KINGS and Indigenous Religious Practice Part 2

I want to highlight two of the implications that only 3 of the 40 kings of Israel and Judah between Solomon and the Babylonian exile supported the repression of indigenous religious practices that the Yahwist only priests and prophets demanded.  

The first and by far most important implication is that these indigenous religious practices are just as much a legitimate part of our heritage as is the Yahwist ideology of the writers of the Bible and the monotheism of the Rabbis. 

If you are like me, you were raised on the idea that monotheism is one of the Jewish people’s great contributions to civilization.  It is certainly true that from the Second Temple era on Judaism has been a monotheistic religion.  The Goddess returned in the form of the Shekhinah (see the books by Patai and Leah Novick for a lot more material), but much of this was esoteric and cloaked in the mythological language of Kabbalah.

Is monotheism such a great contribution?  I know this is a silly question for many people and perhaps even a non Jewish one.  However, as I learned from the graffiti on a bathroom stall at Swift Divinity School at my alma mater 45 years ago, people with a direct pipeline to the divine have a tendency to be bad for humanity. Monotheism lends itself to a dynamic of I’m right, you’re wrong and if you don’t believe as I do, I am justified in violence against you. Just think about the crusades, the wars and deaths because of the split in Christianity in Western Europe, the various conquests of different sects of Islam.  Buddhism, by contrast, has been a much gentler force as it has spread throughout the world, at least in part because it isn’t monotheistic. People who aren’t monotheists have, of course, been violently aggressive, but it seems to me that being monotheistic can exacerbate this human tendency.

Asherah is as much a Hebrew Goddess as YHVH is a Hebrew God.  Polytheism is just as much part of our inheritance as is monotheism. Our Rabbinical tradition regards this as heresy.  But this is what many of our other ancestors, commoner and king alike, believed and practiced.

A second implication is that the reclaiming of the worship of Asherah in conjunction with YHVH as our ancestors did can be used as part of a move away from patriarchy and all the harm it causes.  If we want to promote a far less hierarchical, more egalitarian ethic, we need a balance of sacred male and female energy. That balance can be more readily achieved by worshipping both Gods and Goddesses, both YHVH and Asherah as his consort, as the ancient inscription says (See Professor William Dever’s book, Did God have a Wife), than it can by worshipping only a male God.  And make no mistake, YHVH is conceived of as MALE, even if theologians argue that God is beyond gender. I would add that I don’t think anything in our world is beyond gender, that gender is one of those categories that helps create the context in which we live, die and are reborn. 

I know how utterly radical this sounds. I know it sounds heretical.  I’m also saying that it is tacitly what our ancestors actually believed and practiced.

Part 3 will talk about how our ancestors might have worshipped Asherah and YHVH together based on the hints that we have from the Bible.