Unknown to most Christians and many Jews is the fact that in
the first century CE there were not one but three temples to the shared deity
of the Judean and Samarian peoples who followed the Jewish and Samaritan
religions. Each of these temples was
officially known as a Beth YHWH, or House of Yahweh.
The true pronunciation of the national deity’s name was
corrupted by the Masoretes in their rewriting of the Tanakh which replaced the
vowels rendering the name as Yahuweh to those from the substitute word Adonai
(meaning “Lord”), which is how we ended up with the unrecognizable (from the
standpoint of the original) mangling we know as Jehovah. This in effect castrated their god; the
ending “-weh” is masculine while the ending “-wah” is feminine.
Of course, maybe the Masoretes, who were scholars of a Jewish
sect disdained by the orthodox rabbis as heretical, were simply acknowledging
the transfer of the divine penis from the overall godhead to the aspect known
as the Holy Spirit or Ruach ha-Kodesh in which Christians had sex-changed the
feminine Ruach of the Jews to its own masculine Spirit. Divine penises do not just pop into existence
from nowhere, after all.
The principle of never saying the name of the deity is a
superstition deriving from a twisted misinterpretation of the Third of the Ten
Statements (often misnamed as “commandments”), which exhorts devotees of Yahweh
to not take his name in vain. The truth
of the matter is that claiming “God is on our side” or speaking in his name
violates the injunction of the Third Saying rather than merely speaking the
name Yahuweh, or its modern version Yahweh.
Perhaps the most pretentiously hypocritical affectation is to not even
write the complete word God but using the form “G-d”.
Historical background
As a people, Israel formed in the late 13th
century BCE as a nomadic tribe among the city-states of northern Canaan. Ancient Hebrew and ancient Canaanite are
identical. Israel did not wipe out the
Canaanites; the Israelites are
Canaanites.
Israel did not go down into Egypt as a people because at the
time when a group of Canaanites started to migrate in that direction, Israel
did not exist. When these Canaanites
left Egypt, it was not as escapees from bondage buts as fallen rulers fleeing
the wrath of the formerly ruled. This
was in 1530, and the new Pharaoh chased these Canaanites, known as the Hyksos,
back into Canaan, where he conquered them and all their territory, in the
process destroying the stronghold of Jericho.
In other words, Joshua didn’t fight the Battle of Jericho;
Ahmose I of Egypt did that.
Anyway, from this time on, Egypt controlled all of Palestine
and southern Syria, for some periods dominating northern Syria, parts of
Anatolia, and northwestern Mesopotamia as well, up to 1150, when it lost its
administrative center at Beth Shean (Scythopolis). As late as 1130, by which
time the Sea Peoples had established Philistia, the city of Megiddo was still
part of its empire. After that year, the Philistines dominated all of
Palestine, which is how it got the name. The Exodus did not happen. It is a
fiction, a foundation myth, like the Irish legends of the Egyptian princess
Scota and her husband Goidel Glas being ancestors of the Irish.
Moses, who according to the Torah led the “children of
Israel out of the Land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”, is a fiction
too. The name isn’t Hebrew; the name as
most Americans know it comes from the Greek.
Moses is the form in that language of the Aramaic name Mazas, which is
the form in that language of the Persian name Mazda. Mazda, also known as Ahura Mazda, was the One
True God in the religion of Zartosht, or Zarathustra, known to Greeks as
Zoroaster, the first lasting monotheism of the world.
Native Canaanite peoples began returning south in the mid-13th
century, but remained on the eastern periphery of Philistine territory. Moab arose around the year 1250 BCE. Edom was founded about 1180 BCE. Ammon, in between them, was established in
1000 BCE.
The Philistines were granted or took the area of the five
cities (Gath, Ashelon, Ekron, Ashdod, and Gaza) in 1175 BCE. By 1130, they dominated all of the southern
Levant, what is now called Palestina, by which name the area has been called
since at least the 6th century BCE.
As a consequence, the south became virtually deserted by its native
peoples except for isolated hamlets and small bands. The population shifted north to what is now southern
Syria.
