Do Christians And Muslims Worship The Same God? - NPR Story

a reply to: Sigismundus

Clear as mud?

Very good post, dont hold your breath waiting for a response. The diehards wont bother with scholarship

a reply to: CoBaZ

which if you were looking at it from the Line of Ishmael it is kinda the Adopted Retarded Nephew, they really do not belong to the original covenant but it is like having to take care of that Adopted Retarded Nephew.

You forgot to mention that turncoat Saul/Paul of Tarsus - allowing the uncircumcised rif raff gentile to magically become spiritually circumcised christians; much to the chagrin of James.

It literally rock, paper, scissors.

Like the time, I made the hardest decision in my life...

I picked Charmander.

a reply to: DeathSlayer

evil spirit called "spirit of religion"

The trinity concept was non-biblical; what spirit are you going to scapegoat with that?

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
Muslims will say that they do worship the same God, Christians will say they don't. The Muslims would be right and the Christians would be wrong in this case. Both worship the God of Abraham, both descended from Judaism.

Not likely. If you examine the Torah you will find very little about an afterlife, Jews are rewarded this life, as a master race, being Gods own people. In Christianity the soul’s eternal condition is judged by our thoughts, words, and deeds. So instead of following the Torah commandments to kill people found guilty of adultery, homosexuality or breaking the Sabbath, Christianity teaches forgiveness. The religions seem as different as black and white, good and evil.

The wise men that found baby Jesus were Magi that followed the Zoroaster religion or a form of it that included astrology. The Prophet Zoroaster told that three saviors would be born from virgins so the magi used astrology to locate the first birth. Christianity has far more in common with Zoroastrianism which has been compared here

Neither Christians or Jews or Muslims worship God

They worship their own desires


I don’t even know where the concept came from since it’s not in the Quran or Bible to worship God


Look for the word worship in either book you wont find it

Its a bogus concept

a reply to: Sigismundus

originally posted by: Sigismundus
Muslims worship for their supreme god a deity named Allah - the name derives from an originally pagan Moon & Storm god (married to the goddess Allat) in local Arabic mythology and seems to have gone originally by the name of Hub'allah - but the name Allah has been also used by Arab Christians since pre-Islamic times to refer to the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - and also used by Bábists, Bahá'ís, Indonesian and Maltese Christians.

Allat was supposed to have been one of the three daughters of Allah, not his wife. Also, there was never any deity called Hub'allah, there was Hubal, who was possibly a warrior god quite distinct from Allah- known because one of the very well documented battles between Muhammad and the pagans of Mecca involved a sort of God-diss battle ("Hubal would totally help us beat all your asses" "No, Allah is here to help us, Hubal can do nothing", etc.).

originally posted by: Sigismundus
The Qur'an states: "the reality of Allah, his inscrutable Mystery, and all of his various names and his works on behalf of his creatures..." leaving the gate open to identify other Arabic gods' names with Allah.

The quran doesn't appear to state anything like that. It seems that quote came from the Encyclopædia Britannica Page for Allah, so it isn't in the Quran.

So yeah, clear as mud was an understatement .

Babloyi

You wrote: QUOTE "Allat was supposed to have been one of the three daughters of Allah, not his wife. Also, there was never any deity called Hub'allah, there was Hubal, who was possibly a warrior god quite distinct from Allah- known because one of the very well documented battles between Muhammad and the pagans of Mecca..." etc.


Actually (and confusingly) the moon (and warrior) god Hubal was written in various ways in antiquity as e.g. Hub'Al or Hub Allah, or Hu' Baal referring to the moon god of the Arabians at Mecca where an image of him was worshipped at the Kaaba - the meaning of Hubal or Hubala is unknown but could be related to the Aramaic word Hubah meaning 'Spirit'.

It is possible that the title Allah could be a simple contraction of Al-Ila 'the god' without any direct linguistic reference to Hubal(a) - but the true etymology for Allah and for Hubal(a) is not known.

One imagines that the name 'Allah' is more of a title (like Eloah in the poetic sections to the book of the Hebrew Job) not a proper name like YHWH or Sin or Marduk etc.

The various other titles/names for Allah is mentioned of course in the Sunnah but also in the Qur'an itself

(see the suras "Al-A'raf" (7:180), "Al-Isra" (17:110), "Ta-Ha" (20:8) and "Al-Hashr" (59:24) and also you can read the comments of Abdullah Saeed, The Qur'an: An Introduction, pg. 63. London: Routledge, 2008. ISBN 9781134102945) regarding this practice of circumlocution.

According to the hadith (Islamic oral tradition) there is a special set of 99 names for Allah, but no full list of them, thus the exact enumeration of them is not agreed upon, and the names of Allah (as adjectives, word constructs, or otherwise) exceed a total of 99 in the Quran and Sunnah.

