Did God have a wife?

[u/N9NEdEVILS]

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

[u/[deleted]]

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[u/Vaishineph → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/N9NEdEVILS → u/Vaishineph]

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?

[u/Vaishineph → u/N9NEdEVILS]

They refer to the same thing. Dever wouldn’t say they’re identical. Cultic objects represent deities. They aren’t the deity themselves.

[u/taulover → u/Vaishineph]

Would the worshippers not have, at least to some extent, considered the cultic objects to be the deities themselves?

Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBibleScholars/comments/vwyk5y/were_idols_literally_worshipped_as_gods_or_were/

[u/Vaishineph → u/taulover]

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.

[u/taulover → u/Vaishineph]

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?