Throughout history, humans have been concerned and creative. The first people who created civilization in the Middle East were clever and in step with civilization, they also invented gods. People created gods based on their society and understanding of reality.. Man had no answer to the cold, the heat, and earthquakes, therefore man invented gods who could give man peace of mind in difficult times. To better understand how gods were transformed into mighty gods (monotheism), and how witches were transformed into god-father and imams, we must go back in history. Let’s go back to Jordan and the city of Petra where the gods EL, Baal, Ishtar, Molek, Dushara, and Jehovah were found. Kana’an people worshiped these gods. The name EL inspired the Jews to create the name Israel. Jehovah was the ruthless god who ruled over the land of Midian. Jehovah was a god of war, he was jealous and out for vengeance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. After the Jews became notify with these gods, they brought them home to Jerusalem. At first, they worshiped all these gods, but after Babylon took over Israel, Jews agreed that now they must only worship Jehovah as the mighty god. This happened approximately in the year 622 BCE by King Josiah or Yoshiyahu who was the 16th King of Judah (c. 640–609 BCE). He cleansed Jerusalem of the other gods and the Jews began to worship only the one god Jehovah who laterstimulate the other religions such as Christianity and Islam.
”El is a common diety for god, and it is related to the Arabic word Allah. In the Hebrew Bible, El Shaddai (Almighty God) and El Elyon (God Most High) are also ways to refer to Yahweh.”
In my previous articles, I explained how the god Allah became the god of the Muslims and how Muhammad changed the place of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca for governmental reasons so that he could get support from the rich Meccan people. I also talked about Christianity. What is interesting is how the Bedouins demolish the mighty civilizations and their gods such as the god Marduk in Babylon, and Ahura Mazda in the Persian Empire, and made these civilizations worship the Bedouin god Allah, who himself was inspired by the god El from Petra. (ال)
” Pre-Islamic Arabs believed that the goddesses Al-lāt, Al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt were the daughters of Allah though Nabataean inscriptions also describe her as Allah’s wife instead”.
Although the Bedouins won the battle, they weredetermined by Persian culture and the religion of Zarathustra. In Zoroastrianism, people prayed 5 times a day and the belief in paradise and hell existed. Although the Jews chose to worship only Jehovah, other gods did not disappear completely because they continued to exist in their traditions and beliefs which also inspired Islam and Christianity. The word hell in Islam (Jahannam) is inspired by the Jewish Gehenna which goes back to the belief in the god Molek. According to the Old proofs, the god to whom the Judeans sacrificed their children in the valley of Hinnom. The belief in paradise is a belief that live in the ancient Sumerian people. The belief begin from the Dilmun area. A silent place where people lived well together with brute(Utopia) .
”Dilmun was the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian term for a country somewhere in the Lower Sea. Modern scholars have reconized the site with Bahrain and Failaka, possibly also with the coastal region of Qatar.”
But it was not only the Sumerian people who believed in paradise. As I said, the Persians also believed in paradise and Babylon, and the Egyptians also believed in life after death. King Gilgamesh is proof of this where he climb (up) to heaven after death.
”Gilgamesh himself was recorded as the fifth king of Uruk (probably the Biblical Erech) and ruled approximately 2,600 BC. The father of Gilgamesh was also a king, and his mother was supposedly a goddess, and hence he was partly a god.”
It seems that Jews related the Assyrian king Sargon to Moses. Sargon II was the king of the NeoAssyrian Empire from 722 BC to his death in battle in 705. It also seems that the Bedouin and the Jews learned about unnatural forces such as jinn from Babylon. Jinn were beings created from fire and there were both good and evil. Also, Moses’ 10 commandments were directly taken from the Babylonian king Hammurabi. He was the sixth Amorite king of the Old Babylonian Empire, reigning from c. 1792 to c. 1750 BC. It seems that man created gods and god with his creativity and killed other people to convince himself that he had found the truth and his god was the one true mighty god. As the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) says, religion is created in a sociological context where each god is created about the thoughts of the related society.
Article Courtesy: Arvin Niknia, Independent Author
