The Pagan Origins of the Bible
by Rev. Colin Bossen, November 8, 2009
The archeologist William Dever relates the following anecdote about his step-daughter Hannah. One day, when Hannah was about five, she and Dever were discussing theology. Hannah asked her step-father: "Do you know that God is both a man and a woman?" Dever, who is theologically liberal, replied that he did. Then he asked his step-daughter "why it should be that God was also a woman?" In response to his question, he relates that Hannah "gave me a withering look such as only a child can to a thick adult, and...said: 'Silly! Half the people in the world are women, and God has to be for everybody!'"
Unfortunately, for much of the last two thousand years the God of western culture has not been for everyone. Indeed, the deity is most often portrayed as male, in many cases white and bearded. Such depictions are problematic. Humanity is supposed to be created in God's image. If God is male, then in whose image have women been created? If God is white, then in whose image have people of color been created?
In recent years both the gender and color of God has been challenged by theologians and artists like Starhawk, James Cone, Alice Walker and Bill Jones. Some have called for a rejection of the concept of God, the replacement of God with the Goddess or the substitution of a white God with a black one. All of these projects have their merits. They cause people to reconsider and re-examine their concept of the divine and explore whether the divine is even necessary in contemporary life. I have touched on such debates, and the utility of some of these theologians, before. This morning I want to focus on two slightly different questions: Was God always male? Was God originally singular? How we answer either of these questions will surely influence the contours of the contemporary debate around God's gender and color.
I should be clear from the outset this morning that I am not using the term God as I usually do. This morning God is not metaphor to describe the mystery of existence. Instead, God refers specifically to the God of the Hebrew Bible; the God that Moses called Yahweh. And my questions are: Was that God always male? Was that God always singular?
A growing number of archeologists and biblical scholars answer both of these questions no. They maintain that for much of Ancient Israel's history and for the majority of its people God was not God at all but gods. The singular male deity that we regard as the deity of the Bible was the product of an elite group of male scribes. They defined Ancient Israel's theology only after Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, had been deposed, the majority of the nation's people exiled to Babylon and Egypt and the city of Jerusalem leveled.
There are two sources we can turn to try to discover the religion of Ancient Israel. The first is textual. By scouring the Bible for clues we might discover not only what its authors believed but what their contemporaries believed as well. Additionally, we can examine the physical, or archeological, evidence that Ancient Israel has left behind. Archeology allows the dead to speak, after a fashion. Physical remains offer us glimpses into long dead peoples daily lives and concerns. Sometimes we find records of people who were ignored or distorted by the text.
Just relying on the Bible for our portrait of Ancient Israel would be like only using the text of my sermons to understand the life of our religious community. There is probably lots of useful stuff in them but I doubt they would offer much of picture of our covenant groups, programs or social activities. Taken together the sources give us a fuller picture. That picture suggests that the beliefs of Ancient Israel were more diverse than is commonly understood.
Consider our text from Jeremiah this morning. It is set after the fall of Jerusalem when Jeremiah is living as part of a community of Judean exiles in Egypt. The other exiles are engaged in the worship of gods besides Yahweh. Jeremiah confronts them. He proclaims that the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the kingdom of Judah are a result of the Judean's worship of these other gods. Then he prophecies that if they do not worship "the Lord of Hosts,"--itself and instructive title--alone then "all the men of Judah in the land of Egypt shall be consumed by sword and by famine, until they cease to be." Jeremiah's compatriots counter that their current plight has come about because they stopped worshipping the other gods in the first place, not because they are now worshipping them. Their salvation will come, they argue, from the resumption of the other gods' cult, not its abandonment. They look to the Queen of Heaven, a goddess, for primary guidance, not Yahweh.
The text probably captures a real debate within the Judean community of exile. As the people of Ancient Israel strived to make sense of the destruction of their country many different voices offered explanations. Theological explanations were likely more popular than political ones. For many people it was easier to understand macro-events as the result of the whims of the gods or God rather than as the product of human behavior. National and civic deities favored specific communities. When the communities suffered it was often understood that either the deities failed the community or that the community failed the deities.
Understanding that Judah and its northern sister the kingdom of Israel collapsed because they were small isolated, somewhat technologically backward, nations bordering two of the major imperial powers--Babylon and Egypt--of the ancient Middle East would have required a major shift in worldview. So instead, people argued that Judah and Israel fell because their God--or gods--abandoned them. The kingdoms were conquered because their peoples failed to obey and worship God--or the gods--not because of external factors.
In the community of exile the debate seems to have been over which gods had not been given their due. Prophets like Jeremiah argued that the collapse came because the Judeans did not give adoration to Yahweh alone. Others retorted that the problem was not insufficient adoration of Yahweh but elevation of Yahweh and Yahweh alone. The argument seems to have had gender as an element. In our passage from Jeremiah it is the women who confront the prophet. They challenge him primarily because they want to return to the worship of a pantheon of deities, a pantheon that included the Queen of Heaven. Maybe they thought that by having only one God they had reduced the dominion of the divine. Maybe they felt that with only a male deity the divine was not for everybody. All of the other nations had multiple national gods. Perhaps the people of Ancient Israel made a mistake by relying on one God and one alone.
