Shocked To Find Out Yahweh Was Originally A Canaanite God Who Had A Wife, Asherah

Subduction Zone said:

Please note that those that try to keep themselves uneducated were calling people that brought up these articles uneducated. first. I know that it is uncomfortable to learn certain facts about one's "family" but hiding one's head in the sand is not an answer. Christians should welcome this news. The Old Testament is full of examples of God being evil or incompetent. One can still believe in Jesus as a savior and toss most of the Old Testament. One need not worry that slavery and genocide was endorsed in the Old Testament. One can concentrate on the teachings of Jesus instead of worrying about all of the problems of the Old Testament.

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Clara Tea said:

Head in sand? Subducted?

Toss most of the Old Testament? But that's the word of God. To tell Jews that their bible is wrong, and their religion is wrong, and they are not good and kind people....all that is wrong. We have to respect and tolerate all of God's children.

We should also realize that the Christian and Muslim faiths came from the Jewish faith (so Christians and Muslims are religiously some form of Jew).

Slavery was overcome in the Old Testament. Remember that Moses escaped from Egypt, then was ordered by God to go back again to rescue Jews from slavery.

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Subduction Zone said:

That is because you refuse to learn what is and what is not evidence. The rules for archeological evidence will be similar to those for scientific evidence. When a Bible believer says "there is no evidence" it does not mean that there is no evidence. Nor does it mean that they are lying. In most cases they simply do not understand the concept of evidence.

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74x12 said:

Oh I can tell you really know what you're talking about ...

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Clara Tea said:

Special Relativity shows that traveling close to the speed of light would slow time. General Relativity shows that in a powerful gravitational field, time slows. So, God's time is not our time. That is, theists believe that the universe is 6,000 years old, and scientists believe that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, but both could be right. Time in one place is not necessarily the same time in another place. Time is not absolute.

It would be interesting to assume that God was near the big bang when it occurred, and was in a powerful gravitational field. With that assumption, it should be possible to calculate how powerful the gravity was, and that could tell us how close God was to the big bang.

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74x12 said:

Oh I can tell you really know what you're talking about ...

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SeekingAllTruth said:

Never in my wildest imagination when I was a Christian would I have believed that Jesus' Father, Yahweh actually originated in the Canaanite lands in pre-Israel times. That would make Yahweh a pagan god which the ancient Hebrews apparently adopted as their god. More shocking, Yahweh had a wife/consort named Asherah which would make Asherah Jesus' mom.

"Initially [Yahweh] seems to have been Canaanite in origin and subordinate to the supreme god El. Canaanite inscriptions mention a lesser god Yahweh and even the biblical Book of Deuteronomy stipulates that “the Most High, El, gave to the nations their inheritance” and that “Yahweh's portion is his people, Jacob and his allotted heritage” (32:8-9). A passage like this reflects the early beliefs of the Canaanites and Israelites in polytheism or, more accurately, henotheism (the belief in many gods with a focus on a single supreme deity). The claim that Israel always only acknowledged one god is a later belief."

Yahweh <<<<link

So it turns out the early Hebrews were part of the Canaanite culture, although Genesis claims Abraham their patriarch came from the Sumerian city of Ur. And when they broke away from the Canaanites they adopted Yahweh as their chief war god although Yahweh originally was a lesser god from a pantheon of Canaanite gods including their chief god, El and Baal, Asherah and Astarte.

Moreover, Yahweh had a wife. She was worshiped alongside Yahweh. The Old Testament mentions her several times. It wasn't until the Babylonian captivity that Yahweh basically "divorced" her in the sense that the Jews became monotheistic at that point.

"God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshipped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar. She bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess."

Did God have a wife? Scholar says that he did <<<<link

Did God Have a Wife? - Wikipedia <<<<link

I'm curious to hear what Christians here think about their god originally being a pagan god and having a wife who, if we are to believe the strong scholarship supporting this, was the one who gave birth to Jesus. So Jesus wasn't begotten, he was a product of celestial sex.

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firedragon said:

The question I asked was brother "what does Yahweh mean".

I appreciate your response, but it does not provide an answer. I wish to see your understanding of the word Yahweh due to your post.

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Neuropteron said:

Hi,
The Ras Shamra tets identify Asherah as the wife of the god EL, and refers to her as "lady Asherah of the Sea" this also making her the mother of Baal.
However, there apparenty was considerable overlapping in the roles of the three prominent goddesses of Baalism (Anath, Asherah, and Ashtoreth) as may be observed in extra-Biblical sources as well as in the Scriptural record.
While Ashtoreth appears to have figured as the wife of Baal, Asherah may also have been so viewed.

The apostate Israelites did worship Baal and Asherah, for instance Jezebel, entertained at her table 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of the sacred pole of Asherah. According to the Bible the "degraded" worship of Asherah came to be practised in the very temple of Jahwe. King Manasseh even placed a carved image of the sacred pole in representation of Asherah.

The fact that the Stavrakopoulou's books attempt to combine Yahweh, Allah, God and El as being the same person explains why the notion that Asherah was Yahweh's wife is promoted.
Yahweh just as Asherah, Baal, Ashtoreth, Anath are personal names, whereas Allah, God, El, Elohim and Theos are not, they are descriptive terms referring to a persons position as being a "migthty one, or a strong one" and are impersonal.

