The Bible is one of the most influential collections of texts in human history. Its influence goes far beyond the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, which regard different versions of it as sacred; it has fundamentally shaped how most people living in the west in the twenty-first century, even those who of us who are not religiously Christian or Jewish, think about religion in general. Because the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are so central to modern Judaism and Christianity respectively, many people have wondered whether any non-Israelite cultures of the ancient world had similar collections of sacred texts.
As it happens, a large number of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman texts have survived that were relevant in various ways to those peoples’ religious practices, including some texts that people considered to be “divinely inspired” in some sense and some that bear significant parallels to Biblical literature. Nonetheless, the Hebrew Bible bears some remarkable features that set it apart from other sacred writings that existed in the ancient world.
Concepts of divinely inspired texts in cultures of the eastern Mediterranean
The basic idea that deities could inspire mortals to produce certain words or a certain message was relatively common in ancient cultures. For instance, although the ancient Greeks did not have a “canon” of religious scriptures, they did believe that the Muses (the goddesses who presided over poetry and the arts) inspired works of great poetry, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogonia and Works and Days attributed to Hesiodos of Askre, and the Homeric Hymns.
The Theogonia, a Greek narrative poem in dactylic hexameter that is traditionally attributed to Hesiodos of Askre (who may have been more of a literary persona than a real person) and most likely came to exist in something resembling the form in which we know it today sometime around the seventh century BCE, includes a famous prologue in which the poet describes how, when he was herding sheep under Mount Helikon in the region of Boiotia in central Greece, the Muses appeared to him in a spectacular divine epiphany and gave him the gift of divinely-inspired poetry. The passage reads (Th. 22–34):
“αἵ νύ ποθ᾽ Ἡσίοδον καλὴν ἐδίδαξαν ἀοιδήν,
ἄρνας ποιμαίνονθ᾽ Ἑλικῶνος ὕπο ζαθέοιο.
τόνδε δέ με πρώτιστα θεαὶ πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπον,
Μοῦσαι Ὀλυμπιάδες, κοῦραι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο:
‘ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.’
ὣς ἔφασαν κοῦραι μεγάλου Διὸς ἀρτιέπειαι:
καί μοι σκῆπτρον ἔδον δάφνης ἐριθηλέος ὄζον
δρέψασαι, θηητόν: ἐνέπνευσαν δέ μοι αὐδὴν
θέσπιν, ἵνα κλείοιμι τά τ᾽ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ᾽ ἐόντα.
καί μ᾽ ἐκέλονθ᾽ ὑμνεῖν μακάρων γένος αἰὲν ἐόντων,
σφᾶς δ᾽ αὐτὰς πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον αἰὲν ἀείδειν.”
This means, in my own translation:
“They [i.e., the Muses] once taught Hesiodos beautiful song,
while he was shepherding his sheep under the extremely holy Helikon.
The goddesses first spoke the following speech,
the Muses, daughters of Ouranos, maidens of aigis-bearing Zeus:
‘Field-dwelling shepherds, wicked disgraces, only bellies,
we know how to speak many false things similar to true things,
but we also know, if we wish, how to sing true things.’
Thus spoke the eloquent maidens of great Zeus
and to me they gave a rod of laurel, a flourishing bough,
a marvelous thing, and they breathed into me a voice
divinely-inspired so that I may praise the things that will exist and that have existed.
And they urged me to sing of the race of the blessed ones who always are,
but to sing of them [i.e., the Muses themselves] both first and last always.”
Hesiodos specifically says that the Muses breathed into him an “αὐδὴν θέσπιν,” which means a “divinely-inspired voice,” but the concept of divine inspiration in the Theogonia is somewhat different from what twenty-first-century readers who are accustomed to the way that contemporary Christians talk about “divine inspiration” might imagine when they hear that term.
For Hesiodos, the defining feature of divinely-inspired poetry is its aesthetic beauty rather than its factual trueness. Under Hesiodos’s definition, a poem being divinely inspired does not necessarily mean that it is factually true; on the contrary, Hesiodos’s Muses explicitly declare that part of their power as goddesses is their ability to tell false stories that are equivalent to or of the same quality as true ones (cf. Heiden 2007).
ABOVE: Illustration for the volume Hesiodi Ascraei quaecumque exstant, published in 1701, depicting the Muses appearing to Hesiodos under Mount Helikon and bestowing upon him the gifts of a rod of laurel and a divinely-inspired voice
The ancient Israelites and Judahites did not view divine inspiration exactly how Hesiodos viewed it, but they did not view it exactly the same way as twenty-first-century Evangelicals either. Notably, they believed that God sometimes uses his prophets to deceive mortals for his own ends. This is best illustrated by the story in 1 Kings 22, in which Yahweh sends a “lying spirit” into the mouths of his own prophets in order to deceive the wicked king Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel to go into a battle in which he will die.
