From King Jesus, by Robert Graves:
The Scriptural reference is to Ezekiel 23 – but “Aholah” and “Aholibah” are expressly allegories of Samaria and Jerusalem respectively:
Ashima was a real Semitic goddess but I can find no references to Anatha.
There really was a Jewish temple at Elephantine, and some interpret the Elephantine papyri as proof of surviving polytheism:
See also Asherah.
Anat was a Canaanite goddess of war.
This is my new favorite insult – mainly because nobody will have any clue what it means. 
Maybe it means they’re contrarian.
Neigh-sayers.
That’s KJV – NIV renders it as, “There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.”
I mean, really! Like you can blame her!
King Jesus is a fun book, but no more to be taken seriously than The Da Vinci Code.
Graves had some very severe problems in his interpretation of female divinity figures. His “White Goddess” hypothesis is a monsterpiece of overstatement. He takes some ideas of real value, and exaggerates them beyond all reason.
I have his book on the Greek Myths, and, while his retelling of the original stories, and his first level of footnotes, are both excellent, his second level of footnotes, trying to shoehorn everything into his White Goddess hypothesis, is a load of centaur manure.
Yahweh had an ancient consort that was a part of the ancestral religion that Judaism evolved from. There have been sacrificial offering pottery shards found in the Levant that have “To Yahweh and his Asherah” and similar inscribed on their sides.
Yahweh is a disambiguation of Judaism that sprung forth when the Israelites were identifying themselves as “us” and their neighbors as “them”. The elder stories of the bible in the original texts all refer to “El Shaddai” and the newer documents refer to Him as “Yahweh”. The original name of their god was “El Shaddai” from the Canaanite pantheon who was the father diety of Baal, which was the favored god of the Canaanites after Isreal followed their own beliefs and diverged from the pantheon of their forebearers. (Interesting fact: The original form of Isreal, “Yisra’el” means “El Contends”.)
Asherah was excised from the religion as belief in Isreal and it’s people being “married” or “betrothed to” Yahweh took shape. Between a hundred years before and upto the first part of the monarchy, priests were working to stamp this out. Asherah was also later linked to Baal by their neighbors, which is another reason they wanted to stamp out her worship as part of their identity.
Here is an interesting rebuke to the notion of stopping offerings to Asherah in Jeremiah 44:17-19:
At this point, there was a down turn in Israeli fortunes, and this led to some prophets/priests attempting to stamp out the “bad” practices that were angering Yahweh and causing their misfortunes. The women, who are sometimes said to be the primary worshipers of Asherah, were not terribly pleased with the idea.
You mean to tell me that Judaism wasn’t invented, unsullied, in the 4,000 years or so of the Old Testament? That it didn’t evolve from an earlier tradition that would appear alien to modern Jews and Christians? Well, that is… that’s just… That is to say, it makes complete sense! If you’re not a Creationist, how can you imagine otherwise?
Yudh-Hey-Vav-Hey, hereafter known as “HaShem” did not have a consort, in any recognizable conception of this deity.
If the question is, "Did the people who became the Hebrews/Israelites ever worship a god-goddess pair, that’s a different question, and one I can’t answer. However, part of the definition of the Jews, even back when they were called Hebrews or Israelites, was that they were monotheistic.
I can tell you that there is evidence in the E strand of the creation story in Genesis, and in the Psalms, that there was once a tradition that HaShem killed off an earlier god or goddess in battle. I read a convincing thesis that this was Tiamat (obviously, not that HaShem literally kiled Tiamat, but that the goddess in the story was understood by readers at the time to be Tiamat). I don’t remember the details, though.
I’m in a hurry, so let me get back later with specifics, but I’ll say quickly that “darkness was on the face of the deep” seems to be, in the Hebrew text, a pretty clear picture of death on the face of the dead goddess.
If HaShem was interested in a consort, it would have been easier to court Tiamat, rather than kill her, but HaShem seems to be interested in being the one and only even back when it meant doing so by conquest.
I’m fairly sure I just said the complete opposite. :dubious:
The later interpretations of Judaism certainly were. In my opinion, I can’t say that semantically saying that before it was just Yahweh that they weren’t practicing Judaism is anything but evasive. It’s similar to some Christians saying that Christianity has never actually been tried. While, yes, it is true on some level that the full teachings of Christ have never been put into full practice, what everyone (including the practitioners) have seen for 2,000 years is still “Christianity”. I can’t really buy into that argument, either.
