The origin and Mythology of Monotheism

Porpola in The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy (Journal of Near East Studies Vol 52, 1993 pp: 161-208) trace the belief is rooted in polytheistic, moreover the trace base on the Sumerian, Assyrian Gods. The ten Sefirot are actually the hierarchy of the Semitics Gods (and the for the Assyrians represented the total order control by the King (the King is representing God Assur) as seeing Ashurnasispal palace in Calah in order words divine order in this world—the king was the perfect man represented in the tree of life, justifying the divine ruler and absolute rule of the Empire—the meaning of the symbols and powers was transmitted orally).

The Sefirot similarity to the tree life is not lost, the divine rule of the King—in his perfection was not lost in the tree of life, ones again the Mesopotamians gods in the tree of life coincided the manifestations of the Sefirot Ea the god of Wisdom is place in the same position of the Sefiro of Wisdom, Sin with Understanding, Marduk with Mercy, Samas with Judgement, Istar with beauty (lady of love), Nabu, Ninurta with Victory, Anu (we should come back to Anu), Enlil Crown.

The numerical correlation, not just Geometry distribution of the tree of life, so Ea has value 40, 50 and 60, Adad has value 6 and 10, Samas 10 and 20. The number interchange like 10 has to do with sacred day of Ada combinations of 6 and 10. The sums of the numbers give the sacred names which appear in the middle of the Assyrian Empire. Anu had 1 and Mumu 0, Ea 60, Samas 20, Marduk 50, Istar 15, Ada 10, Nabu 40 and Nergal 14 each of the correlated to the divined manifestation of the Sefirot.

Anu was the epitome of all the Gods, in the period of Tiglath-Pieleser I all these relationships appear in Assyrian Royal encryptions and time Ashurnasispal II become standardize,  where the tree of live have upper and lower faces and Istar the heart.

The mysticism of the Assyrian Gods do not end with the tree of life, the idea of Marduk riding the sun the creation—since was consider the creator, where he was the endless light En sof Or.

One consideration is the numbers are based on sexagesimal system, where the number on the right are bigger than the numbers on the left, the need to subtract according to the Polar system the left is negative. The total number of the branches (4x30=120) and addend the numbers (1+10+14+15+……+60=240) given 360 the Assyrian calendar and universe express in degrees. Istar is the beauty the middle.

In the Sefirot the same to maintain equilibrium left side is negative needs to subtract, the 360 degrees, 360 days and Zodiac all correlated. The book of creation is solely base on the Mesopotamia theology—polytheistic.

In Emuna-Elis described the birth of the Gods, born in a mathematical process, the legend begin in the nothingness (Apssu+Mummu+Tiamat which was the emptiness), when birth occurred the mathematical system become binary (Lahmu, Lahumu) in the infinity universe (Anssar or Assur) included his negative (Kisar). Assur emanated (reflected) heaven Anu is the first manifestation become the world. The mystical number Sin was obtained from Ea divided by two.

The Etana myth (Shekhinah) referred to the Unio Mystica, the individual acceding to the heaven, this ascended is the Mysticism of the Chariot, and where the only explicated was Abulafia. The story of Etana was found in the Akkadian period of 2300 BC.

Elephantine Papyri consist of 175 documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan), manuscripts dating from the 5th century BCE. The papyri come from a Jewish community at Elephantine, then called Yeb, the island in the Nile at the border of Nubia, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BCE during Manasseh's reign to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his Nubian campaign, fragments on papyrus are much older, the largest number of papyri are written in Aramaic, the Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business, and are a valuable source of knowledge about law, society, religion, language and onomastics.

The Passover letter of 419 BCE (discovered in 1907), which gives detailed instructions for properly keeping the passover is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. Further Elephantine papyri are at the Brooklyn Museum, the documents were first acquired in 1893 by New York journalist Charles Edwin Wilbour. After lying in a warehouse for more than 50 years, the papyri were shipped to the Egyptian Department of the Brooklyn Museum.

What is significant the Temple, a letter from the Elephantine Papyri, requesting the rebuilding of a Jewish temple at Elephantine. The Jews had their own temple to Yahweh evincing polytheistic beliefs, which functioned alongside that of Khnum.

