Oh no, I know Exodus has no evidence. I mean in terms of the books, that's the first time law as such comes into it as a concept. Till then it's all command voices (including via dreams), literally wrestling God, and craftiness.
I find Julian Jaynes' hypothesis about the breakdown of the bicameral mind particularly interesting, and more plausible, the more I learn about that time.
I can't comment on Islam, because i admit that's still a big gap in my historical knowledge, except their relation to Middle Ages Europe and the basics of Mohammed's life. I will say this: the concept postmodernism holds so dear, that of, rather than creating something new as a goal, instead creating from combinations of beliefs, concepts and such already extant, while holding no particular one as more "belief-worthy" than another--that is in fact a regression to the exact same thinking the pagan and early monotheistic world had, of USING beliefs and allying yourself with them, but not so much believing them as such. The zenith of this would of course be the Roman ease of creating new gods by law, and almost treating godhood as a kind of posthumous public office. We think of this as cynical and indeed, it is, but we forget that the kind of earnestness we associate with "faith" was a Christian innovation, one reason Christianity de-emphasized most formal rituals. It was about emotion, not system, and I suppose, for both it and Islam, the reason they were so successful was precisely their detachability from nationhood. Even Islam tying itself so strongly to Arabic didn't change that--all things were equal for a long time, because till the Reformation, Catholicism had a similar tie to Latin, if the fact that vernacular translation of the Bible was a heresy is anything to go by. And they both furthered their religions' reach by conquest, but also by attaching themselves to more than one nation at a time.
no subject
I find Julian Jaynes' hypothesis about the breakdown of the bicameral mind particularly interesting, and more plausible, the more I learn about that time.
I can't comment on Islam, because i admit that's still a big gap in my historical knowledge, except their relation to Middle Ages Europe and the basics of Mohammed's life. I will say this: the concept postmodernism holds so dear, that of, rather than creating something new as a goal, instead creating from combinations of beliefs, concepts and such already extant, while holding no particular one as more "belief-worthy" than another--that is in fact a regression to the exact same thinking the pagan and early monotheistic world had, of USING beliefs and allying yourself with them, but not so much believing them as such. The zenith of this would of course be the Roman ease of creating new gods by law, and almost treating godhood as a kind of posthumous public office. We think of this as cynical and indeed, it is, but we forget that the kind of earnestness we associate with "faith" was a Christian innovation, one reason Christianity de-emphasized most formal rituals. It was about emotion, not system, and I suppose, for both it and Islam, the reason they were so successful was precisely their detachability from nationhood. Even Islam tying itself so strongly to Arabic didn't change that--all things were equal for a long time, because till the Reformation, Catholicism had a similar tie to Latin, if the fact that vernacular translation of the Bible was a heresy is anything to go by. And they both furthered their religions' reach by conquest, but also by attaching themselves to more than one nation at a time.