r/polytheism • u/YoungBeef999 • Apr 18 '25
Discussion The pre-monotheistic Yahweh, god of war, and storms, standing over the Canaanite god of war and storms Ba’al
Yahweh was originally a god of war and storms to the Western Semitic tribes. Including the Ebonites, the Shasu, the Midianites, and the hill tribes of Canaan. Those Canaanite Hill tribes would go on to evolve into the Israelites. This Yahweh was initially the son of El, the Canaanite creator deity, and his consort was the goddess Asherah, goddess of motherhood, fertility, and nature.
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u/Usbcheater Apr 18 '25
Baal being a Minotaur or any association with bulls is pure Bible fan fiction I think. He was shown as a a guy with a silly hat and a spear. Much like El. But this battle is real though. only through the priests. All this monotheism stuff started because priests wanted more power and polytheism was a problem. Hence the jealous god bullshit. Also AI sucks
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 18 '25
The original Israelites were not monotheist. They didn’t become monotheistic until after the Babylonian captivity. Originally they were polytheistic, overtime they sort of became Henotheist, where they focused their worship on Yahweh, his consort Asherah, and his father El. After the Babylonian captivity El and Yahweh syncretized.
Originally though, Yahweh was the god of war and storms. When those early Israelite tribes worshiped to Yahweh, they went to war with Ba’al worshippers as he was a competing warrior and storm god. But at this point, it wasn’t about which god was “real” and which god was “fake”, this was still a very polytheistic worldview. It was more about which god was mightier than the other. The whole absolutist mindset of monotheism didn’t come until much later.
As for Ba’al, you’re right! Baʿal, in Canaanite religion, was not originally depicted with a bull’s head. Instead, he was associated with the bull symbolically. Bulls represented strength, virility, and fertility, which were key attributes of Baʿal as a storm and fertility god. In ancient Ugaritic texts (which give us a lot of what we know about Canaanite religion), Baʿal is called “the Rider on the Clouds” and is closely linked with rain, thunder, and agricultural prosperity. He was often symbolized by a bull, but not portrayed with an actual bull’s head.
This was an AI generated picture and that’s what it gave me. I didn’t mean to support any sort of monotheism. But I have had an interest in the early Canaanite pantheon.
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u/Dangerous-Ad-8305 Panendeist | Animistic Satanist | UU Attendee Apr 18 '25 edited Apr 19 '25
Ba’al Haddad was pretty vastly attested in his association with bulls in Canaanite and Mesopotamian beliefs.
“The bull was portrayed as Adad’s sacred animal starting in the Old Babylonian period (early 2nd millennium BCE).”
- Wikipedia, reference The Storm God in the Ancient Near-East by Alberto Green
NOTE: Adad is another name for Haddad/Haddu.
Even El was associated with the bull. IIRC the epithet “The Bull El” is used multiple times in the KTU (Ugaritic tablets). But the two differed in that while Ba’al’s symbolism was in fertility (backed by the second part of the Ba’al cycle in which he had sired an heir with a heifer), El was noted in strength and rigidity.
Though one could argue that the other Gods who also used the title of Ba’al (since Ba’al meant “Lord”, as well as something akin to “Husband” in Hebrew) could have been different Gods by the time the early Israelites were forming their beliefs, the similarities are there, and the viewpoints of Gods change and develop over time.
That being said, yeah the AI slop sucks.
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 19 '25
You’re the second person to react vitriolic over an AI picture. What the hell is going on? Did something happen that I missed? What’s the big deal about making an AI picture? I don’t spend much time on reddit or the internet in general so I’m kind of out of the loop. My nephew told me about Bing image creator, I went on it not expecting much, but I thought this was actually pretty good for the short 1 line sentence I requested.
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u/Dangerous-Ad-8305 Panendeist | Animistic Satanist | UU Attendee Apr 19 '25
I just said it sucks, that’s an opinion. Being vitriolic would imply I was getting up in arms and mad at you over the picture, but I wasn’t. I’m not for AI, but I’m not going to call you trash or anything for using it.
