{"id":4389,"date":"2010-11-01T01:10:07","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T06:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=4443"},"modified":"2010-10-20T15:54:15","modified_gmt":"2010-10-20T20:54:15","slug":"principles-of-paganism-lesson-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2010\/11\/01\/principles-of-paganism-lesson-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Principles of Paganism, Lesson 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lesson 5: Why the Hebrews Ceased to be Pagans<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his monumental contribution to UNESCO\u2019s History of Mankind<\/span>, volume 2, The Beginnings of Civilization<\/span>, Sir Leonard Woolley presents an interesting hypothesis regarding the origin and early development of Judaism.\u00a0 Because the ancestors of the Hebrews were pagans, we should concern ourselves with the question, How did they lose their religious allegiance to ancestor-worship and temple worship of many gods and goddesses?<\/p>\n

The Book of Genesis, which is full of pagan traditions from the earliest stratum of Hebrew oral tradition (and which is a political hot potato if a scholar attempts to translate it honestly), states that Abram (later Abraham) came from Ur \u2018of the Chaldees\u2019.\u00a0 After 1100 BCE, southern Mesopotamia was overrun by an Aramaean people whose descendants are still called Chald\u00e6ans.\u00a0 This ended the Middle Babylonian period, during which much of Mesopotamia was ruled by an Asianic [1]<\/a> people from Iran called the Kassites.\u00a0 In all likelihood, Abram lived before or during the Kassite period, [2]<\/a> so that the qualification \u2018of the Chaldees\u2019 is for the benefit of people living some centuries later in the 1st<\/sup> millenium BCE, in the time of the Chald\u00e6an kings of Babylon.<\/p>\n

It was necessary to distinguish the very ancient city of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia not far from the Persian Gulf, from a more recent town in northeastern Syria. [3]<\/a> This later Ur was apparently founded late in the 3rd<\/sup> millenium BCE by the Neo-Sumerian Ur III Empire, the capital of which was the Ur of southern Mesopotamia, a city dating back to prehistoric times.\u00a0 The northern Ur was a colonial emporium of the Sumerians (who by that time were at least half Akkadian) established in Syria because that land had become disunited and was divided into a number of petty kingdoms; thus it was infeasible for the kings of the older Ur to try to regulate trade with Syria by treaty.\u00a0 Syria had become disunited some 200 or more years previously when the Akkadian king Naram-Suen raided the northern Syrian capital (the land was called Yamkhad in those days) of Ebla, burning it to the ground and thus earning the gratitude of archaeologists by baking the more than 100,000 clay tablets in that city\u2019s archives.\u00a0 These have been unearthed and are still being translated, and are gradually revealing the cultural background to the Aramaean civilization which followed, including much religious material that later wound up in the Old Testament.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the single most arresting find at Ebla was a map of Syria in the late 3rd<\/sup> millenium.\u00a0 This baked clay tablet map shows many towns in Syria, indicating that the land at that time was far more populous than scholars thought.\u00a0 One of the towns marked on the map is another Ur.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t far from another town called Harran.\u00a0 Both Ur and Harran were emporia of the southern capital Ur, and both towns were under the same city deity as that capital, the moon god Nannar.\u00a0 Nannar\u2019s name in the Semitic Akkadian language was Sin (earlier Suen), and in the Hurrian language or Hurrianized dialect of Harran and (presumably) the northern Ur he was called Terah.<\/p>\n