In the early decades of the 9th century BCE, as
the power of the Philistines began to decline, Omri, king of the heretofore
landless Israel, had managed to secure thru alliance, marriage, and conquest,
dominion over nearly all of what is now known as Galilee and Samaria (the
territory rather than the city). He
founded the new city of Samaria as his capital and rebuilt the cities of
Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer. His realm,
greatly increased by his son Ahab, became known as Beth Omri and Samerina, but
never by the name of his tribe.
In the mid-ninth century, Hazael, Aramean king of Damascus, became
the dominant ruler in the Levant, conquering territory of Beth Omri down to and
including the city of Dan, and influencing the rest of the kingdom. A short time later, a division in Beth
Omri/Samerina resulted in a junior petty kingdom ruled by Beth David.
In 830, Hazael of Damascus conquered and destroyed the
Philistine city of Gath, the major inland Philistine center. This cleared the way for the reoccupation of
the mostly deserted area by the descendants of its former inhabitants. But the area remained unimportant until the
capital of Samaria was conquered and destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE.
The kingdom of Samerina fell along with its capital, and
much of its population joined their cousins in Teman, the south, which soon
came to be called Yehud. In the mid-seventh
century BCE, warriors from Yehud settled as military colonists in a buffer zone
between the newly liberated Egypt and its former rulers in Nubia. Their central colony was at the island of
Elephantine, but there were satellite settlements across Egypt.
When Babylon conquered Assyria, they assumed control of the
region, and around 595 conquered Yehud, but leaving it as a client
kingdom. It revolted in 587, and its
capital and major cities were destroyed, and it was made a sub-province of the
province of Samerina. This arrangement
remained with the fall of Babylon and rise of Iran.
Upon the conquest of Samerina and Yehud by Alexander the
Great, Yehud gained temporarily on Samerina when the latter revolted and was
occupied by Macedonian soldiers. By the
end of the Wars of the Diadochi, the entire Southern Levant lies in the hands
of Ptolemy. In his capital of
Alexandria, two-fifths of the city were allotted to Jews and Samaritans.
In 219, Samerina passed to the Seleucids, and Yehud in
198. The population of Samerina was
almost entirely pro-Seleucid and pro-Hellenistic, but while Yehud had a faction
of the latter, another pro-Ptolemy, anti-Hellenist faction formed. This division in Yehud, combined with the
chaos in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires, led to the Judean Civil War and
the rise of the Hasmoneans, who became equally as Hellenistic as their Oniad
predecessors and more tyrannical than their Herodian successors.
Speaking of the Oniads, the heir to the last Oniad high
priest fled to Egypt from the internecine strife among his own kindred and
founded a temple at Leontopolis, in the district that became known as the Land
of Onias.
The Hasmoneans became clients of the Romans and were
eventually deposed by the Herodians to the great relief of the population. Upon the death of Herod and the deposition of
his son Archelaus, Samaria was joined to Judea as a subordinate district of the
sub-province, somewhat of a reversal of the arrangement under the Babylonians
and Iranians.
Houses of Yahweh
Seven temples of the Jews and Samaritans have been
identified from archaeological remains or verifiable historical records as
having been called a “House of Yahweh”.
The earliest House of Yahweh was at Samaria, first built by
Omri and greatly expanded and embellished by his son Ahab. Yahweh was worshipped there alongside
Asherah.
Yahweh, probably the same as Yam/Yaw/Yahu, son of the Canaanite
patriarchal god El, was the “national” god of the tribe of Israel, the same way
that Qaws was the “national” god of Edom, Chemosh was the “national” god of
Moab, Milcom was the “national” god of Ammon, Melqart was the “national” god of
Tyre, and Dagon was the “national” god of Philistia.
Ahab was the great builder of the Omrid dynasty, not only
expanding the city rebuilding programs begun by his father but erecting new
temples to Baal Hadad and other gods.
Next in chronological order is the House of Yahweh at Tel
Arad, which was a military citadel built soon after the destruction of the
Philistine city of Gath in 830 BCE. It
was built next to the ruins of what was once an extensive city in the Early
Bronze Age. In this House of Yahweh,
there were (and in its remains still are) pillars to both Yahweh and Asherah.
