thenakedsamba: Things We Already Knew: Yahweh...

thenakedsamba:

Things We Already Knew: Yahweh had a wife who was edited out of holy books

thesixpennybook:

nextian:

porygon2:

Yahweh had a wife who was edited out of holy books

jonathan-cunningham:

“You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him,” writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. “He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many … or so we like to believe.”

“After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife,” she added.

Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.

Asherah’s connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.

“The inscription is a petition for a blessing,” she shares. “Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from ‘Yahweh and his Asherah.’ Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife.”

Also significant, Stavrakopoulou believes, “is the Bible’s admission that the goddess Asherah was worshiped in Yahweh’s Temple in Jerusalem. In the Book of Kings, we’re told that a statue of Asherah was housed in the temple and that female temple personnel wove ritual textiles for her.”

J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News that he agrees several Hebrew inscriptions mention “Yahweh and his Asherah.”

“Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors,” he added. “Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant.”

This blows my mind. Three of the largest religious traditions in the world have erased the female counterpart of their God. These are the same religions often accused of passing memetic sexism to their adherents- I don’t think this is at all a coincidence.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes across the room. I hate it when people report on Biblical scholarship because it’s always presented as ~exciting news~ for the ~practice of the religion~, whereas actually it is uniformly shit we already knew, and for a very long time. It is not breaking news that Judaism evolved from Semitic religions in Mesopotamia, in which there was a god El married to a god Asherah. Plenty of writers have engaged with this tradition long before this douchebag wrote a book about it — I found out about it in the Red Tent, for instance, which is recent in historical terms, but Asherah is present in mythology much older than that.

Asherah’s connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.

“The inscription is a petition for a blessing,” she shares. “Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from ‘Yahweh and his Asherah.’ Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife.”

I hate to have to break this down for you, but that’s not what this is evidence for. We have some pretty well-documented copies of the Tanakh from before the 8th century, and if Asherah had been edited out in Syria in the 8th century — which is, oh, is that the central hot spot for religious mysticism in early Christianity? Oh, I believe it is! I wonder if that has anything to do with a religiously mystical text — we would know about it. It’s really cool that her worship was still active in Syria, but it does not mean that everyone was going around until recently worshipping both Adonai and Asherah, it means that some people, in the countries where the worship originated, still worshipped both Adonai and Asherah.

I’m happy to see that Biblical scholars and archaeologists are uncovering more evidence that Israelites were not strictly Jewish in 586 BC but polytheistic, that’s pretty awesome! And I’m sure that male editors of the Tanakh did take out Asherah references, because these seem like pretty legitimate Biblical scholars, and I’m willing to trust people employed by Cal and and etc. But that’s not news. It’s only notable if you believe that your religion is founded in the unchanging text of the Bible, and if you believe that, what are you doing reblogging something with the word “editor” in it anyway?

Also, you know what? Shut the fuck up about Islam. This was dying by the time Islam came on the scene. Frankly, I’m a little pissed they’re trying to make it about Christianity, since it looks like this mostly predates it, too, but not entirely. But it is grossly unfair to accuse the Koran of writing out Asherah. She’d been long gone by then.

(Also if this guy thinks we don’t venerate the Sacred Tree imagery in Judaism, he isn’t paying attention. “It is the Tree of Life to those who hold fast to it, and all of its supporters are happy”? MINOR DETAILS OF A DYING TRADITION, I’M SURE.)

http://clayboy.co.uk/2011/03/gods-wife-on-the-bbc-a-tale-of-shocking-ignorance/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Did-God-Have-Wife-Archaeology/dp/0802863949/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299420126&sr=8-1-spell

Well as Someone Who Has A Degree In This Shit, my reaction was pretty identical (as it is to all the ~SHOCK~ documentaries about how MOSES PERHAPS DIDN’T WRITE THE TORAH!!! and THERE WERE IDEOLOGICAL DIVISIONS IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH!!1! and other such terrifying New Facts). The idea that the early Israelites worshipped a female deity too- that YHWH was perhaps not even top dog in the pantheon!- is very basic undergrad Tanakh/Old Testament Studies.

Also, arguing any theory on the basis of a few fragementary pieces of archaeological evidence (which I doubt is what Stavrakopoulou is really doing but that’s how it’s being presented) is incredibly dodgy scholarship. The archaeological record regarding the Ancient Israelites is extremely patchy and the scholarship and the very presentation of the actual artifacts riddled with ideological bias- this is perhaps a little more legit than arguing that the Tel Dan stele is proof of the historicity of Samuel-Kings, but not much better.

Plus the statement that Jews, Muslims and Christians all completely agree on God being singular… whoops look at that, I just coughed up THE TRINITY. Now please excuse me while I also cough very obviously over Sophia (and the explicit identification of it/her with the Logos in John) and my girl the BVM. Not all Christians have a problem with prayin’ to the ladies.

^ Commentary.

And everyone always forgets to mention Sophia. Which is fucking absurd—to present Asherah as newly found information and not once make any mention of Sophia.