This latter detail is very important for Sir Leonard\u2019s theory, for Abram\u2019s father was also named Terah, and he was a fashioner of temple idols.\u00a0 Sir Leonard concludes from this that Terah and his family left Harran (or perhaps the northern Ur) and moved to the old capital in the south, where Abram was born and grew up. [4]<\/a> The southern Ur in those days was Sumerian in culture only. The Sumerians lost their hegemony when the empire of Ur III was overrun by Amorites (\u2018Westerners\u2019) in the north [5]<\/a> and the capital itself sacked and partially razed by Sumer\u2019s ancient enemy, the Elamites of Susa, from southwestern Iran.\u00a0 Many temples of Ur were destroyed in the hundred years or so while the city was occupied by an Elamite garrison.\u00a0 The leadership of southern Mesopotamia passed first to an Akkadian city called Isin, and later to an Elamite-ruled town called Larsa.\u00a0 This was in what is called the Old Babylonian Period, when northern and central Mesopotamia was ruled by Amorite kings from their new capital of Babylon (raised from an unimportant village) who eventually, under Hamurrapi, conquered Larsa and most of the land.\u00a0 By this time the Sumerians were disappearing as a people, becoming gradually absorbed into the general population.<\/p>\n

Archaeology from the Larsa period [6]<\/a> reveals that not all the old temples of Ur had been rebuilt, but a curious architectural feature begins to crop up in private houses. [7]<\/a> As you entered a private house in Ur, a short walk down a corridor led to a door, generally on the right, through which you passed to enter the parlor and the rest of the house.\u00a0 But if instead you proceeded straight to the back of the house, you would come to a family shrine.\u00a0 The near half of the shrine was roofed, the far half open to the sky.\u00a0 Woolley describes the shrine in his own words, for he was the chief excavator of Ur:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026under the pavement of the open half was the brick-built family vault (it might contain a dozen bodies), and the roofed hall was a chapel dedicated to the worship of the family god\u2026after the door of the vault had been sealed up, a platter and a clay water jug might be set against its brickwork, but that was all, and inside the vault there were no offerings whatsoever\u2026The dead man continued to inhabit his familiar home\u2026he required no tomb furniture because everything in the house was still at his disposal.\u201d [8]<\/a><\/p>\n

Evidence of inscriptions in the temples of Ur suggest that the temple worship, while it continued, was increasingly the province of the temple staff themselves, though no doubt the populace attended the festivals.\u00a0 From this scanty and therefore highly conjectural evidence, Sir Leonard hypothesizes that the failure of the god Nannar to protect his city led to a decline in confidence in the great deities of the pantheon and favored the growth of private family religion.<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, we know from the account in Genesis that at one point Abram was called out from the old capital of Ur by his nameless family god, and bidden to travel north back to the land of his forefathers, to the city of Harran.\u00a0 Harran at this time was under the rule of the Hurrians (another \u2018Asianic\u2019 people). Hurrian law prescribed for custody of the figures of the family god (or perhaps of the ancestors) to belong to the eldest son. In Abraham\u2019s family these were called the \u2018teraphim\u2019 (meaning \u2018the family of Terah\u2019; probably Abraham\u2019s father rather than the moon god).\u00a0 While living at Harran, Abraham and his relations would naturally continue to worship the god Terah and the other deities of the Hurrianized Sumerian pantheon of the city.\u00a0 As the Canaanites later reminded the Hebrews, \u201cthy fathers worshipped strange gods beyond the river.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, perhaps because they joined a chartered royal caravan of merchants to the Syrian coast (modern Lebanon) [9]<\/a> or traveled under some other official seal, Abraham and his uncle Lot and their families left Harran and moved to what much later was called Palestine.\u00a0 When they crossed the river forming the western boundary of Hurrian land, they had to leave the moon god and the rest of the pantheon behind, for these were local in character and had to be properly housed in temples; only the nameless god who was the family deity and the teraphim could be taken along.\u00a0 That the patriarchs continued to worship the family god is easily seen from the covenant Jacob made with his cousin Laban in the name of \u2018the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor, the god of their father.\u2019<\/p>\n

The usual practice for migrating people in the ancient Middle East who had left their homeland and its gods behind was to take up the worship of the people who were their new neighbors.\u00a0 But these, the Syrians of the coast, practiced human sacrifice, which did not appeal to the more civilized sensibilities of Abraham and his family.\u00a0 Accordingly, after fulfilling any royal commissions, they avoided the cities and took their flocks of sheep into the hills, living that rural existence in tents familiar to us from old Sunday school coloring books.\u00a0 The teraphim were probably retained until Moses delivered the Decalogue, which as we know forbids idols.<\/p>\n

