God's Wife, Asherah, May Have Been Edited Out Of The Bible Says Theologian

This might not exactly be the version of the Bible you remember from Sunday school.

Early versions of the Bible apparently featured a fertility godess, Asherah, who may have been God's wife, at least according to one British theologian. Back in 1967, historian Raphael Patai mentioned ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah, according to Discovery.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, is shedding new light on the theory. However, even if she's right, the Bible's editors may very well have wiped her almost clean from the document, reports TIME.

From TIME:

What remains of God's purported other half are clues in ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in an ancient Canaanite coastal city, now in modern-day Syria. Inscriptions on pottery found in the Sinai desert also show Yahweh and Asherah were worshipped as a pair, and a passage in the Book of Kings mentions the goddess as being housed in the temple of Yahweh.

J. Edward Wright, president of The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, backs Stavrakopoulou's findings, saying several Hebrew inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah."

It's all a bit Dan Brown-ish, but apparently there are still a few signs of her in the Bible.

From Discovery:

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."

Whether the goddess was actually edited out of the document is debatable, but Aaron Brody, director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, told TIME the ancient Isrealites were, in fact, polytheists.

Stavrakopoulou's books and papers have become the basis for a documentary series in Europe where she discusses the Yahweh-Asherah connection.

Comments

[Dallas D Snell]

08:06 AM on 05/11/2011

God is the Word and everyone now seems to know that word or speak of it in one way or another.

[Dallas D Snell]

07:54 AM on 05/11/2011

Nothing else but the word "God" can ever claim it made the Universe.

[Antony Hylton]

08:55 AM on 04/13/2011

Yahuah makes it clear through his servants the propehts that he is not to be worshipped with elohim acherim.(other gods) Now because Israel were disobedient to his command they defiled his temple and worshipped other gods including asherah. For someone to tell us they were doing what the Bible tells us they were doing 2500 years ago is hardly ground breaking news. Remember at one point they made a golden calf and said this is ...who brought you out of Egypt. For that sin 3000 Isralites died. I am sure many have died because of the worship of Asherah, for Yahuah is indeed a nidkjær Gud as my son often reads. Asherah went to the flames many times I am sure and in their rebellion they may well have stuck her in the temple even as Antiochus Epiphanes put an altar to Zeus there, But neither of them are the true worship of Yahuah. He alone is to be worship!!! And in the coming day he alone will be exalted.

[SrAN]

10:06 AM on 04/02/2011

The Abrahamic religions set themselves apart from other religions because they are almost purely patriarchal. So to hear news that the beginnings or early sects of one of these religions could have worshipped a female deity is honestly no surprise to me. The earliest forms of religion, dating back to the Sumerians, regard men and women almost completely equally. Man cannot create on his own, he needs a woman to do so. That is what always made me scratch my head in confusion about christianity and the other abrahamic religions. God created everything, God is masculine. He creates Adam, Adam is not able to procreate, so God creates Eve (well Lilith first, but she was bad and didn't want to submit in the missionary position). Eve is able to carry life, able to complete the circle and able to give birth with the seed given to her by Adam. So why, if God is masculine, didn't He just give Adam the same life giving ability as he has? Maybe because God didn't make this all by himself.
Just a Pagan twist on the story.

[mike edrosa]

08:24 AM on 04/04/2011

The story of Adam and Eve was taken from the Sumerians BTW. The first humans created by "the Gods" were called Adamu, which we should all know that Adam is the Hebrew word for man and Adamu was the Sumerian word of man. Its also written that the creators (the Gods) of the Adamu where from another planet. Which if the Gods did come another planet that would not make them Gods at all but just intelligent beings or aliens WITH highly advance technology, I say this because if you are able to travel from another galaxy you must have some type of "flying spacecraft" some type of flying chariot as the Greeks would say their Gods piloted. Also to create a complex being like us humans you would also need some type of advance technology and science to create humans or alter their genetics. Which the Sumerians also wrote down that prehistoric man was genetically mutated by the Gods to make the perfect slave... the Adamu...

[Faizan Panjwani]

11:35 PM on 05/20/2011

The whole point of God is that He's GOD. He created genders. He Himself doesn't have one. We call Him He because the thing about society, especially when Judaism was created is that people listened to man's ideas more than woman's. So the holy books for Judaism, Christianity and Islam call him He. Because if you were some dude hundreds of years ago who's mindset centered around the idea that man is the one who works and woman stays at home, and then someone came and started saying that the idols you worshiped were not gods, and that there is only one God and tried to convince you of that, and you were nearly convinced, if they said God was a she, you'd think, wait, a woman created us? That makes no sense, if God is a woman, why'd he make men stronger (which is what a person with that mindset which was common back then would think.) We refer to God as He in religious books because people thought only men could be powerful back then, and the reason the prophets were there was to spread the message, and back then, who would worship someone referred to as "she?" God didn't give Adam the same life giving ability because that defeats the point of creating a mortal world of humans that have families and friends and children. None of the Abrahamic religions believe God reproduces. All of the Abrahamic religions believe God says be and it becomes.

