Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by William G. Dever.

https://archive.org/details/DidGodHaveAWife/mode/2up

Page 34
The Scandinavian branch of this school tended to be more extreme, positing not only celebrations of “divine kingship” in ancient Israel, but even of the hieros gamos, or “sacred marriage” of the gods. In these rites, priests and priestesses, the king and queen, or even “cult prostitutes” supposedly acted out the mysterious and magical union of divinity and humanity by performing ritual sexual intercourse in the sanctuary or even in public worship. Thus was born the pervasive notion of ancient Canaanite and Israelite “fertility cults,” to which I shall turn presently.

There never was much actual evidence for the more titillating aspects of such cults. And today, of course, even the hint of sexual (and sexist) overtones in religious practice is politically incorrect. Yet one recalls that even circumspect scholars were once fascinated (and at the same time repelled) by the “licentiousness” of Canaanite religion. Thus my own teacher G. Ernest Wright, a proper Presbyterian clergyman as well as a leading archaeologist, wrote in his Biblical Archaeology:

The sexual emphasis of Canaanite religion was certainly extreme and at its worst could only have appealed to the baser aspects of man. Religion as commonly practiced in Canaan, then, must have been a rather sordid and degrading business, when judged by our standards, and so, it seems, it appeared to religious circles of Israel (1957:13).

Page 64
the composite authorship and late date of the textual sources relevant to our inquiry here, in their present form, are beyond dispute, as are their theological biases. Let us look at the “schools” that the documentary hypothesis generally recognizes (see further Bibliography).

(1) The “J” document. This source, designated “I” for the divine name “Yahweh” that it prefers ( Jahweh in German), runs mostly through Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. It was originally thought to be the earliest prehistory and “theological” reworking of tradition in the Hebrew Bible, dating to southern circles as early as the 10th century b.c., perhaps from the court of David and Solomon.
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(2) The “E” document. This material, termed “E” because it uses the alternate name for God, “Elohim,” is thought to stem from a northern source. It was originally dated to the 9th century b.c., but now it is more commonly dated to the 8th century b.c. because of its “prophetic” interests. “E” parallels “J” in some senses, with alternate versions of some of the same stories (beginning with Abraham). Eventually it was interlaced with “P” by later editors (perhaps as “J/E”). “E” often conceives of God’s revelation in the form of dreams, reflecting especially on sin and guilt, and emphasizing “the fear of God.”
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(3) The “P” document. This material, from anonymous “Priestly” sources, appears especially in Leviticus. To some, “P” seems late and some¬ what artificial, with its heavy emphasis on exclusive monotheism, on holiness as ritual purity, and on the sacrificial cult. Its “priestly” view of salvation is set, however, in Israel’s prehistory in Canaan, especially in the wandering in the wilderness.
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(4) The “Deuteronomistic history.” The most important source for us, because it is more overtly historical and covers the whole period of the mon¬ archy, is the “Deuteronomistic history,” often designated “Dtr.” It runs from the book of Deuteronomy (added to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers to form the “Pentateuch”) through Kings.

Page 150
The reference to “Ashimah,” obviously a goddess, is puzzling, since such a deity is known only in ancient Arabia. But with a slight consonantal change in the biblical word ashimah (mem to resh) we could read asherah , or “Asherah,” the well-known goddess. The early Hebrew form of mem looks like this: the early Hebrew form of resh looks like this: A simple scribal error? Or a clever attempt to conceal the name of the hated goddess Asherah?

It is noteworthy that the Hebrew root of “Ashimah” seems to be dshdm , “shame,” making it more likely that the editors did not want to read “Asherah of Samaria” (the northern capital), but “ shame of Samaria ”.
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Page 176
Now it is time, however, to focus even more closely on the role that women played in family religion and to explore further the question of whether many Israelite women had a patroness, the old Canaanite Mother Goddess “Asherah.”
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Page 184
I can offer only one other explanation, namely that the biblical writers and editors knew very well what the female figurines represented, and therefore they deliberately suppressed any reference to them . They did not wish to acknowledge the popularity and the powerful influence of these images, much less to enhance them by talking about them. (“Don’t speak of the devil,” as the saying goes.) Thus there is an attempt here to deceive readers, ancient and modern. Why? I think it must be because the images represented the goddess Asherah , whom the biblical writers abhorred (and probably also feared).

I have already shown how some of the biblical references to “asherah” are downplayed in the texts, reducing her as it were to only a “shadow of herself” — merely a symbol of the goddess, a pole or tree. And we have noted how later editors may have tinkered with the pronunciation of the related divine name “Astarte” to make it pronounced as “shame.”