The proto-Judaic people, while possibly not practicing what modern Jews would consider “Judaism” were practicing it’s earliest forms. The change to modern Judaism was an evolutionary process - some of which was brought along with them from previous and contemporary cultures in the past. An example is the fact that a lot of ancient (and even modern) cultures/religions have a flood story. There was a kernel of an ancestral story that grew with the varying cultures over time.
Another issue is that the Old Testament was written over a millennium or so and several of the books make reference to source documents that we haven’t found copies of, yet. We may find more complete ancestral information in one of those tomes, should we ever find one.
Back to the Bible, both Deuteronomic authors E and P emphasized the connection the ancestral god to Yahweh to create a sense of continuity. At some point, the priests/prophets/scribes rewriting the bible (for copying purposes) realized that who they worshiped was fairly different than their oldest religious stories and they made efforts to emphasize that these stories referred to their god as well as the contemporary literature. You can see this emphasis fairly clearly in an E verse in Exodus:
You can see the special emphasis placed on the historicity of the continuing God. Additionally, the verse of revealing God as Yahweh to Moses in Exodus 6 further reinforces this link to the ancestral religion:
For whatever reason (a sojourn to Egypt? The relative isolation of the high plains? Aliens?) the Canaanites that worshiped El split off and didn’t evolve their religion along side the primary population base. Eventually, this religion became a separate entity from it’s ancestral forebearer and later became modern Judaism. The steps between the split and modern Judaism are a long chain of adaptions to circumstances. For instance: Why do modern Jews not sacrifice animals to God in the Temple? This was a central practice in the monarchy. But that was also a change from earlier forms: Older sacrifices could be done at regional properly sanctified altar or temple sites. It was also a change from newer times: Isreal and Judea (the states) both had their own Temple for sacrifices. But with the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, sacrifice became prayer.
We could also say that Solomon and David weren’t practicing Judaism because they made sacrifices while prayer is practiced, today. But that’s really not that useful and I’m sure a significant set of Jews (and probably Christians) would not accept this delineation of Judaism.
Ancestral Judaism, while not what the religion is today, is still Judaism.
Sorry, not buying it. If you go back far enough, at some point, proto-Judaism becomes not-Judaism, and I would argue that monotheism (or, at least monolatry) is necessary for what we are looking at to be at least proto-Judaism.
That’s just semantics.
Fact remains that there took place a devellopment from polytheism to monotheism and thus that at one time the pantheon of “the people living in Canaan-Judah-Israel” consisted of more than one God.
If you expand it to Monolatry than the ealiest proto-Judaists were practicing Judaism, though. El’s worship predated the Baal worship of Canaan and he was the exclusive diety for some period of time for that pantheon. Asherah and, as I said above, the Baal and other gods came later but the El worshipers for reasons that we can’t pin down remained in the service of El with the addition of Asherah as the rest of Canaanite society moved on.
As for monotheism, I have the greatest issue with that as a determining factor because Asherah was worshiped (over time dropping to “honored” and then all practice falling away entirely) into the monarchy, which is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age” of Israel. The logical extension of this is that Judaism did not form until after that period. But common interpretation to both Judaism and Christianity is that Judaism extends back to Abraham. Indeed, the extermination of Asherah worship was a later effort, as at the time of Moses the priesthood was concentrating on keeping the worship focused on Yahweh and not having the population move to Baal as their neighbors did.
It’s easiest to use the Judaic and Christian teachings as the basis for argument and study: Abraham was the division between ancestral religion and the Judaic teachings that evolved over time. But realize that this barrier isn’t a hard line and that ancestral practices bleed into Judaism for quite some time. Later organized efforts of the rulers and priesthoods evolved Judaism from it’s roots and contributed changes for much of Jewish/Israeli history.
“Is that your girlfriend Yahweh?”
“No, she’s just a friend.”
“She said she was your girlfriend.”
“She wants to be my girlfriend, but we just hooked up once.”
“Can I ask her out then?”
