Word: josiah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Josiah, too, driven by a zero-sum worldview in which the worshippers of gods other than Yahweh looked like enemies...
Then, in 640 B.C.E. came an intense Israelite King named Josiah who would lend brutal support to the monolatrist cause and push Israel closer to monotheism. He took the figure of Asherah out of the Temple and "beat it to dust." The vessels for Baal didn't fare well either...
...long as polytheism reigned, there were lots of those prophets. At one point, Israel contained "400 prophets of Asherah" and "450 prophets of Baal," the Bible reports darkly. Josiah's cleansing of the Temple was good strategy in a zero-sum game: the less influence these prophets had, the more...
...Josiah was probably a monolatrist, not a monotheist. But within a few decades of his death, true monotheism would finally emerge. In 586 B.C.E., Israelite élites were exiled to Babylon after conquest by the neo-Babylonian Empire. In passages from Isaiah that are thought to have been written during the exile, Yahweh says unequivocally, "Besides me there is no god." Does this extreme intolerance of other gods - the denial of their very existence - flow from a zero-sum view of Israel's environs...
...hold even higher hopes for the ability of this year’s graduating class to pause, reflect, and consider the world around us. The great, albeit fictional, President Josiah Bartlet once described his job saying, “Every once in a while there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong…other than that, there aren’t very many un-nuanced moments in leading a country….” It is a testament to our education that we do understand nuance, embrace complexity, and savor intellectual challenge...