Yahweh has NO official appearance but Zeus DOES, and it looks like how people depict Yahweh usually. So why does everyone steal Zeus' appearance and associate it with Yahweh? They also stole Zeus' "Treat others like you want to be treated" law. Lol.
>everyone stealswho exactly
>>18663822The Sky Father prototype predates Zeus
>>18663822>So why does everyone steal Zeus' appearance and associate it with Yaweh? Because Zeus is supreme. YHWH in his earliest textual form was not the supreme God. He was a storm deity, a warrior god, a son of El, a member of the divine council. The father god with a divine council is not a peculiarity of one people/religion. It is a universal archetype of ancient humanity. The Semitic El belongs to the same broad archetype. It is the same figure appearing across all major branches of the Indo-European language family. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European name is *Dyēus Phter, "Sky Father." From this root come:Greek Ζεὺς Πατήρ (Zeus Patēr)Latin Iūpiter, from older Diēspiter / *Djous PatērVedic Sanskrit Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ (Rigveda 1.89.4, 4.1.10, 6.51.5)Mycenaean Greek di-we (Linear B tablets, Pylos and Knossos, 13th century BCE)Old Norse Týr (Anglo-Saxon Tīw, from Proto-Germanic *Tīwaz)Illyrian Deipáturos (attested by Hesychius)Hittite Šiuš (from *diēu-)Lithuanian DiēvasLatvian DievsAlbanian Zojz (Messapic Zis)When a Greek invoked Zeus, a Roman invoked Jupiter, an Indian invoked Dyaus, a Canaanite invoked El, a Hittite invoked Šiuš, and a Mycenaean scribe wrote di-we, they were all invoking local expressions of the same cosmic figure: the Sky Father, the head of the divine council, the source of cosmic order. The Abrahamic reform stripped it of its family, and declared the stripped version uniquely true. At some point during the late monarchic period, and especially during and after the Babylonian exile, a group of priestly reformers declared that YHWH alone should be worshipped, identified YHWH with El, demoted or demonized the other members of the divine council, and retroactively edited the sacred texts to obscure the earlier theology. By the time the Tanakh reached its final form, the older divine council theology had been largely concealed, though enough of it remained visible for modern scholars to reconstruct.
The YHWH rabbis taught to worship is the reformed YHWH. The original YHWH was a son of El, standing in the divine council, assigned Israel as his territory by his father. The oldest manuscripts of the Torah preserve this directly.>"When Elyon apportioned the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he established the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. And YHWH's portion was his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance." Read the passage precisely. Elyon, the Most High, divides the nations. He distributes them according to the number of the sons of God (bene elohim). YHWH then receives Israel as his allotted portion. The text describes two distinct figures: the high father (Elyon) who apportions, and a son (YHWH) who receives. This is the divine council of the ancient Near East operating exactly as it does in the Ugaritic texts, where El apportions territories to his sons. The Masoretic Text, the standardized Hebrew edition finalized between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, altered this passage. It reads "sons of Israel" (bene Yisrael) in place of "sons of God" (bene elohim), destroying the sense and producing a meaningless numerical reference (the number of Israelite tribes would be seventy, but the verse makes no sense in context). The Dead Sea Scroll fragment, a thousand years older than the Masoretic reading, preserves the authentic text. The Septuagint, produced by Jewish scholars during a period when the original theology was still remembered, preserves it too. The alteration is a theological censorship of memory. The Semitic El, while not etymologically cognate with *Dyēus in the strict Indo-European sense, belongs to the same typological category: the father god of a divine council, associated with the heavens, presiding over apportioned territories, possessing a consort and divine children. The archetype reflects a shared pattern of archaic religion, with localized expressions in each linguistic family.
Before YHWH was elevated from a washed up rebel 'son of a god' to singularity, the supreme God of the West Semitic world was El. His name means simply "god" or "mighty one" in Northwest Semitic languages, and he was worshipped across Canaan, Ugarit, Phoenicia, and the broader Levant for at least a thousand years before any Hebrew scripture was composed. The Ugaritic texts, discovered at Ras Shamra in northern Syria beginning in 1928 and dated to the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, provide the fullest portrait of El in his original form. He is depicted as an aged king with a white beard, seated on a throne, presiding over a divine council of sons and daughters. He is called ab adm, "father of humanity," and bny bnwt, "creator of created things." His consort is the goddess Athirat (the Ugaritic cognate of Hebrew Asherah), called qnyt ilm, "creatress of the gods." Their sons include Baal Hadad, Yam, Mot, and approximately seventy other divine beings. The Hebrew Bible preserves the name of El throughout, fossilized in theophoric names that every Jew carries without noticing. Every Isra-el, Samu-el, Dani-el, Micha-el, Gabri-el, Rapha-el, Nathan-el, Ishma-el bears within it the name of the Canaanite father god. The word Elohim, the standard Hebrew term for "God" throughout the Torah, is grammatically plural, a formal holdover from the period when the divine was understood as a council rather than a monad. The Bible itself preserves explicit memory of El as distinct from YHWH. The Patriarchs are repeatedly said to have worshipped El under titles such as El Shaddai, El Elyon, El Olam, El Bethel, and El Roi. Exodus 6:3 makes this distinction explicit: "I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name YHWH I did not make myself known to them." The Priestly editor here admits that the God of the Patriarchs was known by a different name, reflecting the historical truth that YHWH was a retroactive theological development. A downgrade!
