Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>]

May I suggest that we desist from using terms such as mono/poly/heno-theism? 
which are relatively modern terms and filled with connotations that 
can be offensive to a wide variety of faiths when applied to the Torah.

As most religions have lost the use of the name, yahowah, the word 'God', 
often capitalised has replaced this name and so there is a little confusion 
caused when we talk about gods, in general.
One thing is indisputable about the Torah, and all of the Tanak: and that 
is that it is mono-yhwh-istic.
The term 'El' is ascribed to Yah's messengers and so includes also the 
heavenly hosts, which include all the faithful angels as well as Shatan 
and his rebels.
Job, which tradition also attributes to Moshe', illustrates a heavenly 
courtroom 
where Shatan confronts Yahowah face-to-face. Shatan is definitely considered 
to 
be living and also can be described as an 'El' but not as the 'El 
Shadai',which 
is a title uniquely ascribed to Yahowah.
"And so Yahowah says to Moshe 'Listen up! I've made you god to Pharoah and 
your 
brother, Aaron will be your prophet"Exodus 7:1.
Also Moshe himself is described as God but never as El Shadai.
Many of the false gods which were worshipped in Egypt resembled animals and 
in fact
the account of the rebellion in Eden shows the temptation as originating from 
an 
animal, a snake. Why is this significant? Because the chain of command was:
Yahowah
Messengers (angels)
Adam
Eve
Animals
If the message to eat the fruit had come from a messenger then the chain of 
command 
would not have been violated. Eve had to obey an animal and Adam had to obey 
Eve for 
both of them to be guilty of disobeying Yahowah.
The purpose of Shatan (the opposer) has always been to be to rebel against 
Yahowah 
and to mislead the masses into behaviour which is offensive in his eyes. All 
the false 
gods of the Tanak were obviously originally inspired by Shatan and his 
renegade crew 
of fallen messengers and it is not unlikely that they appeared to men in the 
forms 
that we see in extant idols in order to make themselves gods, which would 
detract 
from the correct worship of Yahowah, the El Shadai.
For this reason Yahowah is jealous, because the worship of idols is 
ultimately one of 
two things.
a) Worship of lifeless images
b) Indirect or direct worship of Shatan
Yahowah has no physical form and forbids the use of any physical 
representation of 
himself and this is what identifies him and separates from all the other gods.

Hence, while the tanak may well acknowledge the existence of other living 
gods, it 
is quite clear that only he is to be worshipped and that furthermore, nothing 
has come 
into existence without his creating it. See Gen 1.

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On Jul 29, 2005, at 4:40 PM, Read, James C wrote:
> What do you take issue with?
[/James]

Of course, I will let Jim West speak for himself. (As if anybody else
could do it for him.) But I think there are a couple of points here
worthy of my comment, at the risk of some repetition.

[James R.]
> You also do well to remember that it is you who is going against
> hundreds of years of Jewish tradition and not I,
[/James R.]

Reminder: Jewish tradition is not univocal on this issue. Baba Bathra
assigns part of Deuteronomy to Joshua. Ibn Ezra doubted Mosaic
authorship of at least some parts of Genesis. Baruch de Spinoza
entertained the notion that Moses had only written those parts of the
Torah that the Torah explicitly says Moses wrote (the Book of the
Covenant, the Ritual Decalogue, the Deuteronomic Code, the itinerary
in Numbers). And quite a few Jewish scholars today accept the
Documentary Hypothesis (although ironically, in my opinion,
Wellhausen championed it for anti-Jewish reasons). It is an
overgeneralization to say that "Jewish tradition" holds to Mosaic
authorship of the canonical form of the Torah.

[James R.]
> Do you believe that two warring kingdoms contributed in a conspiracy
> to fool two opposing nations into believing that Moshe wrote a scroll
> that he did not?
[/James R.]

I take it that you are referring to Rehoboam's Judah and Jeroboam's
Israel. The problem here is that you have erroneously assigned the
existence of the Samaritan Pentateuch to Jeroboam's Israel, when all
the textual/manuscript evidence indicates that the pre-Samaritan text-
type originated in the fifth century BCE at the earliest. That's the
key flaw in your question: you presume the existence of the canonical
form of the Torah at a stage where it cannot be demonstrated to have
existed, and the evidence you cited earlier (the overwhelming
agreement of the SP and MT) pertains to a much later period. I have
addressed this at more length in another post.

However, what I forgot to add in that post was that your
characterization of Judah and Israel as "warring kingdoms" is a gross
overgeneralization. According to the Former Prophets, Judah and
Israel were *sometimes* at war. But sometimes they were so at peace
that one king could say to the other, "I will do what you do; my
troops shall be your troops and my horses shall be your horses" (1
Kings 22:4). According to the Former Prophets, at times these royal
families married into each other. It's a mistake to think that the
two kingdoms were so at odds that they could not cooperate on
anything. Now I am not saying that the canonical form of the Torah
was some sort of grand Judeo-Ephraimite literary conspiracy, for I
think such a scenario would be nonsense, but an overgeneralized image
of Judah and Israel as "warring kingdoms" is not good evidence for
anything.

Chris

--
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California 90263-4352
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info