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Hebrew Goddesses & Origin of Judaism
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Where, Oh Where Has the Mother God Done?
In pre-historic and primitive societies in which men and
women are segregated into their own living quarters, and
children live with the women, it is not surprising that women
are seen as dominant and provide the image of the supreme being.
To children, women were the source of sustenance and discipline.
Men were mainly out of sight, following their own vain pursuits
and the concept of father did not exist. Any of the men could
have been the father of a child but no one ever knew which was.
All children knew their mother and a mother knew her own
children, but all women had the nurturing and caring role of
mother, and there were enough for all children to be treated
equally. So God was a goddess for myriads of years.
When we come to Judaism and then Christianity, women have
almost gone out of sight. Both religions have a masculine God
and no goddess, masculine priests and no priestesses.
Christianity also has a masculine son of God and what appears to
be a masculine Holy Ghost. This trio constitutes the Christian
“mystery” of the Trinity, but the logic of any such trinity is
to have a father god, a mother god and a baby son god. Where, oh
where has the mother god gone?
The answer is that it was expunged by the Persian
administrators who set up the Jewish religion—in the image of
Zoroastrianism—in the fifth century BC. Zoroaster had abolished
all gods except one—Ahura Mazda—and some angels and demons of
various descriptions, around two centuries before. Now that the
Persians were conquering the world, they thought it a good idea
to have everyone on earth subject to one God of Heaven, whatever
his local name might have been, to match the one king of
earth—the king of kings of Persia. Since the only God of Heaven
had manifestly approved the appointment of the Persian king,
everyone would recognize it as an unchallengeable divine
appointment, and peace would reign!
Family squabbles could not be admitted into this scheme, and
so goddesses were written out of sacred history. Of course, no
Jew or Christian will accept this because they have accepted the
propaganda that there is only one, masculine god, and, if it was
ever different, it was because people were ignorant! Only the
Jews were not ignorant because they had been specially selected
by God in the time of Abraham, about 2000 BC to carry out His
plan for human religious revelation. Unfortunately for all this,
the Jews, or rather their predecessors often called Hebrews, did
worship goddesses as even the Jewish scriptures admit! But, they
were only the backsliders who refused to accept God’s word—for
thus the Persian “restorers” of Judaism painted the inhabitants
of the land into which the Persians transported the “returners
from exile”.
The truth, as scholars know but do not publicly divulge, is
that the religion of the people in the Hill Country of Palestine
before the Persians arrived was recognisably the same religion
as that of everyone else who lived in the Levant and its
hinterland. The richer parts of the eastern Mediterrenean left
plentiful archaeological remains in the form of clay tablets,
most famously at Ugarit, that tell us a lot about ancient
Canaanite religions and their practice. The people here were
called Canaanites and they worshipped a pantheon of gods and
goddesses, led by the supreme god, El, and his wife, Athirat
(Asherah) and their son, Baal Hadad.
Canaanite Religion
The paucity of archaeological remains from the Hill Country
confirm the picture underlying the bible stories—the practices
of the small population that lived there were the same as their
neighbours. The accessible gods were called Baal, meaning Lord,
just as Yehouah is habitually called and actually translated as
Lord (Yehouah Elohim, Lord God). The Persians admitted one god
only and eventually Yehouah prevailed, but it seems that bodies
of people for some time preferred other gods, notably El
(Elohim). The Canaanite title for their son of god, Baal, was
villified by the “restorers” as the name of all false gods,
whatever their real name, Hadad, Eshmun, Dagon, Milcom or
whatever, and that is what we find in the bible.
Reading the bible carefully tells us that three goddesses
were worshipped in the Hill Country later called Israel and
Judah. The three were Asherah, Astarte and the Queen of Heaven.
Possibly the latter is the title of one or both of the other
two, but all three are mentioned, and the Queen of Heaven was so
loved that the people refused Jeremiah’s pleas to turn from her
to Yehouah!
Hundreds of small, mainly female figurines often of
terracotta are found all over Palestine, many datable to the
period of the supposed divided monarchy from 900 to 600 BC. Of
these figurines of goddesses, some are Astarte from the
symbolism, and they can be dated from 2000 BC to the capture of
Jerusalem when they cease. Some Christian and Jewish “scholars”
try to make out that these figurines are not goddesses at all
but are magical talismans or primitive pornography, being models
of prostitutes, but it is impossible to imagine that they do not
have some ritual significance and must therefore be images of a
goddess.
The images that seem identifiable with Astarte come in the
form of plaques that seem to show a recess within which the
image is displayed and therefore suggest that they are models of
an image in a shrine. The plaques are impressed in terracotta
using a mould and show the goddess with upraised arms holding
serpents or lilies or both, though sometimes she holds her
abdomen and sometimes has her hands by her sides. Often she is
standing on the back of a lion. Her hair is dressed in the
flicked style, looking rather like ram’s horns, typical of the
Egyptian goddess Hathor, who had been popular in the south of
the country—many of these plaques have been excavated at Devir
near Hebron. In the Iron Age period, the preferred form of the
goddess was that of an elongated bust, looking like a head and
shoulders on a pillar, and therefore looking more phallic like
the presumed Asherahs.
