Analyze the three primary forms of religion found in the Iron Age, and explain their influence on their respective civilizations in terms of law, government, and culture
What will be an ideal response?
Students should be able to designate polytheism, monotheism, and dualism as the primary forms of religion in this time period, and assign them to their respective geographic/cultural locales. Most early civilizations were polytheistic, and students should be able to distinguish that most early kings were not divine, but divinely endorsed. This distinction affected the social organization by providing a tight interconnection between the government and religious authorities, which the students should discuss. Laws deriving from a religious perspective tended to be more morally based, while laws derived from civil government tended to be more ethically or socially based. Students could point to any number of early civilizations that were polytheistic, including Assyrian, Phoenician, and Philistine. For monotheism, students should be able to explore the Abrahamic tradition, including the covenant between El (later YHWH) and his chosen people and their development of a cultural identification on the basis of religion rather than a geographic establishment with traditional infrastructural elements. The absence of a formal government for the first thousand years and the absence of a written law code until sometime in the first millennium (or any writing at all) separated the Hebrew people from traditional polytheistic communities. For dualism, students should be able to point to the official religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism, which argued for a polarity between good and evil, with specific gods for each. Because this religion was initially transmitted by a prophet and won the endorsement of the king, it was different from the other two forms, in which law and government preexisted the development of the religion.
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