Abraham and Renegade Priests
Jan 1, 2009 14:35:21 GMT -5
Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Jan 1, 2009 14:35:21 GMT -5
Hey Naomi:
I have heard this one as well and I don't think it is to uncommen in the annals of popular alternative history - I'm sure when I used to read some of this I came across it from at least the mind of Laurence Gardner, an author who samples somewhat dubious idea's from just about anyone - Alien Astronaughts and Mesopotamian distortions from Sitchin, Royal bloodlines descended from Jesus Christ, Rosicrucianism, and his own biazarre ideas of people ingesting powdered gold as a super brain supplement - I think Dracula played in that claim somehow. As I noted in the Babylon in Europeon thought thread, cunning persons have been spinning eclectic histories consisting of Oriental intrigues, bloodlines and anything else they can squeeze in since Peladen in the late 1800s - (An antimodernist mystic, Peladan fashioned an occult philosophy out of the Grail Legend, Wagnerian mythology, and the ancient oriental traditions, This eclecticism, in addition to his grandiose dramas, brought upon him mock and ridicule.)
But anyways as to the question I am not in the best position to answer this one personally at it would be better addressed by a biblical scholar with interests into early Judaism, or at least someone who reads up on this juncture as oppose to my own focus on early Sumerian culture. However I'll make some general comments anyway..
Is there any fact to the purported rumor that Abraham was a renegade priest who founded the Hebrew religious cult of Judaism and stole the secret temple language, which has survive today as Hebrew?
Well Hebrew is definetly not a Mesopotamian language - it is yes a Semitic language. There are many Semitic languages and how they disperse and differ from one another is a very complicated discussion I can't attempt but yes in Mesopotamia we have what are called East Semitic languages, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian. We know these languages because they survive in cuneiform texts of course and what is important to note here is that the cuneiform texts ARE the records of either the palace or the temple to a very large degree. Some cuneiform preserves the esoteric practices of these temples and some the 'secrets of the gods' - a term relating to for example the art of the baru, the divener. These tablets, containing the rites of divination, would contain warnings that a curse would fall on anyone who read these tablets and released their secrets to the un-initiated. So in other words, we know some of the secrets of these temples and their important functionaries like the diviner, and have some of what was the esoteric knowledge of those times - and these weren't written in Hebrew.
That Abraham came from Ur is generally accepted in Scholarship and he would have been there not long after the fall of the Sumerians and the absorption of that city into the new Semitic Babylonian domination. The city was therefore steeped in ancient Sumerian culture and tradition but by then ethnically and linguistically Semitic in so far as the two are seperable in such situation.. That Abraham was a renegade or that he so drastically departed Mesopotamian ideology and devotion to the gods is not clear to me - or is it to Biblical scholarship I don't think. We have to note the evidence for early Hebrew acknowledgement of more then one divinity, and there is, and that some have suggested the Hebrews did not accept true monotheism until after their time in Egypt hundreds and hundreds of years later (at least if one takes the suggestion of influence from the cult of Akhenaten put forward by the likes of Sigmund Freud (of all people)).
In any case if it is the Old Testament which characterize's Abraham as so different from the people he left behind in Ur, one has to recall as well this portrayal is coming some 11 or 12 hundred years after Abraham, from author's who are only dimly or inaccurately aware of the progress and changes of their own ideologies in that long period, and who have a vested interest in positioning themselves as the chosen people, and absolutely God sent from the beginning. Look how Semitic based ideologies triumphed in time even over their Roman oppressors with such artful and unyielding bullshit. Abraham was likely very little different in thought or belief than other Semitic persons living in Ur at that time, and only so different in the altered and distorted retrospection of far distant descendants.
I have heard this one as well and I don't think it is to uncommen in the annals of popular alternative history - I'm sure when I used to read some of this I came across it from at least the mind of Laurence Gardner, an author who samples somewhat dubious idea's from just about anyone - Alien Astronaughts and Mesopotamian distortions from Sitchin, Royal bloodlines descended from Jesus Christ, Rosicrucianism, and his own biazarre ideas of people ingesting powdered gold as a super brain supplement - I think Dracula played in that claim somehow. As I noted in the Babylon in Europeon thought thread, cunning persons have been spinning eclectic histories consisting of Oriental intrigues, bloodlines and anything else they can squeeze in since Peladen in the late 1800s - (An antimodernist mystic, Peladan fashioned an occult philosophy out of the Grail Legend, Wagnerian mythology, and the ancient oriental traditions, This eclecticism, in addition to his grandiose dramas, brought upon him mock and ridicule.)
But anyways as to the question I am not in the best position to answer this one personally at it would be better addressed by a biblical scholar with interests into early Judaism, or at least someone who reads up on this juncture as oppose to my own focus on early Sumerian culture. However I'll make some general comments anyway..
Is there any fact to the purported rumor that Abraham was a renegade priest who founded the Hebrew religious cult of Judaism and stole the secret temple language, which has survive today as Hebrew?
Well Hebrew is definetly not a Mesopotamian language - it is yes a Semitic language. There are many Semitic languages and how they disperse and differ from one another is a very complicated discussion I can't attempt but yes in Mesopotamia we have what are called East Semitic languages, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian. We know these languages because they survive in cuneiform texts of course and what is important to note here is that the cuneiform texts ARE the records of either the palace or the temple to a very large degree. Some cuneiform preserves the esoteric practices of these temples and some the 'secrets of the gods' - a term relating to for example the art of the baru, the divener. These tablets, containing the rites of divination, would contain warnings that a curse would fall on anyone who read these tablets and released their secrets to the un-initiated. So in other words, we know some of the secrets of these temples and their important functionaries like the diviner, and have some of what was the esoteric knowledge of those times - and these weren't written in Hebrew.
That Abraham came from Ur is generally accepted in Scholarship and he would have been there not long after the fall of the Sumerians and the absorption of that city into the new Semitic Babylonian domination. The city was therefore steeped in ancient Sumerian culture and tradition but by then ethnically and linguistically Semitic in so far as the two are seperable in such situation.. That Abraham was a renegade or that he so drastically departed Mesopotamian ideology and devotion to the gods is not clear to me - or is it to Biblical scholarship I don't think. We have to note the evidence for early Hebrew acknowledgement of more then one divinity, and there is, and that some have suggested the Hebrews did not accept true monotheism until after their time in Egypt hundreds and hundreds of years later (at least if one takes the suggestion of influence from the cult of Akhenaten put forward by the likes of Sigmund Freud (of all people)).
In any case if it is the Old Testament which characterize's Abraham as so different from the people he left behind in Ur, one has to recall as well this portrayal is coming some 11 or 12 hundred years after Abraham, from author's who are only dimly or inaccurately aware of the progress and changes of their own ideologies in that long period, and who have a vested interest in positioning themselves as the chosen people, and absolutely God sent from the beginning. Look how Semitic based ideologies triumphed in time even over their Roman oppressors with such artful and unyielding bullshit. Abraham was likely very little different in thought or belief than other Semitic persons living in Ur at that time, and only so different in the altered and distorted retrospection of far distant descendants.
