What is your favorite mythological figure (of ancient religions only)?
What is your favorite mythological figure (of ancient religions only)?
What is your favorite mythological figure (of ancient religions only)?
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inb4: the God of the Abrahamic religions hurr durr
Yeah, that asshole is nobody's favorite.
But is it Yhwh or El?
Ah now that's a trick question, because the Abrahamic god is in fact an amalgam of both, which is why he's so derangedly bipolar in the Old Testament!
Yeah. I think historically it is interesting, because the Hebrew Elohim of Genesis is in the plural, and there is evidence that followers of El believed him to be one deity in a pantheon. In that sense, Elohim and the associated creation myths have their roots in a polytheistic religion.
Yhwh was more likely a figure from a belief system of a different region which ended up co-opting the earlier stories. I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I think it is actually plausible that things like the Catholic Holy Trinity have roots in El and Yhwh technically being different figures.
Interestingly enough, when Eelohim is used to refer to the Hebrew God in the bible, it takes singular verbs, while it take plural when referring to the gods of the nations surrounding them.
I wonder how much of that has to do with semantic drift on Elohim, i.e. by the time the oldest extant manuscripts were written, the figure was already considered singular despite retaining the noun plural morphology. The implication there would be that earlier (now lost) manuscripts may have had plural verb agreement for Elohim, or maybe simpler / more plausible, there was a time in the oral tradition where Elohim was still considered a plural figure and would have naturally gotten plural verbs.
I think the fact that the plural morphology exists on the noun at all suggests at least that the figure started as a collective.
Edit: probably also worth a mention that portions of Genesis (e.g. Garden of Eden) mirror portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story which is overtly polytheistic.
There are numerous names and in fact, there are sources which I cannot recall, that said his full name was like 24 letters long or something like that. Not surprising since he’s a hodgepodge of lots of prior mythos and was probably written of and modified over hundreds of years.