According to the Old Testament chronology, the Israelites were told to practice monotheism shortly after the escape from Egypt. That’s generally held to have been sometime between 1700 and 1300 BC. The Old Testament also holds that the Israelites were still practicing polytheism sporadically during the eras of King Ahab (~850 BC) and Manasseh (~650 BC). Based on archaeology, there’s no particular indication of a movement towards monotheism until the 650-550 BC time period (probably starting with Josiah).
The core of the Old Testament was basically formed before 500 BC.
So basically, the Israelites were polytheists for roughly 1000 years and then in a 100 years had converted to monotheism. Overall, I don’t think it’s very reasonable to say that Israelites are only Israelites if they’re monotheists - the Bible certainly didn’t seem to think so, when they wrote it. Polytheistic Israelite history isn’t a brief period of transition before the long great age (unless you skip to moden day). The transition period was really just a few decades. They were hardcore, full-believer polytheists for a millenia. Even including all of history since then, we’re looking at 1000 years as polytheists and 2500 as monotheists. Obviously monotheism wins, but polytheism was hardly college experimentation.
Cite?
To be fair, though, the Old Testament calls out Ahab and Manasseh for being unfaithful. Some of the great prophets in the Jewish tradition were prophesying during their reigns - Elijah, Elisha, and Isaiah. They were be castigated for their non-monotheistic beliefs.
Either your phrasing is confusing or you’re confused about how pantheons work.
El was the leader of the pantheon of gods. Baal is one of the sub-gods among that pantheon. Saying that one predates or post-dates the other isn’t very meaningful, since they were worshipped at the same time. Similarly, talking about El-worshippers vs Baal-worshippers is silly since both were worshipped.
I’ll grant that per town, per tribe, etc. the makeup of the Canaanite pantheon was probably quite different. There likely is no one “Canaanite” pantheon. Without a central government and written source to maintain consistency, whatever formed the basis of the Canaanite religions was constantly being evolved as people moved around, were conquered, conquered others, etc. Chemosh, Amurru, Baal, Moloch, Yahweh, Kaus, etc. all share the same traits as a god - powers, living situation, etc. - a sort of mountain-dwelling weather/war god who was traditionally a #2 to El Elyon. It seems like each tribe basically took that god and made him their patron saint, then to make sure that he was THEIR patron saint and not the patron saint of the tribe on the other side of the mountain, each tribe gave him a different name. Eventually, the tribe who called him Baal become dominant at a pan-tribal level and so a lot of tribes ended up with their tribal god + Baal, even though traditionally they were probably the same guy. When the move to monotheism started to happen, demonizing Moloch, Kaus, Chemosh, etc. became strictly necessary because the Canaanite/Jewish people were at last trying to unify their pantheons into one (and also trim it down to monotheism) for the first time. But previous to that, each tribe was allowed to have their own particular variant of the Canaanite pantheon with whatever gods by whatever names they wanted, but generally you see these three/four:
Everything after that was pretty flexible and probably varied from town to town.
It does, but all the way from the Golden Calf to Manasseh, there’s constant mentions of the Israelites practicing polytheism. So according to the OT, you’ve got God sending locusts, plagues, mana from the sky, parting the waters, smiting people, winning the wars for the Israelites, etc. and yet over the course of ~1000 years the Israelites are steadily unconvinced.
But really, the fact that the OT even mentions polytheism at all was as a vehicle for demonizing the gods of people who the writers of the Bible wanted to convert to Yawhist monotheism, not because they were trying to tell a solid, well-researched history of the Israelites. The only reason to use the OT to argue for Jewish polytheism is because it supplements archaeology. The OT is, effectively, archaeology, in the same way as finding Ugaritic texts gives us a view of the what the Ugarits believed at the time those texts were written. Most of that might be bunk, but it’s stil information that we can use to supplement information that we gather from other sources during other eras. The OT tells us what the Israelite aristocracy believed (or wanted to believe) around 600 BC, the Ugarit texts give us a view of the region in 1200 BC, Kuntillet Ajrud and the Mesha Stele tells us something about 850 BC, etc. Between those and other smaller finds (icons, statues, etc.) we can piece together a most-plausible history of the region and its religions. And in that, it agrees with the Bible that there were Moabites and Midianites and there was Chemosh and Kaus, etc. But it doesn’t agree that the Israelites were an independent non-Canaanite group, nor does it agree that they were recovering polytheists for a thousand years.
High maintenance like you wouldn’t fucking believe!