When the Hebrews settled in the Egyptian delta their assimilation into Egyptian culture was incomplete, owing to the fact that they were shepherds, for sheep and shepherds were abominated by the Egyptians, perhaps because of their recent memory of the hated Hyksos conquerors. [10]<\/a> So when Moses became a fugitive and fled Egypt into the land of Midian (in the Sinai peninsula) and married among the Midianites, he found it easy to adopt his father-in-law\u2019s worship of Yahweh, a former member of the Syrian pantheon (with antecedents at Ebla) very popular at the time among western Semites.\u00a0 There he took the revolutionary (and, from our viewpoint, unfortunate) step of identifying Yahweh with the faceless and nameless family god of Abraham, and Judaism was born, a religion entirely portable in nature.\u00a0 From then on, wherever the Hebrews went, they could take their national god Yahweh with them, and though they later settled in Canaan and many adopted the local fertility religion, there remained among them a prophetic strain of protest from their nomadic past.\u00a0 A god who is entirely portable is cut off from the Earth, and had it not been for the influence of the Canaanites, the Hebrews would have been entirely cut off from that ultimate source of pagan spirituality.\u00a0 It took their later capture by Nebuchadrezzar to divorce them from the Canaanite worship, so that when they were allowed by Cyrus to return to Palestine and by Darius to rebuild their temple, they had truly become a people removed from the rest of mankind.<\/p>\n

Note: This ingenious theory suffers from the shortcoming shared by most theories of the Bronze Age, namely chronology. The Larsa period is much too early a setting for the Abram story, and if we place the patriarch in the Kassite period instead we must assume a long continuity to the family religious tradition at Ur.\u00a0 By Kassite times Harran would have been under the Hittites, but could have retained its local Hurrian dialect (the Hittite capital of Hattusas, in northeastern Turkey, spoke eleven languages).\u00a0 We know the Hittites chartered merchant expeditions to the coast, and Genesis states that Abraham purchased a family burial ground in (the later) Palestine in a cave belonging to the Hittite Machpelah. This brings the late part of Genesis up to the Amarna age and within reach of the post-Amarnic Pharaoh Merneptah, in whose time we read the first inscriptional reference to \u2018Habiru\u2019 in the Palestine area.<\/p>\n

References are to Woolley, Sir Leonard, The Beginnings of Civilization<\/span>, New York and Toronto, the New English Library, a Mentor book, 1965.<\/p>\n

Study Questions:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0 What was the religious error of the people of the Ur III Empire?<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0\u00a0 According to Woolley, how did the residents of Ur react to the fall of empire and the Elamite occupation?<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0\u00a0 Why were the ancestors buried in the family vault not provided with grave furniture?<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0\u00a0 What did the teraphim in Abram\u2019s family represent individually?\u00a0 What collectively?<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0\u00a0 When did Abraham\u2019s family stop worshipping temple deities?<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0\u00a0 Why did his family refuse to integrate with Syrian worship when they reached the Mediterranean coast?<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0\u00a0 Why, according to Woolley, were the Hebrews segregated from Egyptian society?<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0\u00a0 What religious identification did Moses make in Midian?<\/p>\n

Suggested Answers to Study Questions from Lesson Four:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0 What were the two general meanings attached to the word daimon<\/em> in the Archaic Period?\u00a0 An undetermined god or divine agency; a being intermediate between gods and mortals.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0\u00a0 What is the meaning of the adjective daimoni<\/em> in Homer?\u00a0 Strange.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0\u00a0 According to Hesiod, what happened to the humans of the Golden Age after they died? They became guardians and observers of later humanity.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0\u00a0 What was the personal daimon<\/em>? A spirit born with an individual who served as a guide throughout life.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0\u00a0 When did Pythagoreans expect to become daimones<\/em>?\u00a0 After a number of incarnations of living according to Pythagorean rules.<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0\u00a0 When did followers of Orphism or the Bacchic mysteries expect to become daimones<\/em>?\u00a0 After death in the Underworld.\u00a0 How was this achieved? By observance of ethical, ritual, dietary and hygienic purity.<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0How did Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian religious ideas reach Greece? By the Persian conquest of Ionia along the \u00c6gean coast; by trade contacts.<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0\u00a0 What effects did Mesopotamian astrology have upon Greek mythology? Name two effects. Some Olympian deities were identified with the visible planets. Thereafter the major deities were held to have heavenly and earthly aspects, the latter coming to be thought of as daimones.<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0\u00a0 Did early Greece seek to rise above the human condition? Not in Homeric times, at least so far as the evidence goes.<\/p>\n