Commentators try to claim they are not Israelite but
Canaanite, the two types of people living side by side for
hundreds of years. Honest scholars today are asking how these
populations can be so surely distinguished. All of the cultural
evidence is that there was only one population. The
need for two only arises to explain how what is read in the
bible differs from what happened according to the evidence. So,
only the need to fulfil biblical expectations makes anyone think
that there were two different peoples in Palestine at this time.
And the people that lived there were Canaanites who worshipped
Baal and several goddesses.
Asherah
Asherah was the Canaanite Venus, the Goddess of the
 Sea
and the Mother of All the Gods. A lot is known about her from
the Ugarit tablets that go back to the fourteenth century BC.
She was the wife of the supreme god, El, whence her alternative
name, Elath, the Goddess. Semitic deities commonly have two
names, or rather a name and a title, and are known by either.
The parallelism that characterizes Semitic verse might be the
reason for the perpetuation of this habit, if not its origin,
thus:
He cries to Asherah and her children,
To Elath and the company of her offspring.
A stele has an the inscription, “Qudsu Astarte Anat”,
suggesting that Qudsu was a name or title of Anat who is herself
identified with Astarte. Asherah and Qudsu also appear in the
parallelism of Semitic verse where Asherah says in one place:
I myself have not a house like the gods
A court like the sons of Qudsu,
and elsewhere:
He came to qds
Athirat of the Tyrians.
“Qudsu” (“qds”), the same as the biblical “qadesh”
or “kadesh”, means “holy” or “sacred”, or the “Holy One”,
or “Sacred One”. Moreover, the biblical Asherah is given as
Ashtaroth in the plural, seemingly a plural of Astarte, though
another plural is a masculine one, Asherim, doubtless part of
the patriarchal plan to eliminate any hint of female deities.
Asherim is conventionally translated as “groves”. The Sumerians
had a goddess called Ashratim who was also the consort of their
supreme god, Anu, and so she is likely to be an earlier and
perhaps the original epiphany of Asherah.
Asherah is also mentioned in the Amarna letters from
fourteenth century BC Egypt. They are records of reports and
correspondence from Egyptian officials and emissaries outside
the country, and so are an importance resource. They show that
already Asherah was either being confused with Astarte or the
two goddesses were always the same one, differently named. The
names are used interchangeably in the Amarna tablets. The
letters make it clear that her worshippers regarded themselves
as her “slaves”. To this day Christians accept that they are
“slaves” of God, although they wrongly translate the Greek for
“slaves” as “servants”.
Asherah was, then, a goddess known throughout the Fertile
Crescent, but not according to traditionalists for God’s plan,
in Judah or Israel—at least officially. The seventeenth century
translators of the King James Version of the bible hid
the goddess quite from the view of the faithful by translating
“Asherah” as “grove”. Judges 3:7 admits that Baal and
Asherah were worshipped in Israel (and God of course punished
the Israelites for it). The goddess, Asherah, is actually
mentioned forty times in the scriptures.
Several passages in the scriptures describe Asherahs being built
or torn down, or uprooted. It seems they were pillars, usually
of wood, occasionally of stone, effectively phallic symbols but
of the form of a woman, though in Micah 5:14, they are
masculine and therefore surely phallic objects. In fact, each
locality had its shrine to the goddess and doubtless had local
peculiarities, so that we read in the Amarna letters of the
“Asherah of here” and the “Asherah of there”, some of which
might have been tree trunks still rooted in the earth, others of
which were set up under trees and others of which were set up on
the “high places”.
 Judges
6:25,28 says they also stood next to the altars of Baal,
suggesting that Asherah was thought of as the consort or mother
of Baal, and 2 Kings 21:7 and 23:6 admit they stood in
the Jerusalem temple. None of these Asherahs have survived,
because they were deliberately destroyed by the priests of the
Ezra school and its successors. But the terracotta dolls
mentioned above seem likely to be household models of the full
sized Asherahs, so we can get an idea of them.
In the scriptures, the stories about Asherah worship, the
constant destruction and reintroduction of the symbols of the
goddess, simply show the immense popularity she had among the Am
ha Eretz (indeed the name “Am ha Eretz”, usually understood to
be the men of the land, the simple folk, might well be intended
to signify Mother Earth.
In Jewish myth, Asherah worship was first introduced by
women, the wife of Solomon or the wife of Ahab, the latter being
the infamous Jezebel. The prophet Elijah took exception to the
prophets of Baal and defeated them in a gratuitous show of
supernatural power on Mount Carmel, but the prophetesses of
Asherah seem to have been left to continue their practices.
Prophetess might have been used in the accepted sense here
because a fifteenth century BC Akkadian text speaks of a “wizard
of Asherah” forecasting the future, so Asherah might have had a
reputation for fortune telling.
The Asherah of Samaria, supposedly set up by Ahab for Jezebel
(1 Kgs 16:33), was still standing a hundred years later.
Indeed, the impression is that the devotion of the people to
Asherah was constant while the devotion to the male god
fluctuated between Baal and Yehouah. Since, notwithstanding the
fact that Asherah was properly the Mother of the Gods, she was
also the consort of Baal or Yehouah—both mere sprogs of the
supreme god—Asherah remained the female deity whichever of the
male sons of god took precedence.
