The Hebrew Goddess
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Both textual and archaeological information testifies to the presence in the religion of the Israelites at least before the exile of a Goddess—Anat or Asherah—as a consort of Yehouah. Papyri found at the Jewish Egyptian centre at Elephantine include an oath of Anat-Yeho or Anat-Bethel, Bethel ("House of El") being a standing stone at the Elephantine sanctuary used as a cult symbol for Yehouah. A standing stone universally is a phallic symbol, so the "House of El" was his son, Yehouah, and Anat was the consort of both El and Yehouah! Anat-Yeho is the "Queen of Heaven" who is defended by her worshippers (Jer 7:18; 44:17-19;44:25) as superior to the god, Yehouah, doubtless the Yehouah imported by the Persian "returners" from exile.
Archaeologists have also found Hebrew inscriptions at Kirbet el-Qom in the Judaean hills that speak of "Yehouah and his Asherah." Asherah is also linked with Yehouah-Teman and Yehouah-Samaria in blessings inscribed at Kuntilla Ajrud in Sinai. Mesha of Moab also refers to an apparently dual god named "Ashtar-Chemosh." Ashtar must have been a variant of Ishtar. Asherah was a Mother-Goddess known from the Canaanite Ras Shamra tablets. The "returners" were keen to be rid of images of the Asherim, phallic poles or pillars probably surmounted with an image and Deuteronomy 12:3 orders their destruction. 1 Kings 18:19 and 2 Kings 21:7 prove that Israelites worshipped this goddess in both of the kingdoms of the Yehudim. Micah reiterates Deuteronomy in having Yehouah promise to destroy those who do not destroy these Asherim. Whether Ashera, when it occurs in the bible, refers to the goddess or to phallic pillars, the "returners" wanted to be shot of them, much to the annoyance of the Am ha-Eretz and their wives who, over the centuries, had grown fond of them.
It is this popular veneration of the goddess in her phallic form that explains the many cult fertility figurines found in Palestine but rarely spoken about—the pillar figurines. They are probably models of snctuary images sold to worshippers for persoanl devotional purposes. The Astarte Plaques are low reliefs of the goddess often surrounded by a frame probably meant to be the recess containing the cult image in the sanctuary. The Astarte Plaques therefore depict the goddess in the context of her shrine.
Icons
Scholars of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, have chosen to examine the many icons and images that have been found in Palestine with a view to providing a basis for understanding Israelite religion independently of the tendentious hagiography called the scriptures. No one is suggesting that the biblical writings can be thrown away. Even though they are much later compilations than most of the faithful have been led to believe, they still contain fragments of much earlier work and so can still be valueable historical information. The difference is that whereas the scriptures were formerly accepted as the standard, they no longer are. The hints at religious practice deducible from icons is likely to be a sounder yardstick and biblical information will have to fit in with the archaeological work, not the other way around.
Doubtless the modern interest in images rather than words is related to the ease with which we communicate with images in the modern world of TV, cinema and computers. The earlier obsession with documented religion led to Protestant scholars particularly looking down on religions for which there was no such documentation. Religions of the "book" had been seen as having progressed beyond the primitive religions of mere sacerdotal ritual. The modern view is that images can be as valuable as text.
The religions of the Hebrew God were thought of as being free of images because this advanced god could not be pictured. Images of goddesses were found in Israel but not images of Yehouah, a strange and illogical imbalance. If the god could have a consort, both must have been visible. The standing stones were symbolic of the god but there seemed not to have been any recognisable images of Him. The Calf of Samaria of Hosea 8:6, apparently the image of a bull in the temple of Bethel, has been apologised for as the pedestal supporting... nothing! Or an image of the invisible god, if you like!
In fact, of course, the prohibition of graven images in the bible is late and the incident of the "Golden Calves" ("These be thy gods, O Israel") in Exodus 32:4 is a legend written in justification of it, but proving that image worship had occurred. The Norwegian scholar, Mowinckel, in the early part of the twentieth century was already telling people who wanted to listen that the Jewish proscription of images was late and that the temple of Jerusalem for long had an image of Yehouah in some form. More recently a number of scholars have pointed out that references to the appearance of God in psalms such as Psalm 27:4,
One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple,
imply that somewhere was a fine image of God to be seen! Here the implication is clear that the "beauty of the Lord" is to be beheld in the temple, the "House of the Lord" (bethel). Cult statues of Yehouah must have been erected in his the various sanctuaries. The many towns called "Beth-something" in the bible must have been sites of sanctuaries to Yehouah or Baal. Only the "House" of a god is going to be remembered as a notable place. Evidently statues to Yehouah were present in the temples of Jerusalem, Samaria and Bethel. The capping evidence, that cannot be denied, is that Assyrian documents refer to cult images of the Israelites.
