Bible’s Buried Secrets (BBC): Did God have a wife?
April 4, 2011
This episode deals with the origins of the God of the Old Testament (here only El, the Chief God of the ugaritic pantheon, is mentioned, though other influences exist) and with the possible worship of Asherah, a famous Goddess of the ancient Levant, by the Israelites (who were not completely monotheistic before the Exile, in the 6th century BC).
HT: Jim West
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Interesting program, thank you for linking to it. But among traditional Bible scholars the Bible has always represented monotheistic orthodoxy and vast swathes of the Old Testament are devoted to ample documentation of the ubiquity of polytheism reaching the highest levels of Israel’s society during its golden age, so the claims of distortion she makes are overstated.
Though the evidence she presents is fascinating — I love hearing about Baal and Asherah and the finds really enrich our view of what the culture was like back then, and I’m sure nearly all traditional Biblical scholars would agree — the end of the program is just a trendy feminist screed. In theology, far more constant than our shifting views of God are our desires to recast God in our own image, reducing the divine to the banal. Feminist scholarship is just one more example.