What the heck is "Yahoel"? As far as I can tell, it's the name of an angel in an obscure apocryphal work (the "Apocalypse of Abraham"), and is used far more often by New Age types than by mainstream Jews... AnonMoos23:30, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
Controversy
Reverted massive and undefended vandalism by User:Csernica.
Summary of what was reverted (see also comments in History):
The template needed updating.
(1) The title. It is not a list of Middle eastern deities. It is a list of deities which the Aramaeans worshipped. These can be called "Semitic." The deities are all related and within overlapping mythologies. A "Middle Eastern deities" list would have to list unrelated mythologies, such as the ancient Persian, and the many and complex pantheons from Asia Minor. The current template is an excellent idea. A template of "Middle Eastern deities" would be long, unwieldy, and of little value since it would appear in articles where it would list many irrelevant deities.
(2) A few more deities were added exclusively to the Levantine section.
If you are as concerned about this as you sound you should know that arbitrary vandalism is not going to get you want you want. If anything it will make people ignore anything you have to say. Yes, Csernica should not have assumed you edits were in bad faith and your anger is justified. However, your reaction was quite inappropriate. --Tydaj03:38, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I wasn't going to intercede anymore, but I dislike ad hominem logic. This is getting close to a personal attack. You haven't addressed the merits of their edits. Was there a reason for destroying everything someone wrote? Newbies should get special treatment. This is not a very warm welcome.
What irony. But beyond that, no one issued any personal attacks here until you accused Tydaj and myself of sock puppetry, which even a cursory glance at our respective contributions and user pages would have revealed was absurd. That's a very serious accusation to make.
There is no ad hominem logic here. I don't care who anyone is, really; it's irrelevant, and nothing either Tydaj or I have tended that way.
But the beauty of Wikipedia is that no one's work is ever destroyed unless an admin intervenes. Reverting an article to an earlier state is a trivial operation. That's the normal first step to take, followed normally by a civilized discussion, before anyone starts throwing around accusations of vandalism -- which is also very serious. TCC(talk)(contribs)19:40, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I suspect, although I do not know for certain, that all these editors are the same person. Please do not make such massive changes without discussion, or certainly without edit summaries. TCC(talk)(contribs)00:16, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing. However, unconstructive edits are considered vandalism, and if you continue in this manner you may be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop, and consider improving rather than damaging the hard work of others. Thanks.
I hope you realize the irony of vandalizing pages with a warning against vandalism. Heed the warning. --Tydaj03:30, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Allow me to step in. I have examined the vandalism claim. Wikipedia has policies in place about wholesale reverts. Csernica did not say why the whole page was reverted. Perhaps they disagreed. If so, that should be discussed, not deleted.
You, too, have not even bothered to comment on the newbie's (?) above explanation. **Are you the same person as Csernica?** If a user such as the newbie spends the time to carefully comment, it is rude to ignore them. Further, it looks like the they spent a full day on editing it, which demostrates conscientiousness, not vandalism.
Further I spent some time looking at the edits in question. For example, I can tell you right off the bat from Wikipedia's own article on the Tetragrammaton, HaShem is not a name for God. It just means "the name" and is a taboo substitute when reading Jewish texts.
A brief glance at her talk page will reveal she's been here since at least March of 2004. I've been here since early 2005. Not a typical amount of time to have a sockpuppet. And why would a Californian, Eastern Orthodox (apparently) mother pretend to be a male Unitarian Universalist college student in South Carolina?
Additionally, why didn't you discuss the merit of moving the template here before taking usch action? The reason I ask is because some articles on the template are only Sumerian. (The Sumerians were not a Semitic people) --Tydaj16:22, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I do see that my reversion was made over-hastily. In my defense, I was simultaneously dealing with a mildly autistic 7-year-old demanding my attention at the time. However, whatever the cause, a simple re-reversion would have been more appropriate than all this hue and cry. It would have helped if there had been any discussion -- or even edit summaries -- on the original work in the first place, which is a standard courtesy around here. Whether a template of all Middle Eastern deities would be too impractical or unwieldy is a judgment call which ought to have been discussed. TCC(talk)(contribs)07:24, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Vandalism?
I think not. First, I did explain, briefly, in the edit summary and in a remark on this very page. The edits I reverted were mainly done without the courtesy of even an edit summary.