The citadel at Tel Arad is one of two major known centers of
the southern kingdom, known for at least a couple of centuries as Teman, Hebrew
for “the south”. Jerusalem, which had
thrived along with Shechem in the Middle Bronze Age and like it been reduced to
a small town in the Late Bronze Age, had not existed for centuries at this time
and there is no evidence it existed again until after the return of the exiles
in the 5th century BCE.
Paintings on the wall of a shrine at Kuntillet Ajrud in
northeast Sinai with accompanying inscriptions show Yahweh, El, Baal, and
Asherah. One specifically mentions
“Yahweh of Samerina and Asherah” and “Yahweh of Teman and Asherah”.
An inscription dating to the mid-8th century BCE
from an archaeological dig at Khirbet el-Qom, which lies between Hebron and
Lachish, mentions Yahweh and Asherah together, but without the place-names
found at the inscriptions of the previous site.
Just a couple of kilometers from what would be the later
walls of Jerusalem, another settlement, in this case a city or town rather than
a military citadel, was built at what is called Tel Motza around 736 BCE. Here is the third identified House of Yahweh,
and like its two predecessors, Yahweh was worshipped alongside Asherah.
The archaeological evidence above demonstrates that for the
Hebrews or Israelites of both Beth Omri (House of Omri) or Samerina and Beth
David or Teman, henotheistic polytheism was the norm rather than an
aberration. Such would remain the case
for another few centuries.
The kingdom of Samerina joined a regional revolt against the
Assyrian empire in the later 8th century BCE and was captured in the
year 722 BCE, upon which its capital and everything in it was destroyed. It population was deported to the Assyrian
heartland. Refugees flooded southward,
greatly expanding the population of the southern kingdom, which Assyria allowed
to remain as a buffer between its outer territories and the Nubian-ruled
kingdom of Egypt.
Egypt overthrew and its expelled its Nubian rulers in the
mid-7th century BCE, and imported warriors from its neighbor to the
northeast to help defend it from the threat.
Although there were settlements of these mercenaries and their families
at the capital of Memphis, Pathros, Noph, and the northeast border towns of Migdol
and Tahpanhes-Daphnae, the major colony and center of cultural and religious
life of these Hebrew settlers was on the island of Elephantine (Yeb in Kemitic) on the border
between Egypt and Nubia.
Here at Elephantine, around 650 BCE, arose the fourth House
of Yahweh. In contrast to the cult in
Palestine, Yahweh’s consort here was Anath-Yahweh, another of the three major
goddesses of the Canaanite pantheon. The
probable reason for this is that when the Hyksos of Canaanite origin had been
in Egypt, Anath had been their major goddess and she had been inducted into the
native Egyptian pantheon.
From inscriptions and an abundance of surviving papyri, we
know that Bethel, Haram, Eshem, and Nabu, Anath-Bethel were also worshipped at this
House of Yahweh, in addition to Khnum, a god native to the Egyptians whose
temple was immediately adjacent. There were also Arameans, as the contemporary papyri refer to these colonists, among the military colony of Syrene (Aswan) across from Yeb.
The Assyrian Empire fell to the Median and Babylonian empires
in 609, and in 597 the latter’s king, Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered the Southern
Levant. The kingdom of Yehud, by which
name it was now referred, became a tributary client. When Yehud rose in rebellion in 586, Nebuchanezzar
reconquered it, destroyed the “city of Yehud”, and deported its people to
Babylon. We have no way of knowing to
which settlement the phrase “city of Yehud” refers, but archaeological evidence
demonstrates that both Tel Motza and Tel Arad were destroyed at this time along
with the “House of Yahweh” in each.
After this, Nebuchadnezzar added Yehud as a sub-province to
the already-existing province of Samerina.
Worship at this time was probably conducted at local shrines, and the
only known remaining House of Yahweh was at Elephantine.
Babylonia fell to the Achaemenid Empire of Iran in 539
BCE. As part of the conquest, it ruler,
Cyrus the Great, assumed control of the fallen empires western territories,
maintaining its organization and adopting its language, Aramaic. Much admired these days for what is called
his Declaration of Human Rights, Cyrus allowed the descendants of peoples
conquered by Assyria to return to their homelands and allowed them to pursue their
own worship.
In 525 BCE, he conquered Egypt and so became overlord of the
Hebrews there as well.
