BLOOD MOON

Thank you for the very in-depth response, raygun. Very interesting stuff. I’m still a little confused, but that’s pretty normal for me.

So there is actually an ancient arab god named “Allah”, very close to the arab word for “god”. The followers of this god are/were pagan but monotheistic. When you say both words in a hurry they sound the same. Somewhere along the line the arab speaking Christians and Jews started using the word Allah, which means “God” to them, not the name of the pagan arab god. Who started using “Allah” to mean the term “God” first? I thought the Muslims claim they worship the God of Abraham? What do the arab speaking Jews and Christians say the Muslems worship (however incorrectly or not)?

Hmm... so would it be analgous to there actually being a pagan German god called something close to “gott”?

Freegards

The Age of Jahiliyah is a term used extensively in Muslim Arab terminology intimating “the time of ignorance”; i.e., ignorance of a revealed book, and hence the revelation of the unity and oneness of God. Unlike the South Arabians who were a more urban group, the North Arabians of Najd and Al Hijaz, were mostly nomadic. Aside from the indigenous tribes who followed the traditions of the Jews and the Christians, there were the Sabeans and the ‘Hanifs’ (believers in the One and Only God of Abraham and Ishmael; these latter must have been off-shoots from either the ‘Jews’ or the Christians or both).

The northern populations of Arabia developed no ancient culture of their own. They had no system of writing and the only information about them comes from oral traditions, proverbs, legends and mostly poems that were orally transmitted down the decades. Most of these were later committed to writing two to three hundred years after the events that they were supposed to represent (822/922 CE).

During Al Jahiliyah, all Arab tribes throughout Al Jazeerah (The Peninsula) continually fought each other for either acquisition of (or access to) water resources, blood feuds and supremacy (or some combination thereof). Each individual Arab was known and identified by the name of the tribe to which he belonged. There was no sense of unity or nationalism. Each tribe was a separate and independent entity, with different dialects and religious beliefs and had no feeling of affinity or loyalty to any other except in terms of mutually beneficial and convenient alliances. The sense of the ‘Umma al Arabia’, the nation and people of Arabia, was achieved only after all of Arabia was subjugated and united under Muhammad.

In general, the pagan Arabs – the majority in Arabia – had a very primitive and simple astral and animistic religion of at least 360 gods and goddesses. Among the gods of the pagan Arabs, Allah was one of the most important. In Mecca, Allah was the principal though not the only deity. He had three daughters: Al Lat (Crescent); Al Uzzah (Venus) and Al Manah (Fate) (53:19/20). Besides the Ka’ba of Mecca, caves, trees, waterholes, wells, etc., were also venerated especially in the bleak, arid and desolate land the Jazeerah is composed of. There were other ‘holy’ sites also called Ka’ba besides the one in Mecca, such as the ones in Petra, Sana’ and Najran.

Although the sun was worshiped, it did not hold the same level of importance as the moon. Moon worship inherently lends itself to a nomadic and pastoral society, whereas Sun worship is invariably associated with an agricultural one. This would be obvious to anybody who's experienced the scorching furnace heat of the Arabian Desert; the Sun actually is an enemy to the nomads depriving them of pasture, shade and water. On the other hand, the moon is their friend and ally providing them with light, coolness of the night, dew and shade; and this is reflected in its greater importance as a deity for them.

Pagan Arabs built no temples or special structures for their gods. They developed no elaborate mythology, no structured theology and no cosmogony comparable to that of any of their neighbours. The pagan Ka’ba was a special but very simple cube-like building that housed a fallen black meteorite, which was venerated as a fetish. Because of its holiness, the area surrounding it was pronounced prohibited/sacred (Haram). Even before ‘Islam’, it was an object of annual pilgrimage and sacrifice.

Most of the ‘holy’ places of their other divinities were trees, wells, caves or fallen meteors. The pagan Arabs made sacrifices – both human and animal – to ‘Venus’ (Al Uzzah) and it is recorded that Muhammad participated in giving sacrifices to this goddess as a young man. The Bedouins also believed that the desert was full of living creatures/spirits called Jinn whose purpose was to blight their lives with mischief and difficulties. The nomadic Arabs buried their dead while on the move (instead of special final resting-places, i.e., cemetaries). As such no special reverence was held for the dead nor any concept of an afterlife, resurrection, a day of judgement, heaven and hell were developed; all of these concepts were formally established with the advent of ‘Islam’.

Until Muhammad there was no Arab civilization to speak of. There was no central government, administrative personnel, documentation, permanent cities (other than Mecca and Medina), art, sculpture, temples and priesthood, army, etc. Neither did the Arabs of Mecca and Medina have any of these attributes; they left posterity no monuments or temples and no records of their achievements. They had absolutely nothing remotely resembling either the Byzantine or Persian civilizations. No national epic or dramatic literary work of first-class importance was ever developed by the Arabians. That was in unfavourable contrast to the contemporary Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians or the Egyptians of the time who had a much more advanced literary, written and oral traditions; the Arabs were the least literate among all the peoples of the Middle East. Their greatest legacy was the Arabic language.

The Bedouins’ love of poetry was their only cultural asset and legacy. Their poets were held with great esteem and were extremely influential because of their mastery of the spoken word. They acted as the historians, propagandists and spokesmen for their tribes; they were in fact the equivalent of the modern news media reporters. Although poetry reigned supreme among the Arabs of Al Hijaz and Al Najd (north-western and northern Arabia), prose was not well represented in the Jahiliyah literature since no system of writing had yet been fully developed and no trustworthy record of any Arabic literature existed prior to the Quran.