Allat was said to be the wife of Hubal(a) as a moon goddess along with sister goddesses al-ʿUzza and Manat, the three goddesses of pre-Islamic Arabia, and are also listed in the Qur'an.

FYI I never meant to suggest that Allat was the wife of Allah, so if you took it that way, my post really was as clear as mud after all...

a reply to: Sigismundus

originally posted by: Sigismundus
Actually (and confusingly) the moon (and warrior) god Hubal was written in various ways in antiquity as e.g. Hub'Al or Hub Allah, or Hu' Baal referring to the moon god of the Arabians at Mecca where an image of him was worshipped at the Kaaba - the meaning of Hubal or Hubala is unknown but could be related to the Aramaic word Hubah meaning 'Spirit'.

Really? I thought the entire point was that it was a very obscure and unknown deity that was only known due to muslim histories and within Arabia, except for a some nabatean inscriptions to a deity named h-b-l (same way it is written in Arabia). But yeah, if one attempted an aramaic derivation of the name, "spirit" would be the only one that would make sense.

originally posted by: Sigismundus
It is possible that the title Allah could be a simple contraction of Al-Ila 'the god' without any direct linguistic reference to Hubal(a) - but the true etymology for Allah and for Hubal(a) is not known.

Like I said, the etymology of Hubal is perhaps not known (unless one accepted the Aramaic one), but the etymology of "Allah" is pretty standard and universally accepted. Even Strong's Concordance and the Blue Letter Bible mention it as having the same root as El/Elah.

originally posted by: Sigismundus
The various other titles/names for Allah is mentioned of course in the Sunnah but also in the Qur'an itself

Oh sure, of course, no doubt there are many references to the 99 names of Allah, I was just pointing out that the verse where you quoted "The Quran states that...", doesn't exist.

originally posted by: Sigismundus
Allat was said to be the wife of Hubal(a) as a moon goddess along with sister goddesses al-ʿUzza and Manat, the three goddesses of pre-Islamic Arabia, and are also listed in the Qur'an.

I guess there WAS confusion, but even this seems odd to me. I can find no evidence in any scholarship at all (and I mean that quite literally) for Allat being the wife of Hubal. Some sources suggest she is the MOTHER of Hubal, but I think most scholarship of today discards this 19th century view (born of a time when archaeologists and historians were trying to fit everything into the Sun-Moon-Star trinity template which has subsequently been proven to not be as universal as previously thought). Out of curiousity, where did you learn this?

a reply to: babloyi

Babloyi

You wrote QUOTE :

"I guess there WAS confusion, but even this seems odd to me. I can find no evidence in any scholarship at all (and I mean that quite literally) for Allat being the wife of Hubal. Some sources suggest she is the MOTHER of Hubal, but I think most scholarship of today discards this 19th century view (born of a time when archaeologists and historians were trying to fit everything into the Sun-Moon-Star trinity template which has subsequently been proven to not be as universal as previously thought). Out of curiousity, where did you learn this?..."

UNQUOTE

Talk about convoluted.

The more one delves into Meccan and Arabian Henotheism (worship of one supreme clan-god which stands above the worship of lesser gods in a Theogony) the more we seem to be uncovering Matryoshki (Russian Nesting Dolls) and in the process, any exact relationship between Allah and Allat quickly gets muddled.

The names of the gods in Arabia have a long history and went through many grammatical transformations - and incremental changes in phonics accrued gradually and added up to significant changes over time.

J.B. Pritchard in ANET (Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 1969) said that in Nabataean inscriptions we repeatedly find the name of a chief local clan-god accompanied by the title 'Alaha' ('the God').

Wellhausen at the turn of the 20th century stated that Arabs (even before the rise of Islam) used to add the epithet Al-ilah (Allah?) to any local tribal god that happened to be their chief clan-deity, in other words, each tribal clan-god went by the added title 'the God' even though the god himself may have gone by other name(s) or titles. For example with Hubal(a), since 'hubah' means 'spirit' in Aramaic, it might make some etymological sense that we see Hub-al-ilah in some inscriptions which could mean then 'the spirit-god') where 'al-ilah' is affixed to the name of the god. But this is more educated guesswork to me.

Sometimes, Wellhausen argues, Arabs in later stages of their theological history may have also applied the epithet "allah" to a number of different deities as a kind of proper name. (To-day we may speak of 'President Barack Obama' simply as 'The President' and yet centuries from now it might get confusing for future historians when people leave out the proper name and they simply read 'the President' being referred-to).