Third, the template as it stood was blatantly incorrect. It had been retitled (although not renaimed) "Aramaen deities". Not all Semites are (or were) Aramaens, and not all the deities in the template were even Semitic in origin. It included a number of originally Sumerian deities for example, and unless something enormous has happened recently in the world of philology that I have not yet heard about, Sumerians are not Semites. So as it is, the original retitling and your subsequent move were incorrect, unjustified, and of course undertaken without even an attempt at finding a consensus on anyone's part. This is far closer to vandalism than what I did. But don't worry, I'm not prepared to vandalize your user page in retaliation as someone did mine. What we actually have here is a disagreement. If you're going to label every disagreement as vandalism, we're going to get nowhere.
Fourth, from your edit summary on the template, you do not appear to understand what ad hominem means. I did nothing of the sort. Speculating that a set of IP addresses pointed to the same person, where there's no implication of sock puppetry, is hardly that even to the hypersensitive. Asking for a discussion before drastic changes isn't ad hominem either.
Fifth, you're quite correct about HaShem, but I simply adjusted the case of what I found. It's been in the template for quite a while. But I suppose there's a reason there was no link for it, and I agree with its removal.
Sixth, the anon editor is no newbie since he knew to vandalize my user page in retribution for my edits. That's the sign of a veteran Wikipedia warrior. Also quite unjustified and done without any consensus whatsoever, but that seems par for the course lately.
Addendum: Seventh, not only is the move inaccurate as it stands, but potential additions to the template is it formerly stood are no longer possible. Suppose we wanted to add the deities of Mitanni, which was certainly Middle Eastern but equally certainly not Semitic? What about those of the Hittites? Yes, they were based mostly in Anatolia but they had considerable territory in the Levant and after the dissolution of their empire there were several neo-Hittite settlements between the Mediterannean and Mesopotamia. It is now much less general than it was intended to be. I can't see that as an improvement. TCC(talk)(contribs)06:51, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
As the person who made this template in the first place I can say that I gave it such a general title intentionally. In fact, this template is based on the earlier Template:Semitic gods. I gave it a new title for the very reason that I wanted to include Sumerian deities. --Tydaj18:20, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
My recent edits
Re-seperated Ba'al from Hadad. Hadad was not the only deity refered to as Ba'al.
Added a section on Anatolian deities.
Modified the Section about Names of God in Judaism to names of God in Hebrew Bible. Rabbinical names aren't really germane here.
Changed the title to be more inclusive. The Sumerians and Anatolians were not Semitic peoples.
Shortened title to Mideastern Deities to fit in the template neatly.
Reasoning
To be useful, this template should stay with its original purpose, with the deities of the "Fertile Crescent," commonly called "'Semitic'" (which may not be the best term).
(Boring details follow.)
To keep with Wikipedian style, templates should be simple enough that they can be read at the top of an article.
A template listing all the Middle Eastern or even just the Near Eastern deities would take pages, and would include [dozens of] unrelated cultures and traditions. ["Near Eastern" also changes it from its original purpose of "Semitic."]
When User:Stevertigo created this template in the first place [on 8 May 2005] [1], there was good reason for it. [The consensus kept it as "Semitic gods" until it was moved 12 July 2005 without prior discussion.[2]. However, the move is understandable, if not ideal, and the additions of Mesopotamian Gods during the move were truly excellent!]
Mesopotamian, Levantine and Jewish mythologies are part of the same general culture including especially names for god(s). Each shares many common deities. Other cultures such as Phrygian, Anatolian Greek, Armenian, Persian, Kurdic, Turkic, ad nauseam are independent although they lie in the same large region. By creating the original version under the umbrella term "Semitic", Stevertigo was using unambiguous simplicity to group the obviously interrelated cultures. These cultures are commonly known as "Semitic", everyone knows what it means, it is simple. [i.e., "Semitic" was its original purpose.]
Of course, "Semitic" has evolved in meaning since it was created in modern times to refer to literal descendants of the patriarch Shem. I won't bore everyone even more with questions such as if the Egyptians are really Semitic (called "Hamitic" by Biblical terminology, but the language descends from a common Semitic [formerly called Hamito-Semitic but now expanded to Afro-Asiatic, but these are boring pedantic details]) or just what Semitic should mean, etc. However, Stevertigo had a point to group Sumerian deities under the umbrella "Semitic" since whatever they once were, long ago assimilated into what we now call "Semitic." "Aramaean" is a more ancient term that could be used for the same reasons, but like Semitic, it may not be the best.