Biblical scholars have taken various positions on the morality of Yahweh’s actions in this narrative, with some arguing that he behaves immorally by deceiving Ahab to his death (Carroll 1991, 43–44; Brueggemann 1997, 360–361), while others argue against this (Moberly 2003). However one interprets the morality of the passage, though, the story clearly depicts Yahweh as causing his own prophets to tell Ahab falsehoods.
Comparanda from surrounding cultures for the genres represented in the Hebrew Bible
Thus, the concept of divine inspiration was certainly not unique to the ancient Israelites and Judahites. The texts of the Bible, however, have many more specific features in common with texts that existed in other cultures of the ancient world than the mere fact that some people regarded them as being divinely inspired in some sense. As a matter of fact, all the literary genres represented in the Hebrew Bible have parallels in the surviving literature of surrounding non-Israelite cultures.
The legal texts of the Torah bear some close resemblances to other surviving ancient Near Eastern law codes, such as the Code of Ur-Nammu (the oldest surviving law code, dating to between c. 2100 and c. 2050 BCE), the Code of Lipit-Ishtar (dating c. 1934 – c. 1924 BCE), the Laws of Eshnunna (dating to around 1930 BCE), the Code of Hammurabi (the most famous and best-preserved legal text from the ancient Near East, dating c. 1755 – c. 1750 BCE), and the Code of the Assyrians (dating between c. 1450 and c. 1250 BCE).
In fact, the scholar David P. Wright, who was a professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East at Brandeis University until he retired a few years ago, has argued in his book Inventing God’s Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi (published in 2013) that the Covenant Code found in the Book of Exodus 20:22–23:19 is directly based on the earlier Code of Hammurabi. Although this argument is controversial, at the very least, it highlights the degree of similarity between the laws of the Torah and other ancient Near Eastern law codes.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the Hammurabi Stele, a black basalt stele dating to the reign of King Hammurabi of Babylon bearing a relief carving of the sun god Shamash giving Hammurabi his insignia, with the text of Hammurabi’s law code in Akkadian inscribed underneath
Meanwhile, the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible bear significant parallels to a surviving body of Neo-Assyrian prophetic texts written in the Akkadian language, which date to the reigns of the Neo-Assyrian king Esarhaddon (ruled 681 – 669 BCE) and his son Ashurbanipal (ruled 669 – 631 BCE) and are preserved on clay tablets that archaeologists have found in the ruins of the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. These Neo-Assyrian prophetic texts are sometimes known as the “Nineveh oracles.”
The prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible bear even closer parallels to curious fragmentary texts written in a Northwest Semitic dialect found on inscribed plaster fragments dating to the eighth century BCE at the site of Deir ʿAllā in what is now Jordan.
The Deir ʿAllā plaster texts describe a revelation of impending destruction that the gods allegedly made in a dream to a certain “seer of the gods” named Balaam son of Beor. Intriguingly, the same prophet whom the text mentions, Balaam son of Beor, also appears in the Book of Numbers 22–24, where he is portrayed very differently from how he appears in the Deir ʿAllā texts.
The Deir ʿAllā plaster texts hint that other prophetic literatures similar to that of the Hebrew Bible may have existed among other peoples of the Iron Age southern Levant, but those literatures, if they existed, have been almost entirely lost.
Translations and discussions of both the Nineveh oracles, the Deir ʿAllā plaster texts, and other ancient texts pertaining to prophets in the ancient Near East can be found in Martti Nissinen’s book Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East, published by SBL Press and now in its second, expanded edition.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a drawing of a fragment of the Deir ʿAllā inscription
Various stories in the Hebrew Bible have specific narrative parallels in the mythical and poetic literatures of other ancient Near Eastern cultures. Most famously, the flood myth in Genesis 6:5–9:17 parallels older flood myths found in Mesopotamian texts such as the Sumerian so-called “Eridu Genesis” (composed before c. 1600 BCE), the Akkadian Atraḫasīs Epic (composed c. eighteenth century BCE), and Tablet Eleven of the standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh (composed between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE), as well as the Greek myth of Deukalion and Pyrrha, which is attested later.
The historiographical texts of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Deuteronomistic History (which comprises the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and the Books of Chronicles, have some genre parallels with a variety of prose narrative texts that existed in various cultures of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, especially Near Eastern chronicles such as the Babylonian Chronicles as well as royal inscriptions describing kings’ reigns and achievements such as the Mesha Stele, the Tel Dan Stele, Sennacherib’s Annals, the Cyrus Cylinder, and the Behistun Inscription of Darius I.
These same narrative texts also bear incidental genre similarities to early Greek prose historiographical works like the Histories of Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), Histories of the Peloponnesian War of Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE), and the Hellenika of Xenophon (lived c. 430 – 354 BCE).