Excavation work done in 1967 revealed the remains of the Jewish colony centered on a small temple. Petition to Bagoas (Sayce-Cowley collection) is a letter written in 407 BCE to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Judea, appealing for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple in Elephantine, which had recently been badly damaged by an antisemitic rampage on the part of a segment of the Elephantine community.

Now our forefathers built this temple in the fortress of Elephantine back in the days of the kingdom of Egypt, and when Cambyses came to Egypt he found it built. They (the Persians) knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this temple.

The community also appealed for aid to Sanballat I, a Samaritan potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib. Both Sanballat and Johanan are mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah, 2:19, 12:23.

There was a response of both governors (Bagoas and Delaiah) which gave the permission by decree to rebuild the temple written in the form of a memorandum.

You may say in Egypt ... to (re)build it on its site as it was formerly...

By the middle of the 4th century BCE, the temple at Elephantine had ceased to function. There is evidence from excavations that the rebuilding and enlargement of the Khnum temple under Nectanebo II (360–343) took the place of the former temple of YHWH.

The papyri describe the Jews as worshiping Anat-Yahu (or AnatYahu). Anat-Yahu is described as either the wife (or paredra, sacred consort).

The origin of the worship Anat, can be trace on the second development, Josephus the Jewish against Apion, the latest deal as a rebuttal to, where Apion connect the Jews to the Hyksos and the Egyptian priest Matheos.

Matheos said the departure of the Jews from Egypt to the places whither they went occurred in the time of king Amosis, under the leadership of Moses.

Amosis lived in the time of king Inachus (Ahmose and the name was used for the first king of the 18th Dynasty)

Josephus on Apion's blood libel (Against Apion 2:8):

Apion becomes other men's prophet upon this occasion, and says that Antiochus found in our temple a bed, and a man lying upon it, with a small table before him, full of dainties, from the [fishes of the] sea, and the fowls of the dry land... he fell down upon his knees, and begged to be released; and that when the king bid him sit down, and tell him who he was, and why he dwelt there, and what was the meaning of those various sorts of food that were set before him the man made a lamentable complaint, and with sighs, and tears in his eyes, gave him this account of the distress he was in; and said that he was a Greek and that as he went over this province, in order to get his living, he was seized upon by foreigners, on a sudden, and brought to this temple, and shut up therein, and was seen by nobody, but was fattened by these curious provisions thus set before him; and that truly at the first such unexpected advantages seemed to him matter of great joy; that after a while, he inquired of the servants that came to him and was by them informed that it was in order to the fulfilling a law of the Jews, which they must not tell him, that he was thus fed; and that they did the same at a set time every year: that they used to catch a Greek foreigner, and fat him thus up every year, and then lead him to a certain wood, and kill him, and sacrifice with their accustomed solemnities, and taste of his entrails, and take an oath upon this sacrificing a Greek, that they would ever be at enmity with the Greeks; and that then they threw the remaining parts of the miserable wretch into a certain pit.

Now this is such a most tragical fable as is full of nothing but cruelty and impudence; how comes it about that we take an oath, and conspire only against the Grecians, and that by the effusion of their blood also? Or how is it possible that all the Jews should get together to these sacrifices, and the entrails of one man should be sufficient for so many thousands to taste of them, as Apion pretends? Or why did not the king carry this man, whosoever he was, and whatsoever was his name, [which is not set down in Apion's book,] with great pomp back into his own country? when he might thereby have been esteemed a religious person himself, and a mighty lover of the Greeks, and might thereby have procured himself great assistance from all men against that hatred the Jews bore to him. But I leave this matter; for the proper way of confuting fools is not to use bare words, but to appeal to the things themselves that make against them...

The question rises with the idea Hyksos, according to the Egyptian tradition, They are people from Western Asia arriving in the Nile Delta around 1650 B.C.E and the Caanites are found in Egypt in 12^th Dynasty (between 1800 B.C.E. or 1720 B.C.E). Part of the controversial aspects the Hyksos name means heqau khaswet (or heqa-khaset: rulers [of] foreign lands), but Matheos name meaning king shepherd (Ap. I,14).

