tell me something good
It's so good, it can be used to explain any religion :hihi:
Is that necessarily such a bad, negative experience to go through, System? Even if you're an athiest/agnostic or hardcore skeptic, Huff does make some interesting, substantiative points about Biblical history, apologetics, and he's also a sociologist. He also had a very interesting, colorful multicultural childhood and early adulthood being born in Pakistan and growing up being exposed to different religions, cultural attitudes and ethnicities in multiple ME countries.
Most mainstream Biblical historians, classicists, and theologians will tell you that originally, most early Jews or Isrealites were polytheistic, second-class Canaanites who were discriminated and persecuted against in Bronze Age-Egyptian controlled ancient Near East until end of Bronze Age and Sea Peoples invasions, dramatic climate change lead to the collapse of Hittite civilization in Asia Minor, and weakening of Egypt as a regional power caused a major socio-political uprising in many Canaanite city-states in the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.E to the extent they were overthrown and this loose confederation of tribal kingdoms shed their previous Canaanite identity and adopted a crude, early form of Judaism while scattered, rural Isrealite settlements kept or maintained some aspects of Phoenician/Canaanite polytheism for centuries until Bablynonian defeat and captivity. In the 8th-7th centuries, in what is now Northern Isreal, and parts of western Syria their was a major fertility goddess cult that emerged where essentially, Yahweh or God had a wife. Herod the Great's ancestors were actually pagan Arabs that were rivals of the Nabateans and had only converted to Judaism a few centuries before Christ's birth. Herod's the Great own ethno-religious Judaism was always suspect whether from Pharisees, Sadducees, Sanhedrin or radical Jewish Zealots who derisively labeled him a "half-Jew".
That was a slur historians and theologians have discovered you never called Herod the Great or his Hasmonean successors. One time, his favorite wife, Mariamne, after they'd gotten into a nasty verbal fight, called him that and he nearly beat her to death as a result.