Finally, the “wisdom” texts of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, resemble an enormous body of surviving ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian wisdom texts such as the Maxims of Ptahhotep, the Instructions of Sharuppak, the Dialogue between a Man and His God, the Dialogue of Pessimism, and Mesopotamian proverb collections. Hesiodos’s Works and Days (which I mentioned briefly above) resembles works of this genre as well.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of an Old Babylonian clay tablet dating to between c. 1800 and c. 1600 BCE bearing the text of the Dialogue between a Man and His God, an example of ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature
Ways in which the texts of the Hebrew Bible are unusual
Thus, the texts that make up the Hebrew Bible are not unparalleled in the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean. Nonetheless, three important features do mark the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible as unusual.
The first of these is the strong emphasis that Yahweh chose the Israelites as his particular chosen people and made a special covenant with them that they must obey his specific, written commandments in exchange for his divine protection and favor and, if they do not follow those commandments, Yahweh will punish them collectively. The Hebrew Bible portrays obedience to Yahweh’s written commandments as applying even to kings, whom Yahweh will depose if they displease him.
Although this idea itself is not explicitly described in any of the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East, it is evidently a reworking of ideas that were common in ancient Near Eastern cultures. Most ancient Near Eastern peoples had the notion of a national god who looked out for and fought on behalf of their specific nation. The Assyrians, for instance, venerated Aššur as their national god, the Babylonians worshipped Marduk, the Moabites worshipped Chemosh, the Ammonites worshipped Milkam, and the Edomites worshipped Qaus. In a similar way, most scholars believe that Yahweh was originally the national god of the Israelites and Judahites.
Many ancient Near Eastern peoples also had a notion of laws that were handed down from a deity through a human lawgiver. The Law Code of Hammurabi, for instance, claims that the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash bestowed the laws that make up the code on Hammurabi, the king of Babylon. The Hebrew Bible takes these two ideas and combines them to create the idea of a special divine covenant in which Yahweh’s favor and protection is contingent on the people of Israel collectively obeying his laws.
The second feature of the Hebrew Bible that makes it stand out is the fact that at least some texts within it expressly forbid the Israelites from worshipping deities other than Yahweh. This idea is almost unparalleled in the ancient world. While other peoples regarded a certain god as the special patron of their nation, nearly all these peoples honored other deities alongside the national god. (Indeed, the Hebrew Bible itself and archaeological evidence attest that, for a long time, the ancient Israelites and Judahites honored other deities alongside Yahweh and not all the texts included in the Hebrew Bible seem to have a problem with this.)
That being said, one significant parallel exists of Egypt during the Amarna period. The pharaoh Akhenaten (ruled c. 1353 – c. 1336 BCE) vigorously tried to promote the worship of Aten, the divine personification of solar rays, over and above the worship of other deities. Sometime around 1346 BCE, he moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a new city he built out in the desert called Akhetaten, which was located at a site that is known today as Tel al-ʿAmārna. By a certain point in his reign, Akhenaten actively banned the worship of at least some other Egyptian deities, including the god Amun, whose priests were especially powerful in the city of Thebes.
Historians think that Akhenaten’s promotion of the Aten cult may have been at least in part an effort to assert his own political and religious authority and delegitimize the powerful priests of Amun. In any case, his religious reforms did not survive long after his death, since, after the short reigns of the pharaohs Smenkhare and Neferneferuaten (who was possibly Akhenaten’s wife Nefertiti), Akhenaten’s young son Tutankhaten (who took the new name Tutankhamun) restored the worship of Amun and moved the capital back to Thebes.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of a painted limestone relief dating to the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten depicting the pharaoh and his family worshipping the Aten, the personification of the solar rays
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The final unusual feature of the Hebrew Bible is the fact that it eventually took the form of a specific, structured canon of scriptures regarded to constitute divine revelation to humans through prophets and came to occupy such a central place in Jewish and later Christian religious practice and thought.
As we have established, many other cultures of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean had some idea that certain texts could be divinely inspired or revealed in some sense, but the notion of a specific, structured canon of such texts that is central to religious thought and practice is unusual. Neither the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia nor the Egyptians nor the Greeks nor the Romans had such a canon.
Zoroastrian sacred texts
That being said, the Jews and Samaritans were not quite the only ancient peoples who developed a canon of this sort. Most notably, the ancient Persians practiced Zoroastrianism, which followers believe was founded by a prophet named Zarathustra (who is also sometimes known by his Greek name Zoroaster) who received a divine revelation from the great god Ahura Mazda (whose name means “Lord Wisdom”).