Josephus debates the synchronism between the Biblical account of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and two Exodus-like given by Manetho (ca. 300 BC) apparently mentions. Josephus identifies the Israelite Exodus with the first exodus mentioned by Manetho, when some 480,000 Hyksos (also referred to as just shepherds, as kings and as captive shepherds) left Egypt for Jerusalem.

Apion identifies a second exodus mentioned by Manetho when a renegade Egyptian priest called Osarseph  led 80,000 lepers to rebel against Egypt. Apion additionally conflates these with the Biblical Exodus, and contrary to Manetho, even alleges that this heretic priest changed his name to Moses. Many scholars do not interpret lepers and leprous priests as literally referring to a disease, but rather to a strange and unwelcome new belief system.

One characteristic mention by the Egyptians regarding the Hyksos the  practiced horse burials, and their chief deity, their native storm god, Baal, where for the Egyptians  storm and desert god, Set.

Manetho's account, as recorded by Josephus, describes the appearance of the Hyksos in Egypt as an armed invasion by a horde of foreign barbarians who met little resistance, and who subdued the country by military force, where Hyksos burnt their cities, destroyed temples, and led women and children into slavery, Hyksos the ascendancy in their influx into the new emporia being established in Egypt's delta and at Thebes in support of the Red Sea trade. Herbert Eustis Winlock describes new military hardware, such as the composite bow, as well as the improved recurve bow, and most importantly the horse-drawn war chariot, as well as improved arrowheads, various kinds of swords and daggers, a new type of shield, mailed shirts, and the metal helmet.

Another explanation, the Hyksos migration, with little or no war and, the Egyptian rulers of the Thirteenth Dynasty were preoccupied with domestic famine and plague, and they were too weak to stop the new migrants from entering and settling in Egypt. Even before the migration, Amenemhat III carried out extensive building works and mining, and Gae Callender notes that:

the large intake of Asiatics, which seems to have occurred partly in order to subsidize the extensive building work, may have encouraged the so-called Hyksos to settle in the delta, thus leading eventually to the collapse of native Egyptian rule.

By around 1700 BC (just over a hundred years later), Egypt was fragmenting politically, with local kingdoms springing up in the northeastern delta area. One of these was that of King Nehesy, whose capital was at Avaris; he ruled over a population consisting largely of Syro-Canaanites who had settled in the area during the 12th Dynasty, and who were probably mainly soldiers, sailors, shipbuilders and workmen. His dynasty was probably replaced by a West-Semitic-speaking Syro-Canaanite dynasty that formed the basis of the later Hyksos kingdom, able to spread southwards because of the unstable political situation while aided by an army, ships, and foreign connections.

Josephus, quoting Manetho, described more:

 of an Egyptian assimilation to the corrupt ways of the emporia, followed by a rebellion of those who wished to perpetuate native Egyptian centered culture, rather than any kind of military struggle.

By main force they easily seized it without striking a blow; and having overpowered the rulers of the land, they then burned our cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the temples of gods… Finally, they appointed as king one of their number whose name was Salitis. He had his seat at Memphis, levying tribute from Upper and Lower Egypt and always leaving garrisons behind in the most advantageous positions.

Archaeological evidence finds at Edfu could perhaps establish that the Hyksos 15th Dynasty was already in existence at least by the mid-13th Dynasty reign of king Sobekhotep IV. In a 2011 paper by Nadine Moeller, Gregory Marouard and N. Ayers, discuss the discovery of an important early-12th Dynasty (Middle Kingdom) administrative building in the eastern Tell Edfu area of Upper Egypt, which was in continual use into the early Second Intermediate Period until the Seventeenth Dynasty, when its remains were sealed up by a large silo court. Fieldwork by these Egyptologists in 2010 and 2011 led to the discovery of a large adjoining hall which proved to contain 41 sealings showing the cartouche of the Hyksos ruler Khyan together with 9 sealings naming the 13th Dynasty king Sobekhotep IV.

