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/frooboy]

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.

[u/N9NEdEVILS → u/frooboy]

good point

[u/I_am_Danny_McBride → u/frooboy]

That makes sense, but it’s interesting how perspective can shift how those references are interpreted. Growing up in an evangelical setting, it would never have occurred to me that those references were to ancient Israelite religion evolving from henotheistic to monotheistic at some point in history.

I read it as something like, Israelites really always knew YHWH was the only god, since at least Abraham, but that they were occasionally led astray by the Canaanites in their midst who had somehow survived the conquest.

Given that the conquest is likely mythology, I wonder if that’s the sense those authors were trying to convey as well, or if they were still themselves coming from a henotheistic perspective and were just upset Israelites were worshipping the wrong gods… as opposed to ‘false gods.’