Zoroastrians today still revere a body of sacred texts known as the Avesta as divinely inspired by Ahura Mazda and believe that Zarathustra himself composed the oldest part of the Avesta, a set of seventeen hymns in the Avestan language known as the Gathas, which play a central role in Zoroastrian liturgy, known as the Yasna.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a page of Bodleian MS J2 bearing the text of the Ahunavaiti Gatha (Yasna 28.1)
Lost Etruscan sacred texts
Meanwhile, ancient sources attest that the Etruscans, a people who inhabited northern Italy, particularly the region of what is now Tuscany, also practiced a revealed religion with prophets and revered an important body of sacred texts written on rolls of linen cloth in their own language, which seem to have been central to Etruscan religious practice and thought. Modern scholars refer to these lost sacred writings by the Latin name disciplina Etrusca.
Unfortunately, after the Etruscans came under Roman rule, they gradually adopted Roman language and culture, their language died out, and most of their sacred texts became lost, except for some that were translated into Latin. Later, when Christianity became the dominant religion of the Mediterranean world, even the Etruscan sacred texts that had been translated into Latin became lost.
As a result, modern scholars know relatively little about Etruscan sacred texts and beliefs about divine revelation. Nonetheless, scholars have been able to reconstruct some information from surviving works of Etruscan art, Etruscan inscriptions, and one Etruscan linen book that has randomly happened to survive—the Liber Linteus Zagrebiensis or Linen Book of Zagreb, a text believed to be a ritual calendar written on a linen scroll dating to the third century BCE in the Etruscan language that somehow made its way to Egypt and ended up being reused in the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy. (No one knows exactly how this happened, but it proved a fortuitous circumstance for the manuscript’s preservation.)
Unfortunately, the Etruscan language is a non-Indo-European language that is not related to any language that is still spoken or well understood. Although scholars have come a long way toward understanding it, especially over the past half century, much about the language still remains unknown and scholars can only read some words, phrases, and parts of the Etruscan texts that survive.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing portions of the Liber Linteus Zabrebiensis or Linen Book of Zagreb, the only surviving Etruscan linen scroll, which dates to the third century BCE and bears the text of an Etruscan-language ritual calendar
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Conclusion
As we have seen, the texts of the Hebrew Bible are not totally unique or unparalleled, but they are also not normative of religious traditions in the eastern Mediterranean. They bear many similarities to texts in other cultures that flourished in the same broad geographic region during the same time period, but they also bear many unusual or idiosyncratic features, which include the idea of a structured canon itself.
Works cited
- Brueggemann, Walter. 1997. Theology of the Old Testament. Minneapolis: Fortress.
- Carroll, Robert. 1991. Wolf in the Sheepfold: The Bible as a Problem for Christianity. London: SPCK.
- Heiden, Bruce. 2007. “The Muses’ Uncanny Lies: Hesiod, Theogony 27 and Its Translators.” The American Journal of Philology 128, no. 2: 153–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4496957.
- Moberly, R. W. L. 2003. “Does God Lie to His Prophets? The Story of Micaiah Ben Imlah as a Test Case.” The Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 1: 1–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4151846.
- Nissinen, Martti. 2019. Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East. Writings from the Ancient World. 2nd edition. Atlanta: SBL Press.
- Wright, David P. 2013. Inventing God’s Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Which books of the Hebrew Bible don’t have a problem with polytheism?
There is no complete book of the Hebrew Bible that is consistently tolerant of the worship of deities other than Yahweh, but some passages and textual layers within books depict deities other than Yahweh as existing and, in some cases, do not condemn their worship. I previously discussed some of these passages in my post about angels from December 2022, but I will list some of them here as well for convenience.
To begin with what most scholars regard as some of the oldest poetic passages preserved in the Hebrew Bible, Exodus 15:11 asks “Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods?”—a statement which seems to imply that other deities exist, but are inferior to Yahweh. Deuteronomy 32:8–9 seems to quote an extremely ancient poetic text, which describes the high god ʿElyōn (who is apparently distinct from Yahweh in this passage) as assigning patronage over the nations of the earth to various deities and assigning the patronage of the nation of Israel to Yahweh. The Song of Deborah in Judges 5 describes Yahweh as leading a heavenly army into battle in heaven on behalf of Israel and says that the “stars fought from heaven” (Judg. 5:20); the implication is that, while the Israelites fight other nations on earth, Yahweh’s heavenly armies fight against the armies of those nations’ patron gods in heaven.
Moving on, a number of passages in the Hebrew Bible implicitly or explicitly describe Yahweh as addressing a council of other deities. In Genesis 1:26, 3:22, and 11:6–7, Yahweh addresses and exhorts listeners—who are not expressly mentioned, but who are still assumed to be present—using first-person plural exhortative expressions and the content of his statements to them show that his listeners must be other anthropomorphic deities. Psalm 82 expressly describes Yahweh as speaking in a council of other deities (although the poem ends with him stripping the other deities of their immortality).