Bearing in mind the passages about the Queen of Heaven in
Jeremiah, the reason why the shrines to Baal kept getting torn
down might have been because Baal was the Lord (Baal) Yehouah,
being pressed on to the Am ha Aretz by the priests of Yehouah,
and being rejected repeatedly by the people who were devotees of
the Goddess. The destruction of the sanctuaries to Baal
therefore meant the destruction of the sanctuaries to Baal
Yehouah. When the Yehouists eventually asserted their power at
the beginning of the fourth century BC, the scriptural stories
were anachronistically altered to suit the Yehouists.
Be that as it may, the scriptures record that the worshippers
of this god of the Jews and Christians, Yehouah, invited all of
the worshippers of Baal to a solemn assembly for their god at
his sanctuary in Samaria, fitted them out in fresh vestments,
then murdered them every one! The shrines to the bull god in Dan
were not destroyed however and nor were the shrines to Asherah.
If Yehouah was the only god allowed, one can only conclude that
he was identified with the bull god and the goddess was his
consort. In the story of the Exodus, the Israelites
worshipped images of a bull, and a bull was a symbol of
fertility.
The presence of the Asherah in Samaria for so long was made
the mythical reason why the state of Israel was lost to the
Assyrians, together with the ten lost tribes of Israel, but this
is propaganda to justify the worshippers of Yehouah at
Jerusalem—the Jews—hating the worshippers of Yehouah in
Samaria—the Samaritans. In fact, the scriptures credit the king
of Judah, Joshiah, with “burning” the Samaritan Asherah about
forty years before Jerusalem was finally sacked by the
Babylonians. This was about a hundred years after Israel had
supposedly ceased to exist and its people had been deported to
be lost forever. In truth, it was probably only after the
Persian administrators had imposed monotheism that the goddess
was harmed, and the Asherah of Samaria destroyed.
In Judah, Ashtaroth are not mentioned at all, but king Asa
finds it necessary to destroy them, so they must have been there
all the time. His son, Jehoshaphat however, finds he has to
destroy them all again! His son, Joash allowed them back and
even placed an Asherah in the Jerusalem temple where it remained
until the pious monarch, Hezekiah removed it over a hundred
years later (2 Kgs 18:4). Hezekiah also destroyed a brass
serpent that Moses had given the Israelites to worship!
Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh, restored the Asherah but not the brass
snake, despite it having been a gift of the great Israelite
leader.
The Book of Deuteronomy was then found, supposedly
lost and forgotten since the time of Moses, but discovered “by
accident” in the time of king Josiah, just 35 years before
Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians. Plainly, the book
was written by the returning “exiles” sent by the Persian king,
who pretended that this law book had been discovered before they
had even appeared on the scene. It forbade the building of
Asherahs and pillars and had been just the sort of thing that
would motivate a good Yehouist as Josiah was depicted as being.
Yet, despite it, if Jeremiah is taken to be historical, the
people still preferred the goddess and he later found himself
defending Yehouah against the Queen of Heaven!
Anath
 An
Astarte plaque showing the goddess Astarte or Anath holding
lilies or lotuses
Anath was the sister of Baal Hadad and the daughter of
Asherah in Canaanite mythology, and was identified with Astarte
(Hebrew, Ashtoreth). She seems also to be Anahita, the later
Persian goddess. It is curious to the modern mind why goddesses
should be distinguished then evidently confused or conflated
again, and it seems more than likely that the patriarchal
religious leaders divided the original Great Mother Goddess into
her aspects to weaken her, but the people effectively refused to
see all the goddesses thus created as anything other than what
they were—the Great Mother. Thus, Anath, Astarte and Asherah
might have had different names but were seen as the same. We saw
from the Amarna letters and the bible itself that Asherah was
confused with Ashtoreth. The ancient tablets, using the Semitic
parallelism mentioned above, have:
Whose fairness is like Anath’s fairness;
Whose beauty is like Ashtoreth’s beauty.
The two goddesses are equated in these lines of verse, and
such parallels led foreigners, the Egyptians for example, to
think that here were two separate goddesses, whose equality must
have meant they were sisters. According to Albright, however,
Ramesses III called Anath and Astarte, his shield (singular)
suggesting that he knew they were one goddess only.
Anath (Anthat, Anaitis) was a goddess of war and love in the
Ugaritic tablets, a virgin goddess yet promiscuous and vicious.
Anath’s main lover was her brother, Baal Hadad, with whom she
had intercourse by taking the form of a heifer. Baal is
therefore a bull, just as Yehouah was at Dan and Bethel, and in
the wilderness. As a war goddess she is ferocious, killing
wildly and with glee until she has to wade in blood and gore,
rather like the Indian goddess, Kali, also known as Annapurna.
She has characteristics almost identical to those of Inannu of
Sumeria and Ishtar of Akkadia who were called “Lady of Heaven”
and “Mistress of the Gods”, just as Anath and Astarte were in
Egypt.
