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What made Judaism so unique as a religion? They have plenty in common with contemporary religions, sure (animal sacrifice, sacred priesthood, ornate worship, etc.), but I mean in the extremely unique factors. Such as absolute animosity toward worship of any god but YHWH and absolute animosity toward his depiction. Even more strange, when religion was generally just a set of folk beliefs and realized in a few rituals, Judaism was not based on folk rituals, it was highly centralized with just *one* temple for the whole nation. Even more unusual, it was heavily involved in everyday life, your entire life was supposed to be centered around the religion and meditating on its guidelines for living life (this is more common in Asian religions, but certainly not among contemporary semetic or European religions). It's incredibly formal and theologically distinct (by the former, I mean very formal codes for everyday life, and by the latter, I mean explicitly saying the universe was created by a *god* and not always existing or coming out of chaos of its own accord, and that this god is beyond all the universe, and that the things of the universe like starts and earth and sea and sun are just objects that were created).
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*stars and earth
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>>1717629
I think you answered your own question there.
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>>1717629
It's been theorized that Judaism came from an older pantheistic religion, and they broke off. It might be that the older religion just wound up crumbling to.
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>>1717629
That whole "Nation" back in the Ancient times is so fucking small, it consists of a fucking city and its environs.
And Judaism nowadays is as divided as Christianity and Islam is.
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It didn't get like that overnight.
Basically there was this band of nomadic brigands called "Habiru" by the people of the Middle East (Akkadian for bandit, murderer) who were composed from the dregs of every Middle Eastern society, and were alternatingly criminals, vagrants, and mercenaries. Like all Mesopotamians they worshiped various gods depending on their place of origin.
One day they were joined by Moses, who had been a priest of Aten in Egypt, the god who was elevated to monotheism by Pharaoh Akhenaten. Moses convinced the Habiru to enter the Covenant with one of the gods, the minor war god Yahweh. They would promise to worship no other god than him, and in exchange he would make them his chosen people and defend them against all others. Making this pact with a war deity would bring the Habiru many victories. When the Bronze Age collapse happened, the Habiru managed to take advantage of the situation, and carved themselves a piece of land out of formerly Egyptian territory in Canaan, where they founded the kingdom of Israel.
During this, Judaism gradually developed into true monotheism. First they started considering Yahweh as superior to all the other gods. This in turn made him logically the creator. Until finally Judaism denied the very existence of any god by Yahweh. It's simply the long term consequence of not worshiping any of them.
Judaism was transformed again though, mostly by the scholars in Babylon who became part of the great spiritual awakening that swept the Middle East around the time of Jesus, and who turned Judaism into a universalist religion similar in spirit to all the new ones.
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>>1717857
This is fact, or speculation?
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>>1717892
There's no proof of the historicity of Moses, but there must have been someone who filled that role, though his strong connection to Egypt in the Bible and the time frame make the connection to Aten extremely likely.
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>>1717904
>extremely likely
What formula are you using to calculate the probability here?
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>>1717629
I had the same trouble understanding how Judaism came to dominate so much of western theology until I played Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2.
Spoiler: Judaism, in it's original form is a pretty awesome albeit authoritarian religion
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>>1717857
Nice fanfic Anon.
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>>1717857
>No proofs
Into the trash it goes
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>>1717629
Off the top of my head, almost from the get-go, you had a taboo about depicting the Yahweh, who was at the very least an important deity even before he began to displace the others entirely. As far as I know, although I'll freely admit my knowledge is quite limited, that was unique among near-eastern religions, you always had an idol to represent the deity. I am unsure as to the effects this would have on Jewish dissemination and influence though.
Secondly, although it ended up highly centralized, it didn't start that way; even the Bible mentions the "Bamas", altars you had in your backyard that people were offering sacrifices on well up until David's time, and in fact there was considerable resistance to this centralization. First you see it in the hands of the prophets, and then later in the hands of the Rabbis; because the role of the priesthood was primarily involved in the sacrifices and not the theology or the teachings, the religion was able to survive the destruction of said central temple in a way that a lot of Babylonian or other religions centered around god-kings or central temples weren't.
I'm sure there are other things, but it's early and I'm not thinking at my most clearly.
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>>1717629
Were those suits really designed to protect from radiation?
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