From Ancient Near Eastern Religion to the Abrahamic Traditions: A Unified Historical Thesis

This paper examines Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as historically distinct but culturally interconnected religious formations that developed through long-term processes of inheritance, cultural contact, reinterpretation, religious competition, and institutional transformation. Rather than treating the three Abrahamic traditions as isolated systems or reducing their relationships to simple copying, the paper proposes a model of cumulative religious transformation. The first part examines the development of Israelite religion within the ancient Near Eastern environment, including Canaanite and Ugaritic religious traditions, Mesopotamian literary traditions, Egyptian cultural influence, the development of Yahwism, the Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom inscriptions, the Elephantine papyri, and the gradual consolidation of Israelite monotheism. Babylonian and Persian imperial contexts are also examined as possible contributors to later developments in Jewish theology, while distinguishing established evidence from debated hypotheses. The second part examines the emergence of Christianity from Second Temple Judaism and the subsequent transformation of Jewish concepts and scriptures within the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. It then examines the emergence of Islam within the late-antique Arabian environment, emphasizing documented Jewish, Christian, South Arabian, and broader Near Eastern religious interaction while avoiding a simplistic direct-copying model. The paper argues that religious traditions can become genuinely distinct systems while remaining historically dependent upon earlier cultural layers. The recurring mechanism proposed is not simple copying but inheritance plus reinterpretation under changing cultural conditions. A modern comparison with Yoruba-derived Santería is used only as an analogy demonstrating that religious transformation through cultural pressure, contact, and syncretism is a historically observable process.