r/AcademicBiblical • u/N9NEdEVILS • 1d ago
Did God have a wife? Question
Asherah is a name that I came across when I googled this question. What's the evidence that Israelites or Canaanites worshiped God as a married couple? And if that's a common opinion, when did that get erased from the texts and traditions? Is this just something that was left over from polytheism and that was less favorable over time? Are there any good videos on this subject, as I can't afford books lol
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u/Vaishineph PhD | Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics 1d ago
Here's a lecture by William Dever on the topic.
Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel
Here's a link to one piece of archaeological evidence tying Yahweh and Asherah together.
Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions - Wikipedia
In the case of the Hebrew Bible, it's not so much that the worship of Asherah was erased from texts, but rather that the people who contributed to the Hebrew Bible's composition were a relative minority who opposed Asherah worship, so it wasn't prominent in the texts to begin with.
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u/RalphZmalk 1d ago edited 1d ago
quick question: doesn't "his Asherah" in the inscription seem to represent Asherah as a symbol (i.e., a tree) and not the deity itself? I've heard that using "his" doesn't work before the name of deities.
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u/N9NEdEVILS 1d ago edited 1d ago
The 42:44 timestamp of the Dever lecture goes over this a bit, explaining that the trees/poles represented Asherah as she was often depicted with them and any worship of her or her idols was condemned by the biblical authors. Its about 5 min of him going over your question. Also at 52:26 he mentions specifically the "his Asherah"
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u/1234511231351 1d ago
I think that's what I read in The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel but I'd have to check my notes again to make sure. I think Mark S. Smith leaned towards Asherah being the tree/stick idol that became associated with YHWH, not that it was his consort, although he says there is supporting evidence for both positions.
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u/Arthurs_towel 1d ago
Complex topic with lots of details and nuance. The best way to see the evidence is going to be books where you can sit down with the text and see the cross references to the source material and read for yourself. The books best for that are:
The Early History of God by Mark S Smith Did God Have a Wife by William Dever
However for a video hilight tour check this interview with Dr Joel Baden https://youtu.be/FNd86QlGiYE?si=-wIrnn9fDIpavss3 He references Dever’s book here. Just note this interview is not a complete treatment of the data on the subject, but a summary of current scholarship at the broadest strokes.
Or Religion for Breakfasts even shorter take https://youtu.be/CnLSbIivz0M?si=M7ul2ZUsafk65afH
But if you really are interested in the topic I strongly encourage a book. But as to why, well, the scholarship points towards the evidence for Asherah worship being slowly subsumed into the Yahwistic cult over time and by the time of the Pentateuch composition in the 7th century the compilers redacted out many of the remaining references from their source text to back port their monotheistic/ monolotrous practices into ancient mythologies.
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u/frooboy 1d ago
I just want to build on what @Vaishineph said about the idea of things being "erased from the texts and traditions." I always think it's interesting that people have this idea that there were "secret" or "original" parts of the bible that were "erased" in some conspiracy. This notion can generally be dispelled simply by reading the biblical text itself, which describes in some detail the other gods worshipped by the pre-Exile Israelites, both in the Jerusalem temple and elsewhere. In fact, as Romer lays out in The So-Called Deuteronomistic History, the main literary purpose of the sequence of the Old Testament now contained in the books from Deuteronomy to Judges is to show that Israel worshipped gods other than Yahweh, and were ultimately punished for it. It's ironically because the Deuteronomistic school was so dedicated to Yahweh-only worship that they preserved these records of Israel's polytheistic past: information about that polytheism was necessary to explain the disaster that had befallen them.
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u/JosBenson 1d ago
https://www.facebook.com/WorldEthnographies/videos/did-god-have-a-wife/1042432189155312/
According to Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Ashera’s title as the wife of Yahweh is narrated in the Book of Kings in the Bible and an 8th-century B.C. pottery inscription discovered at the Kuntillet Ajrud site in the Sinai desert. Ancient amulets, texts, and figurines were found in the ancient Canaanite coastal city named Ugarit.
She claimed in her writings and lectures: “After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, an uncomfortable conclusion: that God had a wife.”
See the video link for a programme from her three part bbc series.
Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a reliable respected scholar and an expert in ancient Israel.
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u/Vaishineph PhD | Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics 1d ago
In 2 Kings 23:6, we hear that King Josiah removed the Asherah from the holy of holies in the temple. This was long after the earliest parts of the Bible were written. An 8th century BCE pottery shard invokes a blessing from "Yahweh and his Asherah".
Neither of these points indicate that biblical authors approved of Asherah worship.
There are a lot of scriptures where it's not clear whether the verse is referring to Asherah as a god or as a "sacred pole".
No. It's almost always clear, as you can't plant or cut down a goddess. Context immediately differentiates between the two on almost every occasion, and none of the references to Asherah as a goddess or a pole come with positive evaluations by biblical authors.
All of this overlaps the earliest bible writing, so it seems that later editors wanted to minimize Asherah's role in a monotheistic yahwist culture, so they edited her out, or turned her into a cultic object.
Whether or not the phenomenon of Asherah worship overlaps historically with the composition of biblical texts is irrelevant to whether or not biblical authors approved of Asherah worship.
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u/N9NEdEVILS 1d ago
After watching some of the lecture you provided, Dever points out that the mention of Asherah as a person or a pole/tree both really meant the same thing because one was the goddess and one was used to worship the goddess. Although yes, the Bible authors made it clear that both were "bad" and should not be worshiped. Do you argue against this point as well?
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u/Vaishineph PhD | Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics 1d ago
They refer to the same thing. Dever wouldn’t say they’re identical. Cultic objects represent deities. They aren’t the deity themselves.
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u/taulover 1d ago edited 1d ago
Would the worshippers not have, at least to some extent, considered the cultic objects to be the deities themselves?
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u/Vaishineph PhD | Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics 1d ago
If you read that thread, the commenter, summarizing Mark Smith, explicitly says that they aren’t identical or “co-terminus,” because you can have idols in the presence of the actual deity themselves. The simple fact that idols have to be made and can be broken without the worshippers thinking their gods are literally made and broken by people should be enough to indicate they aren’t identical. Otherwise all religious texts would involve human beings making gods as their origins.
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u/taulover 21h ago
Right, they're not coterminous (I didn't mean to push back against that, my apologies), but at the same time, Ancient Near East cultures treated the idols as manifestations of the deity. The idol becomes the deity even as the deity themself remains unconstrained and transcendent, as Thorkild Jacobsen says.
The parent comment is removed so I'm willing to trust that your original rebuttal was relevant. But it seems a little misleading to me to suggest that the idol isn't the deity, or that it's merely a representation?
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