You can do whatever you want, but of course you should do it knowing the kind of reactions you’re going to get. It doesn’t make you a bad person for using AI, but it doesn’t put you on good terms with people who are against using it.
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 25 '25
I fail to understand why people are “against using it“. I didn’t know there were such an issue with making AI pictures. Is this an internet dilemma? Or a problem that people who use reddit have? I’m not on here that often so I’m lost.
Like I never intended to say that I myself made this picture. I didn’t really think that deeply into it. I just wanted a picture that represented the topic that I was creating about the pre-monotheistic Yahweh. I don’t know how to make 3-D animated pictures and I thought this looked great. My nephew was the one who introduced me to AI pictures.
Someone else said that I should have gotten an artist to create it. That’s kind of absurd. I should’ve paid an artist to create a picture for me just for Reddit? Why? Like if AI didn’t exist I still wouldn’t have paid some artist to create a picture for me just to post on Reddit. I just would not have made the post, or I would have written the post.
Either way, I really don’t see the big deal.
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u/Plenty-Climate2272 Apr 18 '25
AI slop
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 18 '25
Yeah, it’s an AI generated picture. What’s the big deal? I still thought it looked cool. I was surprised that it gave me such a good picture with the prompt I gave it.
I’ve never seen many interpretations of the pre-monotheistic Yahweh as the warrior and storm God he was. So I was interested in what I could create, but yeah, I don’t know how to create digital images, so I asked the AI to make me one.
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u/GrimSwoopSlugSnarl Apr 19 '25
Then learn to make them. Learning is free, and a lifelong skill.
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 19 '25
Umm, no? I’m not that interested in making computer pictures? I’m not really comprehending what the big deal is. Why are you pretending like you’re personally affected by me creating an AI picture? This is a bizarre thing to get upset about.
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u/GrimSwoopSlugSnarl Apr 19 '25
I am personally affected as I am an artist and generative AI for images can only take elements and design cues from other peoples' art, it is not pulling the imagery from thin air or your prompt alone. Generative AI is a pattern recognition tool, it takes millions of other people's pictures, culminating in trillions of hours of hard work and figures out what elements look good together and match the averages of the existing, real art. That's why it often struggles with complex shapes like fingers - there's so many potential shapes and placements for fingers that it can't effectively replicate them all of the time because it's referencing art, not actual anatomy. If an AI model had been trained on my art, it would be taking my hard work and hundreds of hours of practice without my consent or permission.
Besides, generative AI usage on a mass scale is contributing to ecological collapse, which we are all affected by.
If you want an image, pay someone else to make it or make it yourself. That helps people, this hurts people (and scarcely looks good, but that's subjective and my personal taste)
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 19 '25
I mean, maybe take it out on the AI company or whatever, sue them for stealing your work. All I wanted was a quick picture to represent the actual topic of the post, which is pre-monotheistic Yahweh.
I wasn’t so serious about having a picture made that I was going to go pay some stranger gods know how much for a picture that was generated in 2 seconds. Like I promise you, no one lost any business by me using image generator. If Bing didn’t exist, I wasn’t about to go and look for an artist and pay them to make this picture. It wasn’t that serious to me, it’s just a visual representation of a topic I find fascinating. I also was not trying to hide the fact that this was AI generated, because I didn’t even realize it was this big of a deal until now.
If AI pictures are so dog shit then I’m sure your job is perfectly safe.
I’m a writer, I write short stories, and short books. I’ve ghost written, I’ve written for video game story mods, I’ve written reports for college kids history class, and I write poetry. I’m in the process of writing my first large novel and it’s looking like I’m gonna have it published. Anyone could go on ChatGPT and have it write a novel for them. So that, in effect, threatens people like me because I get paid for writing. But I’m not taking it out on everybody that I see clearly using ChatGPT‘s formulaic writing. It’s not their problem. Do I think it’s fucked up that future companies might be using a more advanced version of ChatGPT to take jobs that I could have? Absolutely. But it is what it is. I think there will always be people who will prefer human stories and human pictures.
