A night of sleep has granted me fresh perspective, I think. There is a blind spot in my approach. It just happens not to be about Jewish origins. Rather, it is about how long the original cultic notions may have persisted, even in the mainstream. The impression I am usually under by default is that some sort of worship which we now associate with paganism came first; and then it was suppressed in favor of what we would now associate with mainstream Judaism (which is at least in the ballpark of the Sunday School version you spoke of); and by the time we get to late Maccabean times the original "pagan" stuff is pretty much gone, except maybe in little corners here and there.Secret Alias wrote: ↑Mon Oct 05, 2020 8:05 pmWhy should we not take that as original? I think - without getting you angry I hope - that this is a blind spot in your approach.
I get this impression about all kinds of things. Take sacrifices, for example. I presume that people (like Samuel, the judges, Saul, and David in the narratives) making offerings pretty much everywhere on their own homemade altars predates the push to centralize worship at the Temple. Fine and dandy, and this has been the case for me for literally decades. But yes, the impression I get is that by the time we reach a certain point in history that practice has been stamped out (again, perhaps with oddball exceptions, and in locations external to Judea, such as Leontopolis), and now everybody goes through the official Aaronid priests at the official Temple, and so on. My blind spot is not how these practices stack up chronologically, or which one may predate the other, where I assume that "orthodoxy" came first and "heterodoxy" tried to intrude for a while, as per the narrative laid out in the current form of the Hebrew scriptures. No, my blind spot is that I may be underestimating how long those heterodox (and often more ancient) practices persisted into later times (or, rather, how long they were actually prevalent and not relegated to the fringe).
Same goes for the worship of the stars. I have been on board for years and years with the idea that it predates the cultic worship of Yahweh as we know it from the Sunday School version of events. But my blind spot is how long it may have persisted. That is part of what the OP is trying to remedy: my possibly mistaken impressions about such things.
I think you may have picked up on this aspect of my thinking, possibly from something in how I approached the topic, but that you may have misidentified the source of whatever mismatch you were sensing. Is that possible?