re: #197 Lenin’s Mummy

More:

If we turn to Albright’s second
agenda item, “Moses and Monothe-
ism,” even less can be said. Albright
asserted, for instance, that:

The practical monotheism of
Moses and other early Israelite
religious leaders is again being
accepted (1964:294). Only one God … This is the view
of the entire Old Testament
(1964:99). The religion of Israel did not
change in essentials from Moses
to Hillel (1964:57).

Yet the overwhelming scholarly
consensus today is that Moses is a
mythical figure; that Yahwism was
highly syncretistic from the very beginning; and that true monotheism
developed only late in Israel’s his-tory, probably not until the Exile and Return (see the state-of-the-art stud-ies gathered in Miller, Hanson, and
McBride 1987)