Some texts clearly depict Yahweh and his fellow deities as anthropomorphic beings who eat, drink, and even have sex. Genesis 6:1–4 says that, in the days before the flood, the “sons of God” (bənē hāʾĔlōhīm) mated with human women and produced offspring known as Nəfīlīm who were “heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” A number of other passages also mention these “sons of God.” Although later Jewish and Christian readers reinterpreted the “sons of God” as angels or descendants of Seth, they were most likely originally understood as Yahweh’s literal divine sons. In Genesis 18:1–8, Yahweh appears in anthropomorphic form to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, accompanied by two other “men” whom later Jewish and Christian traditions interpret as angels, but who were most likely originally understood as divine companions. Abraham immediately recognizes Yahweh and his companions as gods, tells them to rest in the shade under the trees, has water brought so they can wash their feet, and brings them flour cakes and calf meat with curds and milk to eat; they eat the food in front of him.
In some passages, other deities compete with Yahweh. In Exodus 7:11–12 and 7:22, the Egyptian magicians are depicted as possessing apparently genuine supernatural powers, implying that the gods they draw power from exist and have supernatural powers as well, although the text is clear that Yahweh is more powerful than them. In another passage, however, the god of a foreign nation actually defeats Yahweh; in 2 Kings 3, Yahweh is supporting the Israelites in a battle against the Moabites and the Israelites are winning, but, as the battle is unfolding, the king of Moab sacrifices his firstborn son and this ritual act suddenly empowers the Moabites to defeat the Israelites; although the text does not expressly say why the king of Moab sacrificing his firstborn son would have this effect, the assumption is that the sacrifice motivated or empowered Chemosh, the national god of the Moabites, to defeat Yahweh and drive back the Israelites.
When it comes to polytheistic worship, in several passages, characters who are not otherwise characterized negatively or condemned for their behavior are described as keeping and worshipping tərāfim or idols (e.g., Rachel and Leah in Genesis 31, Micah in Judges 17–18, and David in 1 Samuel 19).
Thank you very much for this post, Spencer. This is one I’ve enjoyed the most up until now. Truly fascinating! If I may I do have a question regarding one of the sources you use for this particular post, namely: which bible version do you use? I ask this question because in your post you often refer to a biblical passage while using the name “Yahweh”. However, when you reference for example the Biblegateway.com, the same passage you’ve previously referred to is now shown but using the word “LORD” or “God” instead. So I am curious to know which bible version you use. Or is it the case that you yourself translate the words “LORD” and “God” from the Hebrew Bible into “Yahweh”?
Hi Ray, I believe the original Hebrew name for God is a set of 4 consonants that are variously interpreted as “Jehovah” or “Yahweh.” “Adonai” is (I think) the Hebrew world translated “Lord.”
Hopefully Spencer can set us both straight.
Hi Archer, thank you for your contribution to my question. I believe that your referring to the Tetragrammaton YHWH or YHVH as the original Hebrew name for the god of Israel, right? I am familiar with that convention as I’ve been reading, watching and listening to some scholars talking about that subject. “Adonai”, on the other hand, is rather new to me, so thank you for including that name in the discussion of this subject!
As an example of the reason for my question to Spencer, in the paragraph containing the sentence “This is best illustrated by the story in 1 Kings 22, in which Yahweh sends a ‘lying spirit’ into the mouths of his own prophets in order to deceive the wicked king Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel to go into a battle in which he will die”, Spencer provided a link under the words “1 Kings 22” that redirects to https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings%2022&version=NRSVUE (=1 Kings 22,
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition). In verses 5-8, 11-12, 14-17, 19-24, 28, 38, 43 and 52-53, the word “LORD” is used rather than the name Yahweh that Spencer has used in her commentary on that chapter. So I was wondering why she chose to use the name “Yahweh” instead of the word “LORD”.
When I quote the Hebrew Bible, I typically use the NRSVUE (which, of Christian Bible translations, holds the most support from critical Biblical scholars and is the translation most commonly used in religious studies courses at non-sectarian colleges and universities) or sometimes the JPS (which is the most widely used Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into English), but I sometimes make edits of my own to bring the translation closer to the Hebrew text. I don’t typically make my own translations from the Hebrew Bible myself, though, because my Biblical Hebrew is not very strong. When I quote the New Testament, I normally use either the NRSVUE, the NRSVUE with my own edits, or my own translation, since I can read Koine Greek very well.
The reason why I often quote the Hebrew Bible as saying “Yahweh” in places where most English translations say “the LORD” is because, anywhere in an English Bible translation where you see “the LORD” (with “LORD” written in all caps), the original Hebrew actually says יהוה (YHWH), which is the four-letter proper name of the God of Israel, also known as the Tetragrammaton. Although this name is written without vowel markings in Hebrew texts, the modern scholarly consensus is that it was originally vocalized “Yahweh” or something very close to that.
