In the Near Eastern section of this course we focused our time on how monotheism began. The idea of one superior being is hinted throughout the readings in Laws Gods and Heroes. In the Enuma Elish (the creation epic) Marduk, becomes the supreme god after he defeats Tiamat. The epic states, “Thou, Marduk, art the most honored of the great gods, Thou decree is unrivaled, thy word is Anu.” This statement is the gods giving Marduk supreme power (one god above all others). Another example is the reading To Aton. This is the story of an Egyptian pharaoh who says there is only one god named Aton, one god for all humanity, and one god who created Earth. The story reads,

Thy rays encompass that land to the limit of all that thou has made:

As thou art Re, thou reaches to the end

of them; thou subduest them for thou beloved son. [ . . .] How effective they are, thy plans, O lord of eternity! The Nile in heaven, it is for the foreign peoples and for the beast of every desert that go upon their feet;

The pharaoh Ikhnaton presents the idea of a universal god that seas over everyone and answers to none. Finally we come to the Hebrew Interpretation of Creation. The basis of all four major forms of monotheism. In the Hebrew Interpretation there is only one god who creates all and watches over every one. This is seen in the verse, “and God saw everything that he made, and behold, it was very good.” The idea we are looking at here is that God is becoming an abstraction and is no longer something of the physical world. In the Book of Job God shows itself as a Whirlwind to Job, not as a human. The book continues to tell us how God told Job how dare he question the Almighty for where was he when God created the earth. These lines create a distance between God and mortals. These are the reasons why we spent so much time on the Near Eastern gods, to see the development of Monotheism the basis

Some topics in this essay:
Enuma Elish, Solon Athens, Near Eastern, Antigone Creon, Western Civilization, Hebrew Interpretation, Hector Iliad, Whirlwind Job, Almighty God, Iliad Achilles, near eastern, eastern gods, near eastern gods, western civilization, god created earth, god created, created earth, marduk supreme, spent near eastern, spent near, hebrew interpretation,