What started Judaism?

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Matt Giwer has some notoriety on the web as being a jerk.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... D67IZD-rYg

Matt Giwer is a neo-Nazi anti-Semitic Holocaust revisionist Usenet troll.
He's in his fifties, is unemployed, and lives in Florida.

Giwer has been a troll for almost a decade now, and he's been visiting this NG
on and off since it was first set up. Typically he shows up every six months
or so.

Giwer is a pretty thoroughly odious character. Although he can pass as a
semi-rational poster for a while, he _always_ breaks down, sooner or later,
into personal attacks, obscenities, flames, and ravings about Jews and Communists.

I guess that explains why the post above seems almost rational.

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/giwer-matt/

I wasn't sure what to make of this but -

http://www.nizkor.org/

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and to combat hatred. Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.

so I guess we can confidently state that Giwer is sort of evil.

Yes, a bunch of crazies started threatening to murder my son and my parents and claimed to be Nizkooks. However, I do have a website http://www.giwersworld.org/ where anyone interested can read what I have really said instead of relying upon the material created those those criminals.

Be that as it may, even if it were all true, Judaism was still created in Alexandria. There is NO physical evidence contrary to that conclusion. We even have the high priest Onias being given an built to resemble Jerusalem for him to rule. At least that is what Josephus wrote.

I expect the same rules of physical evidence to apply to everything regardless of the subject regardless of personal or emotional appeal.

I would have thought this group did also.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Hasn't there been increased doubt about much of what has been proposed about Jewish origins, including the Exodus?

Huff. Post 2011 - Passover In Egypt: Did the Exodus Really Happen?

Believers downplay the extent of "increased doubt" if they know anything about it at all. Historically the Napoleonic wars opened Egypt to Britain and France. People who can only be called adventurers were commissioned to go there and bring back the physical evidence of Exodus. Almost immediately it was apparent that the only connection between ancient Egypt and biblical Egypt was the name. The biblical king of Egypt is outsmarted by a stinking goatherd named Abraham because that king observes Noatic law. A few centuries later another unwashed shepherd barges in on another king and starts making demands -- and lives!

By 1890 it was apparent to the rational contingent of adventurers that it was impossible to reconcile the real Egypt with the biblical Egypt. Out of that came a complete rejection of the bible stories as worthless and, more important, the "invention" are archaeology. That is the development and application of scientific methods to the study of the ancient world.

So for more than a century this total rejection of Exodus has been called "increased doubt" by believers. For believers who try to appear less ignorant they claim the right to change the bible story of Exodus to the point just below the latest level of physical evidence just as they try to downgrade Solomon and his biblical kingdom just below the level of current evidence.

They lost the debate back in the 1890s. Nothing stops a believer from believing.

[stephan happy huller]

Ummm. You still haven't answered the question about the physical evidence.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

What started Judaism? Religion in some form or another is very old and therefore the religion of any specific group of people must have been born in the midst of an existing religious background by a process of differentiation and acquisition of identifying characteristics.

Let us start with the "judaism" of the Septuagint. It is purely a ritual/taboo cult of the 3rd class Uguaritic god Yahu. There was nothing to it beyond ritual and taboo. I assume this was the legal foundation for the Maccabean tyranny, its rule by priests. There were so many rituals and taboos anyone could be summarily executed for violating something. Think the old communist totalitarian police states.

This lasted as long as the Maccabean, Hasmonean, Dynasty continued. When the Herodians took over the power of the priests waned and the people returned to their customs prior to the Hasmonean imposition of Ptolemaic Judaism.

People would not have invented such a religion nor, without submitting to deadly force, permitted such a ruling class to be put over them. History is replete with examples of how tyrannies are imposed. The tyranny of the priests of Maccabe would have been imposed the same way.

Judaism claims to be the first monotheistic religion and to have been an original creation of the people of Israel. It must have started by discarding a myriad of confusing and ridiculous divine masters and replacing them with the unifying and orderly concept of one god, one law and one people.

