I was attempting to make the point that The El/Asherah worship was entrenched in the people-to-be-Israelis. The language for timing should have been conveying relative populations and their movements - there was very low population in the highlands that the Israelis accreted from and the high populations of the city-states that surrounded them (and that they traded with) were growing and setting up new outposts and cities closer to the rural populations. These new population centers worshiped other gods that weren’t El, primarily Baal. This is why the Bible spends so much time denouncing Baal, they were attempting to retain what they considered their identity against interlopers.
Remember that, thousands of years ago, monotheism was an utterly alien concept to most peoples. Most people were either polytheists or practicers of various spirit-religions.
If and when Moses or a Jesuit missionary or anybody else comes to a pagan people and tells then “Jehovah” (or “The Lord” or “Jesus)” is the one and only true God, those pagans don’t readily take to the concept. Many will accept the new god and try to fit him into their existing pantheon, reasoning that you can never have too many gods to pray to.
We see this in Caribbean religions like Voodoo and Santeria. American Indians and African slaves often took what French or Spanish missionaries told them about Christianity and mixed it with their old beliefs. So, to them, Jesus, Mary and the saints were just new gods or new spirits.
Well, most of the ancient Israelites were pagans, too. And even if you beat such people over the head repeatedly with the idea that Yahweh was THE one and only true god, many of them still thought like pagans, and tried to work Yahweh into their pre-existing pantheon. Instead of REALLY thinking Yahweh was the only god, they’d think of him like Zeus or Jupiter, as the most important or most powerful of many gods. And if the older version of Yahweh had a wife, why, the people would assume Yahweh did too.
Look, all through the Old Testament, paganism and idolatry persisted among the Israelites, no matter how hard prophets and patriarchs tried to exterminate that.
In Graves’ version of the story, Jesus is really the son of Prince Antipater, son of King Herod the Great. In Chapter 5, Antipater is troubled that the people of Judaea despise the house of Herod the Idumaean (Edomite) as upstarts, who took the throne by force of arms with Roman backing. Simon the High Priest, a religious and historical scholar with a lot of esoteric knowledge, makes a case that Herod and his family are true heirs to the throne, because like David they are Calebites – that is, descended from Caleb a Kenite of Hebron, who was the great-grandson of Judah. Then Simon tells Antipater something even stranger, which he has not confided even to Herod:
By Simon’s reckoning, the current heiress of Michal is an orphaned Temple ward, Miriam (Mary), daughter of Hannah and Joachim the Levite. He persuades Antipater to secure his title to the throne by marrying Miriam, but to keep the marriage secret for political reasons. Shortly after they are married, Antipater is imprisoned and executed by his insane father. For the sake of appearances, Mary, already pregnant, publicly marries Joseph of Emmaus.
Mary gives birth to Jesus and, when he reaches adulthood (having grown into a scholar of astonishing genius and erudition), she tells him of his royal heritage. By this time the Jewish monarchy is vacant; after Herod’s death, the Emperor Augustus (wisely) decided no surviving member of Herod’s family was worthy of the throne, and placed Judaea under direct rule by a Roman governor. But Mary assures Jesus he is the heir even under Roman law, and will rule as king some day. Jesus goes off to spends some time among the Essenes. He travels to Egypt and settles for a time in On-Heliopolis, a destination of religious pilgrims from all over the known world. In Chapter 16, Jesus sets forth his own conception of his goals:
Back in Judaea, Jesus is baptized by John (his first cousin). He is tempted by visions of several beasts symbolizing vices – Anger, Lust, Pride, Greed, etc. – and tames all of them; but he can make no sense of his vision of a bull.
Shortly thereafter, at Hebron, he makes the acquaintance of Mary the Hairdresser (Mary Magdalene), a Kenite madam and retired prostitute who is rumored to be a witch, and turns out to be a priestess of the old Triple Goddess. She is, in fact, keeping in a cave the original Ark of the Covenant, containing a red and gold tablet carved with pictures. Chapter 19:
Jesus then exorcizes seven demons from Mary; she admits defeat for now, but warns him this is not the end.
By this time Jesus has a following of persons who know that he is the son of Antipater. They stage a ceremony in which John the Baptist anoints Jesus King of Israel; Jesus’ left thigh is forced permanently out of joint, like Jacob/Israel when he wrestled the angel; and Jesus is married to the new “heiress of Michal,” a kinswoman of his mother’s, Mary of Bethany, daughter of Jose styled Cleopas.
In Chapter 29, Jesus is crucified. As he hangs on the cross:
After the crucifixion and burial, Jesus does appear alive to his followers, and tells them, “On Passover Eve I learned this: that the Kingdom is not to be taken by violence.” Then he leads them all up a hill where three women stand: Mary his mother, Mary his queen, “and a very tall woman whose face was veiled.” The four of them vanish in a mist.