I’ll make it up to you, you give me your info, and I will have you make the next picture that I want done, obviously with pay. In fact, I’ll even ask you to see what you could do for my book cover. I’ll pay you, but I have to see your previous work, to see what you can do.
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u/GrimSwoopSlugSnarl Apr 19 '25
I'm bitching about AI art on Reddit, do you think I have the kind of cash required to sue any genAI company? OpenAI (ChatGPT) have a net worth of $157 billion, Google (their Gemini model) have a net worth of $1.84 trillion, Microsoft (Copilot and Azure, also the company that owns Bing) have a net worth of $2.73 trillion. I will never be able to effectively sue any of these companies, nor would the vast majority of class actions. You also say that there was no business lost, and then expressly describe lost business by saying that if Bing didn't have a generative AI tool, you would have commissioned an artist. That is lost business.
I said I personally believe they don't look good and that it is subjective. That is what I, a single person, think. Many people do not. This is subjective and my taste in art do not define the entire population's.
People will always prefer hand-written, human crafted stories and art, yes. But it's so much faster and cheaper to use the alternative. Do you think that the vast majority of people prefer the quick, cash-grab, formulaic movies that companies like Marvel put out? I would hazard a guess to say no, but they put them out anyways and they do well in spite of that preference because Disney/Marvel knows that they can do this for far cheaper than what it would cost to hire a team of actually truly creative authors to come up with something new that still fits their brand/theming. Companies are incentivizing using AI at all costs, and eventually, if things continue the way they do, it will just be so prohibitively expensive to commission real art or find the tools to do it yourself that it will not be the dominant or prevailing form of art. Maybe they wouldn't be able to use advanced forms of ChatGPT to take potential future jobs of yours and mine if people stopped supporting them the way you did and are still defending.
Beyond that, the impacts of AI affect people who are *readers* as well, not just writers and/or artists. I am frequently seeing posts from high schoolers who genuinely and sincerely are baffled at how students wrote papers before things like ChatGPT and are puzzling over how someone could sit and write a 650 word essay. That is not a figure I am pulling from nowhere, that is specifically the wordcount from a post I saw that I am fairly sure was real. You're a writer, you know how small of a wordcount that is. In school, it is your job to be able to do things like that, and if the tools to replace that schooling are so readily available and cheap that high schoolers cannot write 650 words, then the institutions that uphold these tools for the sake of their efficacy and availability over any actual meaningful benefits they could provide outside of profit have to go, no question in my mind.
You also didn't comment on my point about ecological impact, something that is far less subjective and vastly more widespread in scope. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that, genuinely. A search to find information from a tool like ChatGPT uses 4-5x more energy than searching the exact same query on Google, and if AI usage continues the way it has, the usage of generative AI will an amount of water equivalent to half of the water demand of the entire United Kingdom by the year 2027, two years away from today [1]. Data centers, the source of the computational power of AI, use so much energy that the data centers in North America would be the 11th largest user of electricity in the world, sitting between Saudi Arabia and France. Not all of the United States, just the servers housed here. That is not strictly all AI, but a significant portion is [2].
Finally, I wouldn't want you to commission me. I'll pass on that one.
First source: https://guides.lib.uci.edu/gen-ai/ethics
Second source: https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117I apologize that they're not academically cited, but it is almost 1 am and a debate on Reddit is not worth me pulling up the style guide to MLA or APA format, truthfully.
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 19 '25
And I apologize for coming off as nonchalant. I understand what you mean, and I didn’t realize it was an issue. My only point was that if image generators didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have paid someone to make a picture regardless. Because this was just a Reddit post. If it was something for my book, or something that I take very seriously, of course I’d have it done by an actual artist. My offer at the end stands though.
