What can be said about these supposedly ancient Israelite drawings of YHWH and His "wife"

[quote=“Reggie_O_Donoghue, post:2, topic:38888, full:true”]
The Bible acknowledges that Israelites committed apostasy and worshipped false Gods, that’s what happens in one of my favourite Bible stories, the story of Elijah.
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If this type of syncretism did not exist, I do not think there would be so much polemic in the OT against it.

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I like this post by Pete Enns, too.
Thanks.

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That describes the Samaritan religion. Though they retained the Torah (and some other writings), their version of Yahwism borrowed a lot from the typical Ba’al cult.

The latter is most likely the case, but the first is possible as well – it depends on whether you think that a Hebrew nursemaid would have known enough to and then actually did instruct Moses. But it’s also very unclear just what constituted as “the Hebrew religion” at the time. It certainly wasn’t monotheistic in any real sense; best guess is 'El of the Hebrews" was seen as their tribal deity who hadn’t been doing much for a long time; most optimistic guess is that they saw their El as the head of all the deities – though that’s really optimistic because even if we take Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, none of that had been written yet! (The core of the story of Job may go back farther than this, and some bits of Genesis, but they would have been completely oral tales [Job as a whole can’t be this old; the theology is too developed]).

Maybe. Scholars think that Midian may have worshiped Yahweh, but Canaanites? Since the drawing apparently comes from Samaria it’s more the case that the Canaanitic gods were seen as Yahweh’s council and aspects of the Ba’al religion were adopted – after all, Samaria started out as part of the kingdom of Israel, and once the kingdom was divided Canaanitic religion came back and got mixed in (and then when the Assyrians demolished the northern kingdom they settled conquered people from farther east in the area as part of their “dice and conquer” policy where they moved people around in their empire to diminish local social cohesion, and those people brought their own religion with the result that Samaritan religion absorbed some of that as well).

Oops – I missed that! If it’s that early, why the connection with Samaria? I didn’t think Samaria emerged until the Assyrians fragged the northern kingdom.

Yeah – given the paleo-Hebrew script there’s no question it’s ancient unless one wants to posit a forgery done by several different people.

One archaeologist in a lecture in grad school asserted that the ‘purity’ of Yahwism was inversely proportional to distance from the Jerusalem Temple. But with paleo-Hebrew, I think this is probably prior to the Temple period, which would make it more like inversely proportional to the distance from whichever judge (and/or prophet) was on top at the time.

No, that was Joshua.

That’s commonly held but I think it’s incorrect: the calf was understood in Egypt as a footstool for various gods, so the calf was probably meant for worshiping the enthroned but unseen YHWH-Elohim, indicating His presence by providing a footstool. The problem with that was all the association of such a footstool with the Egyptian gods, who – though just having been trashed by YHWH-Elohim – were still in the minds of the Hebrews due to having been living in Egypt.
This connects the the footnote to the command to have no other gods: Yahweh didn’t need anything to represent Him, so not even any graven images meant to represent Him when they came from some other religion.

A dove was one of the symbols for Asherah, but it wasn’t solely connected to her, so I don’t think the link there is a strong one; a dove representing a spirit was more common than that. But the connection of the Spirit of God to a dove symbol is correct.

BTW, isn’t “RiderOnTheClouds” a bit pretentious?

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That’s really what the first Creation story in Genesis is about: it’s a polemic that ‘demotes’ every Egyptian god to being just a created servant of YHWH-Elohim.

Good stuff!

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  • Personally, I’m kind of amused by Genesis’ author(s) characterization of the Moabites and Ammonites as “related” but through their descent from the incestuous relationship between Lot and his two daughters following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Okay, I was technically correct; before the Assyrians the closest name to “Samaria” is “Shamron”, the city that Omri built for his capital. So its use in the article is a bit of an anachronism. The Assyrians called it “Samerina”.

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A fellow grad student once commented that a fair amount of Old Testament ‘history’ is more than a bit like a soap opera. They certainly didn’t go out of their way to polish things up!

