Act 25:19 certain questions about his r, and of
26:5
Religion (Gr. thr’skéia, “worship of God”, “religion”). The term denotes reverence or worship, especially that which is expressed in ritual and service acts (Acts 26:5; Jam 1:26, 27). In Col 2:18, the RVR and the BJ translate thrêskéia as “worship”. But in Act 25:19, what in these versions is translated by “religion” is the word gr. deisidaimonia, which literally means “worship of the gods.”
Source: Evangelical Bible Dictionary
(gr., threskeia, religion, external expression of spiritual devotion). The Latin word religare means to contain, stop or restrain. It came to be applied to the services, rituals, and rules by which faith in and devotion to the deity was expressed. In the OT there is no word for religion. The fear of (Psa 2:11; Pro 1:7) and the worship of God (Deu 4:19; Deu 29:26; Psa 5:7; Psa 29:2) refer primarily to the attitudes of the mind and acts of worship, rather than a ritual. Threskeia in the NT means external expression of religion and the content of faith. James makes a distinction between the make-believe and the reality of religious expression (Jam 1:26-27). Paul was loyal to his Hebrew religion before he was converted (Acts 26: 1-5). Religious in Jam 1:26 (threskos) implies superstition.
Source: Hispanic World Bible Dictionary
Temples, cults, religious objects and texts form a large part of the material in which *archaeology is interested. Each of the regions of the ancient Near East has its distinctive religious beliefs; but, as a result of trade and the mobility of peoples, religious ideas and the gods themselves became accepted over wide areas.
In early times, each Egyptian village turned to its own deity for the blessings of life and protection from hostile powers. The village would boast an altar to its deity, and the worship of the local god would serve as a unifying influence within the community and as a means of distinguishing one village from another. Ptah was the god of Memphis; Tuna, from Heliopolis; Hathor, the “lady of Dendera”; Neith, the goddess of Sais. Neith’s name appears in the name Asenath ‘she is of Neith’, the daughter of Potiphera, priest of On (Heliopolis) who married Joseph (Gen. 41:45).
As small Egyptian communities coalesced to become states (called nomes), the local gods gained wider recognition, and when the empires of Upper and Lower Egypt were unified, two of the local gods—Set of Ombos and Horus of Behdet — became the gods of the two states. Around 3000 BC AD, when Egypt was unified under Narmer (Menes), Upper Egypt emerged as the dominant part of the country and Horus became the god of “the two Egypts” as the combined empire of Upper and Lower Egypt was called. The pharaoh was regarded as the incarnation and patron of Horus and was therefore regarded as a god in his own right. The local gods remained in the affection of the people and, when they moved from one place to another, they took their god with them and erected new altars for his worship. As a result of some supposedly miraculous cure or display of miraculous intervention, the god of a community might gain a reputation for special power. As a consequence, people from neighboring areas in which fame was known made pilgrimages to the altar of the god or built new altars for him in their own villages. Due to some of these reasons, Neith, from Sais, acquired an altar in Esna.
At some early time, local deities were associated with some aspect of their character. The falcon-shaped Montu was worshiped as the god of war, and Min of the Copts became a god of fertility and crops and patron of desert travelers. Ptah of Memphis, in whose province the distinctive art of Egypt originated, became the patron saint of artists, blacksmiths, and metal craftsmen. As such, he can be compared to the Canaanite Kathar-wa-Khassis, the classical Hephaestus, and the Germanic Vulcan.
Sekhmet, from Memphis, was the goddess of fire who destroyed her enemies, while the kinder Hathor, from Dendera, was the goddess of love and joy. Horus, the falcon god, identified with the sun, was depicted as a youthful hero in perpetual battle with his wicked brother Seth, the storm god. The ibis-headed Thoth of Hermopolis was the moon god who had created the divisions of time and ordered the universe. Thoth was the “god of divine words”, who had invented hieroglyphic writing and was the god of learning in general. Sobek, the crocodile god, had his room in the water.
In addition to the state gods and the numerous city gods, the Egyptians were interested in a host of lesser gods, demons, or spirits that could help or harm man. There were gods who helped women during childbirth, gods of the house, gods of the harvest. In times of illness, the spirits provided healing and other spirits were particularly active in times of war. Ma†™at was the goddess of truth and justice.