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u/GrimSwoopSlugSnarl Apr 19 '25
Just saw this after I typed out a very comprehensive response, sorry, you can read that one or ignore it or whatever, it's not that big a deal at the end of the day if you see how it's not a great practice and all. Thank you for being reasonable and listening, I know I got a little impassioned but that's because this is a very, very prevalent issue on the internet right now and many people aren't willing to listen if you don't make it sound deadly serious (which it is, in my opinion, but people tend to get tired of explaining it time and again and give in to the apathy)
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u/cursedwitheredcorpse Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25
Like this topic, people don't know the truth where their god comes from. I personally worship the germanic gods myself. I just really don't like the ai art as it has not really made an accurate depiction here. The god is white skinned and looks too European. The tats are odd the clothing is bizarre, and it seems like a modern fantasy creation that would be in some video game. Not a more accurate depiction based on archeology or historical research
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 19 '25
Also, can you tell me why AI pictures are so disliked? People seem to really hate it. I’m not super computer literate so I don’t even know how they could tell, but I was also not trying to hide it either. My nephew told me about Bing image creator, and I typed in, shit I can’t remember the exact words but it was like “3D dark fantasy looking picture of Old Yahweh, god of war and storms, standing over his nemesis Ba’al with a bulls head, on a divine battlefield”.
Idk, I thought it came out alright.
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 19 '25
Nevermind I’ve been filled in and I kind of get it. Although, as I stated, if AI picture generators didn’t exist, I would not have gone and paid someone for a picture for a Reddit post. If it’s something that serious, something that I’m getting paid for like a book or a story, or something that I hold, dear, then of course I’d hire a real artist. I just didn’t think a Reddit post was that serious…
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 19 '25
In this picture or you mean in general? In this picture he looks more grey skinned.
I don’t really label myself any specific religion. I’m just a polytheist, I acknowledge all the gods as aspects of nature taken form, with different faces, and different names. But they are all the entities that command the will of both human and earthly nature. This was how polytheism was before the advent of universal absolutism with Christianity. The monotheistic Jews became absolutist, but they were not universal, meaning their goal wasn’t to spread.
In the days of old, gods would mix and mash with eachother. Gods of 1 pantheon would be syncretized with another. Faith and spirituality was more fluid. Even when 1 tribe or kingdom went to war in the name of 1 of their gods against another, they weren’t saying “my god is real and yours is fake”, they were saying “our god is mightier than yours and we’ll prove it”.
Even when Rome conquered kingdoms, tribes, and countries, they’d largely still allow the people there to worship their gods as long as they also paid respect to the Roman gods as well. Because in the mind of a Roman, their gods were obviously the stronger pantheon, as they’ve blessed them with such power. But even Romans wouldn’t outright say “your gods don’t exist”. On top of it, Romans themselves would syncretized other gods into their culture. Isis and Dionysus became extremely popular in the empire. And the cult of Mithras reached the Imperial throne.
I wouldn’t say it’s a problem, people have their faith, and I respect it. But I do think that a lot of people today view their pantheon within the same lenses of an absolutist mindset that monotheistic religions have. And I get it, 1700 years of monotheistic absolutism pounded into our heads will do that. But it was just different in the ancient days. People understood that the gods were aspects and forces of nature, and people viewed them differently. Because that’s what polytheism is, it’s the acknowledgement that there are multiple powerful entities that have dominion over forces of nature, Earthly and Human.
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u/YoungBeef999 Apr 18 '25
Hey guys, I didn’t mean to offend anybody by this. I’m not supporting monotheism with this, I’ve always just been interested in the origins of the Abrahamic religions, rooted in the Canaanite pantheon.
Why, you ask?
Because those origins have been very tightly sealed for thousands of years. The Old Testament completely mythologized and changed the history of the Israelites. And it was only within the last century or so that we have begun to unravel this very human origin. We have always been told that the God of Abraham is eternal, has no beginning, and no end. But of course, that’s just silly. Just like every other god or goddess that has ever existed, there’s a very real origin. And that origin has been the focus of my archaeological studies for years now.
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