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mann377

http://news.discovery.com/history/god-wife-yahweh-asherah-110318.html

Evidently Jehovah had a wife according to the above article.

sabastious

They say the Bible provides evidence of Asherah, Yahweh's alleged godess wife, being edited out, but they don't say where.

-Sab

OnTheWayOut

There is good reason to believe that Elohim was plural for "the gods" and YHWH was the god of war. There seem to be remnants of this in the writings.

Genesis has someone saying they will make man in "our" image. It was heavily edited, so all we have is good reason. Bible-believers will simply go on with "You don't know. You must be wrong because Jesus didn't mention it." Stuff like that.

But thanks for pointing it out here.

Mad Sweeney

IIRC, throughout much of the OT God speaks with plurals much like a parent might to his kids.

I say to my kid, "We want you to go clean your room and then take out the trash." I'm not some sort of associative personality disorder. I'm speaking for both myself and my wife. I don't say, "I want you to..." I say, "WE want you to..." Isn't a lot of the OT grammar similar? Isn't God referred to with pronouns like "they" and "them"?

It's been awhile since I read any of this stuff so my memory may be faulty here.

lifeisgood

There can be no doubt about God speaking of creating man using 'we'. This is from a great Interlinear, the Biblos Interlinear Bible http://interlinearbible.org/genesis/1.htm

to our likeness - ki?·mu·?ê·nu; ??????????????

our image - b?·?al·mê·nu ?????????????

lifeisgood

There is no doubt that "Jehovah" was an ancient war god. He was used not only by the Israelites but also by earlier cultures. I tried to tell some Witnesses this a few times and they said it did not matter if earlier cultures had a false god called "Jehovah".

lifeisgood

Asherah appears several times in the Old Testament. You have to understand how the Yahweh cult was formed. Originally, the Hebrews were polytheists. After the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians, the priesthood was taken over by people who wanted one male god. Asherah was rewritten to appear to be a false idol. But, throughout its history, Israel stuck to the worship of Asherah. There are multiple scriptures where Jehovah's murderers are commended for tearing down Asherah's statues and poles and other artifacts and for murdering the priestesses and priests who served her.

Cadellin

Mark Smith's (authoritative, I think) The Early History of God describes the Asherah-Yahweh-El as being located in Ugaritic tradition and migrating into Hebrew religion before the time of the judges. However, although there are somewhat oblique references to Asherah as goddess here and there in scripture (he references Gen 49:25 where the epithet blessing "Breasts-and-Womb" is a title applied to Asherah in extra-biblical ANE texts, and presented contextually in Genesis along with royal titles for Yahweh), his conclusion is that, according to biblical records and "inscriptional material" (I'm not sure what that would be, maybe archaelogical finds? Leolaia I'm not (but I wish I was )) "the explicit cult of the goddess did not endure" in Israel (19).

I haven't read the news article; I suppose I should if it sheds more recent light on this.

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