Ashtoreth refers to the womb, an appropriate reference for a
fertility goddess, but one which shows that it is a descriptive
title of the goddess Anath—Anath of the Womb, one could call her
according to Raphael Patai (PAT-THG). Anath is often also called
the “maiden”, so, although a womb, she is a virgin. The
Egyptians described them as the goddesses “who conceive but do
not bear” because they were permanently virgins. Ashtoreth was
also a goddess of war as the scriptures declare also when the
Philistines offered Saul’s armour in the temple of Ashtoreth (1 Sam
31:10) presumably as a token of appreciation for her assistance
in the battle.
Anath is not mentioned in the scriptures and Ashtoreth or
Astarte are mentioned only nine times, but she was much more
important than such a small number of citations suggests. In
Judges 2:13 and 10:6, Astarte and the Ashtaroth are
respectively mentioned in conjunction with Baal, as warnings to
the Israelites. Solomon is similarly warned by Yehouah (1 Kgs
11:5,33) for adopting Ashtoreth and other foreign gods.
Anath does appear in the scriptures as the place names Beth
Anath and Anathoth or Anatha (even today still called Anata),
the birthplace of Jeremiah, amongst others. Anathoth is simply
the plural of Anath, a convention among the Hebrews in naming
towns. Thus Ashtaroth, the plural of Ashtoreth is also a place
name. These names arose because they were the place of a shrine
(a house or “beth”) for the deity, and were therefore the place
where the deity’s devotees lived—the Anaths (Anathoth) or the
Astartes (Ashtaroth). One of the Judges, according to the
scriptures, was a “son of Anath”, taken by the fathful to be
literally true, but merely disguising that he was a follower or
devotee of Anath.
Queen of Heaven
Jeremiah tried to persuade the Israelite worshippers of the
Queen of Heaven in Egypt to turn to Yehouah but they refused.
Anath and Astarte were “Lady (Lady being the feminine of Lord,
therefore meaning “ruler”) of Heaven” throughout the Near East,
including Egypt. The people, in reply, think it is not through
any neglect of Yehouah that they have had misfortune but because
of their neglect of the goddess!
As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of
the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. But we will
certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own
mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour
out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our
fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah,
and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of
victuals, and were well, and saw no evil. But since we left
off to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out
drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and
have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.
And when we burned incense to the queen of heaven, and
poured out drink offerings unto her, did we make her cakes
to worship her, and pour out drink offerings unto her,
without our men?
Jeremiah 44:16-19
Elsewhere in Jeremiah, the author adds more detail:
Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in
the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the
fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to
make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink
offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to
anger.
Jeremiah 7:17-18
These are small windows into the genuine religion of
Palestine before the Persians altered it. The author, clearly a
propagandist for the Persian “returners” from “exile”, admits to
the longstanding practice of the cities of Judah, and of
Jerusalem itself. Their fathers—meaning in the first passage,
ancestors, not just their immediate dads—their kings and princes
had burnt incense to the Queen of Heaven and poured libations
for her (the equal of the wine of the Eucharist). The women add
that they made cakes for her (the equal of the Eucharist wafer),
and insist that they did not worship the goddess only as a
female indulgence but did it with their menfolk. The earlier
passage in Jeremiah shows that the whole practice was
communal.
The cakes will have been made in moulds just like the moulds
used to cast the terracotta figures of the goddess, found
everywhere, or perhaps the terracotta figurines were themselves
used to make an impression on the cakes, which were then baked
and eaten or burnt as an offering. That the Queen of Heaven was
Ashtoreth is suggested by the use of these cakes, because an
ancient Babylonian text to Ishtar refers to sacrificial cakes
using a name that seems to be cognate with the Hebrew word.
The people had been happy and well fed under the care of the
goddess, but latterly had suffered hardship under the
Babylonians and then the Persian administrators’ efforts to
bring in an exclusive new god, the Persian version of Yehouah.
No one intelligent can read books like Jeremiah,
Isaiah, Ezekiel and other prophetic books without
seeing them as propagandistic pseudepigraphs written by the
schools of Nehemiah and Ezra to persuade the native Palestinians
to adopt the monotheistic religion the Persians were promoting
for political reasons. These books nominally come from the two
centuries before the “restoration” but were obviously
anachronistically cast back in time to justify Persian
novelties. The priestly schools blamed the troubles of the Am ha
Eretz on to their old religious habits—and they laid it on
thick—they were abominations!
In Ezekiel, the prophet is transported from Babylon to
Jerusalem by God himself to see the abominations that are
happening. The Persian reformers composed this to justify Ezra’s
alterations to worship in the city of Jerusalem. The
abominations are a phallic image (“an image of jealousy that
provokes jealousy”), presumably an Asherah; the worship of a
variety of images; the worship of Tammuz, the dying and rising
god whose consort was Ishtar (Ashtoreth); the worship of the sun
that was doubtless an aspect of El, Baal and Yehouah as sky
gods. The Persians apparently were not against the vision of the
sun being used as an aspect of their transcendental god, Ormuzd,
because Mithras was apparently exactly that, but they would not
have anything worshipped except for the God of Heaven himself.
