I've been enjoying reading, on and off, Bloom's book about literary genius: Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002). He rightly points out that 'Very few readers would be untroubled by the phrase "the genius of Jesus", so he doesn't include Jesus among the 100, but he does write about the apostle Paul, the 'Yahwist' (the writer of one of the manuscripts that was [so it is thought by some experts] combined with other writings to form the first five books of the Bible), and Muhammad. Bloom actually published a translation from the Hebrew of 'The book of J' (the work of the Yahwist) of which we only have fragments. He didn't translate it - David Rosenberg did - but his The Book of J, includes his commentary and interpretation of the book.
I'm looking forward to reading it. Just like with the Qur'an, my familiarity with the Bible makes it really interesting to read about the same people, events and subjects in a different text. I find the Qur'an especially interesting on the Old Testament characters - like Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Ishmael (who is more favoured by the Qur'an), etc. A lot of the accounts from the Qur'an of those characters are compatible with the Bible.
It's easy to understand how, as a non-Christian, Bloom sees Paul as creatively misreading (Bloom's term for revising, and wilfully misinterpretting the original text in order to hijack it for oneself) the gospel - the original message of Jesus.
I read (part of) a book that had some fascinating things to say about the old testament, but I ended up not reading any further because I flipped to the very end and the final sentence of the book is: 'You are God'. Spoiler alert: no, I am not God. Not even on my very good days. The book is God: A Human History (2017) by Reza Aslan, and the interesting thing he writes about the Old Testament, besides what he writes about links between other ancient texts and cultures and the Hebrew Bible - which is interesting, but the most interesting thing to me, was his argument that there were two separate and very different conceptions of God that were held by the Israelites.
When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush to tell him to return to Egypt and lead the Israelites out, Moses was living with a Midianite tribe and his father in law was a Midianite priest so, Reza Aslan suggests that Yahweh (the name of the God who appeared to Moses) is a Midianite deity. Even though God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites that 'the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has sent me to you', Aslan argues that:
This claim would have come as something of a surprise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Because the fact of the matter is that these biblical patriarchs did not worship a Midianite desert deity called Yahweh. They worshipped an altogether different god - a Canaanite deity they knew as El.
When I first read that, I thought it was interesting, but now, I think Reza Aslan is putting too much emphasis on names and cultural difference. He doesn't believe that there is one true God, so he's arguing from that premise. If you believe there is one true God, which Christians, Jews and Muslims all do, it doesn't really matter that he was called by a different label in a different culture. It's like saying I worship a different God from French people because they call God, Dieu, or, converesely, that Christians whose first language is Arabic are really Muslims because they call God Allah and use some of the same phrases that Muslims use, like In sha Allah, Masha Allah, and Alhamdulillah.
The word 'El' is simply the word for God in ancient semitic languages. It's not even strictly tied to the idea of there being one God. The word 'elohim' in the Hebrew Bible usually means God - the one God - but sometimes it refers to a plurality of gods.
The name Yahweh developed out of the special new way that God began to reveal himself, starting with Moses and the burning bush and eventually to Israel and hence to the world. Here's the quote from the Bible (Exodus 3:13 - 15):
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.
The 'LORD' that I highlighted - that's the word that became Yahweh. Originally it was rendered YHWH, so who knows how it was actually pronounced, but in this text that word is connected with the verb hayah, to be. The Israelites until that point had known God by various names and designations, but here God is establishing the particular name that he was to be known by from then on, as he revealed himself more fully to them. The introductory part where he talks about 'I am' is interesting. 'I am who I am' is from the hebrew: ehyeh asher ehyeh, and if we translate “He Brings into Existence Whatever Exists”, we get "Yahweh-Asher-Yahweh". So Yahweh is more than just the word that gets translated as 'LORD' in the English Bible, it's also a statement about God's character and his eminence.
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