This morning in church, the praise team played an old praise chorus by Waterdeep that includes the line "You ride upon the clouds." It got me to thinking about how interconnected religions are. My 21st century urban Methodist church gets this image of God riding upon a cloud from the Old Testament, which we read because our religion, Christianity, started out as an apocalyptic Jewish sect. Jews, in turn, inherited the Hebrew Bible from their ancient Israelite ancestors.
God is frequently depicted riding upon clouds in the Hebrew Bible. The image, however, does not originate in the Hebrew Bible. The earliest attestation of it that I know is from the Baal epic from Ugarit, a city in modern Syria that was destroyed in the 11th century BCE, at least a century before any but the oldest biblical texts. Moreover, the epithet "Cloud-rider" belongs not to the God of Israel but to Baal, whom most Jews and Christians now know because he is the divine arch-rival of the God of Israel.
This is common in the history of religions: the Israelites needed a vocabulary to describe their God, so they borrowed it from the gods of their neighbors, even while they were busy execrating their neighbors for worshipping these very same gods. This is what has always bothered me about religious exclusivism: how can religions that depend upon each other make claims that exclude one another?
Comments (7)
Depend on each other for metaphor or depend on each other for origin? Just... very different.
@immortalwithout - Metaphysical origins are inaccessible--all we have to go on are the texts. And Yahweh is a relative late-comer, textually-speaking.
At Rothbury Festival last year, Keller Williams played "Pepper" off Electriclarryland. Hearing Keller play anything at all is a treat, because he is the entire band. He plays all the instruments. (puts them on loop, then picks up the next one, plays for a few, puts that one on loop, etc, etc... till there's 5-6-7 instruments all being looped back).
Re: your actual post, I think we can also conclude that the entire Christian religion is rather unoriginal. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Oh. But not at Rothbury. He was w/ a band there.
Each religion claims that they were the only one to come up with something, and in the case of modern Christianity explanations that I have been familiar with for phenomena like this, any previous historical examples of a particular idea or image - it was simply the true and absolute revealed nature of God that other religions happened to also notice, but Christianity has the claim on. Because they are the only ones who have the rest of it correct. And damn the rest to hell, of course.
I couldn't agree more. Yet, knowing all these common origins, you still worship Yahweh and his alleged son, Jesus?
Prudent point! This is similar to my argument that Christians who spew hate towards Pagans should thoroughly examine the tradition of the Christmas tree and its history.
I also wanted your opinion on what Jesus, often depicted as a pacifist, meant when in Matthew 10:34 he said, "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword."