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Yahweh creates a blood covenant with the Jews. It's a tribal god, Yahweh is a metaphor for the people he represents. Very straightforward reading of the mythos. If some Roman gold selected the Romans as his Chosen people and formed a heritable blood covenant with the Romans wouldn't it be very obvious to you that the god is a symbol for the people represented in the covenant?
It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people. The Hebrew mythos demands sole worship of Yahweh above anything else and declares a holy mission to destroy all the idols of all foreigners. It's a major difference in the religious orders that is not acknowledged by OP and is going to undermine the direction he is trying to take this.
No. I think you are stretching interpretations to force your hobby horse. There are plenty of examples of tutelary deities among pagan religions, including ones that were reused. Do any of the number of deities that the Aztecs believed they had a personal responsibility to keep fed with blood lest the universe get destroyed count as a representation of the Aztecs themselves, even though other Mesoamerican peoples were found to have the same gods with etymologically related names and the same attributes? Were Greeks worshipping Athena worshipping the city of Athens, even as they waged war against it? What about Apollo, who the Spartans considered their tutelary god with the lexical connection being less obvious?
This is true of Romans (with respect to some foreigners), but not of all pagans; e.g. Atenism. Therefore intolerance of foreign gods is not a uniquely Hebrew feature, and can't be used to distinguish Hebrew(-lineage) religions from pagan ones.
Both Athens and Sparta were indeed worshipping a people represented by Athena and Apollo and the ideals they represented. It was an Indo European religion, those figures represent the Indo-Europeans themselves and cult worship of them functionally entailed worship of Indo-European forbearers and founders.
Athena and Apollo represent Indo-Europeans, Yahweh represents Jews. And in any case the Athena cult existed before Athens. Athens was named after Athena. That is nothing like the Mosaic covenant that features in Exodus. If the origin of Athena as a goddess was that she chose Athens as her city then it's unlikely it would have ever been a pan-Hellenic cult. But the pan-Hellenic cult came first and then the name of the city came later. Whereas the Mosaic covenant is the very origin of the Jewish religion and worship of Yahweh.
Can you please provide your interpretation of the blood covenant? Do you think it's literally true? If you don't think it's true, then how could you have any other literary interpretation than the god portrayed in Exodus is a symbolic representation of the people he has Chosen? The covenant is even inherited genetically, it's a tribal representation.
Yes, one of the weaknesses of the word "pagan" is a lack of clarity- I was referring to Indo European religion which does have this quality.
I don't understand why gods have to be symbolic of anything beyond what their believers claim them to be symbolic of, whether that is "wisdom" or "a choleric narcissist father figure that created the universe and everything in it". The blood covenant also does not need any special interpretation: it's just the claim that the all-powerful figure has specially favoured a particular lineage. Can you not believe yourself to be the favourite son of a father with many children without claiming that the father is uniquely similar to yourself? If I think my boss or advisor likes me, does that imply I think he is the same as me? Every medieval European royal house claimed that their lineage was chosen to rule by the Christian god. Does that mean that each house saw the Christian god as a symbolic representation of themselves, in your understanding? Why did different royal houses then ever get along at all, if they apparently had a fundamental disagreement that amounted to "Jesus is symbolic of us! - No, Jesus is symbolic of us!"?
The attempt of medieval European royal houses to appropriate Yahweh as a symbol of their lineage falls flat precisely because of the Hebrew bible. If Exodus entailed God choosing the lineage of Alfred the Great, then it would absolutely be cogent to identify the God portrayed in that mythos as representing the people chosen by him. You sure as hell wouldn't be saying "oh the worship of that god started because the Saxons claimed that god selected them as his favorite among all the nations, who knows what the god is supposed to represent! Nothing, probably."
You aren't recognizing the difference between the mythological impetus for the cult itself being the Moasic covenant, whereas it has not been in any single other case you have tried to cite as a point of comparison. You have just continued to point out that gods representing people is a thing that happens all throughout history, except for Exodus I guess! Yeah right.
The Yahweh cult is rooted in the Mosaic covenant. Yahweh is a symbol of that people. If some other cult emerged on the basis of a blood covenant between a god and a people you would certainly recognize that as plainly obvious.
I still can't discern a single argument that any of the gods discussed is supposed to symbolise the people that worshipped him or her. You just keep asserting that it is so and must obviously be so, against a wealth of literature that is replete with claims of those gods symbolising all sorts of things but people, and not a single example of anyone ever understanding worshipping the god to entail worshipping the associated people. There is of course a trivial sense in which they do, in that people who both believe in the god and in the story that a particular group of people are the god's chosen necessarily will treat that group in a special way, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the latter belief follows from the former, or that this amounts to worshipping the group as synonymous with the god.
Ask any adherent of religions in the Judaism-derived family and they will probably tell you that yes, they worship the exact same god as the Jews do, no, that god is not a symbol for the Jews, and no, they definitively are not expected in a symbolic way to worship the Jews. They will probably also tell you that the thing about the Israelites being god's chosen for some reason or another does not apply to modern-day Jews, and they are just confused. Even the Jews themselves make a point of not requiring non-Jews to believe the part about the covenant.
You know I was actually typing up a reply that argued against @SecureSignals's thesis, as it runs somewhat contrary to the conception of Judaism that I've traditionally held, but then when I referred back to Maurice Samuel's You Gentiles I found this (pg. 74):
which does seem to lend support to his position.
It is worth remembering that Samuel was essentially a troll who delighted in the criticism of his arguments by other Jewish intellectuals in the Jewish press, from Dissent to Commentary.
In any case, it is certainly true that Samuel and SS agree (somewhat) about this, but that’s exactly the interesting thing, since Samuel was otherwise very far politically removed from him.
I essentially agree with Samuel's critique of Christian anti-semitism. Christianity makes anti-Semitism totally incoherent, regardless of the feeling of any given Christian towards the Jews. And regardless of whether or not the Christians understand the actual symbolic meaning of Yahweh, which they like OP do not. They are actually unequipped to properly analyze these works because their own religion is so deeply rooted in the mythos itself.
Christians have no idea what they are reading when they read the Old Testament, if they ever do so.
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