There’s an upcoming documentary series on BBC2 called “Bible’s Buried Secrets” that is starting to attract some attention. One of the people involved is Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, author of Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah. In a recent column in the Mail Online, Dr. Stavrakopoulou introduces her audience to Asherah, wife of Yahweh.
I attempted to track down this divine couple in my new BBC2 documentary series, Bible’s Buried Secrets. Until the discovery in the early 20th Century of an ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit in what is now modern-day Syria, very little was known about the goddess Asherah.
But ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed here reveal that she was a powerful fertility goddess.
But perhaps most significant of all, Asherah was also the wife of El, the high god at Ugarit – a god who shares much in common with Yahweh. Given the evidence within the Bible that she was worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem, might she have played the role of a divine wife in ancient Israel too?
Given the nature of the Daily Mail, it’s probably best to take whatever is written with an atom of salt. Even though Dr. Stavrakopoulou originally wrote it, it was likely punched up by the editors. That may explain the odd conspiracist tone later in the piece, when discussing a now lost inscription of Yahweh and Asherah:
Finding the original inscription, however, has proved impossible. Discovered in the Sinai in the Seventies, the real thing has since been mysteriously ‘lost’. Neither the BBC team of researchers nor my academic colleagues and contacts could locate it.
The antiquities authorities of Israel and Egypt claim to have no knowledge of its whereabouts. Was the inscription simply a casualty of the bureaucratic confusion arising from the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967?
Or did someone take the decision that such a potentially unsettling piece of evidence about the Jewish and Christian God was better hidden?
Doug Chaplin takes a moment to vent about how this is hardly news. But you don’t have to read the Daily Mail to see the media attempt to sensationalize an old story.
I just got finished reading Did God Have a Wife? by William G. Dever. He’s one of the foremost “biblical archeologists” in the world today and he makes the same claim. He mentions an inscription he found that read, “Yahweh and his Asherah,” but I don’t remember him saying anything about it being missing.
This is not really news. Archaeologist William Dever has done a lot of good work in this area — I heard him give a lecture once, where he talked about the worship of multiple gods in ancient Israel. He also asserted that the religious practices described in the Old Testament were never widespread — they were more the wishful pronouncements of a few ultraconservative priests. My theory is that the tradition became established, not because it was widespread (and certainly not because it was true), but because it got written down. From Wikipedia: “… Biblical monotheism is an artificial phenomenon, the product of the elite, nationalist parties who wrote and edited the Hebrew Bible during the Babylonian exile as a response to the trauma of the conquest, and subsequently enforced it in their homeland during the early Persian period.”
Here is a cracking video from youtube presenting the same history, well worth a watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlnnWbkMlbg
Thanks for pointing this out, vorjack. Very interesting stuff.
An atom of salt? Did you mean a molecule of salt?
As far as the Daily Mail is concerned, I’d have said semantics-be-damned and gone for a boulder…
Scholars have known about this for a long time, but it is not a good idea to spread it around on TV that God was invented by some ancient Egyptian and Israelite politicians. Religion is still the best way to control the least intelligent members of society. Hopefully they will be too stupid to understand the evidence.
Dear foxy freedom, how sad it is that you feel that way about those less intelligent people.
As human intelligence is making leaps and bounds it seems a rather stunted idealism.
If we were all more intelligent there would be less wars. If we were all more honest and fair there would be less reason for false religions in the first place