It does not seem to have finally ended, in fact, until the Babylonian Captivity. Spending 40 years cut off from the influence of competing Canaanite gods and disinclined to worship Babylonian gods, they simply got out of the habit.
God has one child, but also He has many children, note Gen 6:2,Gen 6,4:
And Job 1
God has children. And there are also hybrid children which involve human women, perhaps bridges from heaven to earth, but also there are births in the heavens as well:
Pregnancy and female and birth is ever present in scriptures from heavens to earth to hybrids.
It is also evident that God commanded Moses to create thing that exist in heaven on earth and Jesus said what is bound on earth is bound in heaven. The two are interconnected and to use a quantum physics term entangled they reflect each other (why man is in the likeness of God).
Since mankind has children and scriptures show such a clear relationship between the earthy and heavenly realm I feel save to assume that all that started because mother and father god got together one night and the condom failed (again heaven and earth are ‘entangled’) so what happens here happens there.
Easily wedged into Proto-Judaism. People were traveling around the Med all the time, and…
“Astarte didn’t answer my prayers, but maybe these new ones will.” Polytheism may be Humanity’s natural state, since we seem drawn to having gods but prayer doesn’t really to work.
I think it may be more accurate to say that Humanity’s natural state is superstition.
If we take all of the gods/goddesses out of it: human kind has a tendency to fall into a superstitious routine. We are given to repeat what seemingly has made us successful and avoid those that seemingly make us unsuccessful, sometimes going to build elaborate rites based on what amounts to a pseudo-scientific method.
If a farmer were to accidentally leave his seeds outside in the winter and got great crops that following year, he then begins to experiment. If a few years in a row, he does the same steps and gets the same rewards, he will enshrine that action of “leaving seeds in freezing conditions” as a superstitious event. As he uses it more he (or, in some cases, his sons that he passed the knowledge on to) will experiment with this some more. What if we leave them out for 12 frozen weeks this year instead of 10? Or 8? And so forth.
We still do it, today. For a simplistic look, if someone as a normal 2 year old figure out that screaming means he gets his way, he’ll scream more often. If he is harshly rebuked for screaming, he’ll scream less often.
Other things, like old wives tales and such tend to be these nuggets of wisdom handed down over time. Some of them, like eating chicken in broth stock when you’re sick, turn out to be very useful. Others, such as breaking a mirror yielding bad luck, aren’t that useful. Stereotypes are another version of this, such as “Jerks get all the girls.”
But these all stem from the same place: we look for order with an explanation by default and we will happily build complex rituals if it means we find order and explanation from it. Thus, if 200 gods is more useful to a culture, that’s what the culture will adopt. If a single god is more useful, that’s what that culture will adopt.
This is a plausible theory, and I would be lying to say it’s impossible. However, the Kuntillet Ajrud wasn’t gutted/destroyed, despite the OT telling us that half the kings of the era it was used during commonly ordered purges of polytheistic iconography. And I haven’t seen any notes about archaeologists finding masses of asherah poles and other iconography through the ages, from such purges. Overall, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that anyone was aware that monotheism was a target until Josiah’s time.
I’ll search more later, but so far I can’t find anything relevant. Via Josephus’ writings, we have some extra-biblical confirmation of the existence of a close relationship between King Ahab and the Phoenicians. We also have found the royal seal of Jezebel. But I don’t see any confirmation of the existence of Elijah nor Elisha, nor of any of the story of them and Jezebel.
Though even if there was some archaeological evidence to back any of this, it would likely just show a battle between Ba’al and Yahweh for supremacy. It wouldn’t mean that the people didn’t still worship Astarte nor El. Jezebel’s dad was a priest for Astarte, and yet no one in the Bible seems to have any issue with that little bit of religion that Jezebel surely practiced as well. But Ba’al-worship was contradictory to Yahweh worship, since the two gods were effectively the same god in the same position in an otherwised shared pantheon, except one was the patron of the Israelites and the other of the Phoenicians.
But it’s possible that there was no particular struggle of this type until monotheism took off. It’s just as possible that there were a couple of famous priests who had left some notes grumbling about the Queen’s religion. Only later was this expanded into a great crusade with a wide variety of military and magical occurences. Certainly the presence of such events as fire falling from the sky, bringing people back from the dead, etc. makes me sceptical of the historicity of the events. The quality of writing, overall, is too detailed to not be majority fiction given the centuries that passed between the events related and when they were actually put down on paper.
Sorry, I don’t follow. The usual story is that he used a human woman, not a goddess.
