People of the Book

People of the Book

“And on top of all this, please heaven, that famous saying of Plato's is always quoted: ‘Happy the states where either philosophers are kings or kings are philosophers!’ But if you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
-Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 1509

Monotheism and Polytheism
A common term for a non-Muslim monotheist in the Muslim Qur’an is “people of the book.” It was used by early Muslims to distinguish pagan religions from other monotheistic faiths, which at the time, they held in higher regard. It’s an apt term for the distinction, as no pagan religions put the kind of emphasis on sacred scripture than that of the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It might be said that a far more inherent difference between polytheistic and monotheistic religions is the belief that there is only one god as opposed to many, but a closer look shows this to be problematic. The commandment “You shall have no other gods before me,” makes no distinction as to whether these “other gods” exist or not. As it is, opinion varies between many Bible readers as to whether these “other gods” like Ba’al-Zebub are demons inherent in dualistic theology, or completely non-existent, as most modern Jews would have it. Once more, many ancient practitioners of pagan religions centered their cult around one particular deity. The pantheon of gods and goddesses in the polytheistic world were always headed by a supreme being much the same way the God of Abraham is described as ruling over a hierarchy of angels in the monotheistic religions. As it is, the difference between the religion of “one god” and “many gods” is really more of a function of the accepted hierarchy.
Of course, many people following “polytheistic” religions worshipped only one god while accepting the existence of many (called “henotheists”), and many people following “monotheistic” religions pray to multiple divine and semi-divine beings. But one key difference separating monotheistic and polytheistic religions is the jealous nature of the supreme god, who is believed to punish humans, either in this life or the next, for false worship or the worship of a false god or god-structure. Thus Judaism and the monotheistic Aten religion of Egypt from the 1300's B.C. were not unique in that they worshipped only one god but in developing a taboo against worshipping other gods, which the Old Testament typically refers to as “foreign gods.” The book of Exodus reads, “I am Yahweh your Elohim [God], who brought you out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. Do not make yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You will not bow down and worship them; for I, Yahweh your Elohim, am a jealous Elohim, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand [generations] of those who love me and keep my commandments.” (20:2).
The commandment not to worship other deities is associated with idol worship, making Yahweh a god without images. Idol worship is usually made out to be putting anything else above God, normally abstract concepts like the love of money. But in it’s original context, the idol was an image made of wood, stone, or metal symbolically representing a god, which the follower would bow towards to show respect. While both Jews and Muslims still hold to this commandment today, most modern Christians see bowing down before the image of Jesus on the cross as an exception. However, there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that this would be different than bowing down before any other image, and the symbol of the cross was actually unknown in the first three centuries of Christian iconography. The first known appearance is a Greek cross with equal-length arms on a Vatican sarcophagus from the middle of the 400s A.D. But images of the ichthus fish (seen on cars today) and anchors long preceded the cross in ushering in the long history of Christian art unparalleled in Judaism or Islam. How does one come to identify with a God who has no image? While most pagans identified gods by astral bodies or aspects of nature, the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims became identified with words passed down from scroll to scroll and book to book.
Each pagan cult had their own rites and customs, but these were highly localized to a particular temple or city. This plurality of customs extended even to cults who recognized the same god, as the Ba’al or Aphrodite of one city often employed cultic practices that were different than ones taken to heart in another city. This was primarily because the authority of one priest or priestess rarely extended past the area he or she resided in. But written authority can propagate faster than personal authority, and with the spread and gradual acceptance of authoritative scripture came the ability for ideas and associations to survive from generation to generation.
These monotheistic religions that defined themselves by authoritative scripture have completely replaced the pagan religions of Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The world that had been predominantly polytheistic and animistic up to two millennia ago has dwindled down 25% in the present day. The belief that people should only worship one and only one god, virtually unknown outside of Israel and Egypt in the B.C. era, now makes up over half the world’s population, mostly divided between Christians (33%) and Muslims (20%), with Jews and Samaritans making up less than 0.5%. One could see it as the triumph of the written word over that of oral tradition.
Abraham is considered to be the first monotheist in both Jewish and Islamic traditions. Muhammed identified Allah as the God of Abraham, and said that the Arabs were descended from Abraham’s son, Ishma’el, the Biblical patriarch of the Arabs and half brother to Isaac, the father of Jacob and grandfather to Judah. This may come as a surprise to those familiar with the Old Testament, which can give the impression that there is an unbroken line of faith in one God, starting with Adam, past Noah and Abraham, to Jesus. But Non-biblical apocrypha compliments this tradition, telling of Abraham refusing to worship the idols of his father, Terah, and being consequently thrown into a fire by an evil king, usually Nimrod, a parallel to the story of Daniel. Although a miracle saves him, his brothers are killed, and this subsequently sets up the unexplained reason for why God tells Abraham to leave the land of his father in the 12th chapter of Genesis. Genesis mentions Terah, but only that he existed, and gives no indication that he or any of his forefathers, stretching back to Noah‘s family, believed in only one God. Important prophets like Isaiah and Paul also notably focus on Abraham, and when the martyr Stephen gives a synopsis of the Old Testament in Acts of the Apostles, he begins with Abraham. This break of faith between the 9th and 12th chapter of Genesis is also highlighted by archaeological finds of Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations detailing ancient polytheistic versions of the Garden of Eden and Flood stories that predate the Hebrews. Similar flood stories have been found in Indian and Greek mythology as well.