Mithras transformed himself for the Jews into the archangel
Michael, guardian angel of the faithful of Yehouah, a mighty
prince of the heavenly hosts but only an angel.
An Aramaic papyrus from the Jewish military colony at
Hermopolis in Egypt speaks of a temple to the Queen of Heaven in
the fifth century BC, just when the priests of Nehemiah or Ezra
would have been forging the Jeremiah pseudepigraph, on our
surmise. We know from the Elephantine papyri that the Jews of
Elephantine were still worshipping other gods and goddesses
besides Yehouah, including Anath, around 400 BC!
Yehouah’s Spouse
Utterance of Ashyaw the
king: Say to Yehallel and to Yaw’asah
and to… I bless you by
Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah
At Kuntillet Ajrud in the Negeb 30 miles from Kardesh Barnea,
excavation of an eighth century sanctuary by the University of
Tel Aviv in 1975-1976 revealed inscriptions, including Hebrew
prayers, that have still not been published 30 years later. The
text of one prayer was illustrated with two rough figures like
the brutish Egyptian god, Bes, and spoke of “Yehouah and his
Asherah”. This was a severe kick in the teeth for traditional
Jewish and Christian monotheists of the “God’s Plan” variety.
Asherah is a Ugaritic goddess, the consort of El. The people of
eighth century BC Palestine had this same goddess, and she was
considered the consort of Yehouah. Yehouah seemed even closer
than ever to Baal or El. The Arabs before the foundation of
Islam also had a goddess Asherah, and the Nabataean Arabs,
judging by many inscriptions they made in Sinai in the second
and third centuries AD, worshipped a god called “Ywh”. The fifth
century Jewish colony at Elephantine on the Nile, similarly had
Yehouah paired with a goddess Anath-Yehouah.
In the bible, Asherah is depicted as a cult object apparently
a wooden pillar or tree trunk, but translated often as “grove”.
Fighting fires and painting over cracks or whatever other
metaphor comes to mind—they all apply—biblicists claim that
God’s asherah was just a candlestick or altar, or they concede
that some evil Jews did allow Yehouah to have a wife and that is
why they Jews were always being punished, or anything that
sounds plausible as long as it does not mean that Yehouah was
not a perpetual batchelor. But as Theodore Lewis points out in
the Oxford Companion to the Bible:
The asherah symbol in its origin is not easily divorced from
the goddess Asherah.
The archaeological evidence is that the “pre-exilic”
Israelites worshipped first and foremost, a goddess whose spouse
was titled Baal and sometimes called Yehouah—the causer of being
(meaning existence, life). The people saw the goddess as the
accessible deity, even if notionally Yehouah or El were superior
gods in the hierarchy. In the same way, Christians pray to Jesus
or to Mary or even to saints instead of the omniscient god
because they clearly do not believe that God is omniscient. And
they obviously finish up just as satisfied praying to an old
dead bishop as they do to the Almighty God of heaven Himself!
The Persians stopped goddess worship and replaced the old
Baal Yehouah with a new god of heaven in the image of
Ahuramazda. The constant theme of the Jewish scriptures of
apostasy began here, Ezra’s priests portrayed the old religion
as a perversion and an abomination of the wishes of the new god,
and created an imaginary history of relapsing into religious
perversion to justify the change. The prophets were
pseudepigraphic propaganda supporting this scheme.
Interestingly, later on, after the new god had been accepted,
Jews became so protective of the new god that they refused to
accept the gods of the Greeks and eventually started the
Maccabaean wars. The works written to persuade the Am ha Eretz
to adopt the new god were now seen as directed against the
Hellenizing Jews who wanted to adopt Greek ways.
Yet, despite this manipulation, the Jews would not give up
their attachment to a goddess. It simply had to find new forms,
acceptable to those whose only deity was a lonely and invisible
Almighty.
One way that is plain in the scriptures, is that the land and
people of Yehouah, Israel itself, appeared in place of Asherah
or Anath as the betrothed or the wife of God. The goddess
remained in the Jewish world view but as a metaphor for the
object of the love of Yehouah—his people. This fitted in so well
with Persian aims that it is conceivable that they used it as a
way of weaning the native Israelites off their attachment to the
Goddess, just as Christians permitted Pagan gods to be seen as
Christian saints. At any rate it is a strong theme through many
of the Persian books of the scriptures.
Those who refused to abandon the old ways in favour of the
new Yehouah were portrayed as a wanton wife, a promiscuous
Israel, an unworthy bride or wife. If “His people” abandoned the
old ways, then Yehouah would forgive them of their sins and
repent of His anger, and approach Israel to unite with her, his
erstwhile unfaithful wife, in a grand marriage, to which the
faithful would be invited but not the remaining apostates. We
have suggested elsewhere that this marriage ceremony was
celebrated as a ritual by the Essenes, at least (the wedding at
Cana), but whether it is a carry over of some older ceremony in
which Baal Yehouah “married” his consort is unclear, though
quite likely. The older ceremonies were blatantly sexually
promiscuous and the new symbolic ceremony which replaced the
previous Bacchic-like revels was doubtless seen as a progression
to total decorum.
The old goddess became personified as Zion, the city of
Jerusalem representing those who worshipped Yehouah—the Jews or
Yehudim, a word apparently related to “yahad” meaning a tightly
knit community. Zion was a loving mother or a tender and
affectionate daughter to Yehouah—the roles of the goddesses
Asherah (mother of Baal) and Anath (daughter of El). She became
even more important in the Hellenistic period when she
represented the aspirations of the Jews for a kingdom of
God—independence from the Greeks.
Cherubim
The reputation of Judaism as an aniconic relgion—one which
does not permit images—evidently was built after the Persian
“restoration”. The making of “any graven image, or any likeness
of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth
beneath, or that is in the water under the earth (Ex 20:4)” was
written in by the priests of Ezra to prevent the people of the
Hill Country from reverting to their Asharoth. Yet cherubim
decorated the walls of Jewish temples until the end of the
temple of Herod in 70 AD. Surely these were “graven images”.
Christians, unassailable in their perpetual ignorance, think
cherubim are baby angels like the putti of the medieval
illustrators. Well they were indeed winged creatures but they
were more like the griffins, winged bulls and winged lions of
Assyria than podgy baby angels, though angelic figures were also
cherubs. These fabulous creatures were popular all over the
ancient Near East for thousands of years, but perhaps reached
their artistic zenith under the Assyrians. They were certainly
brought by the Persian priests of Ezra from Babylonia, where
they decorated thrones, gates and walls. Support for this is the
word itself which is not from a Hebrew root. The nearest word
for it is found in Akkadian tablets where it stands for an
intermediary between humans and god—an winged beast that carries
human prayer to god.
 Cherubs
are first mentioned as having been set to guard the entrance to
the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword after the expulsion of
humanity (Gen 3:24). In Exodus (25:18-22; 37:7-9),
lengthy instructions are giving for the construction of the Ark
of the Covenant with its Mercy Seat and decorated curtains.
Cherubim were the decorative motif. In 2 Samuel 2:11, God
rides on a cherub and in Ezekiel’s vision four cherubim carry
the throne of God.
Elsewhere, God sits enthroned on the Ark’s cherubim (2 Sam
6:2; 1 Chron 13:7;Ps 80:1) or sits between them (Ex 25:22; Num
7:89). And in the Psalms, Yehouah “rides on the wings of
the wind” (Ps 104:5) or “upon the clouds” (Ps 68:5) or “makes
the clouds his chariot” (Ps 104:5). In 2 Samuel 22:11, we
read:
And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: and he was seen upon
the wings of the wind.
Psalms 18:10 is equally explicit and emphatic that a
cherub stands for the wings of the wind:
And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon
the wings of the wind.
These descriptions explain to us what the cherubim that
supported god or his throne were. The Jewish scriptures are
describing the common near eastern representation of God, or His
Fravashi, used by the Persians and other nations like the
Assyrians. The Egyptians also used a similar device—a winged
disc that was often shown hovering over a dead person or a
religious scene, standing for the soul of the dead or perhaps,
more abstractly, for the protective power of god—holiness.
The Egyptians liked to picture Horus between the twin
goddesses, Isis and her sister, Nephthys, shown as mirror images
of female cherubim, with the winged disc floating above,
doubtless representing god as Ra. Equivalent pictures are found
in Mesopotamia with two winged gods or goddesses (cherubs)
tending a sacred palm tree overlooked by the holy ideogram. This
is doubtless the type of scene described as the one on the cover
of the Ark of the Covenant. Furthermore, it sounds like the
scene repeated several times in 1 Kings as being the
general motif of the chambers of the temple:
Goddesses in the form of
cherubim with stylized palm tree like the description of those
decorating the temple; from Nimrud, Assyria, 900 BC
And he carved all the walls of the house round about with
carved figures of Cherubim and palm trees and open flowers,
within and without… The two doors also were of olive tree
and he carved upon them carvings of Cherubim and palm trees
and open flowers, and overlaid them with gold, and spread
gold upon the Cherubim, and upon the palm trees. So also
made he for the door of the temple posts of olive tree… And
he carved thereon Cherubim and palm trees and open flowers:
and covered them with gold fitted upon the carved work.
(1 Kings 6:29-35)
Gods in the form of cherubim
with stylized palm tree like the description of those decorating
the temple; from Nimrud, Assyria, 900 BC
The description of the visionary temple in Ezekiel matches this
(doubtless it was written first) and adds the detail that the
cherubs faced alternately just as they do in the Assyrian
pictures. Only the Janus-like nature of the heads differs:
And it was made with Cherubim and palm trees, so that a palm
tree was between a cherub and a cherub; and every cherub had
two faces; So that the face of a man was toward the palm
tree on the one side, and the face of a young lion toward
the palm tree on the other side: it was made through all the
house round about. From the ground unto above the door were
Cherubim and palm trees made, and on the wall of the temple…
And there were made on them, on the doors of the temple,
Cherubim and palm trees, like as were made upon the walls;
and there were thick planks upon the face of the porch
without. (Ezek 41:18-20;25)
Even the ten wash stands in the temple were set on bases
which had a decorative motif of palms, bulls, lions and
cherubim.
The two cherubs placed in the Holy of Holies of the temple,
however, from their description in the scriptures, seem more
like the ideogram of Ahura Mazda:
And in the most holy house he made two cherubim of image
work, and overlaid them with gold. And the wings of the
cherubim were twenty cubits long: one wing of the one cherub
was five cubits, reaching to the wall of the house: and the
other wing was likewise five cubits, reaching to the wing of
the other cherub. And one wing of the other cherub was five
cubits, reaching to the wall of the house: and the other
wing was five cubits also, joining to the wing of the other
cherub. The wings of these cherubims spread themselves forth
twenty cubits: and they stood on their feet, and their faces
were inward. (2 Chronicles 3:10-13; see also 1 Kings
6:23-28)
Is this how
the cherubim in the temple Devir at Jerusalem looked?
The cherubim were miraculous because they faced each other
only when Yehouah favoured Israel but the faced away from each
other when Israel had earned God’s ill will. But why were there
two when there is only one god? In Rabbinic tradtion, there are
two cherubim to stand for each of God’s holy names, Yehouah and
Elohim, and, though this is much later than the origin of these
images with the Persians, it could be true. There seem to have
been two factions, each rooting for their preferred god, further
proof that the religion of the Israelites before the arrival of
the Persians was polytheistic.
Now Judaeo-Christian tradition has always been that the Holy
of Holies of the temple was empty, once the Ark of the Covenant
had disappeared from it, despite the descriptions of the
cherubim in the scriptures. In fact, there must always have been
fires burning in there if only for the burning of incense, but
fires were holy themselves in Persian tradition and considered
to be good spirits that took the prayers of the faithful up to
god along with the sweet incense. Rabbi Hanina in the first
century AD reports that there was a fire on the altar, and this
was obviously not the altar for burnt offerings which stood
outside the Holy Place, and necessarily had a fire. This altar
is distinguished in Exodus 38:1 from the altar of incense
of Exodus 37:25. The Holy of Holies and the Holy Place
were a single room, separated only by a veil.
The Ark was meant to rest beneath the touching outstretched
wings of the cherubs, but the loss of the Ark would not have
stopped the temple authorities from maintaining the cherubs.
Only the Ark was unique and irreplaceable. These cherubs are
both shown as masculine in appearance, just as Yehouah is always
taken to be masculine in every respect. A later reason for there
being two images was that one of the cherubim in the Holy of
Holies of the second temple was female—the goddess had not
really disappeared at all!
The basis for this belief is also the Talmud, which talls us
that the two cherubs in the Devir of the temple were a
copulating couple! Well, the Talmud actually says they were
“entwined” like a man and his wife. This explicit sculpture was
displayed to the pilgrims on each of the three major
festivals—Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles.
Both Philo of Alexandria and Josephus must have known what
was in the Devir, but both are cagey or contradictory. Philo
says that the High Priest is so blinded by the incense smoke
when he enters that even he cannot see what is in there, and
Josephus says that nothing is there, then that what is there is
quite respectable, and lastly he admits that there are some
items of sacred paraphernalia in there.
Both must have known, because Josephus had served as a priest
and Philo had visited Jerusalem as a pilgrim. Rabbi Quetina,
according to Raphael Patai, says that the priests would role up
the veil separating off the Holy Place when pilgrims arrived to
show them the “cherubim that were intertwined with one another”,
and declare:
Behold! Your love before God is like the love of male and
female.
The pilgrims would then indulge in orgiastic behaviour, as
they had done under the old religion, as the incident of the
golden calves proves:
And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt
offerings and brought peace offerings, and the people sat
down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play. (Ex 32:6)
No prizes are offered here for the real meaning of the
mistranslation “play”. The same Hebrew word is mistranslated
differently when the Philistine king, who thinks Rebekah is
Isaac’s sister, sees them through his window (Gen 26:8):
Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window,
and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his
wife.
Yes, the word “l’zaheq” means having nooky. The Jews had been
subject to the same relgious influences as everyone else in the
ancient Near East. Their original religion was a fertility
religion based on the cycle of the seasons. If these people
wanted the rains to come and the land to be fertile, what reason
could they have had for not showing the gods precisely what they
required? The sexual act was a sacred act of the cycle of
living, and the hierophants revealed the sacred object that
stimulated the act. It would have been impossible for them to
have remained chaste when they wanted the land to be fertile.
Doubtless the Persian schools could not have tolerated such
behaviour, which suggests it only resumed after Alexander’s
conquest. The priests were, of course, interested in multiplying
the seed of Abraham, who were their bread and butter, and the
Greek regime was sexually liberal, so that the new generation of
Hellenized priests had good reason for promoting occasional
orgies, even if the Jews had become otherwise prudish under
Zoroastrian influence. Effectively they were re-admitting the
old religion of Baal and the Queen of Heaven, but under the
guise of a mystery religion in which the cult objects were
revealed periodically only to the faithful. Naturally,
traditional Jews—those now committed to the religion introduced
by the Persians—would have seen all of this as abominable. They
became the Hasidim who split into Pharisees and Essenes.