The archeological evidence suggests that for much of their history they did not. William Dever, whose anecdote I referenced earlier, explores the world of ancient Israel in his book "Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel." His archaeological research suggests that the worship of other deities besides Yahweh was widespread. He argues that the cult of Yahweh was largely the product of a urban literate Jerusalem centered priestly elite, whom he characterizes as "right-wing, orthodox and nationalist". The experiences of this cult were counter to the experiences of the majority of Ancient Israelites. The majority were rural and illiterate and largely ignorant of the activities of the elite.
To bolster his argument Dever demonstrates that over 3,000 female statuettes have been found in archeological sites relating to Ancient Israel. Many of these figurines are similar in form. They are made of clay and depict the head and torso of a female with large bare breasts. The figurines are found in almost entirely in domestic contexts, "in houses; in cisterns, pits, and rubbish heaps." This leads Dever to conclude that "the female figurines have more to do with household than with community cults, more with ongoing life events than with death and funerary rituals...we are clearly dealing with family religion."
After reaching this conclusion Dever builds the case that the figurines represent a goddess who was venerated in family religion but denigrated by the literate elite in Jerusalem. He argues that we even know the name of this goddess. It was Asherah. In the religion of the Canaanites, the peoples who inhabited Ancient Israel before the tribes of Israel, the two chief deities were El and his consort Lady Asherah of the Sea.
Throughout the Bible the God of Israel is frequently referred to as El. And the word asherah appears at least forty times in the text. There is debate between scholars as to what the word refers to. At a minimum the asherah were objects that stood next to sacrificial altars. They were, according to scholar Tikva Freymer-Kensky, "made out of wood...a stylized tree-image, a pole, or an actual tree." But, as Freymer-Kensky points out, "There are no capital letters in Hebrew, and it is often hard to tell whether any given occurrence of the letters...represent the cultic tree 'asherah' or Asherah, the Canaanite goddess."
Not reading Hebrew I cannot offer a definitive opinion. I can note that Dever is rather convinced that the letters frequently refer to the goddess. He bases his belief on a couple of non-biblical 8th century B.C.E. Hebrew inscriptions that speak of blessings by "Yahweh and his Asherah." It is true, Dever, admits that a possible translation of this text would be "Yahweh and his stylized tree-pole" but that sentence makes little sense. The idea that both Yahweh and his cultic object provided a blessing, if that indeed was what an asherah was, seems more than a little odd, especially when compared to the idea of Yahweh and his consort.
Dever also points out that the figurines discovered in Ancient Israel bear a striking resemblance to earlier Canaanite Asherah figurines. Ultimately, the archeological evidence leads him to conclude that there existed in Ancient Israel a "cult of Asherah." He believes that this cult was widespread and that it existed alongside the official cult of Yahweh throughout much of Ancient Israel's existence.
There is evidence in the Bible that it did. In II Kings 23 the biblical authors detail a series of religious reforms that took place under the king Josiah. Josiah ruled the kingdom of Judah in the mid-and-late 7th century B.C.E. An important achievement of his reign was to renovate the Temple at Jerusalem, the headquarters of the biblical scribes. During the renovation a scroll was discovered by the Temple priests. The scroll is commonly thought to be the biblical text Deuteronomy. Many scholars believe that rather being a historic document it was a forgery planted by devote followers of Yahweh.
After the discovery of the scroll Josiah ordered a return to a pure religion of Yahweh. As the text records, "the king ordered the high priest Hilkiah, the priests of the second rank, and the guards of the threshold to bring out of the Temple of the Lord all the objects made for Baal and Asherah and all the host of heaven. He burned them outside Jerusalem...He suppressed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed...and those who made offerings to Baal, to the sun and the moon and constellations--all the host of heaven. He brought out the [image of] Asherah from the House of the Lord...and burned it...he beat it to dust and scattered its dust over the burial ground of the common people". This fairly graphic description clearly implies that the worship of gods other than Yahweh was widespread.
Biblical scholars debate whether the text's authors were trying solidify Yahweh's hold over the religion of Israel or whether they were trying to return Israel to pristine monotheism. Let us, for the moment, take the radical view put forth by those like Dever who argue that "the real religions of ancient Judah consisted largely of everything that the biblical writers condemned." This would mean that Ancient Israel was not monotheistic but polytheistic. The God of the Bible was not the sole God of the community but instead the chief of a pantheon. For the tribes of Israel the divine was not neither solely male nor on his own. And chief text of monotheism was the product of what many now would call a pagan culture.
The philosopher Cornell West reminds us, "Every culture that we know is a result of the weaving of antecedent cultures." Changing our understanding of one of our antecedent cultures means changing our understanding of our own. Looking at both the Bible and the archeological evidence we learn that the religious practices of Ancient Israel were more diverse and polytheistic than often claimed. The Bible was a product of a group of religious leaders seeking to privilege their religious experiences over those of the majority of the populace. In doing so they created a God--a male deity--at least partially in their own image. If we wish to avoid the same mistake then we should seek out the voices of the silenced, the people who might not make it into the official history books. Historically these have been women, people of color, children, members of the queer community, members of minority religious groups and the economically marginalized. If we listen closely to them then perhaps we will discover the deity or religion that our Universalist ancestors dreamed of, a God and a religious community that is for everybody.
May it be so and Amen.