Paganisme des Hébreux: jusqu'à la captivité de Babylone (1884 Ferrière), book
Paganisme des Hébreux: jusqu'à la captivité de Babylone (1884) is a book by Émile Ferrière.
Abstract
Swept up in the fervor of Darwinian evolutionary models and the inherent positivism of his day, Ferrière suggests that monotheism did not arise among the Israelite people until the time of the Babylonian exile. As he himself puts it, the goal of his book is to: "Prouver par des faits, conformément à la méthode expérimentale, que le monothéisme primordial des Hébreux est une fiction; que le peuple d Israël a été païen et a partagé toutes les pratiques du paganisme cananéen jusqu à la captivité de Babylone, tel est le but de ce livre (3)." Accordingly, for Ferrière the ancient Israelites were just as polytheistic as their so-called pagan, Ancient Near Eastern neighbors. In order to demonstrate this thesis, Ferrière structures his work into four primary parts. In part one, he establishes a timeline for the books of the Old Testament, with a particular focus on the Pentateuch. In part two, he explores the general religious practices of persons from the Ancient Near East and demonstrates their polytheistic practices. From there, in part three, Ferrière investigates the biblical employment of the tetragrammaton, as well as general beliefs among the ancient, pre-exilic Israelites regarding who God was. In part four, he concludes that the ancient Hebrew people, without exception, embodied and practiced their religion in a similar fashion to all their Semitic neighbors. In other words, the ancient Israelites where as polytheistic as their neighbors. Though not explicitly stated, the underpinnings of Ferrière's thesis are largely dependent upon the work of his near contemporary, Julius Wellhausen, who stirred a controversy in ecclesiastical and scholarly circles by suggesting that Moses himself did not write the Torah. Instead, Wellhausen demonstrated that four principle sources (later developed into J, E, P, D) were combined by priestly, exilic writers to compose the Pentateuch nine to eleven centuries after Moses. ~Deborah Forger
Editions and translations
Published in Paris [France]: F. Alcan, 1884.