Paradigm Fossils

When I was young, my family would take road trips to a place in the country a few hundred miles inland from the ocean. The area was mostly dairy farms and oil wells. Down the dirt road from where we would stay, past the cat-tails and ramshackle barn with its late nineteenth century farm equipment still parked inside, there was a ravine with a brook running down through it. The brook was filled with stones, many of which had the fossilized imprints of shells and other sea-life on them. There would be thousands of them. It was said that though being far inland, in geological epochs far removed, the whole place had once been under water. 

I was reminded of this last night when reading descriptions of ancient Judaism's henotheism.  The particular example cited is found in 2 Kings. But one can find paradigm fossils, as it were, of henotheism in modern Christian culture. 

God of gods / Light of light

From O Come All Ye Faithful. This might be characterized as accepting how other divinities are termed by their adherents, but not buying into their realness, and asserting that the God of Abraham is the one real god. Or it might said that other gods are demons over whom the God of Abraham reigns supreme. But I think (in my uneducated opinion) that a simpler explanation is that phrases like this are echoes of an ancient polytheism, and "gods" carries with it the ordinary meaning of the term. There are gods, but among them there was one god preferred by the ancient Jews, whom they regarded as the strongest.  

I don't think it means anything--I don't think it carries any weighty significance--either for or against Christianity or for or against polytheism. In fact, I like it, in the sense that the ancient past has not suffered information death, which is inevitable, but somehow sad, no matter whom it happens to.

I also don't wish that the information be used in any way to harm other people, their belief systems, or their faith in their belief systems. "Love the people with whom fate binds you, but do so with all your heart." Fate has bound people of all different beliefs together on this earth in this era. We have to try to love one another. 

On Google Books, you can read almost all of the first chapter of Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible, by David Penchansky.