{"id":34536,"date":"2017-11-24T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-24T06:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34536"},"modified":"2017-11-12T11:37:29","modified_gmt":"2017-11-12T16:37:29","slug":"qotd-religion-in-the-classical-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/11\/24\/qotd-religion-in-the-classical-world\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Religion in the Classical world"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Jewish law perfectly preserves what any right-thinking Israelite in 1000 BC would have considered obvious, natural, and not-even-needing-justification (much as any right-thinking American today considers not eating insects obvious). By the time the Bible was being written this was no longer true \u2013 foreign customs and inevitable social change were making the old law seem less and less relevant, and I think modern scholarship thinks the Bible was written by a conservative faction of priests making their case for adherence to the old ways. The act of writing it down in a book, declaring this book the sort of thing that people might doubt but shouldn\u2019t, and then passing that book to their children \u2013 that made it a modern religion, in the sense of something potentially separable from culture that required justification. I think that emphasizing the role of God and the gods provided that justification.<\/p>\n

The Hebrew Bible never says other gods don\u2019t exist; indeed, it often says the opposite. It constantly praises God as stronger and better than other gods. God proves his superiority over the gods of the Egyptians when the serpent he sends Moses eats the serpents the Egyptian gods send Pharaoh\u2019s sorcerers. The Israelites are constantly warned against worshipping other gods, not because those gods don\u2019t exist but because God is better and also jealous. This is not the worldview of somebody who has very strong ideas about the nature of reality and how supernatural beings fit into that nature. It\u2019s the worldview of people who want to say \u201cOur culture is better than your culture\u201d. The Bible uses \u201cworshipping foreign gods\u201d as synonymous with \u201cturning to foreign ways\u201d. But God has a covenant with Israel, therefore both are forbidden.<\/p>\n

This seems to match religion in the classical world \u2013 I\u2019m especially thinking of Augustus\u2019 conception here, but he wasn\u2019t drawing it out of a vacuum. Performing the proper rites to the Roman gods was how you showed you were on board with Roman culture was how you showed you were loyal to Rome. The Roman view of religion seems pretty ridiculous to us \u2013 constant influx of new gods and mystery cults that were believed kind of indiscriminately, plus occasional deification of leading political figures followed by their undeification once they fell from power. But throughout it all, this idea that following the rites as Romulus prescribed them showed loyalty, but doing otherwise would result in decadence and defeat, stuck around. <\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “A Theory About Religion”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2016-04-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Jewish law perfectly preserves what any right-thinking Israelite in 1000 BC would have considered obvious, natural, and not-even-needing-justification (much as any right-thinking American today considers not eating insects obvious). By the time the Bible was being written this was no longer true \u2013 foreign customs and inevitable social change were making the old law […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,41,11],"tags":[360,262,446,561],"class_list":["post-34536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-christianity","tag-culture","tag-judaism","tag-rome"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Z2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34537,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34536\/revisions\/34537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}