And other stories from when Jehovah was young.

Wouldn’t that be an awesome name for a book? Unfortunately for its mass market acceptance, John Day’s book has the slightly more scholarly title “Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan”. It is also written in an extremely scholarly style, with footnotes taking up about as much space as the actual text, and numerous discussions of what other scholars have to say on the matter. Still, it is a fairly easy read if you don’t get scared by the format.  (Google Books is your friend. Google Books loves you.)

It should go without saying that the book is strongly discommended for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but unfortunately many other good Christians would probably get terribly upset too if they read it. So don’t, at least until you have read the Bible enough to outgrow the static worldview in which people’s impression of God is supposed to always be the same, no matter when and where.

The Bible actually says out loud that it is a gradual revelation. When Yahweh talks to Moses, he explicitly mentions that the patriarchs did not know him by this name. Even though there are a few references to Yahweh in Genesis. It’s not like Genesis was a blog, you know, which was written down as it happened. And for us Christians, the whole idea of the New Covenant (and the New Testament) requires belief in a gradual revelation. While millions of Christians are adamant that it ended there, that’s not what Jesus says. On the contrary, he complains that he has a lot of things he could not talk to his disciples when he was around them, but had to leave it to the Spokesman, the Spirit of Truth. As far as we know, that One is still at work. If allowed to.

In this perspective, it becomes quite interesting to see that the early Israelites thought God was married. It made perfect sense to them. Everyone married, except losers. Obviously an amazing God would have an amazing wife. The wife in question was Asherah. Some translations (including the one I grew up with) named her Astarte, but if the texts of nearby Ugarit are any indication, Astarte was her daughter.

Actually that’s why I came across this book, while reading wild-eyed people who believe that Easter is named after Astarte. (Easter is named after Eastre / Eostre, a goddess of dawn and spring, worshiped during the Dark Ages. There is no historical record of the corresponding German goddess Ostara, not that this stopped German poets from letting their imagination run wild. Ostara again should supposedly be the same as Astarte, despite the languages being utterly incomprehensible to each other, having separated while the Neanderthals were still alive and well.)

Be that as it may, the Canaanite culture that preceded Israel had worshiped a pantheon of gods, the chief god being called simply El, which corresponds to our word God. For clarification he was frequently called El Elyon (God Most High) or El Shaddai (God of the Mountains, or God Almighty). The old, wise and merciful El presided on the holy mountain of the gods in the north, and his 70 sons were gods of the various countries. All of these details are found in the Hebrew Scriptures as well, so there was at least some continuity despite Yahweh’s burning hate of the Canaanites (kill them all and their camels too). In fact, cultural artifacts indicate that most of Israel actually descended from the Canaanites. In any case, the Bible attests that they were never even remotely eradicated but lived among Israel for centuries after the conquest.

So it should surprise no one that the Israelites, at least before the monarchy, believed in many of the old tales about El, Baal, Asherah and Astarte etc. In fact, there are inscriptions referring to Yahweh and His Asherah, a reasonable assumption since they were told Yahweh was God, and God was married to Asherah, the Queen of Heaven. The prophets kept trying to explain that God wasn’t like that, but it took many long centuries before it started to sink in.

Once you know the cultural context, it is plain to see how the Old Testament portrays a gradual revelation from polytheism through a phase of hierogamy before God is finally seen as spirit, not some old guy up there. (I guess this is still a work in progress some places.)

And at each point, the peasants were no doubt just as certain as we are that they had the final revelation. Nobody though “Why, I am actually blaspheming and worshiping a caricature of God, despite my best intentions.” And neither do I.