{"id":17070,"date":"2013-07-05T05:59:26","date_gmt":"2013-07-05T05:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/2013\/07\/05\/however-the-cool-word-i-learned-was-henotheism\/"},"modified":"2013-07-05T05:59:26","modified_gmt":"2013-07-05T05:59:26","slug":"however-the-cool-word-i-learned-was-henotheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/2013\/07\/05\/however-the-cool-word-i-learned-was-henotheism\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
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However! The cool word I learned was \u201chenotheism,“ described as the faith practiced by Abraham and descendants\u2014the belief that there are many gods, but you should only worship one in particular. In the early renditions of the Bible, both deity and people were pretty clear on there being plenty of gods about, it was just a matter of not worshipping everybody else\u2014\u201cYou shall have no other gods before Me,” not \u201cI\u2019m the only God, guys, so lump it.“ The language, according to Cahill, is pretty clear\u2014this was an environment in which there were obviously a lot of gods about, you were just supposed to stick to YHVH, because\u2014well, y\u2019know. (Not speaking ancient Hebrew, I can\u2019t speak to the truth of this one way or the other, mind you.) The mental shift from that henotheism (ha! Love that word!) to the straight out monotheism of later Christianity\u2014from \u201cI\u2019m the top god,” to \u201cI\u2019m the ONLY god,“ was an interesting sort of shift to make, and obviously had a big influence on the ultimate incarnation of Christianity. One can\u2019t help but wonder what would have happened if things had stayed henotheistic instead of converting to the sort of pure monotheism of modern Christianity.<\/p>\n

Vocabulary is good.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ursula Vernon<\/a> (via fuckyeahursulavernon<\/a>)<\/p>\n

OOOH. Time to mine the seminary library for books on this. (via mls-classics<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

However! The cool word I learned was \u201chenotheism,“ described as the faith practiced by Abraham and descendants\u2014the belief that there are many gods, but you should only worship one in particular. In the early renditions of the Bible, both deity and people were pretty clear on there being plenty of gods about, it was just … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.augustwritesabook.com\/tumblr-backup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}