Did Monotheism come from the Canaanites?

[Usagi]

Bobby,

As for monotheism coming after or out of polytheism, even if you go strictly by the Biblical account, that’s what had to happen by the time we get to anything like recent history. Even if Adam and Eve and later Noah literally existed and interacted with God personally, by the time Abraham was born the whole world seems to have been pagan. God had to drag one guy and his family completely out of their home culture to begin establishing the one nation on the planet that would follow Him properly. (And even then, as others have noted, the Israelites’ fidelity to monotheism or even monolatry was … intermittent.)

Basically, we don’t disagree with the scholars that Israel spent a lot of its existence worshipping Baal and Asherah (or even Yahweh and Asherah as a couple!). That’s reiterated over and over again in the Bible itself. The point on which we disagree, and which does not seem provable either way, is whether monotheism was an early ideal from which they repeatedly fell away or solely a later innovation among a previously polytheistic people.

Usagi

 

[Contarini]

Even the more conservative interpretation only holds that what the authors actually assert as true must be true, and that’s where the whole literary form/genre thing comes in.

Exactly. I wasn’t disagreeing with that. Only pointing out that there are in fact three possible explanations for the “erroneous” numbers: authorial intention, scribal error, and “unrelated to salvation.” I was adding two to the one that had already been mentioned.

Edwin

 

[aragonjohn1]

Exactly. I wasn’t disagreeing with that. Only pointing out that there are in fact three possible explanations for the “erroneous” numbers: authorial intention, scribal error, and “unrelated to salvation.” I was adding two to the one that had already been mentioned.

Edwin

right we are all only human after all.

God bless