So to keep things simple, I think it best to keep it at Middle Eastern and limit it to those ancestral cultures of those we call Semitic. [Semitic, its original title, is better but "Middle Eastern" is an attempt to meet halfway with the one who moved it. This topic has been discussed before. Of course, the addition of the Mesopotamian gods was excellent.]
Castanea dentata01:19, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
A change like this should have been discussed first, not after the fact. You have actually moved it away from its original purpose, not toward. That may or may not have merit, but a consensus would have been better.
First, the present template was created by Tydaj, not Stevertigo, indeed modelled after Template:Semitic deities as it stood several months ago. (See [3]) It was by design more comprehensive, and in any event not every culture in the Middle East was Semitic. Second, in particular it was intended that the Sumerian deities be able to be included. Yes, the Akkadians, Babylonians and other Semites picked them up later and renamed them but they are not in origin Semitic. Third, Anatolian deities are not necessarily Greek. The Greeks brought a number of Phrygian deities into their mythology, but they remain Phrygian and should be listed as such. Further, the Hittite deities are in no way Greek. Although they may share a common Indo-Eurpoean ancestry, by the time "Greek" and "Hittite" were meaningful descriptors they were quite distinct. Putting Anatolian deities into a Greek deities template is therefore an error, IMO.
Please don't reply in bracketed additions to your original comments. First, they're difficult to spot, and second, it creates a false appearance of what I was replying to.
It is, IMO, absolutely necessary to get away from a category of strictly Semitic deities. First, "Semitic" is a linguistic grouping, and it does not map precisely into cultures or religions. In particular, a great many "Semitic" deities are not in origin those of Semitic-speaking peoples. It makes no sense therefore to slap a "Semitic" label on them; it's simply inaccurate. That was one of the main motivators for the new template. Second, not all the peoples of the Near- or Middle-East (whatever you want to call the region; the definitions have become blurred in popular usage) were Semitic. But the natural interest is in the region, not groupings of peoples based on languages. The patchwork of langages there is of great interest of course, and far from the boring, pedantic detail you seem to think. Especially when we're talking about myth. Myth and language are inextricably intertwined, and it's a dead language that has no myths. But the point is that the kind of casual researcher likely to use Wikipedia as a reference will not think about peoples in linguistic terms, but regional first, with the languages to be discovered. Or to you think that when people hear "Akkadian", that "Semitic" is the first thing that springs to mind? TCC(talk)(contribs)01:59, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
Keep it simple
What are you talking about? There is no section on the Akkadian or Sumerian mythologies. There isn't even an article on them. Whoever they were merged with Mesopotamia in ancient times. That's why the consensus here led to just one article: Mesopotamian mythology. Levantine, Hebrew, and Mesopotamian, which are in the box, are all Semitic linguistically, historically and ethnically. Keep it simple.
The huge list of thousands of gods in a god box which you are proposing has already been discussed and dismissed in Wikipedia's myth project. Look for it. Castanea dentata22:00, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
"Mesopotamian" refers to a region, where languages other than the Semitic were spoken. Sumerian mythology has no distinct article because, as you point out, their mythology was taken up by other peoples who happened to be Semitic. But they themselves were not, and even names important in later Semitic mythology such as Gilgamesh are not Semitic in origin. They were nevertheless very much Mesopotamian since they built the first large-scale civilization in the region. "Whoever they were" makes it sound as if nothing is known about them, but this is untrue: quite a bit is known.
"Thousands of gods" is an exaggeration and not helpful to the discussion. If we were to include personal gods there may have been that many, but we have nowhere near that many names. But I do agree the box may have gotten unwieldy in time, and did I not say that some change may have been necessary? The issue is that you didn't bother to discuss the change first, and that as a result there's no consensus on exactly what the change should have been.
For the record, I don't think there's anything really wrong with "Mesopotamian" except for your understanding of it as exclusively Semitic. It isn't. However, the identification of Anatolian deities as Greek, even though some of them were eventually absorbed into Greek mythology, I feel is extremely problematic.
Ancient Greece portal
Myths portal