The first simple declarative sentence of monotheism is found in the Koran. There is no god but god. AFTER that Christians and Jews started making the same claim. Previously they had been hedging their bets declaring unfaithful (false) gods were really demons.

The Septuagint Judaism is clearly not monotheist. There are mentions of others gods being real gods all through it. Yahu is merely the god of Abraham, the god who brought you out of Egypt. Even so since at least 1600 years the believers have translated BYT YHWH as Temple of the Lord and BYT STRT as Strato's Tower. Strato is an imaginary general of Alexander mentioned solely to avoid the obvious translation, Temple of aSTaRTe, the consort of Yahu and also found as a 1st class goddess in the Ugarit library.

As late as the early 2nd c. AD there are mentions of her temple being in use is Jerusalem. It was on top of what is now called the Temple Mount. It had eight sides just as does the Dome of the Rock.

The religion of the priests of Yahu was clearly not the religion of the people. Of course the religion of the priests is never the religion of the people. Priests are just people with skin the in game and a paycheck to protect. Simply said, we have no idea of the religion of the women of Judea because they left nothing in writing.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

But what Greek could have read the Hebrew? Why would they know about it? Are you sure that we have older Greek texts than the fragments of the Hebrew text still in the hands of the Bedouin?

There is no evidence Hebrew was ever a spoken language. It reads more like the pidgin Greek of Aramaic speakers than a spoken language. The fancy script today used as "hebrew" is 1st c. Aramaic. What has been called paleo- or proto- Hebrew is indistinguishable from Phoenician.

There is no evidence of a literate culture in hillbilly country of Judea prior to the 2nd c. BC. And that is about the time the Septuagint appears although even putting it that old is on the extreme edge of speculation. Anyway that means nothing could have existed to translate because there were no literate people to create it.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Ummm. You still haven't answered the question about the physical evidence.

What physical evidence might you be talking about?

I mean I have physical evidence the Judean priest of the 1st c. AD did not take the Torah seriously. In fact, according to Josephus, if you believe Exodus really happened you hate Jews.

[Blood]

What started Judaism? Religion in some form or another is very old and therefore the religion of any specific group of people must have been born in the midst of an existing religious background by a process of differentiation and acquisition of identifying characteristics.


Judaism claims to be the first monotheistic religion and to have been an original creation of the people of Israel. It must have started by discarding a myriad of confusing and ridiculous divine masters and replacing them with the unifying and orderly concept of one god, one law and one people.

I wouldn't see that as a "start," just a reform of existing religious ideas.

There really is no "start" to an ancient religion like Judaism, just a long, slow, evolution.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

What started Judaism? Religion in some form or another is very old and therefore the religion of any specific group of people must have been born in the midst of an existing religious background by a process of differentiation and acquisition of identifying characteristics.


Judaism claims to be the first monotheistic religion and to have been an original creation of the people of Israel. It must have started by discarding a myriad of confusing and ridiculous divine masters and replacing them with the unifying and orderly concept of one god, one law and one people.

I wouldn't see that as a "start," just a reform of existing religious ideas.

There really is no "start" to an ancient religion like Judaism, just a long, slow, evolution.

The Egyptian god Amen, aka Amun, was the first god, the oldest god, there were not gods before him in time. The "no other gods before me" in the 1st commandment means before in time not before in rank or status. Amen made the first man and woman out of clay. Adam and Eve anyone? And of course the Jewish and Christian custom of ending prayers with the name Amen the first god.

It is a sudden appearance as all through bibleland arkies have found statues of Astarte/Ashara alone and the pair Yahu and Ashara. As bibleland was not a literate part of the world almost nothing in the way of inscriptions have been found. Only two of them mention the local gods and both are funerary mentioning both Yahu and Ashara. The worship of both continues in Jerusalem until Rome rebuilt the city in the early 2nd c. AD.

[rakovsky]

Most clearly it was a monotheistic reform movement based on Hebrews who had been under Egyptian rule. Traces of Israelite beliefs can be found in ancient Egyptian and Babylonian religion, one example being the Creation stories and flood stories.