Sigmund Freud, a Jewish atheist and one of the great pioneers of psychoanalysis, instead saw the beginning of monotheism and the Levite priesthood as originating with the monotheistic Aten religion in ancient Egypt around 1300 B.C. The Aten religion was started by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, who was the predecessor and possibly the father of the famous pharaoh, Tutenkhamen. In his book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud presented his theory that Moses had actually been a conglomerate of two different people, one who was a priest of Aten who led the Jews out of Egypt, the other a Midianite priest who delivered the Law from a volcano god named Yahweh. Descriptions of a shaking mountain, unquenchable fires, a pillar of smoke leading the Hebrews to the mountain, and characteristic plagues led Freud to read Mount Sinai (a.k.a. Horeb) as being an accurate description of a volcano. Although the mountains on the Sinai peninsula are not volcanic, there are volcanoes on the western border of Arabia, near Midian, where Moses married into the family of the Midianite priest, Jethro. In the Bible, the condemnation of idol worship begins with Moses, who presents the first laws against them, with the exception of Jacob, who orders his household get rid of foreign gods in Genesis (35:2). One of the cities said to have been built by the Hebrew slaves in the Book of Exodus is Pi-Thom, which translates to “City of Aten.” (1:11). Freud also traces circumcision as originally being an Egyptian custom since the practice had been the most widespread in Egypt. Aside from Freud, the Qur’an says that Queen Tiye, the wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, and Akhenaten’s mother, was the one who adopted Moses (28:9), as mentioned in the Book of Exodus (2:10).
In his book, Against Apion, the first century Jewish historian and Roman general Flavius Josephus confirmed the Babylonian flood story as proof of the validity of the Jewish scriptures, but argued vehemently against an account by an Egyptian priest and historian named Manetho. He, like all the Egyptians of his time, believed Moses had originally been a priest of Heliopolis named Osiris before he changed his name. Josephus also argues against the Egyptian belief that Moses was originally dispelled from Egypt because of leprosy, saying that the laws ascribed to Moses had lepers excluded from the community. Manetho’s account also says that the Egyptian king Bocehoris was told by an oracle of Hammon (or Amen, who was often equated with Zeus) that because the Hebrews were afflicted with leprosy, they were to be drowned and so Moses brought them to Judea while robbing and destroying temples along the way. Josephus criticizes Manetho for his sloppiness in details and blames his outlook on a general hatred for all Semites. The name of God used in the Qur’an, Allah, is derived from ”al-Ilah,” meaning “the God” in Arabic. Arabic Jews and Christians freely use Allah for the word God in their language as well. The name goes back to the pre-Islamic pantheon, who was worshipped along side his daughters al-Lat (“the Goddess”), al-’Uzza (“the Mighty One”), and Manat (“Fate”). The name al-Ilah is related to that of El, Eloh, and the plural Elohim, all Semitic terms used in the Old Testament for God. Although Elohim is a pluralized word, the context of the Hebrew grammar renders it in its singular form, with some exceptions. Allah in it’s linguistic form can not be pluralized but uses the royal ’We’ when referring to himself in the Qur‘an. Some instances of plurality appear in the earlier parts of Genesis, for example, when Yahweh goes to confuse the speech of the builders of the Tower of Babel, he says, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (11:7). “El the Bull” was also the king of the gods in the Canaanite pantheon, and is known to have had two daughters, one or more of them associated with the morning star (Venus), much like in the Arabic pantheon. The name of God in the New Testament, Theos, is likewise a cognate of the Greek storm god Zeus. In Sanskrit, the word is Deus, as in “Deus Ex Machina,” which is related to the word “deity.” In Latin it is “Jove” or “Jovis”, the same as Jupiter, although there has also been question into the relationship between the words Jove and Yahweh (which is sometimes pronounced Yahveh or Jehovah). The English word “God” itself comes from the German, Gott, a deity synonymous with luck and rooted in the Gothic gheu and Sanskrit hu, meaning to invoke. It seems to be related to the Persian khoda, and Hindu khooda. Even this name rabbinic Jews do not write or print, instead rendering the word G-d.
The Old Testament name Yahweh is so sacred to rabbinic Jews that it is believed that the name is never spoken, but is instead substituted with the name Adonai, a common Semitic title meaning Lord. The Christian Bible in turn renders all instances of Yahweh as “the LORD.” Roughly translated “I am that I am,” it gives the etymological impression of totality beyond the division between male and female, but the God of the Bible is definitely that of a male, and the Old Testament records that many Jews worshipped the Asherah, a fertility goddess identified with Venus, along side Yahweh, much to the disdain of the prophets. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud brings notice to the similarity in name of Yahweh (which he renders Jahve) to that of the Roman Jove, an alternative name for Jupiter (Zeus), and also makes a more cautious comparison of Adonai to the Egyptian Aten.
On the island of Elephantine in southern Egypt, ancient papyri caches from the 400’s B.C. describe a community of Jewish soldiers stationed there during the Persian occupation of Egypt. These documents were first acquired in 1893 by New York journalist Charles Edwin Wilbour, but were stored in a warehouse for over 50 years before being brought to light. The documents include a petition for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple after it had suffered damage from an Anti-Semitic rampage, which says that the temple had been built “back in the days of the kingdom of Egypt” and that it was the only temple that wasn’t destroyed when the Persian Emperor Cambyses conquered Egypt in 525 B.C. The community is believed to have started when the King Manasseh of Judah, who is scorned in the Old Testament for having allowed the worship of other gods, sent troops to Egypt for a campaign against Nubia in 650 B.C. The documents also refer to a goddess named “Anat-Yahu,” a combination of the Canaanite goddess Anat and a variant spelling of Yahweh. The “Passover letter,” which gave detailed instructions on properly keeping Passover in 419 B.C., also recognizes Anat as the wife of Yahweh.
A picture found on an ancient store jar excavated in 1978 from Kuntillet, a large caravan inn in the eastern Sinai desert, depicts two nude gods, having the same frame as the Egyptian lion-god Bes, along with a goddess strumming a lyre in the background. The jar dates back to the 700s B.C. and above the picture, an inscription informing the reader that the jar belongs “to Obadaiah, Son of Adnah; may he be blessed by Yahweh” A similar phrase was found in 1968 on a Judean tomb at Khirbet el-Qom, near Hebron. “Uri-Yahu, the Prince; this is his inscription. May ‘Uri-Yahu be blessed by Yahweh, for from his enemies he has saved him by his Asherah.” The impression given from the inscription on the jar is that the two gods are El and Yahweh, and that the goddess is Asherah. There is a verse in the Greek Septuagint and Dead Sea Scroll versions of the Book of Deuteronomy that says “Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you. When El-Elyon [God Most High] gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the sons of Elohim. For Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob [Israel] his allotted inheritance.” (32:7). The verse implies a father/son relationship between Elohim and Yahweh, the god of Israel. But this verse was modified in the Hebrew Masoretic version to say, “…he set up boundaries for the people according to the sons of Israel.” so that it could not be interpreted in a polytheistic way and is the version that is still used in most Bibles today.