[MoonChild02]

04:51 AM on 03/28/2011

Actually, Asherah, also known as Ashteroth or Astarte, was a goddess of the Canaanites and Ammorites. She is mentioned in the Bible. She was the wife of the god Molech, a.k.a. Moloch, Baal, and Asmodeus. Together, they were the deities of fertility, and especially of abortion. They were sacrificed to by cutting open pregnant women, scooping out the fetus, draining it of blood, and then burning it. The same practices were used in sacrificing to Zeus, Athena, Baal Hammon, Tanit, Kronos, Aphrodite, Isis, and, I'm sure, several others.

See these books and chapters of the Bible to see why Christians are so against abortion:
1 Kings 11, 15, 18, 21
2 Kings 17, 23
2 Chronicles 15, 28
Amos 1

[discouragerofhesitancy]

06:26 PM on 03/27/2011

Asherah, the Aramaic word for Monolith?

[timm553]

06:09 PM on 03/27/2011

Why would a non-existent being need a wife?

[Inimitable 1BC]

01:16 PM on 03/27/2011

Since the beginning of time men have been fearful of the power of women that they want to make her less than what she truly is. What's so uncommon about men vanishing the role of women? Look around today they degrade women every chance they get…in movies, in songs, in the workplace and home life!!!

Women get your power back!!!

The bible was created and has been manipulated to scare the masses and weak minded people since the day the first words were spoken or written.

Abrahamic god evolved from a Semitic war/fertility god called Yahweh, whose wife was called Asherah, goddess of fertility/love. Their equivalents are Ares/Mars and Aphrodite/Venus. Later on, Yahweh absorbed element of supreme Semitic god El. El's name is part of names SamuEL, DaniEL, RaphaEL, MichaEL…

You must remember that people in power will always twist things in their favor and religion is just another form of government. Popes used to get married, but this was changed because when they died the money went to their wives and the church was having none of that! Women were priests at one time also, but again, but the so call learned men of the cloth did not like that so that part of history was erased.

Pray to Asherah…Yahweh's EQUAL!!!

[santiago sherwood]

11:40 AM on 03/27/2011

there is a lot edited out so they could control the message no one wants to present a confusing document. you can't win the propaganda war with a poorly told story

[b525]

11:31 AM on 03/27/2011

There is likely something to this, over the years when I read the bible I often wonder about the exclusion of woman in God's life. Surely woman makes up one half of God.

Women in ancient societies and even modern cultures have certain things which they have dominion and power over and men have certain things that they have dominion and power over. Their powers seem to be in many ways seperate, but equal.

In ancient and present hunting and gathering societies women were/are often free to speak out and criticize men, sometimes with extreme virulance.

In some Amazonian and other hunting and gathering cultures anthropologists found that some of the most successful male hunters and fisherman in the tribe often recieved the most scorn and criticism from the women.....after puzzling over this for quite some time the anthropologists realized (and were informed) that if these men were not humbled they would develop large egos and possibly become oppressive and bullying leaders endangering the well being of the entire tribe.

Modern distortions of religion that require women to be silent, covered and subservient at all times do not seem to match our historical and ancient patterns of tribal evolution.

The women in many ways ruled over much of village life and the care of young children etc. and the men respected this and voluntarily gave them room to run these affairs. The women in like manner voluntarily gave men room to run their own affairs.

[William Hunter Duncan]

09:45 PM on 03/26/2011

The Goddess has been edited out of history for the last 5,000 years.

www.offthegridmpls.blogspot.com

[Stephan Pickering]

06:57 PM on 03/26/2011

This article -- and the praise given to Ms Stavrakopoulou -- is woefully out-dated. The scholarship on the Goddess Asherah/Isis/Shekhinah is large, and she has contributed nothing original to the debate. Aside from Rabbi Patai, one need only peruse the work of Judith Hadley and Steve A. Wiggins, and so many others, to discern the scope of the remarkable insights being gleaned. With the Kabbalah, one has Peter Schaefer's careful 2002 monograph MIRROR OF HIS BEAUTY: FEMININE IMAGES OF GOD FROM THE BIBLE TO THE EARLY KABBALAH. It is a pity the HUFFINGTON POST would post a story without better background research.
STEPHAN PICKERING / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham

[oROBBIEo]

06:39 PM on 03/26/2011

Does anyone actually care about this nonsense? The bible is man made garbage. None of it actually happened, its 100% fiction. There is no god. When you have life saving surgery, thank the surgeon who studied science, not god, who did nothing. Get with the times cavemen and women

[Fred Matsheza]

03:21 PM on 03/26/2011

If this was in the scriptures, if at least there was a woman we would not be arguing about it now. God honours his word above his name.

[notasonata]

03:13 PM on 03/26/2011

"Yahweh, the garbage!"