AHC: Make Canaanite religion widespread

Yun-shuno

Banned
As it says come up with a POD which leads to Canaanite religion ya know Baal, Ashera, and the like being a major world religion up into the 21st century?
 

Spengler

Banned
THereare some who would argue the proto Israelites were cannanites. Making their religion a Canaanite religion.
 
Carthage beats Rome, later on Carthaginian religion fuses with Greek philosophy to make a religion which rapidly spreads throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, Europe colonises New World etc., thus hundreds of millions of followers of a Canaanite derived religion?

THereare some who would argue the proto Israelites were cannanites. Making their religion a Canaanite religion.

Isn't that the mainstream view on things except for certain Christians (maybe some Jews too) who believe the Bible is literal history that actually happened? I mean, Hebrew is a Canaanite language, and the Israelites in the Bible worship Canaanite gods, including Yahweh himself, a storm god worshipped by other Canaanites.
 
Nope. It was a standard polytheism, I believe, and those crater when faced with competition from 'higher religions' (usually monotheisms, but Zoroastrianism was dual, and Buddhism makes gods kind of irrelevant). The only polytheism that survived was Hinduism, and it grew and adapted in competition with Buddhism, which was one of the first 'higher' religions - and the first universal one. (Judaism was a national religion).

So, unless it changes unrecognizably it won't survive.
 
Were the Canaanites the same people as the Phoenicians?
The Canaanites gave rise to both the Phoenicians and the Hebrews. Both of these people spoke different regional dialects of the canaanite language which slowly diverged into Biblical Hebrew and Punic.
 
Child sacrifice is not an enticing conversion prospect.

Not necessarily, it merely gives legitimacy and a religious purpose to the widespread pre-modern practice of infanticide. Deformed or otherwise weak children would make the "best" sacrifices as they were the ones that tended to be subject to infanticide.
 
The Canaanites gave rise to both the Phoenicians and the Hebrews. Both of these people spoke different regional dialects of the canaanite language which slowly diverged into Biblical Hebrew and Punic.

What do you mean diverged? Hebrew is and was essentially a Canaanite language. Canaanite simply denotes a collection of languages spoken by Semitic people's to the west of Mari, Aleppo, etc...

Also interestingly it is even more complex than that as cities like Ebla and Ugarit, the main western Syrian cities before the BAC (Bronze Age Collapse) were most certainly not Canaanite and were more conservative on some issues to Proto Semitic and at the same time mixing parts of Akkadian into itself.
 
What do you mean diverged? Hebrew is and was essentially a Canaanite language. Canaanite simply denotes a collection of languages spoken by Semitic people's to the west of Mari, Aleppo, etc...

That's what he said, proto-canaaite diverged into Hebrew and Punic :)
I don't know much about this religion but no rise of the roman empire seems a given to avoid canaaite assimilation
 
That's what he said, proto-canaaite diverged into Hebrew and Punic :)
I don't know much about this religion but no rise of the roman empire seems a given to avoid canaaite assimilation

The Canaanites were declining since the Assyrians, though, and Alexander the Great basically finished the deal. You'd need "no rise of the Assyrian Empire", but even then, what's to stop some other group like Babylon, Persia, etc. from doing the same in the Fertile Crescent? They'd still be linguistically assimilating them into the greater Aramaic-speaking world anyway.
 
Oh perhaps I misunderstood him. Sometimes I get confused with terms in English.

Don't worry, a lot of us are not native speakers (myself included).
For the Roman empire I was more thinking in terms of Carthage and their rivality with Rome. If Carthage survives, the canaaite religion has a chance.
 
Top