Oannes

Jerry Friedman · 21 Mar 2012, 01:39 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:39:16 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Oannes
In-Reply-To: <4F67ADAB.1000307 at verizon.net>
References: <SNT123-W37A8FAC722FE3B6DA463F7CF420 at phx.gbl>
	<1332176108.17066.YahooMailNeo at web114703.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<4F679FB1.9090809 at gmail.com> <4F67ADAB.1000307 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <1332293956.71597.YahooMailNeo at web114710.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

>On 3/19/2012 5:05 PM, James Wynn wrote:

> 
>>> Lee:
>>> I mean the God of the OT recognizes the existence of rival gods,
>> Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> In the early books, but not the later ones.
> 
> It never occurred to me that in the early books of Bible God is ever depicted as actually feeling to be in competition with actual rivals (as opposed to /effective/ competition for the affections of his worshipers). While the early books seem to assume that His worshipers DO believe in rival gods, the upshot of the storytelling seems to imply that the true circumstances are otherwise.


I shouldn't have said that in the OT God recognizes the existence of other gods, since I'm not sure he does.? As you say, his worshipers do, even Moses (Ex. 15:11: "Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh?"), and God never takes any of the opportunities to correct them.

> In Genesis, he condemns Sodom and Gomorrah even though they do not appear to be his worshipers. In Genesis one never seems to encounter a god he must compete with or overcome. In Exodus, God plagues the Egyptians and their gods are not even addressed. In Numbers, Balaam's prophecy seems to assume one God who blesses and condemns. Also, in 1 Samuel, when the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant, they offer it before Dagan. Then the next morning the find the idol fallen forward on its face in front of the Ark.

Possibly suggesting that God beat Dagon.

> Also in 1 Kings when the Aramites decide that the gods of the Israelites are gods of the hills. So they decide to fight them in the plains where they can be easily defeated.? So God thrashes them extra hard to make a point.
> And in Job, argued to be the earliest book written,

Really?? I thought it was supposed to be post-Exilic.? Why couldn't those people put copyright dates on their books?


>there is really no credible alternative to God offered even though Job's worship of God does not protect him from harm.

I agree that there's no clear evidence of God's interactions with other gods.? But there's no clear evidence of monotheism till Second Isaiah (Is. 44:6), I'm told, so it seems likely that the authors of the books agreed with the characters that there were other Gods, but the Israelites were supposed to worship just one.

Jerry Friedman

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net