This is the first in a series of post based on my notes (mostly) from Cassuto, Umberto., "A Commentary on the Book of Genesis: Part 1, from Adam to Noah (Genesis 1-6:8) translated form Hebrew by Israel Abrahams" , Jerusalem, The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1944. I'll refer to this as "[UC]" below.
- Monotheism is the idea that there is one, single God. Polytheism is the idea that many gods exist. Most primitive are polytheist.
- Some early middle eastern religions began to approach monotheism, such as Amenhotep IV [UC 8], who attributed the creation to one of the gods, the sun-god Aten. It appears that some of his predecessors held the same idea.
- Most Middle Eastern polytheistic religious texts begin with a theogeny, or the story of the origin of the gods, couched in epic poems [UC 7]. There is evidence of the bible responding to these earlier texts, and that knowledge of these texts were common at the time Genesis, Isaiah, Psalms & Job were written.
- Yahweh is not included in a theogeny -- because he always existed, a key concept of monotheism. Nor do the Israelites have festivals commemorating events in Yahweh's life -- because he is non-changing, so there is nothing to commemorate. Festivals are about historic events of Israel
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