Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Robert Wright wrote an excellent book that not only shows how culture shaped and continues to shape religion, but also gives hope for the future as to the relations between the major religions.
Information on The Evolution of God by Robert Wright can be found at http://www.evolutionofgod.net/. |
I had an interesting conversation about such things sometime back with a late friend who was a Reform rabbi (and married to an Orthodox Catholic priest.) I was curious about when Satan became the great enemy of God. Women were burned in Salem after accusations they were witches, based on a biblical proscription "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!", and I was curious about when that particular phrase was supposedly written, and what it meant to those who wrote it.
The early Hebrews were polytheists, and the early conceptions have God as one of a number of elohim. He didn't claim to be the only god. He simply required his followers to put him first in their worship. (Moses besting the Pharoah's magicians has a strong flavor of "My god can beat your gods!") I was curious about the transition, and how he went from "the god that is our god" to "the only god that exists."
Likewise Satan wasn't a supreme evil to the early Jews, and didn't gain that status until sometime into Christianity. Witches by the Salem reckoning were folks who had sold their soul to Satan, but I doubted that meaning for the term existed when the verse was penned. (A suggestion I saw elsewhere indicated the term might better be translated poisoner, and in the original context referred to someone who would poison a water hole. In the semi-arid area where the Hebrews and the Arabs originated, that would be universally condemned.)
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Dennis