Wait … God Had a WIFE?!? ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/mjtgyB4g2F0/maxresdefault.jpg) 🔗 **Source:** [Wait … God Had a WIFE?!?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtgyB4g2F0) You ready? >> All right, let's see it. >> The God of the Bible originally had a wife. This is not some new age revisionist theology. This is archaeology. >> This is accurate. As near as I can tell, the majority of scholars who specialize in early Israelite history are in fairly widespread agreement that in the earliest periods, the original patron deity of the nation of Israel, the northwest Semitic patriarchal high deity L was worshiped alongside their consort partner or wife Asher, who is Athiats in the ancient Egaritic literature. And I actually have an online class that I taught a few years ago on Asher, the Israelite goddess. And then when Adonai and L were conflated, Asher became the consort partner or wife of Adonai as well. And as this content creator is going to discuss, we have archaeological data indicating the pairing of Adonai and Ashra, not just in inscriptions, but even in drawings as we can see here. And I even sell this shirt as part of my merch. But there are a lot of people who push back and say, "Well, we know that Ashstro was worshiped because that was a state of apostasy. That was a corruption of the more pure, more monotheistic Israelite worship." And I've got a question about this on the largescale state-of-the- biblical studies survey that I'm conducting because I want more robust data, but it seems to me that the majority of scholars who specialize in early Israelite history also suggest the data don't support the conclusion this was a corruption of a more pure monotheistic worship practice. Rather, this was the original state of affairs and the pivot towards the demonization of Asher and the prohibition of her worship is actually a secondary development and in my opinion that probably takes place with King Josiah in the 7th century BCE. But again, I will have more robust data so I can say for sure whether or not this is a majority position. But it seems to me that at least the scholars that I'm reading about this, which I think is representative of the broader field, the position that most scholars take is that yes, initially Adoni and L would have been worshiped alongside Asher. And we even have data from the late 5th century BCE at Elephantine in Egypt where there is a reference to a combined divine name, Anat and Adoni. And anat is another divine name for a female deity. And so the two of them seem to have been worshiped together as a pair as late as the late fifth century, early 4th century BCE. So worship of a female deity is something that goes back deep into the history of ancient Israel. And if you would like to read some scholarship on this, probably the most accessible discussion is this book, Did God Have a Wife? by Bill Dver. But more academic treatments, more technical treatments include uh these books. And then I also have a chapter on this in my own book, The Bible Says. So what we get right and wrong about scriptures most controversial issues. Zev Michelle excavated a remote site in the Sinai Desert. He pulled up pottery shards from the 8th century B.C.E. the era of the Hebrew kings. The inscriptions on those jars read Yahweh and his asher. Matching inscriptions have since been found at Kibet Elcom in the West Bank. The main excavation report for Contilad is this publication and in it you can find a lot of discussion of these inscriptions, these references to Adonai and his Asher. And here are some of these inscriptions as well as some of the drawings that depict Asher in anthropomorphic form as well as in her symbolic form as a tree either a date palm or an almond tree with ibix's feeding on either side which is a ubiquitous symbol in ancient West Asia and in the opinion of some scholars including myself this stylistic tree is probably linked to the manora which may have been a version of an asher cultic object. We can go back to this ure from Lich which shows Ivix's feeding on either side of a stylized tree which has a distinct similarity to how manoras would later be depicted. The Hebrew Bible itself in the book of Kings records that a statue of Asher stood inside the temple of Solomon for 2/3 of its history before King Josiah finally tore it down. >> This is true. You have a discussion of an asher pole being taken out of the temple and destroyed. And this would not have been an anthropomorphic statue, but probably a kind of stylized tree, which would have represented Asher. And there are two different ways that the Bible may have tried to accommodate the existence of just such a tree in the Holy of Holies because according to the Deuteronomist, King Josiah took it out and destroyed it. But it may be related to the manora. And so the whole notion of the manura within the holy of holies may be a way to kind of sanitize and rehabilitate the existence of a stylized tree in the holy of holies that represented ashra. And then there's another interesting theory based on this paper by a scholar named Ran Iller that the budding rod of Aaron may have been an ash or a pole. And the entire story of Aaron's budding rod was a way to obscure that and kind of replace the understanding of this object as a cultic object associated with Ashra with this story of the budding rod of Aaron being placed within the ark of the covenant. So, there are a few different ways that scholars think the biblical authors are trying to account for the likely long-term presence of an ash or a pole within the Holy of Holies, probably alongside whatever divine image may have been in use to represent Adonai, the God of Israel. And I talk about this to some degree in my book, Adonai's Divine Images, a cognitive approach. And this is an open access book. You can find a PDF of it freely online. Why did he do that? >> So the destruction of the Asher cultic image was probably a part of a broader campaign of cultic reform that may have taken place to some degree in the late 7th century BCE. Most scholars would say what is discussed in 2 Kings 22 and 23 is probably not very historical. This is probably later attempts to make this sound like a more significant reform than it originally was. But there are a lot of scholars who think that Josiah probably did implement some cultic reforms as a part of an attempt to centralize worship in Jerusalem. Because prior to this, there were temples scattered around ancient Israel and Judah. And there was worship of Adonai and manifestations of Adonai in a variety of different places, probably using a variety of different types of cultic media. And there were probably different deities that were associated with that worship up to and including personal household worship