Episode 276 – God’s Wife
This week’s we talk about God’s wife, some of the responses to the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, cover a few regional stories, and the latest on blasphemy around the world.Dustin’ off the Degree - God’s Wifehttp://bit.ly/an276-gods_wifehttp://bit.ly/an276-archaologyThroughout the Old Testament, especially the older books, God is sometimes identified as Yahweh, but more often he’s called El or Elohim, sometimes he’s referred to as the “Heavenly Host”. El was the Canaanite high god whose name means “god” and elohim is the plural of El, meaning gods. Sometimes God is referred to using singular pronouns, but other times they’re plural, which correcting for the translation error in Genesis 2 would read that “the gods made made man in our own image, male and female they created them.” English translations make it“he created them”, but they leave the “our” since it didn’t seem strange to the translators of the King James Version, since King James would have used the royal “we”, even when he was commissioning of the translation that bore his name.The more likely explanation is that authors of those texts were sometimes talking about the gods, when using Heavenly Host or Elohim, and were talking about a specific god when writing about El or Yahweh. It’s also likely that Yahweh replaced El at some time. Throughout the pre-exile stories in the Old Testament it’s clear that most of the people worshiped the gods, while a select few, sometimes just the prophets of Yahweh worshiped only him.We also see in the stories in 1st and 2nd Kings where the evil kings are building high places and raising Asherah poles, while the some good kings are tearing down the high places and cutting down the Asherah poles and others are only removing the high places, but not the Asherah poles. These high places were where the people could make sacrifices to Yahweh, the god of war and to Asherah, the goddess of fertility.One interpretation of this would be that some of the “good” kings wanted people to only worship Yahweh while some only wanted the worship to be in the capital, where he could control it. At the same time the bad kings wanted the people to make their sacrifices to the gods, including Yahweh, near their homes.Archaeologists working in the Sinai desert found three inscriptions dating back to the 8th century BCE asking for the blessings of Yahweh and his Asherah. Conservative Christian scholars would have you think this is means Yahweh and his sacred tree or Yahweh and his pole, but much more likely would be that they were asking for the blessing of Yahweh, the king of heaven and god of war as well as Asherah, his wife and queen of heaven, the fertility goddess. This makes far more sense considering that even now, if you are free of war and have plentiful harvests, you’ll at least survive.Before the Babylonian exile, most of the prophets weren’t worried about Asherah worship, they were more concerned with Baal, then they started blaming God’s wrath on their worship of Asherah.The prophet Jeremiah went to Egypt to join those who had escaped the exile to Babylon. When he found a group of Jews there he was pissed and chastised the people for their idolatry. The people responded:16 “As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we will not listen to you. 17 But we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we did, both we and our fathers, our kings and our officials, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no disaster. 18 But since we left off making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine.”That was Jeremiah 44:16-18 (ESV)By the end of the exile, the Jewish people were monotheistic. There was one god, YahwehSupport the show