12/30/2011, revised 5/2/ 2013 Hebrew Goddess Religion By : Billy Rojas Raphael Patai begins his 1967 book, The Hebrew Goddess, with the observation that it would be miraculous if the ancient Hebrews were unaffected by the culture in which they found themselves after their arrival in the Promised Land. After all, there is no question that the first Hebrews were newcomers in the area. This is basic to the story of Abraham and Sarah, who are described in Genesis as arriving in the country as part of a large contingent of people many of whom were soldiers. Genesis 12 : 5 provides the first information to this effect, mentioning the many dependents of Abraham and Sarah. Genesis 13 : 1 - 8 adds that these first Hebrews in Canaan were very wealthy in cattle and sheep and silver and gold and had numbers of herdsmen who worked for them. There also were some number of slaves who apparently were acquired in Egypt during Abraham and Sarah's sojourn there. And there were many tents, which suggests a fairly large number of people. Genesis 14 : 14 tells us about a military expedition led by Abraham during which his 318 retainers ( soldiers ) saw action. Not that this is the usual way that the story of Abraham and Sarah is told. Indeed, sometimes Sarah is hardly mentioned at all, and at least in church the Sunday School or sermon theme on the subject ordinarily concentrates on the patriarch and his covenant with El-Shaddai, the name that Abraham understood to mean "God," which also is seldom ever used by Christians. That is, the typical Protestant approach, which may also be the typical Jewish or Catholic approach, focuses on what is personal and spiritual, ignoring the context of the story as if none of it mattered. In other words, here is one of the most famous of all stories in the Bible and yet relatively few people are aware of the actual details --in the Book of Genesis, for anyone to read. This is an example of how doctrinal conditioning directly effects perception. Some facts we read about simply do not register. Patai calls our attention to another dimension of the Abraham story --indeed, to many other Biblical stories-- which is seldom considered by today's religious believers. In this case it is the plain fact that when the first Hebrews arrived in Canaan, they were a small minority who lived among an already established population. About which Patai asked : Is it remotely thinkable that the Hebrews were unaffected by their social environment ? Are Jews in contemporary America no different than when their grandparents arrived from eastern Europe in the early 1900s ?
Actually there are so many differences that it would be just about senseless to even try and count them all. And this is true, even if to lesser extent, even among the Orthodox, at least half of whom are "soft Orthodox" who are virtually in the Conservative Judaism camp. Maybe they "keep kosher" but they think American. Also, just how different, really, were the first Hebrews in Canaan ? Were they similar to the Haredim or were they more like the Canaanites themselves ? As Patai pointed out, especially since Haredi customs and mindset derive from ghetto experiences in medieval Europe that are unrelated to the Torah, the evidence in the Bible tells us that the better comparison, easily, is to the pre-existing Canaanites. Consider the testimony of the Bible in the book of Joshua : "Long ago your forefathers, Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor, lived beside the Euphrates, and they worshipped other gods." Joshua 24 : 2 Later in the chapter we read that the Hebrews of the period, roughly 700 years after the time of Abraham and Sarah, were still worshipping the deities of Mesopotamia. This is exactly what Joshua 24 : 14 says, adding, in verse 16, that they had, by then, also incorporated Amorite deities into their religion. Verses 20 - 24 continue this theme, which obviously was important because the phenomenon was very real, namely, that most Hebrews, even after all those many years, continued to follow their own version of Mesopotamian religion. Indeed, this is remarkable inasmuch as the events of chapter 24 supposedly were taking place about 50 years after the exodus from Egypt. And how does that add up ? Presumably ( all ) the Hebrew people were in bondage in Egypt for several centuries. Yet in all those years they had not absorbed various elements of Egyptian culture and religion ? Yet here they were, still practicing Mesopotamian Pagan religion. Which is to say that --obviously-- many Hebrews never went to Egypt and what Joshua was describing was a scene in Canaan some time after the Hebrews who had gone to Egypt had returned and had reunited with those who had never left, who, more likely than not, were the clear majority. Which the Bible does not say directly but which it says, nonetheless. Which you would not get if your only frame of reference is doctrinal, where what you read is automatically interpreted to match the doctrine rather than requiring the doctrine to match the facts. Patai insisted that the facts MUST set the agenda, not the other way around. There are reasons for doctrinal positions ; they are not arbitrary. But to the extent that they are history centered, and rely upon an understanding of historical events as recorded in the Bible, they may be anything but accurate. This is because, with some exceptions, the doctrines that shape Christian