The Search for Monotheism in the Ancient World
As we look back on Early Civilizations and highlight every contribution they have significantly passed on to us, there is one thing that vividly stands out and has had the most lasting impact: religion. In the beginning, the thought of an omniscient, all-powerful God that created life and controlled the universe was irregular and not believable to people. The reason for this pessimism was because the belief in one God could not explain why natural disasters regularly occurred. People did not understand how an omnipotent God could let catastrophic events and terrible occurrences exist, leading them to conclude that a number of gods controlled certain sectors of the globe. They also could not understand why the good suffered and bad prospered. Polytheism, the belief in more than one God, nourished what people wanted to believe and it was the primary form of religion for many years. But more importantly, polytheism provided explanations of the fundamentals for understanding religion during the fourth millennium B.C. In this paper, I will compare and contrast the Enuma Elish, Genesis, and Hymns to the Sun and Nile. Each documentation will differ in belief and context because of each culture's concept, locale and source o
Much Hebrew religion modeled itself from Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature. It may have taken the will of one man to converge (Abraham), but the Hebrew civilization was the first civilization to accept and learn faith in one God. "Many of the themes, narrative detail, and styles of writing in the Hebrew Bible derive from earlier cultures". Similar to the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians wanted change but failed to achieve it due to overpowering dictatorship. The Mesopotamians faced the same problem of acceptance when they laid the groundwork for all future cultures to come. The Hebrew God for were first time showed compassion and ethics that was unparallel to any other gods. The Egyptians believed that death was continuation of live on earth but much more pleasant. The "Egyptian Hymns to the Nile and Sun" are religious doctrines that demonstrated Egyptian ethnicity and values. The religious epic of the New Year's Festival that defined their cultural origins was Enuma Elish. Even though there were many similarities, Egyptians differed the Mesopotamians because they did not want change whereas the Mesopotamians could not accept change because there were too many questions left unexplained for them. Sacrifices and obedience were usually the key duties expected of man by the gods in the ancient world until the development of a more sophisticated religious view. The Hebrew civilization differed from the prior two in size, time and technology.
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