Page 185
Now if the biblical writers had wanted to be precise in mentioning this wooden image of or for the goddess Asherah, they had the more or less precise terms discussed above at hand. But they did not use any of these words. They chose what I would call a circumlocution, a way of “skirting the is¬ sue ” They wanted to condemn Ma’acah for her veneration of Asherah, so they had to be specific about her most sinful act. But they call the Asherah image only an “abomination” — something too terrible to mention by name. We either have to conclude that this was a deliberate attempt to obscure a reference to Asherah and her images; or suppose that the writers didn’t really know what a mipleset was, and were aware only that it was something very bad. I find the latter unlikely. I am confident that the biblical writers knew very well what a mipleset was; they just didn’t want you to know. In my view, it is all part of the attempt of a hierarchical, male, ortho¬ dox Establishment to drive Asherah underground — an attempt that ultimately succeeded. And there she remained, until she was dug up recently by archaeologists. I can already hear the cries of protest that there was no such “conspiracy.” But rather than raising theoretical objections, let us continue to look at the evidence — without theological presuppositions, if possible.
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Page 209
CHAPTER VII – Asherah, Women’s Cults, and “Official Yahwism”.

Traditional biblical scholarship has only reluctantly admitted that there was a goddess Asherah who might have been known to some ancient Israelites and worshipped by them. Most of the more than 40 occurrences of the word ’ asherah in the Hebrew Bible, as we have seen above, are taken to refer only to a wooden pole or tree-like object that was simply a “symbol” of some sort (often without asking, “A symbol of what ?”).
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Page 212
II Kings 23 is the most revealing passage of all. This is the “set piece” of the Deuteronomistic historians and their revisionist history of ancient Israel: the story of the reforms of their hero (and no doubt patron), “good King Josiah ” Among his iconoclastic deeds he, like Hezekiah before him, is said to have demolished all the high places and removed “the Asherah” from the Temple and burned it. In addition, however, he attacked other aspects of folk religion that had “infiltrated” the Jerusalem Temple, as the biblical writers saw it. And in describing these “pagan practices” they inadvertently give us valuable eyewitness details. In fact, what we have in II Kings 23 is nothing less than an “inventory” of the religious practices of most people in ancient Israel, not only toward the very end of the monarchy, but as they undoubtedly had been in place from the beginning (Asherah had been tolerated in the Temple until now).

Note the elements of folk religion here:

(1) “Idolatrous” priests
(2) High places (bdmot) in all the cities of Judah and all around Jerusa¬ lem, even at the gates of the city
(3) Incense burned to Baal
(4) Standing stones (mdssebot)
(5) The worship of “the sun, the moon, and the constellations, and all the hosts of the heavens” in the Temple
(6) Horses and chariots dedicated to the sun at the entrance to the Temple
(7) Altars (for incense) on the roof of the Temple
(8) “Vessels made for Ba’al, for Asherah, and for all the host of Heaven” in the Temple
(9) Cult prostitution in the Temple (although this is in fact doubtful; below)
(10) Child sacrifice in the Kidron Valley below

Page 216
Classical writers like Herodotus wrote describing how women in Babylon were compelled at least once in their lifetime to go sit in the Tem¬ ple of Aphrodite and solicit a man to engage in sexual intercourse. Other ancient writers describe Phoenician religion as blatantly sexual. It is out of these prejudices, ancient and modern, that both the myth of the “sacred marriage” of the gods being acted out in cult celebrations and the myth of “cult prostitution” were created (see further Chapter VIII on “fertility cults”).

There is neither etymological, cultural, nor historical evidence to support these notions. And among the excellent scholars who have helped to demolish such misreadings of the biblical texts are women who have written perceptively on ancient Israelite religions (such as Ackerman, Bird, and Frymer-Kensky). All we can really say about the qedeshtm in II Kings 23:7 is that they were functionaries “dedicated” to temple service of some sort, but that the reformers disapproved of them and wanted them expelled.

Parallels to the females of this class of functionaries have been drawn with the qadishtu women in ancient Mesopotamia (the Hebrew word is cognate). But these women, although “dedicated” to temple service, were not prostitutes. Some attempts, however, to “salvage the reputation” of women cult personnel in the Jerusalem Temple may have gone too far in the other direction. Frymer-Kensky likens them to “vestal virgins” (1992:201).
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Page 270
This exercise in political correctness brings me to another, less amusing case, the questioning of the Canaanite and Israelite cults as “fertility religions.” Denying the existence of ancient “fertility cults” has almost become a mantra. One can easily see why, given the caricatures common in early scholarship, which regarded Canaanite religion as obscene but were obscenities themselves, professing to be repulsed but in fact being transparently prurient (Chapter II). These views were, of course, those of the commentators at the time, all males. But the reaction has gone too far in the other direction in my opinion, and it is more driven by currently fashionable ideologies than by genuine advances in scholarship.