10.\u00a0\u00a0 What was proto-puritanism, and where does E.R. Dodds think it came from? The view that faculties peculiar to humans, such as reason or ethical purity, were the only ones deserving of human focus.\u00a0 Dodds thought the notion of becoming supra-human may have derived from contact with shamanic cultures among the Get\u00e6 of the northern Black Sea coast.<\/p>\n

11.\u00a0\u00a0 According to later classical Paganism, where did daimones<\/em> come from and were they good, bad or mixed? Daimones were held to live between the Earth and the Moon, in \u2018the upper air\u2019 (which was thought to extend as far as the moon).\u00a0 They were regarded as ethically mixed at first, but christians believed them to be universally bad.<\/p>\n

12.\u00a0\u00a0 How did the deities of the later classical Pagans differ from those of heathen peoples outside of the Empire? The late classical Pagans thought of the heavenly deities as being ethically pure and incorporeal, while the heathens outside the empire retained the more ancient idea of the gods as being at times beneficial, at other times harmful to humans, and as having physical corporeality.<\/p>\n

13.\u00a0\u00a0 What were Paul\u2019s two theories about Pagan deities? \u00a0That they were either errors or devils, i.e., bad daimones. Which theory was favored by early missionaries and why? Early missionaries favored the idea that they were devils because the peoples they were trying to convert had undeniable experiences of their gods and other spirits.<\/p>\n

14.\u00a0\u00a0 When did Paul\u2019s other theory come into favor and what allowed this to happen? The church induced a fear of \u2018demons\u2019 in its subject peoples and this led to the gradual disappearance of Pagan religious experience.\u00a0 Still surviving Pagan traditions could then be characterized as erroneous human speculation by those who wished to preserve them for cultural reasons.<\/p>\n

15.\u00a0\u00a0 What were the pre-Christian deities of heathens like in relation to humans?\u00a0 They followed and epitomized the seasons and were ethically neutral towards humans, as humans are towards each other.\u00a0 See also the answer to 12 above.<\/p>\n

Exercise:<\/p>\n

The late President Ronald Reagan, when he was governor of California, was infamous for making the statement, \u201cWhen you see one tree, you\u2019ve seen \u2018em all.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 A few years ago when I was living in North Carolina, I decided to drive up into Virginia to visit cousins.\u00a0 I drove up the coastal highway, which is bounded on both sides by belts of trees, and for quite a stretch has trees up the center island as well, with occasional breaks for exits and turnarounds.\u00a0 These were not recently planted California saplings but good, east coast old-growth trees, towering overhead and nearly touching, so that I felt as if I were driving up the aisle of an enormous temple.\u00a0 I noticed that the trees in the middle formed the shapes of ships or waves when seen in the aggregate.\u00a0 I recalled the ignorant statement by Reagan and extracted the drop of truth from it, as Spinoza would have us do.\u00a0 I looked at trees in groups, saw them leaning towards each other like friends, or standing resignedly apart.\u00a0 I saw them as aware of themselves, and of each other, and read attitudes and expressions into the way they leaned, and reached for each other.\u00a0 After all, this was not total fantasy; plants are aware, in a way, of their surroundings, and no doubt the roots of many of these old trees were intertwined together.\u00a0 So perhaps that old governor was right without knowing it, right in an unexpected way: When you see one tree, you\u2019ve seen \u2018em all, but when you see them together in groups, they become persons.<\/p>\n