Starting sometime in the Hellenistic Period, it became taboo for ordinary Jews to pronounce the name of God out loud and a tradition arose of substituting the Hebrew word אֲדֹנָי (ăḏōnāi), which means “my Lord,” when one was reading aloud from the Hebrew Bible and encountered the divine name.
Some of the earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced in the third and second centuries BCE, such as 4Q120 (a fragment from Qumran of the Septuagint text of the Book of Leviticus dating to the first century BCE), transliterate the divine name into Greek letters as Ιαω (Iaō). Some other early Septuagint manuscripts simply leave the divine name in Paleo-Hebrew letters, although surrounded by Greek text. Eventually, however, it became standard in Septuagint manuscripts to render the divine name as the Greek word Κύριος (Kýrios), which means “Lord” in Greek. Later Latin translations of the Hebrew Bible followed this convention by rendering the divine name in Latin as Dominus, which likewise means “Lord.” In turn, English translations have followed this convention by rendering the divine name in English as “the LORD.”
The reason why I often restore the proper divine name in quotations in my posts is to make clear that the text refers to a specific, named deity: Yahweh, the god of Israel.
If I’m not mistaken, when the Hebrew Tetragrammaton was included in Greek Bible manuscripts, some people hilariously misread י ה ו ה as Π Ι Π Ι (going the opposite direction), which would be pronounced “Pipi”.
https://glanier.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/πιπι-and-the-use-of-hebrew-in-greek-manuscripts/
Ethan, not a direct answer to your question, but perhaps interesting to know nonetheless:
Professor Mark S. Smith has written various articles and books about the origins of the Israelite religion, amongst which the book “The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel”. Summarized on Wikipedia:
“Smith says that Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in origin, and that deities such as El, Baal and Asherah, far from being alien to the Israelites, formed part of their heritage. He therefore sees Israelite monolatry (the insistence that Israel should worship one god, Yahweh, but without denying the reality of other gods) as a break with Israel’s own past.
Yahweh, he argues, originated in Edom/Midian/Teman as a warrior-god and was subsequently assimilated into the highland pantheon headed by El and his consort, Asherah and populated by Baal and other deities.[2]
Smith sees this process as marked by two major phases, which he describes as ‘convergence’ and ‘differentiation’. In the period of the Judges and the early monarchy, convergence saw the coalescence of the qualities of other deities, and even the deities themselves, into Yahweh.[3] Thus El became identified as a name of Yahweh, Asherah ceased to be a distinct goddess, and qualities of El, Asherah and Baal (notably, for Baal, his identification as a storm god) were assimilated into Yahweh. In the period from the 9th century BC through to the Babylonian exile certain features of the Israelite religion were differentiated from the Yahweh cult, identified as Canaanite, and rejected: examples include Baal, child sacrifice, the asherah poles, worship of the sun and moon, and the cults of the ‘high places'”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Early_History_of_God
Another book of him you or others may find interesting is “The origins of biblical monotheism : Israel’s polytheistic background and the Ugaritic texts”: https://archive.org/details/originsofbiblica0000smit/page/n347/mode/2up
You can also find various video’s on YouTube in which he talks about his research and findings in this subject area.
A very interesting read, and as always, very well written. Great job Spencer! You bring together a lot of different sources and information from numerous and various ancient groups of people and cultures, and do a great job discussing them.
Thanks! Although my primary research focus is ancient Greece, I have gone to great lengths to learn as much as I can about a wide range of ancient cultures and incorporate content about them in my posts.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the oldest complete Bible is the Ethiopian Bible which is more closely aligned with the Bible used by Catholics than that of Protestants. It is even illustrated and shows the saints and Christ as people of color which actually makes historical sense vs. the Europeanized depictions that have been used to perpetuate white supremacy 🙁
What you’ve said here isn’t entirely factually correct, but it does contain several grains of truth.
The texts of the Hebrew Bible were originally composed in the Hebrew language, except for a few passages and sections of some books (namely Genesis 31:47, Jeremiah 10:11, Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26, and Daniel 2:4–7:28), which were originally written in Aramaic, a West Semitic language closely related to Hebrew.
The oldest surviving manuscripts bearing any version of a text that is now included in the Hebrew Bible are the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, a pair of two silver scrolls found at the site of Ketef Hinnom near Jerusalem dating to around 600 BCE, bearing two slightly different versions of the Priestly Blessing found in Numbers 6:24–26, written in Paleo-Hebrew script.
In the third and second centuries BCE, the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Hebrew Bible were translated into Greek as the Septuagint. In most cases, the Septuagint translation is relatively close to the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts, but, for a few books, it differs substantially. In particular, the Septuagint texts of Daniel and Esther are substantially different from the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of those books and they include some passages and whole narratives that are not found in the original Hebrew and Aramaic.