One victim of the purging of the language is the goddess Anat. She appears often in the Ugaritic texts as the consort of Ba’al, this pair being the younger West Semitic rival deities of El and Asherah, now somewhat in their dotage (above). But the character and roles of Anat are difficult to rationalize. Her regular title is “Maiden Anat”; yet she is portrayed as Ba’al’s lover, copulating with him endlessly. She has been understood as a “Fertility Goddess,” a giver of life, because of her sexuality; yet she is a warrior goddess who rounds up Ba’al’s enemies and slaughters them, wading up to her vulva in blood and gore, laughing triumphantly. Anat is also a huntress. So who is she really?
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Page 289
Josiah’s reawakening religious conscience was apparently inspired by the “discovery” of the long lost “book of the law” (that is, “of Moses”) hidden away in the Temple archives (II Kings 22:3-23:3). When the scroll was brought to Josiah and read to him, he was extremely distraught and fearful: “Great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book” (II Kings 22:13). As I noted above, the scroll that then becomes the Constitution of Josiah’s reforms was almost certainly planted in the Temple by members of the Deuteronomistic parties, whose orthodox monotheistic agenda they attributed to Moses. What better way to start a revolution than by rediscovering a lost work of the founder, Moses? If this seems deceptive, we might remember that, as Lang puts it, “Yahweh-aloneists stop at nothing to achieve their objectives,” and that “religious zeal shrinks at no methods” (1983:39).

The specific measures that Josiah took are outlined in II Kings 23 and have been discussed above. Again, as with Hezekiah’s reforms, these acts are aimed at folk religion — here not out in the boondocks where people may be expected to be “pagan,” but rather in the Jerusalem Temple and the “official” cult. Of particular interest are the numerous references to the cult of Asherah (II Kings 23:4-14 and above).
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Page 290
First, the date of the Judean pillar-base figurines, which I discussed extensively in Chapter V and related to the cult of Asherah, can now be narrowed to the late 8th and particularly the 7th century b.c. (Kletter 1996; 2001). That means that the “Asherah” figurines were flourishing precisely during the attempted reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, one of whose principal objectives was eliminating the cult of Asherah. Again, the biblical writers, despite (or because of) their polemics knew what they were talking about. Folk religion was not only perceived as a threat to their agenda, it was a threat to their agenda. The continued use — even the growing popularity — of the Asherah figurines in the late 7th century BC proves just how popular and persistent her cult was, right to the end of the monarchy.
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Page 293 – 294
For our purposes here, the numbers don’t really matter much, since despite skeptics Jerusalem did fall; the Temple was destroyed; and parts of Judah were depopulated. And these events precipitated a religious as well as a political crisis that brought the religions of ancient Israel to an end over the next half-century or so. Thus were laid the foundations for what we must call Judaism, beginning under Ezra and the returnees (below). That such changes did take place over time is beyond reasonable doubt. It only remains to speculate how and why — in particular, with respect to the ways in which traditional Israelite polytheism evolved into monotheism.
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Page 295
true monotheism emerged only in the period of the exile in Babylon in the 6th century b.c., as the canon of the Hebrew Bible was taking shape. That is why van der Toorn’s term, which I have used here — “Book religion” — is so appropri¬ ate. Monotheism did not arise out of folk religion, out of common prac¬ tice, but rather out of theological reflection after the fact. This reflection on experience, including disaster, is what informs the Hebrew Bible.

The Bible is thus ”revisionist history,” revised on the basis of the lessons that the authors presumed to have drawn from their own stormy history. The fundamental lesson for them was that Yahweh was indeed a “jealous god,” punishing those who flirted with other gods. The conclusion? Don’t do this again! And many of the exiles in Babylon, as well as the remnant left back in Judah, learned that lesson. Nothing teaches us like pain.
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Page 298
Having looked at both the negative aspect of monotheism and the Law (legalism and exclusivity), as well as at their better prospects (universal justice), we still have not satisfactorily explained why monotheism developed at all. In the history of religions, monotheism is a late, very restricted, and even somewhat arbitrary development. From a secular perspective, it could even be argued that monotheism does not necessarily represent “progress,” because it is in some ways less sophisticated — that is, less comprehensive, less flexible, less natural. In any case, it is not polytheism that needs to be explained, but rather monotheism.
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Page 299
I would go even further. I don’t think that the Deuteronomists’ “Temple theology” ever had much to do with the realities of local and family folk religion. And I doubt whether the written version of official religion — “literary piety,” as in the Psalms — was widespread in a largely illiterate society. Even the “Ten Commandments” in their present form were probably peripheral to most people’s lives, along with the “Sinai” and “Mosaic covenant” themes. There probably was a historical Moses, who introduced the desert deity Yahweh to tribal groups in the Sinai. And “Mosaic” traditions may have lingered, at least orally, throughout the monarchy, even in folk religion. But the promotion of Moses to the position of “founder of Israelite religion,” the elevation of “law” to a preeminent position, is almost certainly the product of the 7th -6th century b.c. Deuteronomistic theological agenda.

