IS - RA - EL
What does the name Israel mean?
by Betty Rhodes
Is it just a co-incidence that the name 'Israel' incorporates three gods/goddesses, or is it the reason for the name Israel?
The name 'Israel' according to the Jews, means "God rules", or "God shines"


True
                          IsisISIS                                    

Isis [IS] was an Egyptian Throne Goddess dating back to the 5th dynasty. Her name literally means the feminine aspect of the throne - also the Queen of the throne. However, the hieroglyph for her name used originally meant (female) of flesh, i.e. mortal, and she may simply have represented deified Earthly queens of the World. She was most prominently remembered as the wife of Horus, or, in later periods, as the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus, and was worshiped as the archetypal wife and mother. Isis is the feminine archetype for creation - the goddess of fertility and motherhood. She has gone by many names, such as the 'virgin' Mary, and played many roles in history and mythology  -as goddess, virgin, and female creator of life.

Isis  represents the feminine aspects of life - male and female alike, for she represents creation, rebirth, reincarnation, Ascension,  intuition, psychic abilities, higher frequency vibrations, love and compassion. In other words, she represents nature and all that is natural of our existence. She is the mother nurturer - the High Priestess - the Goddess of creation, and perhaps representing Eve,  the first woman and mother of all.

Isis became prominent late in Egyptian history when it began to absorb the cults of many other goddesses. It eventually spread outside Egypt throughout the Middle East and Europe, with temples to her built as far away as the British Isles. Remnants of her worshipers remained in Christian Europe as late as the 6th century, when at that time, her memory was honored as the virgin mother of the Chrisitan god, Jesus.  [At right is a photo taken of Betty Rhodes dressed as Isis for an Egyptian theme play in 1978.]



RA EGYPTIAN GOD    RA

Ra (sometimes spelled Rê) is the sun-god of Heliopolis in ancient Egypt. Ra originally meant "mouth" in the Egyptian language, and was a reference to his creation of the deities of the Ogdoad system, excluding the 8 concepts which created him, by the power of speech (compare how Yahweh was said to have created the world). In later Egyptian dynastic times, Ra was subsumed into the god Horus, as Re-Horakhty (and many variant spellings).

D10
The Eye of Ra,
or the Right Eye of Horus

The sun is either the entire body of Ra, or just his eye. The symbols of Ra are the solar symbols of a golden disk or the symbol ⊙ (circle with a point at its centre). He was also associated with the Phoenix, as he rose again each morning in flames.

The Eye of RA was a symbol that signified royal power, yet on the numeration side denoted a decimal system where round off was set to the first 6-terms. The ancients believed this symbol of indestructibility would assist in rebirth, due to their beliefs about the soul. The more recent tradition of freemasonry adopted the symbol in the form of the Eye of Providence and as such it has survived to this day, and appears as the Eye of Providence on the recto of the Great Seal of the United States. The Eye of Horus (flanked by Nekhbet and Wadjet) was found under the 12th layer of bandages on Tutankhamun's mummy.

Horus was an ancient god in Egyptian mythology who dramatically evolved over the whole of Egyptian history. Early on, he became identified as a sky god, where one of his eyes was the sun, and the other the moon. His weaker eye later became less important in his mythology, and he became more strongly aligned with the sun, particularly when the cult of Thoth, a moon god, arose. As the sun, or rather, with his eye as the sun, his eye had a special meaning, and became a symbol of power when combined with the hieratic aspects of the subject. Originally, Ra held this position, but as Horus gradually became more important, he transformed into a sun god, so Horus became thought of as Ra, or rather Ra-Herakhty ("Ra, who is Horus of the two horizons"). Later Horus-Eye numeration decreased in importance in Egyptian life, with hieratic, demotic and later improvements in Egyptian arithmetic solving the oldest Horus-Eye problem. The oldest Horus-Eye problem was to write any number, like one (1), exactly, without throwing away any piece of the number.



Enlil and
                        NinlilEL [depiction at left is of Enlil and Ninlil]

Ellil

by Micha F. Lindemans
"The Akkadian god of earth and wind. He is the son of Ansar and Kisar, the primordial deities, and the father of the moon god Sin. Together with Ea and Anu he forms a powerful triad of gods in the ancient Mesopotamian religion. He is represented wearing a headband which is decorated with horns. He is equivalent to the Sumerian god Enlil."

Enlil

by Micha F. Lindemans
      "In ancient Sumero-Babylonian myth, Enlil ("lord wind") is the god of air, wind and storms. Enlil is the foremost god of the Mesopotamian pantheon, and is sometimes referred to as Kur-Gal ("great mountain"). In the Sumerian cosmology he was born of the union of An heaven and Ki earth. These he separated, and he carried off the earth as his portion. In later times he supplanted Anu as chief god. His consort is Ninlil with whom he has five children: Nanna, Nerigal, Ningirsu, Ninurta, and Nisaba.

      Enlil holds possession of the Tablets of Destiny which gives him power over the entire cosmos and the affairs of man. He is sometimes friendly towards mankind, but can also be a stern and even cruel god who punishes man and sends forth disasters, such as the great Flood which wiped out humanity with the exception of Atrahasis. Enlil is portrayed wearing a crown with horns, symbol of his power. His most prestigious temple was in the city Nippur, and he was the patron of that city. His equivalent is the Akkadian god Ellil."



What I also suggest is that EL and YHWH were two separate 'gods' - see: YHWH as Marduk.  So we see that the gods El and Yahweh are distinct gods from each other, as distinct as their individual names. Yahweh was worshipped as a war god from the deserts of southern Palestine who migrated north to Judah while El was the god of Israel whose home was Mesopotamia. Historically speaking, the two gods must be regarded as originally distinct that subsequently were related and finally identified through political and religious syncreticism. Betty Rhodes

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