Ancient Liberals

Actually it was the Judeans who worshipped Yahweh.
Israelites worshipped Elohim.
So their Gods were merely tribal. The first Commandment acknowledges other Gods.

Both worshiped Yahweh (Jehovah) immediately following their exodus from Egypt. There was a spit in the 12 tribes later that lead to to creation of the two kingdoms. However, there's more to it than that. Each kingdom wavered back and forth over time contingent on which King was in power. There were Kings who "did good in the sight of God" and Kings "who didn't walk in the ways of the Lord (Yahweh). Other cultures and religions were constantly being built up or torn down during this era. So, while there was sporadic worship of other gods, both the Northern and Southern kingdoms were bound by their original Pentateuch, or Book of the Law. The struggle to maintain that one faith, and the constant drift toward pagan religion is what led (Biblically) to their overthrow by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and later, Alexander the Great. All of this is found in 1 and 2 Chronicles, and 1 and 2 Kings. Alexander isn't mentioned as he wasn't around when the last OT book was written.
The Old Testament does recognize the existence of other "gods", when describing the beliefs of others but they are described as caved images, stones, or wood, idols that were powerless. Acknowledging, for example, that someone worships Ra, does not imply that Ra is an actual entity.

There are actually a lot of scholars that question whether the Exodus ever really happened. There is zero evidence in Egypt for any such event and you have to ask yourself why over 3 million people would wander around for 40+ years in an area the size of Rhode Island. Of course why go to "The Promised Land" when you have food falling from the sky every day to feed you.... You have to suspend any common sense for it to work. At least I do.

haha

yeah pretty much

Interesting.

A search seeking to tie Elohim soley to Israel proved mostly fruitless, the word actually being plural for God. So it in itself acknowledges the notion. There seems to have been a regional use of it, with Elohim used more in the north and Yawheh in the south, so, as the Kingdoms went, that supports what I said to some degree at least.

And I did not mean recognize them as equals, just as a matter of fact. The Hebrew Diety was a tribal one, as stated in the First Commandement.

“Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it, 2 so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God," Deuteronomy 6:1

The term "LORD" is translated for Jehovah or Yahweh, both words formed from the YHWH in the Hebrew (vowels added). The term "God" used in the same verse is "Elohim". This connection is found throughout the OT. They are the same, as you can see in the verse itself. Elohim is not a name, but a title or position like "Jimmy" the "butler". Elohim is plural but its context is used in a singular sense throughout the texts as well. It speaks to plurality as well as oneness.

For example in Deuteronomy 6:4 it gets more descriptive. "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord,"

Same terms are being used for Yahweh and Elohim in that verse as well. This phrase is scattered all throughout the OT...but I already said that. Something worth noting: When the two terms are used in conjunction with one another Elohim is speaking of an individual entity, but it does refer to multiple gods when used apart from Yahweh or LORD and it is commonly written in English translations.

For example, in Exodus 20:2,3 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of [a]slavery.

3 You shall have no other gods [b]before Me." So it could say, "I am the Yahweh your elohim...You shall have no other elohim before me."

There is a plurality when speaking of Yahweh that is answered best if Yahweh is a part of a group. You're getting into Trinity theology here, so I'm just going to stop now. lol

And yet Hammurabi - the first person in history to establish rule of law- wrote those very laws before God plagarized them for Moses.

Whatever the nickname was at the time, the Elohim known as Yahweh was (and still is) a tribal one. That's why he was their God and no one else's.

It is not coincidental that the evolution of Tribal God > Supreme God > Only God occurred under Arani rule. Theologians agree that Zoroastrianism is the original monotheistic religion, and Ahura Mazda was the template for what the God(s) of the Hebrews later became.

BobParker already explained about El & Elohim, and had I read that in Wikipedia prior as well. If you visit it, it can link you to another entry about the apparent regional leanings in terms of use of Elohim and Yahweh, as well as detail other specifics in terms of their use.

Commandment*

Probably. I don't know the specifics (or much about the Bible at all), and even in the Torah, it's pretty muddled.

I had heard the Judeans started writing it down first, then the Israelites, with some slight differences (as expected from people separated for some time), and both tomes were combined later. That's why one line Daved slew Goliath, then later it says he approached Goliath already slain by someone else and just cuts his head off. Inconsistencies within books throughout are partly because of this.