organizations ( confessional Churches, denominations, etc ) are the products of earlier 'modern' eras of time, the early 1800s or 1700s, even the 1500s, and sometimes years before that. These were eras before the rise of modern historical scholarship, specifically before Biblical historical scholarship. Which is to say, to make the doctrines come out right --in terms of history-- it can well be the case that actual history, even when it is in the Bible itself, is ignored because of a simple fact : One's consciousness, committed to a doctrinal interpretation of scripture, will not allow the facts to be understood for what they are. Patai's book demands nothing less than as much historical objectivity as we can summon up when reading the Bible. Doctrinal views necessarily come later and need to be judged according to how well they reflect actual history. There can be no compromise about this.And this is our starting point for reconstructing religion for what is now the 21st century. Genesis 12 : 6 Canaanites lived in the country Abraham and Sarah traversed Genesis 13 : 7 Canaanites and Perizzites lived in the lands where Hebrews gazed their flocks. Genesis 14 : 1- 4 City-states existed in the land, Ellasar, Admah, Zoar, etc Genesis 14 : 13 Abraham and Sarah lived at Mamre among Amorites Genesis 14 : 18 Abraham enters a covenant with Melchizedek, Canaanite king of Salem None of these people made any difference ? None of their religious beliefs and values and practices mattered to the minority Hebrew population in the country ? As Patai put it on page 25 in the 1990 edition of The Hebrew Goddess : "it would be strange if the Hebrew-Jewish religion, which flourished for centuries in a region of intensive goddess cults, had remained immune to them. Yet this is precisely the picture one gets when one views Hebrew religion through the polarizing prisms of Mosaic legislation and prophetic teaching. " In other words, the interpretation of facts that the author or authors of Genesis, and other parts of the Hebrew Bible wanted us to internalize simply does not square with the facts themselves. Something isn't right, and we need to discover what it is. This is not an incidental problem. When we examine the contents of the Bible, specifically the oldest parts of it, what we find is decidedly not the picture that monotheistic doctrine wishes to convey. Far from there being a unitary masculine-in-character, God, responsible for literally everything, to whom everyone owes absolute obedience, what we find is, as page 30 puts it : "down to the very end of the Hebrew monarchy the worship of the old Canaanite gods was an integral part of the religion of the Hebrews." Indeed, "worship of goddesses played a much more important role in this popular religion than that of the gods." Moreover, for many years, from the rise of monotheism itself in roughly 850 BC for another two or three centuries, various prophetic denunciations of Goddess worship were mostly ineffective, and even as late as the era of Hezekiah, or even up to the time of Josiah, Hebrew religion remained much like that of the Canaanites and resisted nearly all efforts to change it into a monotheistic faith. Chapters 1 and 2 of the book discuss, in detail all the internal evidence in the Bible itself which tells us exactly this. To be sure, non-Biblical evidence is crucial and must not be overlooked. This, and what a scholarly-critical reading of the Bible tells us. Which is to say that to become able to read the text of the Pentateuch and other historical books for what they are, it is important to understand the nature of their composition. None of which was arrived at glibly based on aversion to religious faith. Quite the opposite was the case. The process of arriving at a new understanding of the Bible, which really didn't begin in earnest until about the middle of the 19th century, started with religious devotion, seeking to better understand the actual meaning of the text better, and took another hundred years or so to finally fathom things for what they really are. Most of this process in best explained in Richard Elliott Friedman's 1987 opus, Who Wrote the Bible ?, but Patai contributed his own scholarship to the issue. To skip ahead to the conclusion, as outlined on page 35 : History as we find it in the Torah and other books is "preserved in relatively late reworkings" of earlier writings that were doctored to suit monotheistic doctrinal views. What is impossible to miss, once you start to see the process behind the writing of the text of the Bible as we have it, was one of massive editing-out of references to original Hebrew faith and replacing those originals with doctrinal commentary that is uniformly antagonistic to that actual historic religion. We do find more-or-less reliable accounts of events when the events in question are "secular" in nature ( what king reigned at what time, what nations played a part in the Israelite past at what times, etc ), but this is not the case at all, or seldom is, when the discussion turns to what the Hebrews believed prior to the era of monotheistic dominance. Indeed, the redactors of the Bible made sure that "all references to non-monotheistic forms of popular worship are not only consistently derisive and unrelentingly condemnatory, but are kept purposely in vague and general terms." That is, through nearly ceaseless repetition of this monotheistic