Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??
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It's because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.
That might be a bit oversimplified, but that's really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.
the only "um akshually" I would even bother adding to this is that the Torah / Pentateuch is just the first five books of the Tanakh, which is the best / closest approximation of books that later became the Christian old testament. The Tanakh also includes the Prophets (Nevi'im), and the Writings (Ketuvim). There's also a few books in there that the council of Nicaea (the council of og old Catholic dudes who decided which books were true or not) chose not to include. Also relevant is the Septuagint which was the first translation from Hebrew into a mainstream language (which at the time was Koine Greek) which is relevant because that specific translation has had a profound effect on translations since, which really hammers in that concept of "a translation of a translation of a translation of-"
Yeahhhh... I took a class on the history of the Bible, but that was about a decade ago, so I'm spotty on some of the details. Thanks for fleshing it out, though - I knew my take was probably missing something!
I've been getting back into Christianity lately for a variety of reasons but I've also been doing a lot of research into the history and philosophy and whatnot and reconciling:
that outer sphere of what all these different people over the centuries have written and decided to include or exclude from their various compilations and what motivated them morally or especially politically to do so
vs
the inner sphere of my own lived experience with what does and does not make the world a better place and what motivations exist in the modern day to practice or interpret those centuries of texts in one way or another
and honestly it's actually been really interesting from an academic perspective as well. It's a fascinating combination of history, language, culture, and even what influences it's had on the sciences over time like I recently wound up learning some stuff about early geometry and the ways metaphysical interpretation of mathmetical concepts have affected the architecture of churches.
and that actually led me to creating this gif of how Metatron's Cube is constructed using basic geometric concepts with a compass and straightedge. The animated circles were specifically programmed in FMS logo it was a really fun way to spend my weekend.
I was reading a scholar's book and one of her central themes was that there are clearly two gods in the Bible. It was really dry reading, couldn't finish.
Some argue that there are even more! I'm definitely not an expert on this one, but I remember something about Yahweh being the god of some town or village that then somehow got absorbed into the old testament god when tribes and traditions consolidated, and then new testament god is just a completely different animal. I'm probably getting something wrong, so don't quote me.
You might find my top level comment on this post interesting.
Aw fuck yeah, that's what I like to see. Thanks for writing that up friend. 👊
Seems clear early Jews believed in multiple gods. There's more than a couple passages in the Old Testament talking about gods, plural. I would think singular vs. plural would make the translations, and even if you changed the passage to singular god, it wouldn't make sense or need to be stated.
"You shall have no other gods before me.", comes to mind.