Like "create them in our image" which they got when they borrowed the tale from the Sumerians.
Also something you never hear in Sunday school about is the Nephilim, who were either the sons of God who took a fancy to human women and came down to impregnate them, or were the progeny of such visitations. Jesus as the only son of God doesn't jibe well with God's sons raping women way before and leaving a trail of bastards, great ones, giants among men...

Lucipher was no Angel, he was a God. And in the original version of the Eden story (which never mentions Satan) before even the Egyptians got to it, the Serpent was not only a God, he was the good God, or at least those two Gods were dueling, Earth Mother Nature Serpent God duking it out with Sky God conquering Nature with this new fangled settled agrarian society thing.

The Nephilim were either the sons of God, or the sons of the sons of God.

I meant that prior to the Bible Lucipher was known as a God.

Much of Genesis, etc, was borrowed from the Sumerians, Gilgamesh's flood, Hammurbabi's laws (commandments)...
Serpent worship goes even earlier than than Mesopotamia or the Egyptians.

And the concept of a one God for the Jews was a result of Zoroastrian influence after they liberated them from good old Babylon and made them part of their Empire.

Just because the Sumerians wrote first about the flood, that doesn't necessarily discredit a later recount of it.

And vice versa.

The fuss Christians make about fundementalism (something most Jews don't do, and it IS their God, their religion, their history) is counterproductive. If there is a universal divinity, then such would reveal itself to ALL creation. Arguing that only one (altered by Chrisitianity, no less) strict version of tales shared by multiple people in a wider swath and in most cases even way before there was an Abraham is missing the point, an it in effect nulls the point, since it only seeks to establish this 'truth' by limiting it to an obscure very small spec of desert while excludng the rest of the world, including the seat(s) of Christianity itself.

Holy cow. We agree ... ;)

It happens.

and* it in effect

The flood narrative transcends many cultures and it makes sense historically that it would be so. If there were a catastrophic flood (regional or world wide) the survivors would be inclined to incorporate it into their theoganies. The story would spread and change over time. A historian puts together all the stories and ties together their consistencies. For example a family on a boat transcends several flood narratives. Interesting footnote: The Chinese symbol for "flood" is a boat with 8 people on it. It's one of their oldest characters and its origin is unknown or, at a minimum, hotly debated.

No one really wants to get me started on "the Flood" ... but just a couple of things:

Since Genesis 7:20 says that the flood covered the highest mountains by about 15 - 18 feet, that means that Mount Everest was covered and the water was 29,050 feet deep. And the ark supposedly floated on water at this altitude. Oxygen? Temperature? No one can survive at those altitudes and under those conditions. Do you realize how much that water weighed?

And where did all this water go? The math doesn't add up. Where did all this water go?
The earth has a radius of 3,963 miles on average. When flooded, again according to a literal interpretation, the earth would have had a radius of 3,968.5 miles. The difference is 1,086,984,344.03497 cubic MILES of water. Cubic miles. MILES. Over one billion ... with a B.

How many gallons are in a cubic mile? 1,101,117,147,428.5715 ... that’s 1.1 trillion ... with a T.

So basically multiply one billion by one trillion and that’s how many gallons of water would’ve had to evaporated in less than one year. Only about 120,000 cubic miles of water evaporate from the earth every year. It would’ve taken over 9,058 years to evaporate all the water that’s claimed to have fallen in the fable of Noah’s Ark. And where did it go? Fable.

The "Law" wouldn’t be given for hundreds and hundreds more years. How did Noah know what were “clean” and “unclean” animals? Those definitions were not established for hundreds more years. Since it’s pretty well accepted that the early chapters of Genesis were written by up to three, and possibly four, different individuals, the references to “clean” animals was probably written later by a priest and that portion of the story was added so as to not offend the Hebrews who questioned whether Noah brought “clean” animals aboard the ark for food. They had their own cognitive bias too.

Here’s another one: fresh water. How did Noah provide a year’s worth of fresh water to all these animals? The entire story is an impossibility and if you’re willing to do the slightest shred of research, you’ll find that the story was copied from older civilizations, then adapted to make it palatable to the Hebrews when the story was written down in 800 - 600 BCE.

The ice worms stable must have been fun to keep frozen.

I regret that I have but 1 upvote to give them, these 2 comments are the best thing I've ever read on this site, other than MyrianWaffleEV's obituary meme and all that went with it that night.

