(This is my first attempt at doing something like this. So…here we go. If it works then I can do more like it focusing on other – more specific – related themes.)
Let’s start by taking a walk through the timeline together. In this video, I try to show the “big picture” so we can see exactly where the bible fits into the timeline of world history.

The History of Religious Thought

(Religious concepts as they develop through history, and why they are important)

Well, here is a beginning.  It is an overview , a global perspective, as it were, of the history of religious thought.  It is necessarily a work in progress.  It is not meant to be a definitive “end-all-be-all” of, well…anything. It is just a way for us to organize our thoughts and have that as a starting point.

There are a lot of basic religious beliefs that can be found in the Bible.  It would be a mistake, of course, to think that we can ONLY find them in the Bible.  Here is a list (not exhaustive, by any means) of basic religious concepts that we can find in the Bible, but that have their origins elsewhere:

Afterlife

Ritual

Ritual Worship

Deity

Dedicated Sacred Space

Ritual Initiation

Law as Divine

The bible starts to be written around 1000 – 950 BCE. So, there is an historical “build up” to that point. Our goal is to understand the role that history has in helping us understand the bible as we read it. 

We start with reminding ourselves of the age of the planet that we live on.  That may seem like a strange place to start, but, actually, I think it is just the right place to start. Modern religions – and, then, the members of them – generally have a feeling that either theirs is the only legitimate religion (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) or that their religion has been around forever. In point of fact, no religion has been around forever. It is healthy to remind ourselves of the big picture before we arrogantly place ourselves into that picture.

The planet earth has been around for about 4.5 (or so) Billion years.   Humans, as the sapient bipedal species that we think of as “humans,” have only been around for about 4.5 million years. The story of humans and our observable development of religious sensibility doesn’t start  until around 200,000 BCE.  (“Observable. . .” This is a reference to Archaeological data: observable = “hands on” evidence that we have of socio-anthropological development.)

Circa 200,000 BCE We have ritual burial (indicating a belief in afterlife).

Circa 60,000 BCE We see the pantheistic deification of nature (cave bear cult). During this time there develops an identification with the natural world in which all things are, in a sense, divine.  The people participate in that – participating in divinity – in a cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Chief Seattle, in 1852, described this identification with the natural world perfectly:

Circa 18,000 BCE we have the great temple caves.  Think of the Caves of Lascaux in France, used for initiation rituals.  The purpose of the caves is similar to the purpose of cathedrals – to leave the everyday world and enter into the realm of the mystical – where all around you are surrounded by pictures and images to remind you that you are in a different place both physically and psychologically.  It is in this place that the religions come alive in the context of ritual. Other examples of early cave art exist, but Lascaux, I think, remains the most famous example.

Circa 7,000  BCE we perfect agriculture.  In embracing farming and the domestication of animals we move away from nomadic hunting and gathering to settling down.  This also leads to many professions that were not possible to focus on before.  The unifying factor is religion and the development of a professional priesthood. 

Nothing had so great an impact on world cultures as the development of farming. The transition from a tribal-nomadic way of life to an agrarian one will not only change how we relate to the world around us, but irrevocably change our perception, and our relationship to, the divine.  Like Chief Settle describes in the video above, in a tribal-nomadic/hunter-gatherer culture the theological view is almost always pantheistic. All things are divine; every bird, bee, flower and tree – and you and me.  The world was seen as an interwoven divine system. Each and every thing in the natural world was divine (not a god) and thus was worthy of our respect and represented an interdependent and symbiotic relational dynamic. 

As we transition to agrarian culture, however, our views change.  We begin to master the earth. We do not gather food, we grow the food.  We no longer move around to hunt the herd, we domesticate the herd. Hunting and gathering will never die out, obviously, but the development of farming and the domestication of animals sets us into a certain theological trajectory that no culture will ever be able to fully return to.  Humans became, in a way that we had not before, like gods caring for the earth and producing food.  Humans could not control the weather, or the season, or the tide.  And we became dependent on weather in a way we had never been.  In a tribal-nomadic/hunter-gatherer culture, the rain was something that made you wet. In an agrarian culture, if there is no rain, we die.  Our attitude to the elements is bound to change.

May it Be On Earth as it is in Heaven

And as agrarianism develops, we settle down into small farming villages, which develop into towns, which develop into cities, which develop into city-states. We see the development of government and law, professions (the professional priesthood being one of them) and pantheons.

You can almost always tell what a culture believes about the divine, and their relationship to it, by how they see themselves as a culture.  The societal caste system develops concurrently with city state development. As the name implies, the caste system represents a whole societal system of immovable castes. The idea is that if we are to have order in the chaos of our lives, then we must pattern ourselves on the divine caste. We should mirror the divine caste. Since there is one supreme god who orders the heavens, then we have one king who orders the earth.  This person will have supreme political power and thus, by virtue of the power given to him by the gods, will be considered divine himself (a king, or an emperor, or a Pharaoh, etc.)  He is the top of the caste system pyramid of power.  Below him are the priests, followed by the nobles, followed by the merchant caste, and finally followed by the peasant caste.

It is a reflexive sociological construct based on a pantheitic (religion based on a pantheon) theological belief. 

Some more Dates

Circa 3500 BCE city-state civilization, for the first time in world history, reaches an apex in Mesopotamia.

Circa 3200 BCE writing develops in Mesopotamia 

Circa 2350 BCE Sargon the Great becomes an important heroic figure in Mesopotamia.  Part of the story of Sargon (particularly the infancy narrative) will serve as a pattern for the infancy narrative of the Moses story in the Exodus epic.  Likewise, the Moses story will serve as a pattern for the Jesus story in the Gospel of Matthew.

Circa 2050 BCE The code of Ur-Nammu becomes the first written law code

Circa 1750 BCE Hammurabi receives the law from the sun god Shamash.  The Code of Hammurabi will be used as a pattern for the Law of Moses (the 613 Mosaic Laws.)

Circa 1000 BCE Hebrew becomes a written language (the bible starts to be written.)