I still look at trees the way I did in South Virginia, sometimes straight on, sometimes peripherally.\u00a0 I can\u2019t prove it, but I believe this is how my Pagan ancestors saw them.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> \u2019Asianic\u2019 is a designation scholars use for ancient peoples whose language bears no discernible relation to any others known.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> See Note at the end of this article.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Perhaps the same as one called Urfa today, which muslim tradition erroneously identifies as the Ur of Abraham.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Woolley, pp. 492 \u2013 4.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> c. 2000 BCE.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> c. 1920 \u2013 1800 BCE.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Woolley, p. 458.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Woolley, p. 458.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> A much later charter of this sort, of the Hittite King Suppililiumas, has been recovered.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> But the hieroglyph for \u2018Hyksos,\u2019 once read as \u2018shepherd kings,\u2019 has since been reinterpreted to mean \u2018rulers of foreign countries\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lesson 5: Why the Hebrews Ceased to be Pagans In his monumental contribution to UNESCO\u2019s History of Mankind, volume 2, The Beginnings of Civilization, Sir Leonard Woolley presents an interesting hypothesis regarding the origin and early development of Judaism.\u00a0 Because the ancestors of the Hebrews were pagans, we should concern ourselves with the question, How did they lose their religious allegiance to ancestor-worship and temple worship of many gods and goddesses? The Book of Genesis, which is full of pagan traditions from the earliest stratum of Hebrew oral tradition (and which is a political hot potato if a scholar attempts to translate it honestly), states that Abram (later Abraham) came from Ur \u2018of the Chaldees\u2019.\u00a0 After 1100 BCE, southern Mesopotamia was overrun by an Aramaean people whose descendants are still called Chald\u00e6ans.\u00a0 This ended the Middle Babylonian period, during which much of Mesopotamia was ruled by an Asianic [1] people from Iran called the Kassites.\u00a0 In all likelihood, Abram lived before or during the Kassite period, [2] so that the qualification \u2018of the Chaldees\u2019 is for the benefit of people living some centuries later in the 1st millenium BCE, in the time of the Chald\u00e6an kings of Babylon. It was necessary to distinguish the very ancient city of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia not far from the Persian Gulf, from a more recent town in northeastern Syria. [3] This later Ur was apparently founded late in the 3rd millenium BCE by the Neo-Sumerian Ur III Empire, the capital of which was the Ur of southern Mesopotamia, a city dating back to prehistoric times.\u00a0 The northern Ur was a colonial emporium of the Sumerians (who by that time were at least half Akkadian) established in Syria because that land had become disunited and was divided into a number of petty kingdoms; thus it was infeasible for the kings of the older Ur to try to regulate trade with Syria by treaty.\u00a0 Syria had become disunited some 200 or more years previously when the Akkadian king Naram-Suen raided the northern Syrian capital (the land was called Yamkhad in those days) of Ebla, burning it to the ground and thus earning the gratitude of archaeologists by baking the more than 100,000 clay tablets in that city\u2019s archives.\u00a0 These have been unearthed and are still being translated, and are gradually revealing the cultural background to the Aramaean civilization which followed, including much religious material that later wound up in the Old Testament. Perhaps the single most arresting find at Ebla was a map of Syria in the late 3rd millenium.\u00a0 This baked clay tablet map shows many towns in Syria, indicating that the land at that time was far more populous than scholars thought.\u00a0 One of the towns marked on the map is another Ur.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t far from another town called Harran.\u00a0 Both Ur and Harran were emporia of the southern capital Ur, and both towns were under the same city deity as that capital, the moon god Nannar.