Israelite and Canaanite Religion
Biblical theology required the religion of the Israelites, sponsored, as it was, by God himself, to be vastly different—superior no less—to the religion of the other inhabitants of the Levant. The clerics therefore made a point of emphasising any difference they thought they saw between Israelitish religion and that of their contemporaries and compatriots, the Canaanites. Now a panther might be black all over but it is still in every other respect a leopard! To emphasise its different colour from other leopards is to miss every aspect of its true nature. Latterly the fashion among biblical scholars has been precisely to examine the similarities between Israelitish religion and that of the Canaanites. Only the balance of similarities and differences can fairly suggest whether "God's religion" was different in the beginning from Pagan religions.
Now according to the Holy Book, in Deuteronomy, God wants His Chosen People to enter Canaan and wipe out the native people living there as idolaters. The native people would be eradicated and their idolatry would be expunged. This was, of course, a wish of the Maccabees—a thousand years—later who felt themselves threatened by the Greeks and was never a wish of the native Israelites who amicably shared the land with their Canaanite brothers. That, the Hellenised writers considered, was the trouble. The Israelites did not wipe out all other competing religions, but they should have done. Accordingly they put the warning into the scriptures. The temptations of Baal were made to represent the temptations of Zeus and Apollo and the philosophy of Plato, all the pertinent problems for Judaism at the time the scriptures were set down.
Yet an archaeologist (W F Albright) besotted by biblical theology, despite a lifetime of "scholarship," can assure the readers of a "learned" book that "Canaanite and Phoenician paganism" contrasted with "the faith and practice of Israel." The only contrast here is in the author's tendentious choice of words to describe the religion he favours and the one he does not.
Albright and all the many other biblical bigots can only see the source of their own religion as dynamic and true while the religions of the Canaanite neighbours of the Israelites were static and false. Because these religions are dead, they were seen as already dead even when they were alive, while the religion of a small minority of the people of Canaan, the Israelites, was alive, and so it has remained. God's religion was an active historical stage for Him to unfold his plan, though quite why God had to unfold his plan in this restricted and obscure way, rather than unfolding it for everyone he had created in the world, is never answered. No one knows because the whole thing is a fantasy of clerics intent on controlling simple people to their own financial advantage.
Albright saw the Israelites as non-Canaanites who had entered the land from outside whether by conquest as the bible says or by infiltration, as the theologians accepted as a fall back position. There was not the least bit of evidence on or under the ground for any such invasion, and Albright was an archaeologist! The received view today is that, if there is no hint of a change of culture in some respect, then there was no change. There is no hint, so there was no change. What changed was the climate.
Dessication of the land in the Bronze Age led to some Canaanites having to take to a more marginal method of living, pastoralism probably supplemented by the proceeds of banditry. These hill dwelling pastoral Canaanites and part time bandits were called the Apiru or Hebrews. At a later date, just as the Iron Age was beginning, the climate became less arid and conditions changed back to those suitable for sedentary life. The Hebrew bandits started to go straight, settling down first in the hills, then they were gradually admitted back into civilised society. They had not entered or re-entered Canaan, they were ethnically Canaanites, a mixed group anyway, and they had Canaanite culture throughout.
What happened to Moses?
Israelite religion must therefore have been a variant of the religions practised by Canaanites in general. The main difference which arose between this religion and other neighboring ones was that the Persians selected Jerusalem as the centre of a pseudo Zoroastrian cult based on the local god Yehouah. There was no particular slow variation from other Canaanite religions, but there was a sudden imposition of a foreign cult on to the local religion of Jerusalem. The imposition was resisted by locals for many decades but ultimately it triumphed, albeit in a highly fragmentated state.
This imposition is the reason why Yehouah became monotheistic and is probably why the religion also rejected images. As Herodotus noted, the religion of the Persians was relatively free of images. Christianity was far from shy of sacred imagery despite its Judaic roots and monotheism is seen by many progressive people today as symbolic of religious intolerance rather than fidelity. In particular, the submergence of the Goddess is seen by many religious people as a huge disservice to both men and women through neglect of feminine attributes that today are seen as desirable in both sexes, but which have been unnaturally suppressed in favour of an exaggerated masculinity.
Clearly, this history precludes the whole of the myth of Moses and the Exodus and, indeed, all of the bible until the Israelites were settled in Canaan. The Pentateuch or the five books of Moses, called by the Jews the Torah, are no longer thought by any scholars as early works as they once were. They were originally thought to have been written by Moses himself, a man who is supposed to have died about 1300 BC. Now they are thought to have been written no earlier than the "restoration.".
