Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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 magicials 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
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Yahweh seems to have originally been a member of El's pantheon. There are traces of that origin in the Hebrew Bible, notably Deuteronomy 32 verses 8 and 9. Here they are, from the New Revised Standard version. The word translated as "most High" is elyown (עֶלְיוֹ), which seems to be a reference to El, the head of a Canaanite pantheon of deities. ("El" still survives as a part of many Hebrew names, such as Israel, Ezekiel, etc.) The word translated as "LORD" in this passage is the Tetragammon (YHWH); Yahweh.
...8 When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods;
...9 the LORD's own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.
In time, Yahweh came to supplant El in the minds of his worshipers and many of the attributes formerly ascribed to El came to be seen as his own, according to some scholars.