\u00a0 Nannar\u2019s name in the Semitic Akkadian language was Sin (earlier Suen), and in the Hurrian language or Hurrianized dialect of Harran and (presumably) the northern Ur he was called Terah. This latter detail is very important for Sir Leonard\u2019s theory, for Abram\u2019s father was also named Terah, and he was a fashioner of temple idols.\u00a0 Sir Leonard concludes from this that Terah and his family left Harran (or perhaps the northern Ur) and moved to the old capital in the south, where Abram was born and grew up. [4] The southern Ur in those days was Sumerian in culture only. The Sumerians lost their hegemony when the empire of Ur III was overrun by Amorites (\u2018Westerners\u2019) in the north [5] and the capital itself sacked and partially razed by Sumer\u2019s ancient enemy, the Elamites of Susa, from southwestern Iran.\u00a0 Many temples of Ur were destroyed in the hundred years or so while the city was occupied by an Elamite garrison.\u00a0 The leadership of southern Mesopotamia passed first to an Akkadian city called Isin, and later to an Elamite-ruled town called Larsa.\u00a0 This was in what is called the Old Babylonian Period, when northern and central Mesopotamia was ruled by Amorite kings from their new capital of Babylon (raised from an unimportant village) who eventually, under Hamurrapi, conquered Larsa and most of the land.\u00a0 By this time the Sumerians were disappearing as a people, becoming gradually absorbed into the general population. Archaeology from the Larsa period [6] reveals that not all the old temples of Ur had been rebuilt, but a curious architectural feature begins to crop up in private houses. [7] As you entered a private house in Ur, a short walk down a corridor led to a door, generally on the right, through which you passed to enter the parlor and the rest of the house.\u00a0 But if instead you proceeded straight to the back of the house, you would come to a family shrine.\u00a0 The near half of the shrine was roofed, the far half open to the sky.\u00a0 Woolley describes the shrine in his own words, for he was the chief excavator of Ur: \u201c\u2026under the pavement of the open half was the brick-built family vault (it might contain a dozen bodies), and the roofed hall was a chapel dedicated to the worship of the family god\u2026after the door of the vault had been sealed up, a platter and a clay water jug might be set against its brickwork, but that was all, and inside the vault there were no offerings whatsoever\u2026The dead man continued to inhabit his familiar home\u2026he required no tomb furniture because everything in the house was still at his disposal.\u201d [8] Evidence of inscriptions in the temples of Ur suggest that the temple worship, while it continued, was increasingly the province of the temple staff themselves, though no doubt the populace attended the festivals.\u00a0 From this scanty and therefore highly conjectural evidence, Sir Leonard hypothesizes that the failure of the god Nannar to protect his city led to a decline in confidence in the great deities of the pantheon and favored the growth of private family religion. Be that as it may, we know from the account in Genesis that at one point Abram was called out from the old capital of Ur by his nameless family god, and bidden to travel north back to the land of his forefathers, to the city of Harran.\u00a0 Harran at this time was under the rule of the Hurrians (another \u2018Asianic\u2019 people). Hurrian law prescribed for custody of the figures of the family god (or perhaps of the ancestors) to belong to the eldest son. In Abraham\u2019s family these were called the \u2018teraphim\u2019 (meaning \u2018the family of Terah\u2019; probably Abraham\u2019s father rather than the moon god).\u00a0 While living at Harran, Abraham and his relations would naturally continue to worship the god Terah and the other deities of the Hurrianized Sumerian pantheon of the city.\u00a0 As the Canaanites later reminded the Hebrews, \u201cthy fathers worshipped strange gods beyond the river.\u201d Then, perhaps because they joined a chartered royal caravan of merchants to the Syrian coast (modern Lebanon) [9] or traveled under some other official seal, Abraham and his uncle Lot and their families left Harran and moved to what much later was called Palestine.\u00a0 When they crossed the river forming the western boundary of Hurrian land, they had to leave the moon god and the rest of the pantheon behind, for these were local in character and had to be properly housed in temples; only the nameless god who was the family deity and the teraphim could be taken along.