Thanks, I will study your last post when I come back from work.

In the meanwhile, since you said this:
"Yes, the bible is full of examples of Jews worshipping all manner of deities"

then why did you try to claim they were monotheistic, they were clearly not.

And whatever Abram did, it only shows one person supposedly promoting one God of many others who were competing. (you have not proven Abram was pushing monotheism, BTW)

Anyway, just because later scribes mistranslated Elohim, which is many Gods, into "Lord" or "Yahweh", or "God", or whatever they wanted to homogenize the composite entities, it does not mean their forgery lends any more credence to the Bible.

Agnos,
I have to wonder how strident you can become.
You appear to subscribe to the "say it long enough and loud enough and it must be true" school of thought.

The Religion of the Hebrews from their founder, Abraham, was monotheistic. Their history indicates that they sometimes abandon their belief and embraced other religions. It is very simple to see that this is not the same as making their original religion polytheistic. It's a different religion with a different god or gods. Even in the text you pointed out in Hosea, it is clear that the Being (the LORD) that is "speaking" is NOT that same as the one being worshiped.

Agnos,

Israel of the OT is a model of what man is as an individual. The details about the relationship between Israel and Yahweh are recorded so that we can understand who and what we are. Yahweh even had a name for Israel, Jeshurun. The citizens of Israel were his body parts, arms, legs, head, etc, which were moved about in their various activities according to what was happening at the centre of his being, the temple. The temple was the seat of Jeshurun's essence, his heart and mind.

Within the temple priests moved about like the thoughts within Jeshurun's mind. The priests had access to the Holy Place (conscious mind), but could not move beyond the curtain into the Most Holy Place (unconscious mind). If their activities followed the directions set out in the ten commandments, and the ordinances and statutes that were given to Moses, then the interface between Yahweh and Jeshurun remained active. The priests carried the word of God that came to them within the Holy Place to the people, and the people implemented whatever instructions were passed to them from priests. Jeshurun prospered whenever this process functioned according to the instruction book they were given, and they were devastated when they did not.

Abraham walked and talked with El-Elyon/Jehovah/Yahweh, the architect of this system. A system that has been shown to me from the pages of scripture. A system that is mirrored within the soul of every NT believer. A system that is meant to operate within the soul of every person ever born. It cannot operate however, within a soul that has no knowledge of it, or has no desire for it. God will not violate the sovereign right of every individual to determine for themselves how they want their soul to function.

Neither will He stick around where He's not wanted, as you point out in regard to Israel's pursuit of their Baals. The problem for those who don't want Yahweh, is that I do, and Zippy does, and Kokoro does, and B11ng00 does, and rroper does, and Habiru does, and Ardakhan does, etc, etc, etc. Yahweh's presence continues in this creation as long as there are souls who want him to be here. Now, just as there was a last soul in the antediluvian world, so there will be a last soul in this world, and in that day all things will be concluded. Yahweh will remove his presence from this creation forever.

I certainly have no dersire to be here on that day.

Cheers and God bless,
enegue

Sorry, time limits. So what you are doing in essence, -and forgive me for saying this, I'm not trying to be disrespectful- is trying to prove the Bible with the Bible. That does not work especially since this document is made up of several books, that were written over a very long period of time, and were not originally part of one book. Now if you remember the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, for example, certainly you must realize that he is talking about a variety of gods there, but it does not necessarily mean that all those gods are real. The fact of the matter is that just because something is in a book, that does not imply that it must be real. So it is with the Bible. Clearly many writers such as Homer and others have described the extraordinary feats of ancient deities, and even assuming that such writers endorsed one particular god or another, that does not lend any credibility to those claims. So in conclusion, what makes you think that the god of the Bible is any more real than the gods mentioned in all the ancient books ever written? All religions have their own Bibles, so to speak, and all of them are written in such a way as to appear logical and consistent, and the Old and New Testaments are no different. In order for you to find the truth, you must stop trying to prove the Bible with the Bible, because it's like trying to argue Superman is real for example, by studying the movie scripts that tell his story.

Enegue, you this: "Abraham walked and talked with El-Elyon/Jehovah/Yahweh"

Now everything you say is your interpretation and unproven assertion. Did Mohammed walk with Allah too? Why one, and not the other?

You live in this stuff so much, you have lost your grasp on reality, and I mean this in a candid way, I don't mean to be disrespectful. It is clear to me that you have lost the ability to distinguish what's real and what's just doctrine and mythology.

YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ABRAHAM. NO ONE DOES. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO HE WALKED WITH, AND YOU ESPECIALLY DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE "DIVINE" ATTRIBUTES OF THE SUPPOSED "ENTITY" HE IS SAID TO HAVE WALKED WITH.

ENEGUE, WAKE UP, IT'S ONLY A BOOOOOOOOOK!!! PUT TOGETHER FROM MANY SEPARATE BOOKS. THEN THEY CHANGED THE CONTENT TO MAKE IT FIT.

These are some thoughts from the thread that I had as I caught up on my reading. To head off any "which god" type responses, I would like to indicate that I capitalize the title when I am referring to the God of the Bible. If it is capitalized, it is that God that I believe in, the God of the Bible, not another god. This holds true for everything I write. It is possible that I will miss the occasional "shift" key. While this is rare, I reserve the right to make mistakes.

Agnos,

The King James Bible is not "the Catholic" Bible but I will acknowledge that it is drawn from most of the same sources. It doesn't matter. The KJV is only one of many translations I look at. I used it because it was the easiest to pull a copy of the definition from. My other translations replace "THE LORD" with "Jehovah" which is exactly what the dictionary entry I posted shows.

What you pointed out is not news. It's fairly common knowledge which has no effect on the issue under discussion. Your argument, which is that this text "proves" that Jehovah and Baal were one and the same and were both worshiped by the Hebrews at the same time, is clearly false.

It appears to be a fiction perpetrated to promote an idea that just isn't true, and like so many of these ideas, it has no substance.

ZZ