Many of the Egyptian gods were represented in animal form. Sobek the crocodile; Thoth, the ibis; Khnum, the ram; Hathor, the cow; and Buto, the snake: they were represented in that way. Gods could also be represented as humans, and it was common for gods who had been represented as animals to transform into human figures with the heads of the animals they represented. Thus, Sobek could be represented as a crocodile or as a man with a crocodile’s head; Khnum became a man with the head of a ram; Horus, a man with the head of a falcon; Thoth, a man with the head of an ibis. The goddess Sekhmet became a woman with the head of a lioness.
Egyptian religion included the worship of a multitude of such gods, often arranged in groups resembling human families. Certain animals, particularly the Apis bull, were revered and, in addition to the divine pharaoh, certain notable humans had been deified. The phenomena of nature—the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, the earth, the Nile River—all had a part in Egyptian religion. Traditional religious ideas were challenged once during the history of the pharaohs, when *Akhenaten sought to outlaw all religious activity except that which honored the Aten, the sun deity. Akhenaten’s reforms did not long outlive his originator and the priests of Amun at Thebes, against whom he had rebelled, were able to reassert his authority soon after his death.
The religious ideas of Egypt have parallels in Sumeria and in cultures that derive their religious ideas from the *Sumerians. There too, local gods became national and international gods as cities gained prestige and power. The Sumerians conceived the universe as subject to the pantheon of gods in charge, respectively, of the sky, the earth, the air and the water; of the sun, the moon, and the various planets; of the wind, the storm and the tempest; of the rivers, the mountains and the plains; of cities and states; of the fields, crops and irrigation canals; of the pickaxes, brick molds and the plow. There was a hierarchy among the gods, the main ones being the four creator gods: An, the sky god; Ki, the god of the earth; Enlil, the god of the air; and Enki, the god of water. Inanna, the goddess of fertility was a favorite Sumerian deity.
Much of the Sumerian religion was absorbed by the Semitic Assyrians and Babylonians, whose culture replaced that of Sumer in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The Sumerian gods were often called by their Semitic equivalents. Sumerian Utu, the sun god, became Shamash; Nanna or Nannar, the moon god became Sin. The cult of the moon god was common in *Ur and *Haran. The Sumerian Inanna became the mother goddess Ishtar. Marduk, described in the *Enuma Elish as one of the younger gods, was the patron deity of Babylon. With the growth of the Babylonian empire Marduk’s rank increased. Further north was Ashur, the god of the city of Assur and his empire Assyria, who became the creator god.
The Semitic names of the Mesopotamian gods appear in Palestine and Syria. City names such as Beth-shemesh (“house of the sun”) indicate that an altar to the sun god had stood there. The most complete knowledge of the Canaanite religion comes from *Ugarit where El is the father of the gods, and Baal the most popular deity of the second generation. Baal and his sister Anat were both gods of fertility. The ritual prostitution of the Baal cult made it abominable in the eyes of the prophets of Israel.
The Hittite religion included some gods native to Asia Minor, others introduced by the Indo-Europeans, and others adopted by the Hittites from their neighbors the *Sumerians, Babylonians, Hurrians, and Canaanites. The first efforts were made to combine deities of similar function and to place them by families, and a genealogy of the gods is found which can be compared with the Greek traditions incorporated by Hesiod in his Theogony. Most prominent among the Hittite deities was the weather god known to the Hurrians as Teshub, controller of both the life-giving rain and the destructive storm. Shaushka, like the Babylonian Ishtar, was the goddess of love, sex, and war. The wife of the god of time was the sun goddess who was known as the queen of heaven and the queen of the Hatti lands. She protected the Hittite kings in battle.
Istanu, the sun god, like the Babylonian Shamash, was the god of right and justice. He was king of the gods and judged humanity.
See also UGARIT, EGYPT, BABYLON.
Source: Archaeological Biblical Dictionary
This word does not appear in the OT. In the NT, the Greek word threskeia was used to indicate the set of rites and external signs of a cult or belief. Thus, speaking of his own experience, Paul said before † ¢ Agrippa: † œ… who also know that from the beginning, if they want to testify, according to the most rigorous sect of our r., I lived a Pharisee † ( Acts 26:5). It is evident that he speaks of Judaism. He uses the term again in his letter to the Colossians († œLet no one deprive you of your prize, affecting humility and worship of angels †). The expression does not emphasize doctrine, but rather rituals and customs. Santiago says that if someone complies very well with the rites († œhe thinks he is religious †) but † œdoes not bridle his tongue, but deceives his heart, the r. of such is vain. the r. pure and without blemish before God the Father is this: To visit orphans and widows in their tribulations, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world† (Jas 1:26-27).
Source: Christian Bible Dictionary
Already in ancient times they wondered…