If Allah ('the God') is masculine, the feminine form Al-ilat (Allat) will produce 'the Goddess', so whenever there is a pairing of say the moon god with a sun goddess (in Arabia like preGermanic cults, the moon god was typically male whereas the sun-goddess was usually female) you have a kind of Henotheistic heads of the family (in pre-Islamic times at any rate).
You are correct that the 19th century looked a bit too hard for theophoric Triads in these Arabian Theogonies - so the exact relationship between 'Allah' and 'Allat' (the feminine of 'Allah') and even 'Hub'allah' becomes more than a little confused. In some instances Allat is the goddess mother of Hubal(a) while others show that Allat being the daughter of Allah (not wife) - but remember that Arabian gods/goddesses were easy to syncretise -

In Arabia generally any moon god/goddess was considered the high chief clan-god for a particular region. Even YHWH was supposed to have started his career as the moon-god of Midian (where Moses gained his conversion), and in some Hebrew writings (e.g. the poetical sections to the book of Job for example chapters 3-40) the name YHWH does not appear at all, but the writer chose to use the Elamite high god Eloah - which is thought to be cognate with Al-ilah (Allah?).

Even more confusedly, it is said that Muhammed himself stated that Allat, Uzza and Manat were pseudonyms for male angels (!) worshipped by his Meccan forebearers but we know that these goddesses were worshipped as female deities centuries before his time...and with this kind of tiresome obfuscation and downright misrepresentation on the part of the founders of Islam of pre-Islamic theogonies (to say nothing of the deliberate and maliciously wanton destruction of pre-Islamic 'pagan' artifacts on the part of ISIS in our own century) no wonder why so many scholars have thrown their hands up in frustrated disgust when trying to reconstruct the pre-Islamic Weltanschauungen...

Christians and Muslims and Jews don't worship God they worship their own desires.

Worship is a bogus concept anyway.

For how can you worship something you don’t even know?

The best they do is copy sacred habits and hope for some grace

Th e Quran itself says to new believers


To knock off saying you’re a believer, just say you’re a submitting one, since faith has not entered your heart

originally posted by: aorAki
I thought Judaism was all about the profits?

LOL...okay, you got me there

a reply to: Sigismundus
Convoluted indeed!

originally posted by: Sigismundus
J.B. Pritchard in ANET (Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 1969) said that in Nabataean inscriptions we repeatedly find the name of a chief local clan-god accompanied by the title 'Alaha' ('the God').

But 'Alaha' literally just means "God", not "the God".

originally posted by: Sigismundus
For example with Hubal(a), since 'hubah' means 'spirit' in Aramaic

Actually, 'spirit' in Aramaic would be 'hu/ru', not 'hubah'. IF one wanted to be create a conspiracy theory idea of the origin of the name 'Hubal', the closest one could get would be "hu" "Baal", but even that is a stretch, because "Baal" is spelt with an ayin, while written records of Hubal's name have it simply as h-b-l.
Again, I'm not a fan of much of Wellhausen's conjectures, because they all seem to be built off a broken 19th century understanding of semitic religions, but if there are some actual inscriptions that prove his point, I'd love to know about them. The point is that while there seems to be an inordinate amount of historical conjecturing attempting to conflate the entities that are "Allah" "Hubal" and in some cases "Baal", they have always been very distinct entities, and there is literature contemporary to Muhammad's time (and earlier) and identifies them separately and uniquely.

originally posted by: Sigismundus
If Allah ('the God') is masculine, the feminine form Al-ilat (Allat) will produce 'the Goddess'...

Again, that just seems like 19th century wishful sun-moon-star trinity stuff. The feminine form of 'ilah' would be 'ilahah'. The feminine form of "Al-ilah' would be "Al-ilahah" (although a contracted form paralleling 'Allah' doesn't seem to have ever been used).

originally posted by: Sigismundus
Even YHWH was supposed to have started his career as the moon-god of Midian (where Moses gained his conversion)

I thought YHWH was a warrior god (later extended power over the weather)?

originally posted by: Sigismundus
Even more confusedly, it is said that Muhammed himself stated that Allat, Uzza and Manat were pseudonyms for male angels (!) worshipped by his Meccan forebearers but we know that these goddesses were worshipped as female deities centuries before his time...and with this kind of tiresome obfuscation and downright misrepresentation on the part of the founders of Islam of pre-Islamic theogonies (to say nothing of the deliberate and maliciously wanton destruction of pre-Islamic 'pagan' artifacts on the part of ISIS in our own century) no wonder why so many scholars have thrown their hands up in frustrated disgust when trying to reconstruct the pre-Islamic Weltanschauungen...

