I’ve studied the cultures and civilizations of the ANE. I assure you that there is so much to know about this stuff that only a tiny handful of people can actually claim any expertise. I’m not one of them. However, I did my best to examine the materials I could access. Part of the problem is that experts didn’t often address things from the angle I’m taking here, so it’s a lot of estimation and best guesses.
Abraham appears to have been Akkadian. That’s not a race, but a culture and language background. They were sometimes among the nobility of the Sumerian Empire, but the one slender thread that ties Ur with Harran is they both had temples to Sin, the moon god. Whatever it is his father did for a living, Abraham’s life was likely attached to a level of scholarship that was common in temple communities. Keep in mind that temples in those days could be like major corporations in a sense, with folks doing all kinds of work within the community.
At any rate, Abraham was wealthy enough to be nobility, and educated enough to be fluent in Aramaic, which held the place that English does in our world today. It wasn’t necessarily the native tongue of many, but very efficient for commerce and communications, and it seemed like everyone who was anyone could use it.
We aren’t told much about how God managed to get his attention. Whatever it was, Abraham was able to exercise a kind of otherworldly faith that might have been more common in his day, but certainly not today. After his father Terah moved the entire extended family household to Harran, Abraham was told to become a tent-dwelling nomad in another land altogether. This would have been a major demand we can scarcely comprehend from this distance. It meant become the kind of man his entire civilization hated. Just the circumcision alone was considered barbaric and despicable by everyone Abraham knew.
His descendants managed to hang onto at least some of his culture and intellectual background. However, it’s a good bet that Abraham was selective about what he passed on, in order that they not have to struggle over the same things he did.
Then we jump to the time when Moses rises up in Pharaoh’s household with an Egyptian education. He needs to get reacquainted with the “wandering Aramaean” culture. So God had him chased out into the wilderness where he spent 40 years with Jethro, whose identity is a little hard to nail down. He’s also called Reuel (a title, “Friend of God”) and Hobab in some texts. He apparently is a priest of the same God Abraham served, and so was able to teach Moses all the ways of the wandering Aramaeans, as well as the God of Abraham.
We can speculate, and perhaps justify piecing together hints about an enduring lore, a knowledge of God under the name “El” (usually combined with other honorifics). Balaam certainly knew what was contained in the Covenant of Noah, and apparently much more. He recognized the Kenites on sight (Numbers 24:21) and knew their religion. We get the impression that this “El” was also the national deity of the Kenites, though we hardly know where they come from. All we know is that they mixed with Israel throughout the Exodus and Conquest, and lived among them in the Promised Land.
It was to Moses that El revealed Himself as Yahweh/Jehovah.
Up through the reign of King Hezekiah, the knowledge of God grew and became rather firm in the hearts of Judah, at least. Granted, such knowledge of the lore and history was more common among the upper classes, but plenty of peasants seemed to have a solid faith in God. It’s one thing to have the knowledge in your head, but it’s another to be driven by what your heart can grasp without your head.
Then came that awful reign of Manasseh, when the written copies of the Covenant were lost or destroyed. King Josiah did his best to seize upon the one copy found in the foundation of the Temple, but it’s a simple and obvious fact that the people as a whole had lost much. The reforms of Josiah simply did not have time to take root and change the people back into what they once were. A certain amount of their identity was forever lost.
When the Exile came, the whole nation suffered a one-two punch (Babylon and Persia) that really put a big kink in their assumptions about reality. Both empires brought into the mix a strong element of money-grubbing that simply wasn’t part of the Hebrew culture. At the same time, we can’t simply call it materialism, because it doesn’t quite fit that label. It was frankly religious in nature. However, it did move the Judeans closer to materialism. The people building the Second Temple were struggling against a deficit in awareness of what God could do, and that depth of profound trust and commitment.
So during the Restoration, we see the people slipping constantly into a somewhat materialistic frame of mind. Then comes the conquest of Alexander the Great. While the Judeans rejected the external trappings of Hellenistic culture (loose morals), they did buy into the Aristotelian intellectual assumptions of Hellenism. Thus, we have the birth of Judaism: All the trappings of Hebrew culture, but none of the intellectual assumptions from the ancient Hebrew nomads.
This was the birth of legalism. It’s not quite the best of Hellenism with its high artistry, and definitely not the depth of Hebrew mysticism. It turns the mystical symbolism of the Pentateuch into a rule book over which semantic gamesmanship is actually encouraged.
It’s no wonder so many Jews choked on the claims of Jesus. You’ll notice they weren’t uniformly dead to faith, but it was rather rare. This is part of how we know that genuine faith is a miracle of God. But once that miracle comes to our awareness, we have an awful lot to reclaim.
