How The Desert Metaphor Shaped Monotheism
God from the heat of the inhospitable desert
Monotheism arose in the Middle East, in ancient Egypt (under Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE), Iran (Zoroastrianism), Canaan (Judaism, which spread via Christianity), and Arabia (Islam).
Zoroastrianism and Christianity aren’t purely monotheistic: the former religion envisions a process by which a single God will reign after an apocalyptic triumph of good over evil, and Christianity is only nominally monotheistic, not substantially so since Christians divide God into three divine persons and Catholics add a pantheon of sanctified saints.
Monotheism arises as a reform of polytheism, which speaks to one major influence on this kind of religion: the projection of human preoccupations onto the environment. Polytheism projects social relationships onto the forces of nature, dividing up the powers of the universe into social classes as though nature were ruled by a kingdom of higher and lesser gods.
The Mesopotamian gods, for example, “had human or humanlike forms, were male or female, engaged in intercourse, and reacted to stimuli with both reason and emotion. Being similar to humans, they were considered to be unpredictable and oftentimes capricious. Their need for food and drink, housing, and care mirrored that of humans.”…