Not sure how much blame you can place on Muhammad in this instance. The theory you're explaining is an interpretation by Francis Edward Peters (and a rather convoluted one, if you ask me), of certain Quranic verses. I don't see how a verse talking about the absurdity of God having 3 daughters and another about the pagans giving angels feminine names can be conflated into one statement saying that angels were transformed into worship of these 3 deities.

As you say, confusion (and convolution, I suppose ) abounds!

a reply to: babloyi

You wrote QUOTE: The feminine form of 'ilah' would be 'ilahah'. The feminine form of "Al-ilah' would be "Al-ilahah" (although a contracted form paralleling 'Allah' doesn't seem to have ever been used)...I thought YHWH was a warrior god (later extended power over the weather)? UNQUOTE

Grammatically we see the consort of the male Phoenecian god Ba'al ('Lord') spelled out as Ba'alat ('Lady') as in Ba'alat Gebal (not Ba'alah Gebal, i.e. the 'Lady of Byblos') in certain paired Ugaritic inscriptions so it would not be impossible to see Allah feminised to 'Allat' since there is a Levantine linguistic prcedence for it- (although we must not forget that there are 'believers' that claim that Allah is an indeclinable proper noun without plural or inflective grammatical possibilities...);

At any rate, the influence of Phoenecian and Syrian/Levantine gods in Arabia is outside the scope of this thread but we can certainly see clues of it everywhere in inscriptions from preIslamic times. Baal's sphere was the thunderstorm with life-giving rains, so that he was also a fertility-god figure.

As for YHWH (i.e. the Midianite clan-god Yahweh) it is interesting that the Hieroglyph displaying the phonogram of the crescent moon in ancient Egyptian is pronounced 'Yah' cf: = יהּ‎ which is a contracted form of the name YHWH we sometimes see in the Psalms (see Psalms 68:4 or the song in Exodus 15:2 for a couple of quick examples) - this would suggest some connexion with a moon cult (as is the Hebrew lunar calendar) and can also be seen as suffixes on verbs such as H-L-L (Hallelujah etc.)

The Hebrew word moon is "yareakh" יָרֵחַ which might be cognate with "Yah".

In Egypt, one of the earliest occurrences of Yahweh seems to be as a place-name ("land of Shasu of YHW") in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE) the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom see: Freedman, O'Connor & Ringgren 1986, p. 520."YHWH". from Botterweck, G.J.; Ringgren, H. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament.

Yahweh also seems to have taken over some of the syncretistic attributes of Ba'al as a storm and fertility god (see Psalm 29 in the Hebrew scriptures which originally seems to have been borrowed from a Baalite shrine which read: Habu Baal Benei Elim (Give to Ba'al, ye sons of the gods) and was adjusted to accommodate YHWH (interrupting the alliteration of the letter B = giving us : Habu YHWH Benei Elim = 'Give to YHWH ye sons of the gods') where the alliterative nature of the poem is ruined.

Yahweh as a god with warrior attributes is also well attested ('YHWH is a man of war' (Exod. 15:3) and his title YHWH Tsabaoth can be translated as Yahweh of Armies (or 'hosts' presumably either a literal or celestial army) see Psalms 44:9 where YHWH was expected to fight alongside the Israelites

The syncretism we see with the Canaanite local gods is explicit in Exodus 6:3 states

"And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by [the name of] El-Shaddai (almighty god) but by my name YHWH I was not ever known to them."

where YHWH is identified with the Canaanite god El-Shaddai.

Yahweh in fact may have been merged into the pantheon of EL - as head of the Canaanite pantheon (el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched beside the earthly armies of Israel), Dever, William G. (2005). Did God Have A Wife?: Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-2852-1.

Interestingly Eloah (found in the poetical sections of the book of Job chapter 3-40) is gramatically feminine but takes a masculine form of the verb (and Eloah [he] said) whereas the plural form (Elohim) is a masculine plural, probably to be understood as some kind of 'royal' (cf: 'We are not amused' of Queen Victoria) or a grandiose plural.

The Heb. Elohim seems to be an expanded form of the Northwest Semitic noun il (אֵל, el) and is cognate to the 'l-h-m found in Ugaritic, where it is used for the pantheon of Canaanite gods - i.e. the family of El, the creator god and chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon, in Biblical Aramaic ʼĔlāhā and later Syriac Alaha "God", and in Arabic ʾilāh "god, deity" (or Allah as " The [single] God").

The Quran apparently uses alīha as the plural of īlah for pagan gods and has used "Allahum" (O God! - plural) for the sole god (v."Allah"). The equivalent, in modern Arabic, of Elohim as meaning 'gods' would probably be Īlahīn (إلاهين), although from what I understand it is rarely used in Arabic.

Just a few more convolutions to ponder over....