The secure and sealed contexts of these seals likely demonstrate that Sobekhotep IV and Khyan were contemporaries. This would mean that the 13th Dynasty did not control all of Egypt when Sobekhotep IV acceded to power and that there was a significant overlap between the 13th and 15th Dynasties since Sobekhotep IV was only a mid-Thirteenth Dynasty ruler.

The ceramic evidence in the Memphis-Faiyum region of Lower Egypt also argues against the presence of new invading foreigners. Janine Bourriau's excavation in Memphis of ceramic material retrieved from Lisht and Dahshur during the Second Intermediate Period shows a continuity of Middle Kingdom ceramic type wares throughout this era. She finds in them no evidence of intrusion of Hyksos-style wares. Bourriau's evidence strongly suggests that the traditional Egyptian teaching, long espoused by Manetho, that the Hyksos invaded and sacked the Memphite region and imposed their authority there, is fictitious.

Not until the beginning of the Theban wars of liberation during the Seventeenth Dynasty are Theban wares again found in the Faiyum. Some texts indicate that while the Hyksos controlled the delta region administratively, the Thebans were too busy mining gold and making money off the Red Sea trade to care. Lower Egypt and Thebes functioned autonomously, and shared limited contact with each other

Bourriau argues that Manetho's description of Hyksos rule is confirmed by the evidence in the Kamose texts: Kamose's rejection of vassal status, the strict control of the border at Cusae, the imposition of taxes on all Nile traffic, and the existence of garrisons of Asiatics led by Egyptian commanders.

Supporters of the peaceful takeover of Egypt claim there is little evidence of battles or wars in general in this period. They also maintain that the chariot didn't play any relevant role, no traces of chariots have been found at the Hyksos capital of Avaris, despite extensive excavation.

Mummified head of Seqenenre Tao, bearing axe wounds. The common theory is that he died in a battle against the Hyksos.

The revolt which drove the Hyksos from Upper Egypt began in the closing years of the Seventeenth Dynasty at Thebes. Later New Kingdom literary tradition has brought one of these Theban kings, Seqenenre Tao, into contact with his Hyksos contemporary in the north, Apepi.

In Canaan part of the Gods Parthenon found and in the wife of Joseph, Asenath (Hohy Anat), the worship oldest plausible recorded occurrence of Yahweh is as a place-name, land of Shasu of YHW, in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 B.C.E), the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia.  In this case a plausible etymology for the name could be from the root HWY, which would yield the meaning he blows, appropriate to a weather divinity.

Israel emerges into the historical record in the last decades of the 13th century BCE, at the very end of the Late Bronze Age when the Canaanite city-state system was ending. The milieu from which Israelite religion emerged was accordingly Canaanite.

 El, the kind, the compassionate, the creator of creatures, was the chief of the Canaanite gods, and he, not Yahweh, was the original God of Israel—the word "Israel" is based on the name El rather than Yahweh.

El lived in a tent on a mountain from whose base originated all the fresh waters of the world, with the goddess Asherah as his consort. This pair made up the top tier of the Canaanite pantheon; the second tier was made up of their children, the seventy sons of Athirat. Prominent in this group was Baal, who had his home on Mount Zaphon. Baal became the dominant Canaanite deity, so that El became the executive power and Baal the military power in the cosmos.

El and his sons made up the Assembly of the Gods, each member of which had a human nation under his care, and a textual variant of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes El dividing the nations of the world among his sons, with Yahweh receiving Israel.

The Israelites initially worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal. In the period of the Judges and the first half of the monarchy, El and Yahweh became conflated in a process of religious syncretism:

 As a result, ’el (אל) became a generic term meaning God, as opposed to the name of a worshipped deity, and epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, diminishing the worship of El and strengthening the position of Yahweh.

Features of Baal, El and Asherah were absorbed into the Yahweh and Asherah possibly becoming embodied in the feminine aspects of the Shekinah or divine presence, Baal's nature as a storm and weather god becoming assimilated into Yahweh's own identification with the storm.

In the next stage the Yahweh religion separated itself from its Canaanite heritage, first by rejecting Baal-worship in the 9th century, then through the 8th to 6th centuries with prophetic condemnation of Baal, the asherim, sun-worship, worship on the high places, practices pertaining to the dead.