Store jar drawing from 700s B.C. excavated from Kuntillet
Inscription reads “to Obadaiah, Son of Adnah;
may he be blessed by Yahweh" /
Bes, Egyptian god who protected households

In arguing that there could never be more than four gospels, St. Irenaeus links the number to the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four faces of the cherubim, and the four creatures covering their eyes before the throne of God as described in the Book of Revelations. In John’s Apocalypse, it says, “the first beast was like a lion, and the second like an ox, and the third had a face like a man, and the fourth was like an eagle in flight.” (4:7) Irenaeus associated each of these creatures with one of the gospels. These representations that can still be found in gospel decorations today, although the icons have become shuffled as St. Augustine, Pseudo-Athanasius, and St. Jerome each decided to switch around the icons the gospels were associated with. The cherubim (or karabu, literally “to be near“) were seen as angelic bodyguards of Yahweh in ancient Israel, much like the griffons attending Zeus in Greek mythology, the sphinx guardians of Egyptian mythology, the lamassu of Babylonian and Assyrian mythology, and the anzu bird of Sumerian and Akkadian mythology. They were usually depicted as having the head of a human, the wings of an eagle, and the body of either a lion, like in Egypt (where lions were more prevalent), or that of a bull (which is more in the Assyrian style).
It’s been hypothesized that the existence of these animalistic bodyguards can be attributed to a common solution invented in order to harmonize the beliefs of animistic societies that worshipped totem animals to the beliefs of polytheistic or henotheistic societies that tended to construct a hierarchy of human gods that mirrored the hierarchy of a developed human civilization. Traditional animists would want to keep their totem animal’s association with the god, but this would only seem to degrade the human god to more others, so the totem animal would instead be transferred to the god’s bodyguard. The totem of the Elamite culture of ancient Iran was the eagle and this may have played a role in the ancient Sumerian Myth of Anzu, in which the anzu bird steals the Tablets of Destiny from Enlil (equivalent to El of the Canaanite pantheon), but is defeated and replaced by Enlil’s offspring, “the son of God,” a more anthropomorphic hunter god named Ninurta.