Pissing People Off One Topic At A Time - Part 2
El and Y-H-V-H
by: Shmuel ben Shlomi
The first civilization on record that came into existence about 4000 years after the Younger Dryas Period (post deluge) was known as Sumer, or Sumeria, located in the region we now call Iraq, parts of modern Syria, Turkey and Iran (Persia), commonly called by the Greek designation Mesopotamia (the Fertile Crescent).
Beginning nearly 7000 years ago this first post flood society gave us the foundation for what can be termed civilization along with such monumental inventions as the wheel, the plow, writing, irrigation, plumbing, sanitation, domestication of animals, organized religion, formal governance, etc.
What was present in the form of a civilization before the Younger Dryas is still up for debate since little or no written material has been discovered dating before 7000 BCE, however, the discovery of such places as Gobekli Tepi in Turkey lend credence to the idea that there existed an organized group of people dating before 14000 years ago. We simply know nothing about them at this point in time.
The organized religion of the Sumerian peoples is something we do have in written documents known as cuneiform tablets from that period and continue to learn a great deal about. And, yes, believe it or not the writings left behind by the peoples of the Fertile Crescent are ripe with stories about visitors from outer space who came to this planet 450000 years ago, created human beings (homosapien-sapiens) around 250000 years ago via genetic engineering of a local hominid in South Africa with the end result being us humans. And, here you thought the stories of UFO and aliens didn’t really pick up until the late 1940s CE after the Roswell incident.
The reason I bring this up is because the idea of gods or Elohim has been part of our history for thousands of years before our current Jewish Bible was a gleam in the eye of the Creator. The basic concept of a Supreme Being began there in Sumer with a Trinity Godhead. The only thing that has changed over the last 7000 years is the name(s) of those gods but the story has basically remained the same across the spectrum of time.
This trinity of sorts speaks of a Supreme Leader named Anu and his two sons - Enlil and Enki. And, while those names, for the most part, have been lost to the annals and amnesia of time the crux of the story has moved from civilization after civilization until our current time in the 21st Century CE. Only the names have been changed to protect the ignorant.
With the collapse of Sumer at around 3800 BCE and the movement of one particular band of nomads to the West into what was known as Canaan (later named Israel) the trinitarian gods became known as El and two of his main sons Baal and Y-H-V-H. El was Anu, Baal was Enki and Y-H-V-H was Enlil. Just as Enlil, the oldest son and heir apparent was a Storm God for the Sumerians thousands of years earlier so too Y-H-V-H was originally a Warrior Storm God. Over time Y-H-V-H took over the duties of his loving father El and eventually forcefully removed Baal from his throne. This did not occur overnight but took hundreds of years until eventually, by the post exilic period, circa 600 BCE, Y-H-V-H became the only one true God in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people totally supplanting his father El and his brother Baal. Monotheism began in earnest and has continued until this day.
Y-H-V-H was no longer a tribal warrior storm god but was now the only God with no rival.
Factual history may be a bitch, but it is a factual bitch indeed.