Iron Age Yahweh was the national god of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. After the 9th century BCE the tribes and chiefdoms of Iron Age I were replaced by ethnic nation states, Israel, Judah, Moab, Ammon and others, each with its national god, and all more or less equal. Chemosh was the god of the Moabites, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qaus the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh the God of Israel (no God of Judah is mentioned anywhere in the Bible).

 In each kingdom the king was also the head of the national religion and hence the viceroy on Earth of the national god; in Jerusalem this was reflected each year when the king presided over a ceremony at which Yahweh was enthroned in the Temple.

The centre of Yahweh's worship lay in three great annual festivals coinciding with major events in rural life: Passover with the birthing of lambs, Shavuot with the cereal harvest, and Sukkot with the fruit harvest. Probably pre-dated the arrival of the Yahweh religion, but they became linked to events in the national mythos of Israel: Passover with the exodus from Egypt, Shavuot with the law-giving at Sinai, and Sukkot with the wilderness wanderings.

Yahweh's  worship  involved sacrifice, but many scholars have concluded that the rituals detailed in Leviticus 1–16, with their stress on purity and atonement, were introduced only after the Babylonian exile, and that in reality any head of a family was able to offer sacrifice as occasion demanded.( number of scholars have also drawn the conclusion that infant sacrifice, whether to the underworld deity Molech or to Yahweh himself, was a part of Israelite/Judahite religion until the reforms of King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE). Sacrifice was presumably complemented by the singing or recital of psalms, but again the details are scant. Prayer played little role in official worship.

Bible gives the impression that the Jerusalem temple was always meant to be the central or even sole temple of Yahweh, but this was not the case: the earliest known Israelite place of worship is a 12th-century open-air altar in the hills of Samaria featuring a bronze bull reminiscent of Canaanite Bull-El (El in the form of a bull), and the archaeological remains of further temples have been found at Dan on Israel's northern border and at Arad in the Negev and Beersheba, both in the territory of Judah. Shiloh, Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah, Ramah and Dan were also major sites for festivals, sacrifices, the making of vows, private rituals, and the adjudication of legal disputes.

Yahweh and the rise of monotheism

Image on a pithos sherd found at Kuntillet Ajrud below the inscription Yahweh and his Asherah. Pre-exilic Israel, like its neighbours, was polytheistic, and Israelite monotheism was the result of unique historical circumstances. The original god of Israel was El, as the name demonstrates—may El rule.  In the early tribal period, each tribe would have had its own patron god; when kingship emerged, the state promoted Yahweh as the national god of Israel, supreme over the other gods, and gradually Yahweh absorbed all the positive traits of the other gods and goddesses. Yahweh and El merged at religious centres such as Shechem, Shiloh and Jerusalem.

Asherah, formerly the wife of El, was worshipped as Yahweh's consort or mother; potsherds discovered at Khirbet el-Kôm and Kuntillet Ajrûd make reference to Yahweh and his Asherah, and the statues were kept in his temples in Jerusalem, Bethel, and Samaria.

 Yahweh may also have appropriated Anat, the wife of Baal, as his consort, as Anat-Yahu mentioned in 5th century B.C. E in the Jewish colony at Elephantine in Egypt. A goddess called the Queen of Heaven was also worshipped, probably a fusion of Astarte and the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, possibly a title of Asherah. Worship of Baal and Yahweh coexisted in the early period of Israel's history, but they were considered irreconcilable after the 9th century B.C.E, following the efforts of King Ahab and his queen Jezebel to elevate Baal to the status of national god.

The worship of Yahweh alone began at the earliest with Elijah in the 9th century B.C.E, but more likely with the prophet Hosea in the 8th; even then it remained the concern of a small party before gaining ascendancy in the exilic and early post-exilic period. The early supporters of this faction are widely regarded as being monolatrists rather than true monotheists; they did not believe that Yahweh was the only god in existence, but instead believed that he was the only god the people of Israel should worship. Finally, in the national crisis of the exile, the followers of Yahweh went a step further and outright denied that the other deities aside from Yahweh even existed, thus marking the transition from monolatrism to true monotheism.