God as "Father of Heaven" or "Spirit of Heaven": An exploration of Max Weber's analysis of the formation of God's image in ancient Chinese and Palestinian civilizations

Ancient Palestine and ancient China were two regions where two historically effective religions emerged: Judaism in one and Confucianism in the other. In these two religions, there are two images of God and two models of human-God relationship, which acted as one of the effective factors on the different historical paths of the two ancient Palestinian and Chinese civilizations: in China, the idea of God as a "spirit of heaven" And in ancient Judaism, he appeared as "Father of Heaven". Max Weber, as a sociologist who has conducted extensive comparative studies on world religions, although he speaks of the "relative independence" of religious ideas, But he considers the formation of these two images of God to be influenced by the economic and political structures of these two civilizations. In this article, we intend to present his analysis of the political and historical contexts of these two civilizations and the role of these factors in the formation of two images of God and the formation of two types of prophets in these two civilizations.