Elsewhere, the Talmud describes the discovery of the entwined
cherubs by foreigners violating the temple’s sanctity:
They entered the Holy of Holies and found there the two
cherubim, and they took them and put them in a cage and went
around with them in the streets of Jerusalem and said: “You
used to say that this nation was not serving idols. Now you
see what we found and what they were worshipping”.
These violators are supposed to have been Ammonites and
Moabites, but the only historical event that it could correspond
to before the restoration was the capture and robbing of the
temple by Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persian “restorers” would have
included evidence of such an abomination in the salutary works
they wrote that now constitute the prophetic books of scripture.
The event therefore took place in the Greek period when it
became normal for Jews to refer to the Greeks by the scriptural
names of their gentile enemies. The Ammonites and Moabites must
therefore have been really Greeks and the desecration and
parading of the sculptures in cages must have happened before
the Maccabaean war. The desecration of Antiochus Epiphanes in
170 BC seems the likely occasion.
The old cherubim in the shape of the ideogram of Ormuzd must
have been replaced by the sensuous statue of copulating cherubs
after the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks. Patai suggests
that the change was effected by Ptolemy Philadelphus who made
several expensive gifts to the Jewish temple and began the
translation of the Torah into Greek. Perhaps more likely is his
son Ptolemy III Euergetes, who was a noted Judaeophile and even
worshipped at the Jerusalem temple, according to Josephus. His
son, Ptolemy Philopator, wanted also to worship in the temple
but was prevented from doing so and planned to massacre Jews in
revenge. He regarded the Jews as being devotees of Dionysos and
therefore had Jewish slaves tattooed with a vine leaf.
When the Maccabees rededicated the temple in 165 BC, did they
restore the statuary destroyed by Antiochus Epiphanes? It seems
they did, because the cageyness of Philo and Josephus suggest it,
and the fact that the Hasids fell out with the Hasmonaeans has
the same implications. The excuse given by apologists is that
some Hasids objected to the Maccabees taking the priesthood,
reserved for the Zadokites, but the real reason will be that
they had returned the institutions to those of the Greek
inclined sect of the Sadducees, who claimed they were the heirs
of the Zadokites, instead of back to the religion introduced by
the Persians.
Nevertheless, for many Jews the attraction of the goddess
remained and she had had a metaphorical existence as the bride
of God, Israel. The explicit statue must have seemed to many a
graphic illustration of the intimacy of Yehouah and His people,
and therefore did not seem in the least improper. And a goddess
equal to Yehouah had reappeared as the female cherub in the
statue. It took the growing strength of the Persian parties, the
Pharisees and the Essenes to pressurize the priesthood into
segregating men and women and preventing them from indulging in
sexual flippery when the mysteries were revealed.
Women, who had previously had a temple court of their own
giving direct sight of the revealed cherubs, were relegated to
second class citizens in galleries having no view of it. The
goddess was to fade again into metaphor and the poetic
constructions of the Shekinah, the Wisdom of God and the Holy
Ghost before the Christians even masculinized even that.
Continue:
Book 2: How Persia Created Judaism,
 The
people danced and danced.
The people shouted and shouted.
They danced and shouted for the whole day.
There was no fire.
Hazor estelas
 Hadad
|
Baal-Zebub
What Schaeffer found at
Ugarit was by far the largest collection yet discovered of proto-Phoenician clay
tablets dealing with religion and myths. Scholars argue over whether the
Ugaritic texts properly can be called Phoenician. They do not argue over the
many insights these valuable texts gave into what the Phoenicians believed.
The
active role was taken by Baal, the god of storms. It is Baal's identification
with strength, violence, youth, dynamism that characterizes his position as the
leading male god throughout Phoenicia, 13aa1 has come down to us as the
Phoenician god, the one who personified for the Hebrew prophets a faith that was
all too competitive with their own. The Bible is full of thunderous declamations
against the evils of Baal. He represents, by extension, the entire non-Hebrew
Semitic pantheon, with all its trappings of multigods, infant sacrifice, idol
worship and so on.
The
most detailed description of a Phoenician temple is in the Bible.
An
unclothed, winged Ishtar stands holding the rod and circle of justice in each
hand. There is a lion and crescent moon on each side, drilled stars and a table
(?). The boxed inscription is in two horizontal registers; the top a linear
cuneiform, but the bottom appears to be Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nonsense
hieroglyphics appear frequently on Syrian seals of this period as magical signs,
and so these may have no decipherable meaning. The cloudy rock crystal is a
scarce material for cylinder seals, although it could polish up to more
transparent. An attractive and unusual seal in many ways. 30 x 16 mm, c.
1000-600 B.C. 
An
attractive, translucent quartz seal in the usual late first millennium style —
domed, pierced for suspension and far smaller than earlier seals. Groove around
the base and a god holding a staff on the bottom. 20 x 15 mm x 24 mm tall, c.
800-500 B.C.
Another
Neo-Babylonian date domed stamp seal in a hard black stone, perhaps basalt. An
oval occulus motif on the bottom. This lower, small shaped seal was to become
the standard in the Parthian and Sassanian Empires up to the Arab conquest. 18 x
10 mm x 154 mm tall, c. 800-500 B.C. 