The oldest surviving true Biblical manuscripts are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at the site of Qumran near the Dead Sea, which date to between the third century BCE and the first century CE. Most of these early manuscripts are highly fragmentary, but some of them are more substantial. The Dead Sea Scrolls include at least some pieces of at least one manuscript of every book of the Hebrew Bible, except the Book of Esther. They also include the oldest surviving virtually complete manuscript of any Biblical book: the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), which dates to between c. 150 and c. 100 BCE and bears the complete text of the Book of Isaiah in Hebrew, apart from a few small sections that are damaged.
All the works of the Christian New Testament were originally written in Koine Greek. The oldest surviving fragment of a manuscript of any New Testament text is Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a tiny fragment of a papyrus codex of the Gospel of John that originates from Egypt and dates to sometime between c. 125 and c. 200 CE. The fragment is about the size of a credit card and bears the Greek text of John 18:31–33 and 18:37–38. A number of surviving papyrus codices from Egypt dating to the third century CE, however, preserve texts of some entire books and large sections of books of the Greek New Testament. For instance, Papyrus 46, probably dating to the early third century CE, contains the last eight chapters of Romans, the almost complete texts of Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians, and two chapters of 1 Thessalonians. Papyrus 75, which has been dated to the early third century CE, contains nearly the complete Greek text of the Gospel of Luke and more than half of the Gospel of John. Meanwhile, Papyrus 66, which dates to the third or early fourth century CE, contains nearly the complete Greek text of John.
The oldest surviving manuscript containing portions of all four canonical gospels and the Book of Acts in one volume is Papyrus 45, a papyrus codex that dates to the early or middle third century CE; the manuscript originally contained the complete texts of all four gospels and the Book of Acts and its surviving portions contain large sections of the four gospels and the majority of Acts in Greek.
The earliest substantially complete manuscripts of both the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament are the Codex Vaticanus, a parchment codex most likely dating to between c. 325 and c. 350 CE that contains most of the Septuagint and most of the Greek New Testament, and the Codex Sinaiticus, a parchment codex most likely dating to between c. 330 and c. 360 CE that contains most of the Septuagint and the complete Greek New Testament. The Codex Alexandrinus, which dates to the fifth century CE, contains the majority of the Septuagint and the majority of the Greek New Testament as well. The Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus, a palimpsest dating to the fifth century CE, contains most of the Greek New Testament and six books of the Septuagint. Together, these four parchment codices dating to the fourth and fifth centuries CE are known as the “great uncial codices” and are immensely important for Biblical textual criticism.
Early Christians and Rabbinic Jews established slightly different canons for the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible respectively; the early Christian Old Testament contained all the texts included in the Hebrew Bible, but also the additions to Daniel and Esther that are only found in the Septuagint versions of those books and several additional books, which are known as the Apocrypha or Deuterocanon. In the late fourth century CE, the Church Father Jerome translated both the Septuagint (including the Apocrypha) and the New Testament into Latin as the Vulgate, which became the standard, most commonly used version of the Bible in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and is still the officially endorsed Latin Bible of the Catholic Church.
By the fifth century CE, the four gospels were translated from the original Greek into Geʿez, the language of the kingdom of Aksum, which ruled what is now Ethiopia. The oldest surviving manuscripts in Geʿez are the Garima Gospels, a set of three illustrated manuscripts bearing the Geʿez text of the four gospels. The oldest of the Garima Gospels (Garima 2) dates to around the fifth or sixth century CE and the second-oldest dates to the sixth or seventh century CE. Together, they are the oldest surviving complete illustrated manuscripts of the four canonical gospels. Although older Greek manuscripts of the gospels survive, none of those manuscripts are illustrated and it is the illustrations that set the Garima Gospels apart.
Eventually, the Septuagint (including the Apocrypha) and the complete New Testament were translated into Geʿez. Today, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church endorses a Biblical canon that includes not only the standard Apocrypha (minus 1 and 2 Maccabees), but also additional books, such as 1 Enoch; 1, 2, and 3 Meqabyan (which are different from 1 and 2 Maccabees); Josippon; 1, 2, 3, and 4 Sinodos; 1 and 2 Covenant; Ethiopic Clement; and Didascalia. The resulting canon of eighty-one books is the largest traditional Christian canon, substantially larger than the canons of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches.