\u00a0 That the patriarchs continued to worship the family god is easily seen from the covenant Jacob made with his cousin Laban in the name of \u2018the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor, the god of their father.\u2019 The usual practice for migrating people in the ancient Middle East who had left their homeland and its gods behind was to take up the worship of the people who were their new neighbors.\u00a0 But these, the Syrians of the coast, practiced human sacrifice, which did not appeal to the more civilized sensibilities of Abraham and his family.\u00a0 Accordingly, after fulfilling any royal commissions, they avoided the cities and took their flocks of sheep into the hills, living that rural existence in tents familiar to us from old Sunday school coloring books.\u00a0 The teraphim were probably retained until Moses delivered the Decalogue, which as we know forbids idols. When the Hebrews settled in the Egyptian delta their assimilation into Egyptian culture was incomplete, owing to the fact that they were shepherds, for sheep and shepherds were abominated by the Egyptians, perhaps because of their recent memory of the hated Hyksos conquerors. [10] So when Moses became a fugitive and fled Egypt into the land of Midian (in the Sinai peninsula) and married among the Midianites, he found it easy to adopt his father-in-law\u2019s worship of Yahweh, a former member of the Syrian pantheon (with antecedents at Ebla) very popular at the time among western Semites.\u00a0 There he took the revolutionary (and, from our viewpoint, unfortunate) step of identifying Yahweh with the faceless and nameless family god of Abraham, and Judaism was born, a religion entirely portable in nature.\u00a0 From then on, wherever the Hebrews went, they could take their national god Yahweh with them, and though they later settled in Canaan and many adopted the local fertility religion, there remained among them a prophetic strain of protest from their nomadic past.\u00a0 A god who is entirely portable is cut off from the Earth, and had it not been for the influence of the Canaanites, the Hebrews would have been entirely cut off from that ultimate source of pagan spirituality.\u00a0 It took their later capture by Nebuchadrezzar to divorce them from the Canaanite worship, so that when they were allowed by Cyrus to return to Palestine and by Darius to rebuild their temple, they had truly become a people removed from the rest of mankind. Note: This ingenious theory suffers from the shortcoming shared by most theories of the Bronze Age, namely chronology. The Larsa period is much too early a setting for the Abram story, and if we place the patriarch in the Kassite period instead we must assume a long continuity to the family religious tradition at Ur.\u00a0 By Kassite times Harran would have been under the Hittites, but could have retained its local Hurrian dialect (the Hittite capital of Hattusas, in northeastern Turkey, spoke eleven languages).\u00a0 We know the Hittites chartered merchant expeditions to the coast, and Genesis states that Abraham purchased a family burial ground in (the later) Palestine in a cave belonging to the Hittite Machpelah. This brings the late part of Genesis up to the Amarna age and within reach of the post-Amarnic Pharaoh Merneptah, in whose time we read the first inscriptional reference to \u2018Habiru\u2019 in the Palestine area. References are to Woolley, Sir Leonard, The Beginnings of Civilization, New York and Toronto, the New English Library, a Mentor book, 1965. Study Questions: 1.\u00a0\u00a0 What was the religious error of the people of the Ur III Empire? 2.\u00a0\u00a0 According to Woolley, how did the residents of Ur react to the fall of empire and the Elamite occupation? 3.\u00a0\u00a0 Why were the ancestors buried in the family vault not provided with grave furniture? 4.\u00a0\u00a0 What did the teraphim in Abram\u2019s family represent individually?\u00a0 What collectively? 5.\u00a0\u00a0 When did Abraham\u2019s family stop worshipping temple deities? 6.\u00a0\u00a0 Why did his family refuse to integrate with Syrian worship when they reached the Mediterranean coast? 7.\u00a0\u00a0 Why, according to Woolley, were the Hebrews segregated from Egyptian society? 8.\u00a0\u00a0 What religious identification did Moses make in Midian? Suggested Answers to Study Questions from Lesson Four: 1.\u00a0\u00a0 What were the two general meanings attached to the word daimon in the Archaic Period?\u00a0 An undetermined god or divine agency; a being intermediate between gods and mortals. 2.\u00a0\u00a0 What is the meaning of the adjective daimoni…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}