowards.

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

#95

Post by FridayoLeary »

alecco wrote: post #94
FridayoLeary wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's known as the Dark Ages for a reason. Society regressed in most ways. Maybe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Europe only started finding their feet during the Reneissance.

Beware Hollywood and English literature propaganda: Catholics were morons; pirates are cool; French and Spaniards are dumb, evil, and cowards.

Yes, pirates were not cool. The rest of the list though...

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

#96

Post by cogman10 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #81
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. Well, only one of those is the name of a god. El is just the ordinary word "god". Ba'al is the ordinary word "lord". Unlike El, this could theoretically double as the name of a god in a couple of ways. In the typical case it didn't, and gods addressed as Ba'al had names beyond the title. Compare "Ba'al Hadad", where the god'…

El was the great God and Father of all gods, YHWH was his son [1]. The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%28deity%29?wprov=sfla1

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

#97

Post by griffzhowl »

smithkl42 wrote: post #33
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?

"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…

There's also evidence that even the exclusive worship of YHWH is something that's written in to the history at a later date, e.g. the Elephantine papyri predate any known manuscript of the Hebrew bible, and seem to show a polytheistic community of Jews in Egypt in the fifth century BC. This community was in contact with the Jerusalem temple, and there's no suggestion in their correspondence that what they were doing was unorthodox at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyri_and_ostraca

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

#98

Post by griffzhowl »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #21
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…

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…

Some of the parallels between the Roman and Greek pantheons are also because they derive from the common Indo-European root. e.g. Jupiter, Zeus pater and Dyaus pitr being the sky father

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

#99

Post by griffzhowl »

toasterlovin wrote: post #43
octopoc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> that need to justify one’s beliefs, provides a drive that monotheists have and polytheists lack FYI, before the monotheists fully suppressed the polytheists in the Roman Empire, it was the polytheists who were suppressing the monotheists.

As far as I know the history, the Roman religion was pluralistic in the sense that you could worship whatever gods you wanted, but you also had to pay respects to the Empire's gods. The monotheists refused to do that for the obvious reason, and that was the primary cause of conflict

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

#100

Post by alecco »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #95
alecco wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware Hollywood and English literature propaganda: Catholics were morons; pirates are cool; French and Spaniards are dumb, evil, and cowards.

Yes, pirates were not cool. The rest of the list though...

> The rest of the list though...

Please read some unbiased history books.

Catholics: Copernicus, Mendel, Pascal, Ampere, Fermat, ... And The Renaissance is always skipped by them for some reason.

Figures like Napoleon or The Catholic Monarchs were cowards and stupid?

But I think I'm wasting my time answering you. You seem quite closed minded, blue team, read team.

Post reply on HN