Of course, it is possible that the books were written late but used much earlier sources. That seems quite likely but some scholars will not even go that far. And even if true, no one can be sure which parts of it are genuinely old and which parts are not simply a much later romance. People about the time of Christ, or just before, were just as able as more recent authors like Sir Walter Scott or William Shakespeare at writing historical fiction, but no bible basher will consider the possibility.
The truth is that both books of the Christian bible are sugar baskets of popular fiction holding nuggets of historical truth. Dissolve away the fiction and the history remains, but no one has a suitable solvent, and so no one knows what is true and what is not. What we can say is that there is not the least evidence for large chunks of the Old Testament as it is presented to us and therefore it is likely to be mainly fictional.
Norman Gottwald tries to retrieve something by saying that, although the people and specific places might be false, the cultural and social situation might be accurately represented. It is anoher way of admitting that the people who wrote these historical dramas were not fools. They had read poems, sagas, myths and books written in earlier times and just as any competent author can today, they were able to reconstruct a fair represention of a historical period. Into it they placed their fictional characters just as Scott or Shakespeare would.
Gottwald tries to give this contrivance a scientific air by calling people and places H1 and period detail as H2. So, all right, the period detail might be correct but we can only be sure by using independent sources, and even then, so what? The period detail is not the point of the Old Testament stories. If Joshua or Deborah did not exist, what do their stories in the Old Testament tell us? The answer is that the Persianised or Hellenised Jews had a talented Catherine Cookson, quite able to write good stories.
Apparently, the books of Samuel use the word "Hebrews" in a pejorative way that fits well with independent evidence that it meant bandits at that time. In other words, it is rather like the word "Viking" and who is to know that the word did not retain that connotation and that the Hebrews were not rather proud of it? It would fit in excellently with the self image of the Maccabees who probably sponsored the "Hebrew" scriptures and had stood as outlaws against the Greeks to win the independence of Palestine.
This brings up the level of psychological truth that might be in the scriptures. They tell more about the writers than about the subject. Honest scholars will have a great deal more to discover about this aspect of the bible than they have hitherto. The themes throughout the scriptures are those of the people being liberated and returning to a promised land, of people who were lost and subject to the temptations of foreign gods, of people wandering and finding a home, of people crossing into a kingdom, all the time harassed by alien peoples. This is how the Maccabees saw themselves and the Jews, and it was their battles against the alien Greeks that the bible is a set of allegories about.
A Proper Historical Approach
There is not the least bit of evidence ever found that the Israelites were ever in captivity in Egypt and escaped to discover a Promised Land. It was the Maccabees who led the Jews to a promised land of their own, not Moses. What had happened in history and was known by Jewish writers at the time of the "restoration," was that Palestine had been a colony of Egypt for long periods of history. The decline of Egypt and the rise of Assyria, culminating in the annexation of Egypt by Assyria under Esarhaddon in the seventh century, allowed the Palestinian mini-states to throw off the yoke of Egypt. The metaphor of the Exodus served as an allegory of the freeing of Palestine from the Egyptians, as an expression of the Egyptians as traditional enemies of the Jews and as a vehicle for the adoption of the laws brought by the Persians.
What the faithful do not like is that Palestine has a genuine history separate from the scriptural romances and the purpose of scholars should be to try to find out what it is. Once the bible is put on one side as untrustworthy, the way forward that suggests itself is to study all of the Palestinian mini-states together in a comprehensive study of the whole region between Egypt and the Euphrates. The religions in particular of the region should be studied independently of the major religions that later emerged because it has been the constant distortion of forcing everything through this unnatural sieve that has produced such a lot of incomprehensible intellectual spaghetti.
Already archaeology has shown that Israel and Judaea were not religiously or ethnically distinct from other small states in the region like Moab, Edom, Ammon and the rest of Canaan. Even if these states existed before the eighth century BC they would not have prevented the other people of the region from travelling. If they existed, they existed for trade because the economies of the hill countries were based on a narrow range of produce, olives, vine and sheep, necessitating trade. The region's population must have had a certain mobility and must have continued to mix. Monotheism was not the norm until after the exile. It was the influence of Persia that created a distinctive Judaism stripped of earlier features such as a popular goddess, fertility rites, astrology and divination.
The Christian and Jewish "scholars" to whom this is anathema object that their critics are anti-religious, as if any criticism of these artificial and backward religions implies criticism of all religion. In fact, some of the critics are perfectly conscientious Christians and Jews but ones who put integrity ahead of paperhanging. That, though, is something that too many sanctimonious wafer-nibblers cannot understand. They cannot see Israel and Judah as anything other than the singular nations their bibles say they were, and are quite unable to draw the conclusions that the evidence insists upon. |
