God’s Girlfriend
Matt Alspaugh, JUC Member and
Ministerial Student, Starr King School for the Ministry
Jefferson Unitarian Church
Golden, Colorado

When Liz and I lived in Colorado, we enjoyed hiking in some of the mountains and high places that this state had to offer. We were not peak-baggers by any means – those are the folks who collect climbs, all the 14,000-foot peaks, for example, as if they were rare coins. We just enjoyed even a low hill or ridge if it was part of our route. Any high place, especially those where we could be alone, offered a sense of awe, access to the sacred, of closeness with the divine.

We could sometimes sense a spiritual energy present at these spots. Sometimes this energy got real and physical as an afternoon thunderstorm developed, and the static electricity would raise the hair on your head, and that meant get down off the peak quickly, lest you get electrocuted! Closeness with the divine, even God-fearing, takes on a new meaning at those times!

It is easy to imagine early peoples setting up shrines or worship places at high places around their homes. Certainly Native American peoples here in the West regarded certain peaks as sacred, and maintained ancestral shrines on them. So I was not surprised when I read many comments in the Hebrew Bible about altars set up at high places. In fact, a quick search in my Palm Bible finds 75 references to ‘high places’ as worship sites in some 15 books of the Hebrew Bible.

What is interesting is that the writers of the books of the Bible view almost all of these sites in a negative light, as angering their God. From the days of Solomon on to the era of prophets like Micah, a constant backstory in the Bible is that the Hebrew people continued to worship at these high places, against the wishes or priests and prophets. Why would the people do this? Why would these people apparently be so disobedient to their God?

I’d like to suggest today that these people worshipping at the high places were often worshipping more than just God.

Consider Jeremiah 44.16, which was our first reading today. In this reading, the prophet Jeremiah is lecturing some townspeople and they tell him that they plan to continue to worship a ‘queen of heaven’. They know from experience that worshiping this goddess brings food and prosperity; and that when they could not worship her, they perished from starvation or violence.

Many of you may recognize from our quote from Jeremiah the name of the curriculum Jean Decker mentioned: Cakes for the Queen of Heaven. In another part of the passage, the women say they will make cakes for her, marked with her image.
Could this Queen of Heaven be a female partner, a consort, to God? Perhaps this is the female deity known as Asherah. Many of the Bible passages describing ‘high places’ mention a stone altar, a stone pillar, and a wooden pole. The stone pillar is believed to represent God in some cases and the pole to represent Asherah .

Almost all of these Biblical texts speak of Asherah in a harsh and condemning way. These texts either condemn those Hebrew kings who allowed people to build such sacred places and create Asherah representations, or they praise those kings who burned and destroyed such installations. Even Jeremiah condemns those who worship the queen of heaven and warns them that God will destroy them like others before them. It’s clear that the Hebrew Bible has an agenda here, and worshipping other gods is not part of program.

Now, we Unitarian Universalists have a tendency to pay little attention to the Jewish and Christian teachings that are part of our tradition. As UUs, we consult the Bible rarely, and only occasionally do our ministers use the Bible as a source for preaching material.

Some of us reject the Bible completely, out of hand. We draw our personal spiritual fulfillment from other sources and we see little value in connecting with what this tradition has to offer. Often this is because of past experiences that have wounded us. Some of us have come from fundamental religions in which the stories and teaching of the Bible have become frozen into a rigid and brittle form, becoming mere conveyers of dogmatic teaching.

Others of us have come from liberal Christian or Jewish communities who struggle with how to responsibly use the stories of the Bible to tell the larger story of God’s love. Why would a loving God destroy all life on this planet save for paired sets of each species freighted away on a boat? Why would a loving God harden the Pharaoh’s heart against releasing the Israelite people, so that he, God, could then send plagues of locusts, frogs, blood, and murder to the Egyptians? Why would a loving God lead the Israelites to murder the people living in Canaan so the Israelites could take the land from them?
To deepen the issue, how do we as parents and as religious education teachers explain these stories to our children? We recognize that these stories are so deeply embedded in our culture that it’s important for our children to understand them , but how do we move beyond talking vegetables on the television to deeper ways of presenting this material? How do we get beyond merely telling them, “it’s just a story”? Both as a student and as a religious education teacher, I struggled with these issues.

It is as if we are trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and the pieces just won’t fit together. You know the puzzle pieces I’m talking about, those really hard blue-sky pieces that are left after you’ve worked out all the easy edge and foreground parts of the puzzle. If we’re going to make any sense of this puzzle perhaps we need to step back a bit. Perhaps the dog did eat a few of the pieces, or maybe someone mixed in some sky from another puzzle by mistake.

In sorting out the puzzle of Biblical history, an additional tool – archaeology – is beginning to yield some clues. Archaeology brings new voices into the discussion, in the form of religious artifacts and icons, texts on tablets, and remnants of everyday life. We’ve uncovered much of this material in the last few decades, and it clues us into the lives of ordinary people in early Israel, and about some of the pivotal events of those times.