The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic canons are larger in turn than the Protestant canon because, in the sixteenth century, the German theologian Martin Luther, an important leader in the Protestant Reformation, challenged the authority of the texts that were included in the Vulgate Old Testament, but not the Hebrew Bible accepted by Jews, arguing that they were of lesser or dubious authority, and, in his German translation of the Bible, he relegated them to a separate “Apocrypha” section between the Old and New Testaments. Protestant Bibles traditionally included the Apocrypha as an intertestamental section until the nineteenth century, when Protestant Bible publishers began eliminating them to save printing costs. Thus, the Protestant canon of the Old Testament is identical to the Jewish canon of the Hebrew Bible, with the only different between being the order of the books within the canon.
The oldest surviving manuscript containing the majority of the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew and Aramaic is the Aleppo Codex, which was copied in Tiberias, a city on the Sea of Galilee, around 920 CE. Although the Aleppo Codex originally contained the entire Hebrew Bible, around 40% of the manuscript has been lost. The oldest surviving manuscript containing the entire Hebrew Bible in Hebrew and Aramaic is the Leningrad Codex, which was copied in Cairo in 1008 or 1009 CE.
Modern critical editions and translations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament generally rely primarily on the Masoretic Text preserved in the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices, supplemented by the earlier Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint manuscripts in cases where scholars believe these preserve older versions of the text. Meanwhile, modern critical editions and translations of the New Testament generally rely on the early papyrus fragments and codices and the four great uncial codices, especially the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.
I loved this fascinating post. I was especially intrigued by the idea that for the Greeks divine inspiration was all about the aesthetic quality of a work rather than its truthfulness.
Thanks for providing much needed context to the productions of the ancient world–once again!
May I ask a question is that how universal are these gods like can they extend their influence into foreign nations and lands like can the Greek gods or Egyptian gods influence places like India or Yemen and did they view anything wrong with foreigners worshiping their gods
Dear Spencer McDaniel,
I had a few historical questions that I wanted to ask you. Do you have an email address that I could reach you with?
Samaritans are an interesting bunch, be it their religion or their own textual version of the Torah.
Very interesting article as usual, Spencer! One small correction: Etruscan was not a language isolate, but was part of the Tyrsenian language family that also included Rhaetic in the eastern Alps and Lemnian. The family’s origins are debated, with some arguing an eastern Aegean origin (closer to Lemnos), and others arguing for an Urheimat in Italy or the Alps.
I apologize. You are right that Etruscan technically isn’t a language isolate, since scholars do know of a handful of other very poorly-understood, poorly-attested, extinct languages that are related to it. I was already aware that the Rhaetic and Lemnian languages are thought to be related to Etruscan. My point in the post above is that Etruscan is not related to any language that is either still spoken or well understood by scholars. I have now corrected my post to make this point clearer.
Great article, Spencer. Why do you think the Bible had such differences from surrounding cultures?
Also, as I understand it, the Phoenician city-states to the north were the cultural cousins of the ancient Jews. As in, Phoenicians thought of themselves as Canaanites and their priests were called something similar to cohenim, which is what the priestly class was called in Israel. Do you think a Phoenician religious text would look similar to the Bible?
(Only posting this here because the relevant posts’ comments sections are closed)
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2024/01/14/dont-blame-paganism-for-the-united-states-problems/
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2024/03/21/why-were-elaborate-floor-mosaics-more-common-in-antiquity-than-today/
Here you outline how classical aristocrats were solidly “old money” aristocrats with fashion, moderation, and displeasure with changes in the status quo, while blokes like Trump and Musk are more “new money” aristocrats – who while inheriting great wealth, obtained gargantuan levels of wealth through profiteering and exploitation. (Trump less so)
However, one element tying Musk to these old-money aristocrats (aside from stringent social conservatism, misogyny, and disdain for workers) is that they both regard artists via similar lens. Similar to how these classical aristocrats viewed “artists” as just talented manual laborers making something with a purpose, Musk (as evident by him consistently refusing to credit and acknowledge artistic pieces) views artists as too possessive of their own art – pit night onwards a universalizing conception of art. When Musk stole Hard Drive’s (satire website) title as a meme to post on his Twitter (while cropping out the watermark), he justified it by saying that the constant need to credit artists “ruins the ethnics” of art, with other comments (such as the Hard Drive-Elon Twitter thread) referring to the “selflessness” of anonymous men creators. So Musk here clearly values the aesthetics and purposes of art far more than the effort put into creating them from artists. So I guess in this one sense he is similar to classical ancient Mediterranean aristocrats
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-fight-satirical-news-website-hard-drive-2022-5
https://cheezburger.com/8617989/elon-musk-gets-squashed-on-twitter-for-saying-artists-shouldnt-be-credited-for-their-work
https://www.thegamer.com/elon-musk-hard-drive-argument/
This is completely off-topic, but I remember you mentioning, perhaps a few years ago, something about charms that young Greek (or Roman?) men wore to protect their virility from harmful feminine forces.
If I remember correctly – maybe you could point me to a reference because I find it interesting but I haven’t found anything else mentioning it.
Thanks.