Reply #14: "Abbas = God" was common useage by Jews [View All]

[TechBear_Seattle]

The religious group that controlled the Temple in Jerusalem during the 1st century BCE through most of the 1st century CE -- and who, by extension, defined the official religion of Jerusalem and the Jewish people -- defined God as being distant and remote, inaccessable except by means of complicated sacrifices performed by a highly trained caste of priests. This group, the Sadducees, held that God could only be appeased, not communicated with, and cared only for the legalities of the Law and not for the day-to-day problems of the people.

In opposition, most other religious movements held that God was immediately accessable to anyone willing to pray and intimately interested in what you were doing and why. God was not a monarch, but a father. For this reason, the Pharisees, Zealots, Essenes and other religous groups used the Aramaic equivalent of "daddy" to mean God. That is what "abbas" is: an intimate form of the Aramaic word for "father."