Islamic apologists claim that the pagan Arabs referred to ALLAH as the One True God of Abraham and Ishmael, and the Lord of the Ka`aba. While the first part MAY have been true in certain cases, I believe Allah was more often than not the God of gods to the pagan Arabs (and Lord of the Ka'aba intimated presiding above the other 359 deities). Islamic apologists also claim that the pagan religion was originally pure monotheistic in nature (devotion wholly to Allah), and that the pagan Arabs, however, tainted this simple monotheistic religion by resorting to worship of idols as intercessors to Allah. It is claimed the pagans would stand by an idol and, using it as an intercessor, worship Allâh through the idol. I'm skeptical. I believe the pagan Arabs were polytheistic in the full sense of term, i.e., all 360+ idols represented actual entities, albeit wholly subservient to Allah.

Allâh, the paramount deity of pagan Arabia, was the target of worship in varying degrees of intensity from the southernmost tip of Arabia to the Mediterranean. To the Babylonians he was "Il" (god); to the Canaanites, and later the Israelites, he was "El'; the South Arabians worshipped him as "Ilah," and the Bedouins as "al-Ilah" (the deity).

Just like in Greek and Roman mythology, the pagan Arabic pantheon was organized somewhat in a heirarchy and heading that heirarchy was the supreme deity akin to Jupiter or Zeus. This deity went by various names, e.g., Sin, Hubul, Ilumquh, Al-ilah, Allah. No doubt the etymology of the latter term was al-ilah elided. For the pagan Arabs, Allah was the God of gods. When Muhammad came along, he made all that go away, replacing even the pagan Allah with the Allah of Islam. Now the connotation of the elided word Allah becoming The God from a purely modern monotheisic perspective (the One True God of Abraham and Ishmael, and the Lord of the Ka`aba). However, at this time Allah no longer presided over 359 other deities; his "Lordship" at Ka'aba now being analagous to that of the God of Israel indwelling the Temple at Jerusalem.

It must be understood, that the Arabic language didn't have a formal alphabet or script until the Quran was committed to paper almost 200 years after Muhammad's death. c. Rabin makes reference to a tri-lingual script found in Zebed of Northern Arabia. But as I've explained, those tribes had no writing whatsoever and each tribe throughout Arabia utilized a particular term in accordance to the specific dialect spoken by their tribe. That the Arabs had a definitive concept of God and god is without any doubt. Whether the Christian or primitive-monotheist pagan Arabs spoke the unelided al-ilah, or the elided Allah, or some other Semetic, Syriac, Coptic, Maronite, Aramaic, etc., variant (most likely used interchangeably), the connotations being understood probably entirely dependent upon the context within which a particular word was used.

Thanks for your excellent posts. However, I’d like to point out that the Coptic people and language are not Semitic, as your posts could be taken to imply. Whatever word Coptic Christians used for God in the pre-Islamic days, it is unlikely it had any relationship to Allah, unless imported from the related Hebrew or Aramaic languages.

The Coptic language, which is now used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church, is the descendant of ancient Egyptian. The Copts themselves are the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who have not converted over the centuries to Islam. Those who converted quickly assimilated into the general Egyptian populaiton and now consider themselves Arabs.

It is probable the present-day Egyptian population as a whole is genetically descended more from the ancient non-Semetic Egyptians than from invaders from the Arabian Peninsula, ethnic Arabs. To the extent this may be relevant.

I found some really interesting stuff on "biblebelievers.org.au".

Apparently ... "Jesus was not a Jew ... a claim which then leads to "holocaust denial".

There's also some paranoid anti-Catholic stuff there.

When a site is full of crap on some topics ... I have trouble trusting it on other topics.

YMMV.

Thanks for the link.

The Khazar story of the Turkic origin of the Ashkenazim has been pretty thoroughly disproven by modern DNA analysis.

The Jews of today are obviously not unmixed descendants of the Jews of the time of Jesus, but they are largely descended from them, and are probably less mixed than most other ethnic groups.

I especially liked the idea that the Khazars have been censored out of history by a Jewish conspiracy, as if today’s schools spend a great deal of time discussing the roughly contemporaneous Rus, Ghuz, Petchenegs, Magyars, Bulgars, Sassanids, etc.

Right, but there was some contention concerning what word Christian Arabs were using until Al Jahiliyah ended. Its plausible that some Coptic missionaries emigrated to Arabia and as a result one or more tribes converted to Coptic Christianity. Those Arabs would be used to referring to God as Allah (or non-elided Al-ilah as the case may be). And even so the Copts themselves don't speak Semitic, the converts certainly would be (Arabic being very similar to Aramaic). Moreover, the converts to Coptic within any Arab tribe wouldn't suddenly begin speaking Coptic just because they converted; they're going to continue speaking their native tongue. My thinking is that in such cases, they're going to continue to referr to God using what ever Arabic terms for God they're most familiar with. The question is, and I don't have a clue, what are the Arabiic forms of the personal names of God, i.e., the Tetragramaton and YeHowah. Quite frankly I believe that they'd use some form of the original Semitic words in that they don't exist whatsoever in ANY Arabic dialect. The issue of how to write those words in Arabic script is entirely moot, because they were wholly illiterate until about 800 AD and by then Al Jazeera had been conquered by the sword. It would be interesting how modern Arab Christians address those issues though.

Again, thank you for taking time to write a very interesting post to FR!

Freegards

Roger that.