This material allows us to begin to construct an alternative understanding about the origins of most of the Hebrew bible. The traditional view, and that of literalists and other conservatives, is that material in the Hebrew Bible is essentially historical, and that the texts were written down pretty much when the events occurred, at least starting with the Exodus from Egypt at about 1250 BCE. However there is little material ‘in the ground’ that matches at least the first half of this history: no remnants of the Ark, no other recordings of the Exodus events, no walls of Jericho that come tumbling down.
Our alternative understanding suggests, rather, that much of the Hebrew Bible was assembled late in its history, during and after a pivotal event in Jewish history. In 587 BCE, the Babylonian Empire overran the tiny Hebrew nation of Judah. In this traumatic event, Judah was completely destroyed and its rulers and priestly elites were taken into captivity and became slaves in Babylonia.

As slaves, these elites struggled to understand what had happened to them. Looking through the tears of pain and rage, they began to interpret their story more clearly – they had violated a legal covenant with their God. Through those tears they saw their God as raging and vengeful, a jealous and very masculine God who would have no other Gods before him.

This God stood in opposition with all other Gods, including Ba-al, who was worshipped in earlier times by the rural folk, and of course the goddess Asherah, partner of God. In their grief, the exiles began to create a plan for understanding and appeasing this God. They began to dream of restoring the covenant, and recovering and preserving their nation and culture. As a literate minority, they wrote this down, writing much of such key books as Exodus and Numbers, and almost all of Leviticus. They edited much of what existed, for example, changing Genesis to emphasize creation in seven days and the need for a Sabbath day. I refer you to John Shelby Spong’s book “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism” for a good discussion of this.

When the Persians overran Babylonia a half-century after their exile, the Judean elite was allowed to return to their land. With the support of the Persians, they reestablished domination over the region, and continued to write what became the Hebrew Bible, describing their special covenant with God, and began to recreate a Judean society in this model.

What was this society like? First, religion was highly centralized. God could be properly worshipped only at the temple in Jerusalem. Men were expected to travel to Jerusalem three times a year, if possible, to supply animals and goods for sacrifice. Every family was expected to contribute a tenth of their production to the support of the temple. At the temple, only the priests were permitted to perform the sacrifices and other worship activities. And the priest role was hereditary, passed from father to son. In this scheme, rural worship sites, which were very often the sites that included equal access for a variety of gods, were eliminated.

What of Asherah? Since she did not fit into this ‘One God’ theology, she was essentially written out of history, becoming a minor antagonist in the whole story. If we depended on the Bible alone, we’d have very little information about her.
But all is not lost. Archeology gives us clues to her. Among these clues are thousands of terracotta female figures discovered in the region of Judea that seem to many scholars to represent a mother-goddess . Numerous worship sites have been found, often at located high places, complete with standing stone pillars and slots in the ground for the wooden posts representing Asherah. Several inscriptions were discovered containing language like “I bless you by God … and his Asherah” , strongly suggesting Asherah was a partner to God.

Asherah, like God, makes appearance all over the region, for, as early peoples moved about, their gods traveled with them. Among the earliest texts mentioning Asherah are on clay tablets found in Ugarit, a trading center in Syria, and dated 1500 years BCE. Our second reading today was from a fragment of one of these tablets. In this story, Asherah receives a visit from her enemies Ba-al, the number two male deity after her partner El, an early name for God, and Anat, Ba-al’s partner-to-be. These two are bringing a gift. Asherah is initially fearful, worrying out loud whether these visitors have come to kill her family. Only when she realizes they bring a gift for El and her does she rejoice.
Here is a deity that displays emotions of fear and of joy. A goddess who sweats, convulses, who cries out. Here is a divine being worried about her kin and her children. How cool is that! A goddess who lives real emotions that we humans understand. This story snippet allows us to see a side of a god we don’t see in the Hebrew Scriptures. We can establish a new emotional connection with Asherah that we do not see very often with the God of Israel. Other material describes Asherah, as giving birth to the gods and goddesses of the desert , maybe even gods like Bez, who is simultaneously a male and female deity. Asherah was clearly connected to creation for these ancient peoples.

I think the early Hebrew elites lost a great deal when they banished Asherah from their heavens. They lost the direct images of creation and renewal represented by this deity. I speculate that they lost the connecting, community forming, love creating aspects that Asherah could easily represent.

By remembering Asherah today, we can create a fuller, more authentic image of God. This is true whether you see God with multiple faces, multiple forms, or God with multiple ways of being. Even if you do not personally image any God at all, Asherah and the God of the Isrealites are both archetypal images buried deep in our subconscious. If they do not dwell in our individual subconscious, then they certainly dwell in the subconsciousness of our society. By raising up these images from their hidden places we aid in a therapeutic process of understanding and healing our broken society.
By working to understand the ways in which these early Biblical stories came to be created, we find a more authentic and respectful way of appreciating what our Judeo-Christian traditions have to offer. We can understand the rationale for the focus on monetheism and on covenant in these traditions. We can more directly connect with the powerful ethical teaching of the early Hebrew prophets, who encourage us in our peacemaking and economic justice endeavors.

Understanding these stories might permit us to build bridges to the liberal branches of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faith traditions, to those who share the most ancient of these texts with us. In this way, we may find other religious liberals who share our passion to heal the world.