leitmotif, readers of the Bible internalize a viewpoint that makes objective thought about non-monotheistic faiths just about impossible. Believers are conditioned to hate and revile such religions. Hence the term "Pagan" becomes virtually a swear word and polytheist or other faiths are regarded as false by definition. None of this is discussed candidly in the pages of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. This viewpoint is simply asserted over and over again, along with cherry-picked examples of bad behavior on the part of non-monotheists, all the while, minus a few cautionary counter-examples, as all stories about monotheists present them as paragons of virtue. Yes, all of this has effects. Patai then went on to show how the Bible, despite the best efforts of the monotheists who redacted ( edited or re-wrote or invented ) much of the text as we have it, nonetheless felt compelled to retain parts of the original material, sometimes large parts, because there was no good alternative. The stories and histories were too well known. They had to be re-told --with as much fidelity to the originals as possible. The strategy that the monotheists made use of was to recast the old material as if it had originally been written by other monotheists who lived long ago. Most of this re-writing was done in the era after the return from exile under Ezra. Either Ezra himself, or scribes associated with Ezra, did the work --whether motivated by sincere piety or for the sake of gaining power for a priestly caste it is up to the reader to decide. What Patai did not discuss was another major element of the overall story. This was not because of serious limitations in his scholarship but because the concept of a "Bible within the Bible" simply was, at most, unclear during the time we wrote. And he was in hot pursuit of Goddess tradition not only in scripture but in Jewish tradition more generally. That theme was not his focus. Most of the book after the Introduction and the first four chapters ( out of 11 ) is about extra-Biblical legends, customs, beliefs, etc,. Hence, from my perspective, what The Hebrew Goddess, as a book, really consists of are chapters 1 - 4 and a lengthy Appendix with optional supplementary material. But there certainly is a hidden Bible inside the Bible and there is no way that myself, nor many scholars, would even know about it except for the doors that Patai's work opened. In other words, The Hebrew Goddess does not provide the final verdict in religious history. It "merely" sets the stage for a completely new understanding of religious origins and about the place of religious faith in modern-day society. The secret Bible lost in the pages of the Bible consists of : Ruth ( Naomi as Inanna / Ishtar ), Esther ( Ishtar ), Song of Songs ( based on Mesopotamian Goddess-of-Love court poetry ), Ecclesiastes ( based on Mesopotamian wisdom literature ), Job ( based on a Babylonian text entitled "I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom" which makes much of Ishtar's role in faith as a salvatrix ), Jonah ( and the righteous reborn Ninevites --viz Ishtar devotees ), plus major parts of Genesis, Numbers, Proverbs, etc., and most of the Book of Judges, at least to the extent that the original for it can be reconstructed. Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha should also be included. And a good number of passages in the New Testament as well, such as Matthew 12 : 41 - 42, John 4, Acts 19, and Romans 8 : 18 - 28, to cite a few examples. Which should be clear enough if you consult a good modern translation like the NEB, RSV, Oxford, Jerusalem or New Jerusalem versions. In so many words, original Hebrew faith survived as an alternative --and semi-secretive-- tradition within "Judaism" ( the religion that became dominant among Hebrews after ca. 500 BC ) and then resurfaced in various Christian traditions. In fact, it can be argued that the basis of Christianity was this alternative Hebrew tradition and that it finally succumbed when those who were its strongest supporters were won over to what eventually would be recognized as Christian orthodoxy.. The alternative --original-- tradition persisted, when it did, primarily within a strictly Jewish context, as a highly mystical school of thought which would eventually evolve into the Kabbalah. By then, of course, the triumph of monotheism was just about total within Jewish tradition. It was total within Christianity, too, except for the fact that the Virgin Mary was given Goddess-like status and her cult became almost universal in both the East and West. But all of this goes beyond the scope of this paper ; it is brought to the reader's attention so that the implications of the main themes that are discussed can be better appreciated. Now we are better able to look closely at the evidence in the Bible for Goddess religion as once having been the orthodox faith of the Hebrew people. The implications are enormous. As soon as the evidence is recognized for what it is, undisputed facts, a new reformation within both Judaism and Christianity becomes imperative and inevitable.We are living in he last days of normative Judaism and the last days of Christian orthodoxy. Biblical faith is about to become Biblical all over again --dynamically Biblical-- but in ways that traditionalist believers can hardly imagine. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
