ESOTERICA
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
43:11 · 3.8M views · Mar 3, 2023
An ESOTERICA episode tracing Yahweh from a warrior-storm god near Mt Seir to the god of the Israelites in the Judean highlands. It examines how Yahwism absorbed and contended with Canaanite religion.
HN users recommend it as an impressively well-sourced, academic look at the origins of the Abrahamic religions.
3 comments from Hacker News
My favorite find in the last few months is the youtube channel "esoterica" - here's his video on the origins of yaweh as a storm god this video He recommends books and primary sources for every episode and they vary from interesting more pubscience type stuff to incredibly expensive and deep academic sources out of print. The gentleman who runs it is very obviously jewish in practice but only uses that to inform his historical context instead of override it, its very refreshing as someone who is an atheist.
I watched this a while back and it was one of the few videos I’ve seen recently that really impressed me: this video
I think the part i find interesting is it seems like we have a better picture of how the mythology shifted over time and was interpreted by different groups than we do with greek and norse mythology. So not just the stories themselves but how they were adapted in different contexts. I dont actually know that much about the subject. Recently this video on youtube popped up for me about early history of what would later become the abrahamic religions, and i was just kind of fascinated by it this video