Under the influence of their monotheistic overlords, the
Hebrews, both Jews and Samaritans, moved from henotheism to monolatry and
eventually to monotheism. When the first
new House of Yahweh, the fifth known, was built atop Mount Gerizim next to the
city of Shechem, it featured only the one deity, Yahweh. Shechem, built on the ruins of the Bronze Age
city of the same name, was the capital of the province of Samerina.
To the south, in the sub-province of Yehud, exiles had
returned also, but rather than return to their earlier settlements did like
their cousins and erected a new city on the ruins of another Bronze Age city,
this one at Jerusalem. Here they
constructed the sixth House of Yahweh about the year 425 BCE. It paled in comparison to the temple on Mt.
Gerizim, but like it featured only the one deity.
Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered the Levant and
Egypt in 333, and by 331 founded what became the most important city in the
Mediterranean in ancient times, Alexandria.
To the Jews and Samaritans he allotted two of its five divisions, and
the settlement there became the major center of Hellenistic Judaism. Its synagogue was the largest of the ancient
world, but there was no temple.
Alexandria became the seat of the Ptolemaic empire.
To the north, another city founded by Seleucis I, Antioch,
became another center for Hellenistic Judaism and Samaritanism, but with much
less influence than its southern rival.
The man who would have been high priest Onias IV fled
Hasmonean-ruled Yehud for sanctuary in Egypt, which granted him territory in
the district of Leontopolis that became known as the Land of Onias. There he built the seventh House of Yahweh in
154 BCE, but its importance was overshadowed by the nearness of both Alexandria
and Jerusalem.
After conquering and forcibly converting the Idumeans who
had been previously forced southwest into the Negev by the Nabateans in 110, John Hyrcanus turned north to conquer Samaria
and destroy the city of Shechem and its temple.
Only two Houses of Yahweh now remained.
Five years later,
Aristobolus I conquered the southern half of the kingdom of the Arab Itureans,
whose realm extended from Mount Lebanon and Damascus south to include Galilee,
adding Galilee (Galil ha-Goyim, “District of the Gentiles”) to the Hasmonean
kingdom and making the rest tributary after having forcibly converted its
population.
Among his other
qualities, Herod the Great, an Idumean descendant of forced converts who
overthrew the unlamented (by anyone) dynasty in 37 BCE, was a prolific builder,
and in 10 BCE he rebuilt the House of Yahweh on top of Mt. Gerizim as well as a
new city on the ruins of Samaria called Sebaste. He also expanded the temple of the Jews in
Jerusalem.
Upon the deposition
of Archelaus in 6 CE, his territories of Judea, Idumea, and Samarea were joined
together into one Roman sub-province of Syria as Judea.
The Judeans rose up in revolt against Roman rule in 66 CE,
with some of their Samarean cousins joining them the next year.
The Samarean revolt was crushed later in the same year that
it began by a legion under the legatus Sextus Vettulenus Cerealis, who then destroyed the temple on
Mt. Gerizim and the adjacent city of Sebaste.
Jerusalem fell to
the legions in 70 CE. The Romans
destroyed the city entirely, tearing down its walls and dismantling the temple
mound down to ground level. The war
dragged on for another three years, however, until the fall of Masada. That same year, 73 CE, Vespasian ordered the
temple at Leontopolis destroyed so that it would not become a center of
dissent.
When the Samareans
did not join the Bar Kokhba War of 130-135 CE, Hadrian rewarded them by
rebuilding their temple, their House of Yahweh, on Mt. Gerizim.
After the Samareans
rose in revolt against Flavius Zeno Augustus in 484 CE, he destroyed their
temple once again, after which it was never rebuilt.
List of known Houses
of Yahweh
(Their
location and dates of existence)
Samaria – 878 BCE-722
BCE
Tel Arad – late 9th
century BCE-587 BCE
Tel Motza – 736
BCE-587 BCE
Shechem – 450 BCE-110
BCE
Jerusalem – 425
BCE-70 CE
Leontopolis – 154
BCE-73 CE
Shechem – 10 BCE-67
CE
Shechem – 135 CE-484
CE
Footnote: Evidence from Hosea 2:16 (8th century) suggest that at that time the Hebrews prefaced the name of their national god, Yahweh, with the title "Baal", meaning "Lord" or "Master".
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