Ask yourself this: how did the two toed sloths get from South America to the Middle East to get on the ark, then if everything was destroyed, how did the two toed sloth get from Mt Ararat back to South America considering there was no vegetation to eat? The earth had been flooded and the soil would've been salted by seawater, remember? Two toed sloths can travel about one half mile per day as long as trees are available. There are no trees available in the ocean or across much of the Sahara. You can use Google Earth to calculate the distance then ask yourself ... how long did this little trip take? How did they get back? Answer: they never went. Noah's Ark is a fable.

How did koala bears survive the trip since they only eat eucalyptus tree leaves and how did Noah gather those leaves since they're not grown in the Middle East? Did Noah travel to Australia to gather the food the koala needed and then somehow keep them from rotting? The same for pandas who eat only a specific type of bamboo that isn't grown in the Middle East. Did Noah gather that too? Oh, yeah, and remember this too: that bamboo has to be fresh. Ask a few similar questions about polar bears, pronghorn antelope, penguins, kangaroos, and all the other animals. Think. Maybe, just maybe, the flood story was meant to scare people into acting a certain way rather than be a scientific historical account ... just like Jesus’ parables and the book of Revelation ... and honestly, the rest of this "holy" book.

Christians love to pick and choose which passages in their book are literal and which are figurative based on their cognitive bias. Few question that Revelation is figurative (although the Left Behind folks aren't in this category) but almost all Christians believe (or want to believe) that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are quite literal. In the meantime, some of us are relying on science rather than a book of myths, legends, fairy tales, and sheer impossibilities. Talking snakes and donkeys anyone? How about women getting pregnant without having sex? How about those "iron chariots" that were able to defeat God? How about the J-man being "unable" to perform miracles in a city because "no one believed" (sounds like Uri Geller on Johnny Carson - look it up). How about causing your sheep and goats to have spotted offspring simply by having them look at striped sticks while mating.

Anyone who believes "The Goatherder's Guide to the Universe" is nuts.

Yet most ancient civilizations share, in certain aspects, the great flood 'myth'.

For anyone looking for more info on what Pascalean is talking about see here: https://ancientpatriarchs.wordpress.com/2016/06/05/chinese-memories-of-noahs-flood-ship-with-8-mouths/
The 'mother god' of China is Nüwa. Credited with creating mankind and fixing destruction and flood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa

I find it ironic that you’re reading the Bible. I’m glad, but it’s ironic

I guess it makes sense but I’m just saying

I have read the Bible and Quran. I dont believe in either

The Bible was easier because it was more of a story.

Nobody asked

Because you were sent a special invite to interject your irrelent finding of irony here?

Open forum, you don't have exclusive rights to do what you criticize others for doing.

irrelevent*

Gods? The Bible only mentions one God. And fallen angels. As far as I see, the Bible calls out other 'gods' because that is how tribes treated them. I've heard people say the 1st commandment is 'arrogant' but when you realize people were sacrificing babies to their 'god' moloch or baal, burning them, it makes more sense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch

Exactly. The word is identical to the usual plural of el, meaning gods or magistrates, and is cognate to the 'l-h-m found in Ugaritic, where it is used for the pantheon of Canaanite gods, the children of El, and conventionally vocalized as "Elohim". (from Wikipedia)

Actually, It's stated that he is the only God

You're kidding. right?

No, he refers to other gods as "false gods" and when Elijah had a "who's the better god" contest with the prophets of baal, he poured water on the altar and the fires of heaven lot the altar, and the baal prophets cut themselves and screamed, but with no response. The best part is that when baal didn't answer, Elijah mocked them, asking if he was asleep.

Wrong.

Kindly read the comments form various memers on this thread, including my posting of the First Commandment.

Can you just reiterate those points here? The thread is kinda a shitshow right now and it gives me a headache just looking at it

No.

You literally want me to type it all out for you because you're too lazy to scroll up and down to read it? Seriously? Not even an upvote from you?

Ok.

In short, you are wrong.

Let me rephrase

Ok, you may.

I just want to know how I'm wrong, just the straight answer, no data, I'll look that up myself, also, which bible do you refer to?

Again, scroll.

Seems I may have been slightly off on that sort of.

You don't even know if you should pee standing up or down, now you want to teach biblical theology?