thread: 2007-01-04 : Self-identification vs. Membership
On 2007-01-10, NinJ wrote:
Tim, you can infer a Monist perspective from the arc described by the different perspectives on God across the story in the Tanakh.
God starts as a dude in the second Creation story (the one with Adam and Chavah). He "walks" around the Garden, has conversations, does stuff. Midrashim aside, it's pretty clear that God is one of the Elohim, all the gods.
In the course of the story, God becomes increasingly abstract: a voice in dreams, the burning bush. God lives on Sinai, then in the Ark. God is no longer a person, but a force. Still, God is the Lord of the Israelites; they carry the Ark around into battle so that He can see what's going on and throw thunderbolts.
Eventually, God becomes Master of All Creation (and, naturally, has always been so). By the latter parts of the Tanakh, God is an entirely abstract entity. At this point, you can see the God mentioned in the first creation story, "At the beginning of creating the Heaven and Earth" where there's "Chaos and void" and God is only "ruach" (wind, breath, spirit). This story's tacked on by the Priestly writer, and, as I understand it, almost certainly a much later addition to the canon.
So what you can infer from this is an ever-expanding view of God: originally the home god of a clan, eventually God of the Universe. Originally, a single, personal entity, eventually a vast and incomprehensible one suffusing all creation.
Most Jewish mystical traditions (all of which have grown up since the canonization, whatever they might believe) hold that God is not [i]inside[/i] the Universe, but bigger even than that. I consider that to be a silly thought; it means that the Universe is just bigger than we thought by exactly one God. (...which may make the Universe infinite. I dunno. This gets pretty uselessly abstract at this point) The point is that God becomes less and less of a localized entity and is more and more all-knowing and all-making.
