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The first commandment

Stitch

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Stitch
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you shall have no other gods before me.
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Is this an acknowledgment that there are other valid gods (within Judaism / Christianity) but that you can't worship them or that you can so long as you don't hold then in higher esteem than Yahweh? Or am I reading stuff that isn't there?
 
Nope you've hit upon a valid argument. Also seen in Genesis 1:26.

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."


Who is the US. I've seen it debated that the Us refers to the Trinity and other such arguments but basically it boils down to the fact that these stories are lifted from Pagan histories.
 
Stitch said:
Is this an acknowledgment that there are other valid gods (within Judaism / Christianity) but that you can't worship them or that you can so long as you don't hold then in higher esteem than Yahweh? Or am I reading stuff that isn't there?
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Yes, it is such an acknowledgement.

It is called henotheism.
 
You guys are reading it from an objective viewpoint, that's all. If you are a believer, you shouldn't even think about the wording. There is only one god, and the bible doesn't mention the others, even if it does.
 
Yes he does, he mentions them in the first chapter of his sacred text. So
UH
YES he does.
 
Not if you're a believer, then the "us" is simply a majestic "us" and not really a plural. Believers don't let such facts that you point out bother them.
 
Most people think that a straightforward reading of the text says that God is telling those people that he is first among many. He is the god of Israel, and those other gods are for other people.

Also, a lot of historians think that this was a fairly accurate description of belief at the time Exodus was written. The Bible itself says that in Israel, a lot of people worshipped Ashteroth/Asherra/some other variant of "Ishtar". There is some archeological evidence that stongly suggest that there were two deities in the neighborhood back then, one male and one female, Yahweh and Ashteroth, and over time, the male guy became dominant, and the female was written out except as the bad deity that Israel worshipped when they fell away from the one, true, God.

It's hard to say what it "really" means, because what we have in the Bible today was cobbled together from lots of sources. What did the original authors have in mind? That's pretty much lost to history.
 
Meadmaker said:
Most people think that a straightforward reading of the text says that God is telling those people that he is first among many. He is the god of Israel, and those other gods are for other people.

Also, a lot of historians think that this was a fairly accurate description of belief at the time Exodus was written. The Bible itself says that in Israel, a lot of people worshipped Ashteroth/Asherra/some other variant of "Ishtar". There is some archeological evidence that stongly suggest that there were two deities in the neighborhood back then, one male and one female, Yahweh and Ashteroth, and over time, the male guy became dominant, and the female was written out except as the bad deity that Israel worshipped when they fell away from the one, true, God.

It's hard to say what it "really" means, because what we have in the Bible today was cobbled together from lots of sources. What did the original authors have in mind? That's pretty much lost to history.
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Quite right. "What was the original intent?" might better be asked as "what were the original intents?".
 
Stitch said:
Is this an acknowledgment that there are other valid gods (within Judaism / Christianity)
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Not in Christianity - but in early Judaism.

...but that you can't worship them or that you can so long as you don't hold then in higher esteem than Yahweh? Or am I reading stuff that isn't there?
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Henotheism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism

I read that it was common, in that day, to pay respects to the local gods as you traveled through their lands. If you went through Canaan, you had to say "hi" to Baal.
 
Satan

The problem is that the strictest interpreters of the Bible believe that all of the 'other God's' actually represent Satan- that, in fact, all alternative 'gods' are actually Satan, trying to fool us. So it doesn't matter that the Bible seems to recognize alternative gods, because they are all really Satan.

This is the strictest interpretations of the Bible. There are plenty of reasonable people who are actually willing to accept the idea of multiple gods (or that many gods can actually be different faces of the One, and that being good is more important than saying the right words). But it isn't the reasonable people that we need to be concerned with.
 
Wasn't there a passage in the Old Testament where Yahweh sentenced the other gods to "die as mortals?"

'This is my sentence: Though you are gods, all sons
of the Most High, yet you shall die as mortals die, and fall as
any prince does.' -REB: Psalm 82:6-8

I read a long time ago that Yahweh was originally the god of war in the Hebrew pantheon, and they believed he basically staged a coup against the other gods.
 
triadboy said:
Do you mean Canaanite?
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I was taught the same thing in a high school World Religions course. Not Canaanite, but Hebrew. The Hebrew god of war.

It seems to me (pure speculation) that the author(s) of passages referring to other gods were simply acknowledging that other cultures and peoples worshiped their own gods. This god was supposedly saying, "Nope, Don't even go there. It's all about me, me, me; a Me burger with Me fries and a Me shake."

It's done several times in the bible, as I recall. There's the warning about the god who requires a sacrifice of infants to be thrown into a fire, and how that's bad, mmmkay? I would not think it was meant to imply or say that there are other, valid gods in Judaism/Christianity, but that other people at least thought other gods existed, and y'all jist stay out of them thar places, y'heah?

But that's just my nose--erm, my opinion.
 
Stitch said:
Is this an acknowledgment that there are other valid gods (within Judaism / Christianity) but that you can't worship them or that you can so long as you don't hold then in higher esteem than Yahweh? Or am I reading stuff that isn't there?
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i think that the basis of this commandment is not to place faith in anything other than God meaning idols. I read this one time and it really struck a chord.

I believe in all my children, they MUST believe in me.
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all other gods refers to the "host of heaven" fallen angels

Deuteronomy 17:3 And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded;
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The same question arises with the Biblical injunction "suffer not a witch to live." If God wrote the Bible, is this saying that God believes that witches actually exist, something we know to be untrue?
 
Remember the context in which that was made. There were all these tribes all over the place, and they all had their gods. This commandment says, "I am the greatest of all of these."

This makes sense when you recall how God introduced himself to Moses as the redhea^H^H^Hburning bush: "I am the god of thy father, Abraham." IOW, God had to identify himself as Abraham's god, and not the god of the tribe in the opposite valley.

As has been noted, there is plenty in the old testament that indicates that the writers acknowledged many gods. Here, God can't just come up to Moses and say, "I am God." Moses's response would be, "Can you be more specific?"
 
Ipecac said:
that witches actually exist, something we know to be untrue?
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Depends what you consider to be a witch I guess. I have a native american friend who is wiccan and considers herself to be a witch (a white one admitedly)
 
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