These are all late theological and literary constructs propagated by extremists toward the very end of the monarchy — right-wing, orthodox, nationalist parties. These concepts became normative only when “Book religion” came to the fore, as the new “Jewish” community began the process that would lead eventually to the formation of canonical Scripture.
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What is conspicuous in the archaeology of the province of “Yehud” in the Persian era in the late 6th-4th century b.c. — the biblical period of “the return from exile” — is the complete absence of all the evidence of polytheism that we have surveyed above. That includes high places (bamot); local shrines and sanctuaries of all kinds; Hebrew cultic inscriptions; and especially the female figurines. All these things end with the end of the Iron Age, sometime in the mid-6th century b.c. [550 BCE]
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Page 300
The texts make it clear that these bowls were used by Jews to protect them against the night goddess “Lilith,” who was a ghostly demon, sometimes a consort of the male gods, who steals children at night (Patai 1990:221-254). Lilith is known as early as the 3rd millennium b.c. in Mesopotamia, but she becomes especially feared in the eastern Mediterranean world in late antiquity. Some of the incantation bowls picture her on the bottom, naked, with long loose hair, pointed breasts, exaggerated pubic triangle, and chained ankles. The texts are very explicit about her.
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Page 301
Thus “Lady Wisdom” (Hebrew hokma; later Greek Sophia) appears in several texts (Job 28:12-28; Proverbs 1:20-33; 3:7-19; 8:1-36; 9:1-18). It is significant that Lady Wisdom is portrayed in these biblical texts as a partner with Yahweh in creation; that she goes about on her own, speaking publicly for Yahweh; that she brings specific blessings and long life; and, above all, that “she is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her” (Proverbs 3:18). All these traits and activities sound like Yahweh; but they also sound like Asherah, do they not?
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Page 302
The sexual imagery in this esoteric mystical literature, little known to moderns, even Jews, is striking. The pair are lovers, so close that they are inseparable, indeed almost a composite androgynous deity. Some descriptions of love-making are graphic.

When the seed of the Righteous is about to be ejaculated, he does not have to seek the Female, for she abides with him, never leaves him, and is always in readiness for him. His seed flows not save when the Female is ready; and when they both as one desire each other; and they unite in a single embrace, and never separate. . . . Thus the Righteous is never forsaken. (Patai 1990:124)

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Page 303
My point has always been that in time orthodoxy drove the Great Mother underground, where she was almost forgotten for centuries, until popular piety and archaeology rediscovered and revived her. Asherah, in whatever guise, appears to be alive and well.
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Page 306 – 307
Some doctrinaire feminists have gone to extremes, of course, arguing without any evidence that originally there was only one Great Mother, who prevailed until she was dethroned by upstart male deities in later historical times and was thereafter suppressed. This was most forcibly argued by the European archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in books like Language of the Goddess (1989). Such pseudo-scholarship has been embraced by various New Age Goddess cults and “Neopagan” religions that selectively resuscitate the beliefs, images, deities, and practices of ancient religions.
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An excellent antidote to the foolishness perpetuated by the “Goddess movement” is a collection of scholarly essays edited by Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris, Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence (1998). The authors offer a critical review of literature going back a century or more, in the light of the archaeological data from many areas of the world (the chapter on ancient Israel is by Karel van der Toorn). They also include a critique of some extremist Christian feminist theologians and their substitution of female chauvinism for male chauvinism, simply another “mystique” Above all, they show that there was never a single ancient “Goddess,” but that each culture must be appreciated for its diversity.
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Page 308
Another useful, sensible collection of essays is the volume Women and Goddess Traditions in Antiquity and Today , edited by Karen King (1997). Several writers examine Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern traditions, as well as Buddhist, Hindu, and other non-Jewish and non-Christian religious traditions, and the experiences of women within them.
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Page 313
I can only speak for men, and for myself in particular. Knowledge of the Goddess has introduced me to the other half of myself. As Patai puts it:

The goddess thus speaks to man with four tongues: keep away from me because I am a Virgin; enjoy me because I am available to all; come shelter in my motherly bosom; and die in me because I thirst for your blood. Whichever of her aspects momentarily gains the upper hand, there is a deep chord in the male psyche which powerfully responds to it. Her voices enter man and stir him; they bend man to pay homage to her and they lure man to lose himself in her, whether in love or in death. (Patai 1990:154)