AtD, naming

[Ian Livingston]

I'm no authority, but I believe the earliest recorded monotheism was that of
Aton, the solar disk, of Akhenaton in Egypt.  Akhenaton was pharaoh for a
brief time during the Hyksos colonization of Egypt during the Second Empire
period.  He was very unpopular for turning his back on the ancient gods.
Died of poisoning, I think.  The people who eventually emerged from Egypt as
the Hebrews had entered Egypt as a part of the Hyksos invasion several
hundred years prior to Akhenaton's failed transcendent experiment.

The Mosaic books, including Genesis, appear long after the new tribe of
Hebrews left Egypt.  To the best of my knowledge, there is no Egyptian
record of their having been restrained from leaving, nor of any plagues
preceding their departure from Egypt.  In fact, I know of no Egyptian
mention of their leaving.  Egypt hosted many people in its long history and
always seems to have had a civilizing effect on its visitors.  The Hebrews
seem to have walked away with a great idea for a god.

All this has little to do with naming in Wittgenstein, and probably little
to do with naming in Pynchon, but perspective can be everything.  It is odd
how things seem to become what we name them, and how the unnamed allures.

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 2:03 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/premo.html
>
> scholars draw on the text of Genesis to conclude the following
> controversial ideas about early Hebrew religion:
>
> — Early Hebrew religion was polytheistic; the curious plural form of
> the name of God, Elohim rather than El, leads them to believe that the
> original Hebrew religion involved several gods. This plural form,
> however, can be explained as a "royal" plural. Several other aspects
> of the account of Hebrew religion in Genesis also imply a polytheistic
> faith.
>
> — The earliest Hebrew religion was animistic, that is, the Hebrews
> seemed worship forces of nature that dwelled in natural objects.
>
> — As a result, much of early Hebrew religion had a number of practices
> that fall into the category of magic: scapegoat sacrifice and various
> forms of imitative magic, all of which are preserved in the text of
> Genesis .
>
> — Early Hebrew religion eventually became anthropomorphic, that is,
> god or the gods took human forms; in later Hebrew religion, Yahweh
> becomes a figure that transcends the human and material worlds.
> Individual tribes probably worshipped different gods; there is no
> evidence in Genesis that anything like a national God existed in the
> time of the patriarchs.
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 6:28 AM,  <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> > Not to flog a dead horse [oh hell, why not?], but the name of "God" in
> Genesis is really "The Gods", I.E. in the beginning, the Jewish church was
> polytheistic. "In the beginning the Gods created the heavens & earth". Yet
> another deliberately misdirecting bit of mistranslation.
> >  -------------- Original message ----------------------
> > David Payne:  1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
> >
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20080508/8ffe9cf3/attachment-0001.html>