Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews all worship Loki?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

So I'm reading the latest installment of David Plotz's "Blogging the Bible" project -- which is a great idea that I could and should have thought of first, but anyway -- and Plotz offers this observation while discussing Jehovah's positively Texan penchant for the death penalty:

Another capital crime is sacrificing to "a god other than the Lord." This reminds me of something I forgot to mention in my Ten Commandments discussion. This law and the first two commandments appear to acknowledge the existence of other gods. In the commandments, for example: "You shall not bow down to them or serve them."

Which raises questions about the nature of their monotheism. Did the Israelites believe Baal & Co. were genuine supernatural beings but were second-raters and charlatans compared with the Lord? Or did they think these other gods were just figments, delusions imagined by the stupid Philistines and Amalekites? To say it another way: Were the Israelites polytheists who believed their God trumped all the others? Or were they monotheists who thought all the other gods were imaginary? Exodus is not clear on this, but as I read it, it sounds like they were polytheists who thought they had picked the top god.

This isn't the first time I've seen this suggestion; it shows up, with a more seriously scholarly pedigree, in Elaine Pagles' The Gnostic Gospels. So what if Jehovah is just a Middle Eastern Loki: a vain, jealous, petulant attention whore who's trying to cut his fellow dieties out of the God biz by tricking us into thinking they don't matter?

So, how do we know He's the only God? Because He says so? It's like that old Woody Allen joke: "The brain is the most important organ in the body. Of course, it's the brain that tells us that."

And what happens when teh other Gods finally gang up on him?

Or, maybe they have already, which is why he's stuck lording it over a benighted race of losers in an obscure corner of the universe.

That actually makes sense.

[Seeker]

Israel Finkelstein, chairman of the Archaeology Department at Tel Aviv University, and archaeology historian and journalist Neil Asher Silberman are the most famous non-theist historianians of judaisms' origins these days I believe.

"There is much evidence that such monotheistic demands were an innovation in both Judah and Israel, where worship of subsidiary gods and goddesses, as well as the heavenly bodies, was traditional. Nor were they adopted widely by the people, who continued to worship using goddess figures in their homes."

http://www.theosophical.org.uk/Biblunsbd.htm

[Urban Ranger]

Don't dis Loki. He just got bad rap.

[Arrian]

Blogging the Bible

Fun stuff.

-Arrian

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Yahweh, before becoming the Lord God, was Baal's God of War. Apparently he disbanded the councel of gods and proclaimed himself the one and only.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345384563/002-0831760-1358466?v=glance&n=283155

"The History of God" - a good book by British author and former nun Karen Armstrong.

[Tattila the Hun]

Coup d'état? Haw.

[lord of the mark]

the idea that the ancient Israelites evolved gradually from polytheism to henotheism (there are may gods, but you should only worship the number one) to monotheism is pretty standard in the history of ancient Israel. Im glad the guy from Slate seems to think hes the first to come up with it, but whatever.

IIUC there are MANY non-theist historians of ancient Israel. Finklestein just happens to be a radical biblical "minimalist" (IE he discounts the bible as a general historical source) plenty of people think hes wrong who arent necessarily religious.

The idea that hashem emerged from the canaanite god of war also seems fairly obvious to me. You just have to read Judges, and see the people worship Baal in times of peace, and Hashem when they need liberation. Or look that epithet "god of armies". Which BTW, is why ive always thought the prayer we say after the Shma, in which we read a bible quote that goes into some detail about how if you follow hashem your crops will grow, and if you dont rain wont fall, etc, should be kept, despite being an obvious source of discomfort for some. I think it was first formulated as an explicit assertion of monotheism - the war god is ALSO the god of peace and fertility, they are NOT seperate forces. A deep, mysterious statement of the essence, and paradox, of monotheism, which is why we say it right after the Shma.

as for loki, that idea doest seem to come from this blogger. Sounds more like Harold Bloom in the Book of J. Biblical criticism historically divided the text among different authors based on stylistic and historical hints, into J (the Yahwist) E (the elohist) P (priestly material) and D (Deuteronomy) with J the oldest material. Bloom makes the conceit of reading J as a seperate book, and finds the god of J to be an uncanny trickster, someone Bloom finds much more interesting than the more serious, "religious" god of E, P, D. Its an interesting perspective, and one worth reflecting on, though Blooms approach has been criticized on technical grounds (bloom thinks the book of J is not ritual focused - he neglects the likelihood that there was J ritual material that was censored caused it disagreed with the other sources, which won).

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Arrian
Blogging the Bible

Fun stuff.

-Arrian

Arrian, ever read Peter Pitzele on the dysfunctional family of Genesis?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062512404/sr=1-2/qid=1150740496/ref=sr_1_2/002-0475063-5572009?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=books

[Elok]

I'm not going to comment on the main point of this, since I know little about ancient semitic cultures (though the mention of a book about the gnostic gospels as "scholarly" in this context sets off my red BS flag quite a bit). But how would JHWH be "like Loki" in that respect?

It's been a while since I read up on Norse myth, but IIRC Loki didn't usurp the Aesir (though Ull occasionally gave Odin the boot as part of a winter allegory). He just constantly played tricks on them for his own advantage, usually very rashly. He was always getting himself and others into and out of scrapes.

EDIT: Oh, and the progression from poly- to monotheism seems fairly natural, at least in the West. Even Civ2 recognizes that. I mean, monotheistic trends appeared later than polytheism in most cultures, right? Not that your point is irrelevant, but it's not really earthshaking. Zoroastrianism went through a similar process IIRC.

And the bit about God-as-upstart-usurper was cooked up by some of the Gnostics millennia ago too. They called him the Demiurge, and blamed him for creating the evil material world, from which Christ came to liberate us and suchlike. I suppose that was what your Gnostic book was getting at?

[Arrian]

Im glad the guy from Slate seems to think hes the first to come up with it, but whatever....

To be fair to the guy, he's up-front about his ignorance. I don't think he's claiming that he's breaking new ground here.

No, I've not read Peter Pitzele.

-Arrian

[alva]

Asjemenou!!!




Ow, Loki...not Loeki.

[Berzerker]

Clearly they were polytheists (pantheists?), upon entering the "Promised Land" Joshua (Josh 24:2-6?) explains to the people about the olden times when "our fathers" served other gods in the land of the 2 rivers - Mesopotamia. Who were their fathers in this distant land? Abram and his ancestors... This presents a problem if we are to take the geneologies literally, Noah was still alive when Abram's father or grandfather was alive. How could these people, even people who survived the Flood, worship or even acknowledge the existence of other gods?

"Let us make man in our image", and man and woman were made in their image.

Then there's the episode in the Garden where "The Serpent" strolls in and mucks up the place while "God" gets mad and discusses the appropriate response with un-named colleagues. At some point, perhaps after the influence of that Egyptian pharaoh who was into monotheism, or maybe monotheistic hebrews influenced him, Jewish society appears to have had a mixture of mono and poly theism with mono coming to be the more widely held belief - at least among the educated priest caste.