"God's Wife Edited Out of the Bible -- Almost:" ... You cannot make this stuff up... or can you?

In today's blog entry I am offering my take on latest offering from the non-believing community's efforts to enlighten the rest of us regarding the Bible's true content.

The headline at the Discovery channel website can be found at
http://news.discovery.com/history/god-wife-yahweh-asherah-110318.html#view-comments

This is where we learn that contrary to the clear biblical witness, according to Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “God's wife, Asherah, was a powerful fertility goddess.”

As you might suspect, when I read this it was news to me. Why would this be news to those of us with at least passing familiarity with the biblical narrative? Well, that is simple. It turns out that good old Asherah has been edited out of the Bible by the male writers of the text.

So, if this is true, we are left with two possible scenarios: 1. There is no God and the Bible is not the inspired Word of God and is instead truly a work of men and thus editing out this important tidbit regarding God's wife is just part of the long march to uber-male domination in the ancient world or 2. There is a God and the Bible is inspired and He did have a wife and He doesn't seem to have had a problem with her being excised from the Scriptures. That is no way to treat a wife.

On the other hand (option 3) this might just be a giant bunch of hooey. I vote for option 3.

The basis of the theory about God's “wife” is that there is evidence that Hebrews worshiped Asherah. No kidding. Anyone remotely familiar with what the Bible says would not find it surprising at all. Since the worshiping of Baal and Asherah were two of the big idolatrous sins that kept getting the Hebrews in trouble with God. Of course if you have a predetermined agenda you can easily reconfigure this reality and make a claim like: “The ancient Israelites were polytheists, Brody told Discovery News, "with only a small minority worshiping Yahweh alone before the historic events of 586 B.C." In that year, an elite community within Judea was exiled to Babylon and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This, Brody said, led to "a more universal vision of strict monotheism: one god not only for Judah, but for all of the nations."

Now Brody is actually partly right. The Babylonian captivity in 586 B.C. did lead to a stricter practice of monotheism. That was the whole point of God allowing the Babylonian Captivity! To create a repentant people. Good grief.

The other argument offered in support of God having a wife? The answer Stavrakopoulou gives: Asherah is mentioned in Kings. Well Asherah is also mentioned in Deuteronomy, Judges, in addition to 1 and 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Micah. Not to mention, since Asherah is an idol, being mentioned by God to Moses in a less than favorable light when God said: "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. "You shall have no other gods before me. "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20:2-4 ESV).

Furthermore, everyplace Asherah is mentioned, in Kings and elsewhere, it is part of a condemnation or warning to the people. If the “writers” of the Bible just wanted to get rid of any mention of Asherah, why did they leave her in at all? The underlying argument of the article is “well someone set up an idol in the temple so it must have been part of the normal practice of worship since that what some did” is a really perverse use of the “is-ought” ethic that pervades much of modern culture. The take in the line of thinking offered in this article seems to be like this: “Well the idols were there so it must have been o.k.” That is like saying, well there is sin in the Church so this a normative and therefore acceptable practice in the Church. No, it is not. And no, it was not and is not o.k. to engage in idolatry now. Idolatry, which in this case, takes the form of making a claim that “God had a wife.”

Now, I understand that the writer of the Discovery Channel article and the folks whose opinons on this subject that she is writing about probably don't believe that God did say... well... anything since I doubt that they believe in God. But the thing I wonder is this, if they don't believe He is, how can they believe He was, and if He wasn't, why do they care if He was married?

"For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." (2Ti 4:3-4 ESV)

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Final... for now...Thoughts on the Woman at the Well

Is it really the job of the Church to build bridges “to” culture or is it the calling of the Church to be the bridge to God that Jesus has already built with His blood? In this moment at the well, is Jesus really building a bridge of compassionate conversation to the woman or is He building a bridge for the woman to cross over to Him? Perhaps the outward appearance of the “well-event” is of Jesus, God-Incarnate, coming to the woman. But in the story itself Jesus is already AT the well. The focal point of this story is, in fact, the focal point of the entire story of history: Jesus.

The story of Jesus and the woman at the well is not as much a descriptive example of how we are to build bridges to where people are so that we might meet them on their common ground. Because the story is not about us... the story is about Jesus. The truth, often overlooked, is that Jesus is the primary subject of the evangel and not us. We are the object of His love. He is the focal point of the Good News and we are the recipients of that love. When we get that then we might begin to mine the deepest treasures of the “well-event”. The danger of the wrong view of “evangelical bridge-building” is two-fold: 1. Failure to realize that when we build bridges the traffic can, and certainly will, cross in both directions (hat tip to R.C.S.) and 2. Missing the point that the woman did not encounter a man at the well who had heard about here and spoke to her in a compassionate way … she met God incarnate at the well who knew her at the deepest level of her heart and showed compassion to her anyway. The main point of the story is not who Jesus met but who the woman met.
And is certainly not primarily about how Jesus met the woman, but rather “who the woman met” at the well. Because she met God at the well. The fact that she met God at the well gives meaning to the contents of the true well. The well from which the living water flows.

When the story becomes something else, even slightly, we weaken the very evangel that we state we desire to share before we have even shared it and thereby dilute it of its deepest gift: Jesus and the bridge He built to the world on the Cross.

As we prepare to enter the second week of Lent, my prayer is that our focus will be on Christ's bridge of love already built and that we might in our compassionate conversations with others simply point them to the bridge already built.

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Thoughts on the Woman at the Well: Part 2

Conventional evangelical wisdom regarding the story of Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well in terms of application often goes something like this: See, here is Jesus building a communication bridge by meeting the woman “where she is.” In this gloss on the story Jesus is understood as the antithesis of judgment and the penultimate example of engaging culture in a relevant way through open, free and true two-way conversation. The give and take of the conversation, from the human perspective, gives all appearance of actually being two-way. The call, based on this understanding of the “well-event,” is clear: Those called to present the evangel (good news) are to build bridges to culture.

But I wonder if this conventional evangelical wisdom regarding the “well-event” is correct.

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Some thoughts on The Woman at the Well

In the next few blog entries I am going to share some of my musings on the story of Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well.


Here is today's thought:

I wonder sometimes if we understand what... or rather WHO the Scriptures are about.

Take for example the story most commonly referred to as “The Woman at the Well.” The description tells us everything doesn't it? The story is about “The Woman” at the “Well.” But is it really? The story is not really primarily about the woman at the well... the story is primarily about Jesus at the well. The story only has meaning because Jesus is at the well. The woman came to the well many days but the day we are told about is the day Jesus was there. The woman's story is important and her reaction even more so. But her deepest meaning is rooted in the prior presence of Christ at the well. And this is always the case.... he is always the one who is already there... wherever “there” may be when we arrive.

As I prepare to begin my Lent my prayer for myself and for you is that you will look for Jesus where He already is.

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