Although it is true that there is a scriptural connection between Yahwe and Ashtoreh, it is not one of husband and wife. It does not follow that a connection between El and Ashtoreth as being married mean that Yahwe was the husband of Ashtoreth.

The Bible however does mention that Yahwe has a wife. This wife is a heavenly organisation called "Jerusalem above" and is purely figurative.

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Subduction Zone said:

Denial will not get you anywhere. Do you know how one refutes evidence? With stronger evidence. All you have is a belief in the Bible and not much knowledge of how it was written. I could help you with the concept of scientific evidence, but you refuse to learn that because that threatens your Genesis beliefs. And it appears that understanding archaeological evidence would hurt your general belief in the Bible. Bible literalism is the fastest road to atheism for the rational thinker.
b

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SeekingAllTruth said:

This is so true. The Bible has made more people into atheists than communism and karl Marx combined. Richard Carrier famously said, "A friend said, 'Read the Bible' . So I read the Bible. When I finished it I said, "Yep, I'm an atheist."

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Subduction Zone said:

You need to study your Old Testament. Slavery was not overcome there. In fact the slavery of the Hebrews after the mythical Exodus was just as bad as that of the old South in the U.S.. And calling the Bible the "word of God" is blasphemy that claims that God is evil and incompetent. One cannot be logically consistent and claim that the OT God is a loving God.

By the way, telling people that their religion is wrong is not telling the people that they are not good. You might want to work on your own reasoning skills a little bit. If God is love then he is not the God of the Old Testament. One cannot take the Old Testament literally and claim that God is moral or just.

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KenS said:

No... I am saying that YHWY was God. The Canaanites then began to create religions and thus they have a semblance of YHWH but they added to the truth of YHWH and that is why there are traces within Baal. However, God delineated who was the true God.

So, you don't have to be surprised

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74x12 said:

No need to disprove either of those statements.

Let's look at what you quoted ... Notice the key word in the first quote "seems" and the keywords in the second quote "theory" and "suggests". Neither of these statements are facts or really even proof. It's just what some "experts" are currently theorizing. Such theories and similar ones are a dime a dozen and there are many conflicting theories at this point.

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SeekingAllTruth said:

Indeed. Here's what Richard Dawkins says about Yahweh:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

And when you read the Old Testament without filtered lens you see that's exactly how Yahweh is portrayed. Every single quality. How could he not be? He was created by fearful men, terrified of what Yahweh would do if they displease him, and in their minds he did--many times for worshiping other gods. He says he's jealous, he practically brags about it, he's hates homosexuals, dominant women, he's annihilated whole races simply because they weren't Jew, he's murdered babies, he's a megalomaniac, he changes his mind frequently even though he says, "I change not" and he's a bully. No wonder the god of the New Testament and the one of the old are as different as night and day. 2000 years can change men's minds about a god's traits.

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Batya said:

You really think Richard Dawkins reads the Bible through an unfiltered lens?

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SeekingAllTruth said:

Who came first, the Canaanites or the Hebrews? Scholarship I read says the Hebrews were a part of the Canaanites.

Jonathan Tubbs, a British archeologist, argues that the Israelites were themselves Canaanites, and that "historical Israel", as distinct from "literary" or "Biblical Israel" was a subset of Canaanite culture. Canaan when used in this sense refers to the entire Ancient Near Eastern Levant down to about 100 AD, including the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Mark Smith adds, "Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature." [Wiki, s.v. "Canaan"]

Hebrews Were Canaanites – The Gold Scales

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Messianic Israelite said:

SeekingAllTruth. Good evening. Seems to me, you still have your ways to go before you FindAllTruth. I skim read the article. Perhaps I will go back and read in thoroughly. I was laughing as I read it. I can only expect Yahweh would do the same. It's nonsense.

Yahweh was undoubtedly known to Adam and Eve in the Garden. They passed this knowledge on to their descendants. Noah would have passed this down to his descendents. Abraham his, and so on. But obviously then there would have been Caananites and other people's who knew the Name, but didn't maintain a pure worship of Yahweh like the Israelites at least tried to do. Do you remember the Golden Calf incident? Aaron said in Exodus 32:4 " And he received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf: and they said, These are thy elohim, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. 5 And when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To-morrow shall be a feast to Yahweh" Significant why? Because although Aaron had made an idolatrous object to worship, he said that the feast was to Yahweh. Moses came and corrected the situation of course, but if this could happen with the Israelites, how much more could it happen with the people who were not Israelites?

Scholars are essentially grasping at straws. Most of the theory operates on conjecture. Is this really the reason why you choose not to believe in Yahweh? Adam and Eve didn't start with polytheism. They started with monotheism and truth. Some, if not many religions, may therefore have some truth in them. That doesn't mean we should rush headlong and believe a lie.

It's a treacherous lie that Yahweh was developed, and the notion of Yahweh evolved. As for me, I'm going to do as the Psalmist says. Psalm 7:17 says "I will give thanks unto Yahweh according to his righteousness, And will sing praise to the name of Yahweh Most High."

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Batya said:

Canaan was the grandson of Noah (Noah>Ham>Canaan), and Abraham (a descendant of Shem) was the first to be called a Hebrew, so technically the Canaanites existed before the Hebrews. That doesn't mean the Hebrews were an offshoot of the Canaanites. YHWH existed before the Canaanites or anyone, so whether the Canaanites worshipped a god by that name or not proves nothing.

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