Monotheism, Yahweh and his Asherah

Good point. A downgrade in status for all deities (but one) is built into the monotheistic premise.Revered deities in a polytheistic belief system normally move around in male-female pairs. Deities create life, after all, and everyone knows you do that by putting male and female ingredients together.The symbolism often places the father figure in the sky and the mother figure in the earth. This is certainly true of the images we find in the ancient Near East. In an agrarian society the sexual metaphor is there for the taking: the sky fertilizes the earth (in the form of sunshine and rain) and the earth brings forth life. That life, once begun, tends to stay bound to earth, as an infant is bound to its mother.Monotheists were obliged to take an airbrush to this familiar picture. Their premise stated that one deity exists and is eternal; everything else is finite and represents something created by this being. The main adjustment they made was to present earth as an 'it' rather than a 'she.' It was a creation of the Sky Dad, who now had to absorb the role of both parents.In Genesis you can see pointed original images, but you can also see reworked images that show traces of the original symbolism. An example of the first comes when Elohim places "lights in the sky" as you would hang a lamp in your tent. This picture literally puts the widely esteemed deities of sun and moon in their place. Yet in creating humanity we find God supplying the breath (sky element) and the earth supplying the dust. Two 'parents' for our species are still implied.Ultimately no symbol is ever eradicated. Symbols constantly come back--are 'reactivated', as Jung put it--when people seek balance. Even with a 'no goddesses allowed' policy, ancient Hebrew writers couldn't resist pairing their deity with female companions: Lady Wisdom, the promiscuous sisters, the Daughter of Zion and so on. Rabbinical literature presents the Shekinah arach mentions: the sabbath spirit. The female figure typically represents something on earth--a city, a people, a gathering--for which the heavenly male figure has tender feelings.___Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.Edited by Archer Opterix, : brev.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

One threat a female deity would pose to monotheism: she would make syncretism a natural option. 'It is not good for Dad to be alone.'Monotheistic Yahwists would find it relatively easy to frame stark either-or choices between their deity and someone else's male sky god (Ba'al, Marduk, Oriris). The conflicting nature of the claims made for the deities would be obvious.With a female deity, though, you'd get a both-and option/ Why not fix up the lonely Yahweh with the pretty goddess next door to form a Divine Couple? The result would be a balanced metaphor, a familiar image, an ecumenical compromise--and a disaster for strict monotheism as a premise.That said, I haven't really bought into the suggestion that 'girl gods' were picked on more than 'boy gods.' I see plenty of disapproval directed at male deities, too. The determining factor in how much bad press a competing deity received seems to have had more to do with that figure's regional popularity. Asherah worship, I understand, tended to take place in areas removed from urban centers. This would make her rites harder to monitor and more difficult to eradicate. Rededicating a public temple in a city square from Ba'al to Yahweh and posting guards around it wouldn't necessarily change what people did in the woods.The patriarchal nature of ancient Hebrew society seems more evident to me in the picture monotheists promoted than the pictures they battled. They made Earth Mom 'it' but left Sky Dad a 'he.' They didn't have to.Questions of chronology and canon formation enter into this, of course. How monotheistic were most pre-exile Yahwists anyway? What we know is how monotheistic later writers thought they should have been. The literature as it has come to us does suggest that syncretism was far more common before the exile than afterwards.___Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo repair.Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.Edited by Archer Opterix, : added detail.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Interesting idea. In a dangerous environment it's easier to protect the nest if the female of the species looks drab.Asherah was a Canaanite deity. She would naturally disappear as an issue in exile literature if the people of Judah were no longer in Canaan--unless many people of Judah were also Asherah devotees at the time of their exile.I wonder if the 'ferocity in maintaining their cultural identity' is partly due to monotheism as an idea having more resilience in an exile environment than polytheism. Just a conjecture.A transcendent deity that requires no housing would survive better in an environment where no housing is permitted. Asherah worship seems to have been tied very closely to her rural locales, as Yahweh and Ba'al worship had been tied to temples until then. Maybe 'monotheistic Yahwism' survived where other religious strains died out under this stress of the changed environment.___Edited by Archer Opterix, : brev.Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.