  • My father was his mother’s only son and his father’s oldest son. My father’s father went on to marry a second time, father a daughter 18 years after his oldest son was born, and then father a son 32 years after his oldest son was born.
  • My father’s mother, on the other hand, was married eight times in her life. She’d have divorced the eighth husband too, but he died first. I remember her vividly complaining that darn Lutherans didn’t believe in birth control. {Her son and daughter-in-law had five biological kids, and lived on a poor preachers salary.]
    From my perspective as the family historian, what your fellow grad student called a “soap opera” would have just been some more “family history”.
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Kuntillet Ajrud is south into the Sinai region. The text scraps include both Hebrew and Phoenician, indicating a diversity of peoples, as to be expected out on the margins of Hebrew influence. Kitchen (2003, On the Reliability of the Old Testament) points out that iconography is very much not in keeping with claims that the picture might represent YHWH and Asherat. Both the Hebrew and Phoenician texts reference both YHWH and Asherat, as would be expected both from popular Israelite syncretism (often endorsed by the kings) and from someone from neighboring tribes taking some theological pieces from Israel.

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Honestly, I think both are valid conclusions. Recall that many laughed at the prophets in their day for their devotion to Yahweh alone. After all, even the Israelites of the colony in Elephantine believed God was wed to Anat!

The problem is clarifying exactly what is meant.

The interpretation of the drawings as being of YHWH and Asherat is probably wrong. However, the texts certainly include combined invocations of both.

Were the individuals writing such things Israelites, or were they from neighboring people who had picked up a bit from Israel and mixed it into their own beliefs? That’s probably impossible to prove one way or the other.

Does this mean that YHWH was originally just one out of a pantheon and later writers changed the Old Testament to impose a historical fiction of monotheism? No. As has been pointed out several times on the thread already, the OT consistently portrays Israel as often going astray either by bringing in other deities or bringing in other practices. Such finds are completely compatible with the accuracy of the biblical account. Much later, the Jews at Elephantine in Egypt (descendants of those who dragged Jeremiah to Egypt to escape the Babylonian captivity) were mixing in other deities, exemplifying what Ezra and Nehemiah were working against, so there are definite Jewish archaeological examples of polytheism as well as the somewhat more ambiguous evidence from Kuntillet Arjud.

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It’s in the hill country in eastern Sinai on a trade route in what was Edom, and Sinai was a very mixed place around 800 BC so syncretism is a strong possibility. Given that the location was part of the Kingdom of Edom at the time it would probably have been a matter of Yahweh being incorporated into Edomite religion, unless the jar got there via trade from the north; that could explain why it’s “Yahweh of Samaria”.

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The two articles already mention that the two figures are probably a depiction of the Egyptian God Bes. Their male genitalia are clearly visible. So the inscription and the drawings may well be unrelated.

[Edit: Some scholars believe the “object” between the right figure’s legs is a soot smudge that faded over time. Others think the “genitalia” are actually tails, because the figures also have other bovine features.]

Asherah can refer to the personal name of the goddess, but also to a cult symbol. Both options would go against the Torah of course. Which is not a surprise. The prophets are clear that idolatry reigned. What it does tell us though, is that Yahweh was a major God.

It is interesting that the word “queen” is never used to refer to royal Israelite women. Dr. Gary Rendsburg suggests that this is evidence of monotheism. The Israelite king was seen as a representative of Yahweh (1 Chronicles 29:20).

“Against such background, one can understand that the presence of a queen as the official consort of the king would be considered theologically dangerous. … the elevation of the mother of the king to “royal-lady” in ancient Israel was intended to dispel any suggestion that the king had a consort, thereby paralleling Israel’s view of Yahweh, a deity who had no consort.”

Link to article

https://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/docman/rendsburg/122-no-stelae-no-queens-two-issues-concerning-the-kings-of-israel-and-judah/file

The people may have believed Yahweh had a wife. But this was not the official doctrine.

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