involving divine images and probably involving ancestors and other deities like perhaps Asher. And so in an attempt to rid his kingdom of all this other worship that was directing resources and attention elsewhere, Josiah may have said, "No, you're not allowed to engage in any of that household worship, any of that ancestor worship, any of that worship of Asher. You're only allowed to worship Adonai, and you're only allowed to do so in my temple in Jerusalem, which would have focused all the nation's resources and cultic attention on Jerusalem, on Josiah's priesthood, and on the temple that was run by Josiah in Jerusalem. So, it seems to be about power and resources and structuring values and boundaries in a way that forwarded Josiah's interests over and against the interests of people who engaged in household worship, which usually would have heavily involved women. And if you're interested in the role of goddesses and of female priests in early Israel, I would highly recommend Susan Acriman's God's Goddesses and the Women Who Serve Them. This is the academic consensus among biblical archaeologists at Oxford, Exiter, and Harvard. The real question is why did the editors of the Torah spend generations chiseling her name from the record? I think the explanation is most likely that people were trying to structure power, values, and boundaries in ways that served their interests, which meant taking away that access to power and resources from the groups that they didn't like, which would have included female priests and the worship of Asher as the consort partner or wife of Adonai, the god of Israel. The pattern runs deeper. The Hebrew word for what God took from Adam to form Eve is sa. It appears 40 other times in the Hebrew Bible. And every single time it means side. Side of the altar, side of the ark, side of the mountain. Co-equal. The woman came from the man's side. Born of his bone, flesh of his flesh. The way Adam himself said it in the very next verse. One Latin translator picked the word rib and a thousand years later we're still living inside that one wobble. >> I think there would be a lot of scholars who would dispute this representation of what's going on here. Salah does more directly reference a side rather than a rib. But you do see it used in reference to like the wooden beams that would support the side of a ship, which you could see how conceptually could be related to ribs. So I would usually point out to people that the idea here seems to be more than just a rib, particularly because Adam says not just bone of my bone, but also flesh of my flesh. So it seems to be a larger chunk of Adam than just a rib. But I don't know that the majority of scholars would agree with the notion that this is supposed to represent a 50/50 kind of egalitarian split down the middle of Adam. But that is a reading that has quite a bit of antiquity within early Judaism. There was an understanding that prior to this split, Adam was a being that had both male and female parts. And so they were then split into a male and a female similar to Aristophany's myth in Plato's symposium. So there is some antiquity to this. I don't know that egalitarianism was the central message of it. And I think scholars would suggest the exact understanding of what's going on here is still a little too disputed for us to be able to say it definitely meant this and therefore ri is a mistransation. And when Yeshua himself prayed, he prayed in Aramaic, his native tongue. The Lord's prayer begins with, "O birther, father, mother of the cosmos." So this is entirely inaccurate, and this is based on this book from the '90s called Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus's Words by Neil Douglas Clots. And really, it's just a mystical meditation on what meaning we could read into the Lord's Prayer. Douglas Clattz represents it as a more accurate representation of all these deep meanings within the Aramaic, but it's entirely inaccurate. And there are no scholars who would agree that that's what's going on in the Aramaic. Again, this is just a mystical meditation. This content creator said regarding God's wife that this wasn't this new age revisionist stuff. Uh, this part of this video is 100% new age revisionist stuff. >> The first word in the original Aramaic is abun, a fusion of aba, father, and wound, womb. He was praying to the father mother god. >> So this is just entirely false to begin. Abwun does not combine father with womb. It combines father with a first common plural possessive suffix. It just means our father. However, it's not pronounced abun. It's pronounced aun. But additionally, this is Syriak, which is not Galilean Aramaic. So, it's not the language that Jesus would have spoken. in Galilean Aramaic. If we were to try to back translate from Greek to a hypothetical original Galilean Aramaic, it would probably be Aunan, which would be the Galilean Aramaic way of combining father with the first common plural possessive suffix our. So why was the feminine redacted from the creation story, erased from the prayer of the rebby who came to set the record straight? Most people will tell you this is patriarchy. They'll say it's about male power and control. But that's just the surface structure. The deeper current runs underneath. There are forces at work in this world that are fundamentally anti-life. Their entire project is to sever humanity from the source that births, feeds, and renews us. Because life on this planet flows through one channel, the mother. The womb is the threshold every soul passes through to get here. The woman who carried you was your first universe, your first ocean, your first sky. Erase the feminine from the origin story and you sever the rope between humanity and the living source of everything that breathes. This sounds like it's trying to attribute demonic forces to the patriarchy. I don't think that there are data that support that conclusion. I think patriarchy, selfishness, people trying to structure power and values and boundaries in ways that serve their interests over and against the interests of others, people who because of systemic power asymmetries are almost unilaterally male. I think those are the things that primarily contribute to the eraser, the demonization of the worship of Asher and other marginalizations and oppression of females involved in worship, female deities and the role of women in the priesthood and things like that. I think that has much better explanatory power and makes much better use of the data and also doesn't have to rely on misinformation like Douglas Clots's entirely inaccurate attempts to meditate mystically on what the Lord's Prayer could mean. And the fit for this video has been data over dogma., Wait … God Had a WIFE?!?, YouTube, 01ksk7tffra7qhyqyj5tzmp9xq.