Around this time of year we hear a lot of nonsense about Easter= Eostre= Ishtar= Ashira =Asherah ='God's Wife', who was erased from history. This is a simple claim to make, and you may hear a lot of equally flimsy people who say the same things about it with equally shaky assertions. It is not surprising that on the most holy day of the year they want to disparage Christianity, to take Christians down a notch. Here is what Jimmy Akin has to say about Asherah.
Cy Kellett:
Is it some sort of… I’m not
going to pretend like, all right. So it’s one of those, you share your little
video. I don’t know the difference between that and Instagram or Vine or any of
them, but basically you get to have your say. And one of the things that people
have been having their say about over on TikTok is that Yahweh, the God of
Israel, had a wife. And I sometimes feel like there’s almost, like this is
something I maybe ask you about before the end of the show. Is there some named
part of the human psyche that says we love new and innovative ideas? Like I just
want to be the person who has the new. Not necessarily is it true or not, but
this seems to be the new idea, that Yahweh had a wife. So help me out there.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, okay. So the situation
is represented differently by different folks. And in particular, there’s a
scholar on YouTube who has put out a couple of these videos, which I’ve seen.
And why don’t we give the listeners a taste of one of the things he says.
Cy Kellett:
All right, let’s give them a
clip there, Darren.
Tik Tok Clip:
Asherah worship, recognition
of Asherah as the consort or wife of Yahweh was 100% normative prior to the
reign of Josiah, his campaign of cult centralization, and then the events of
the exile. We have no text from the Hebrew Bible we can confidently date prior
to Josiah that marginalize or vilify Asherah. They all date to Josiah or the
exilic period, such as the two texts mentioned by that creator. They try to
rewrite earlier history and earlier traditions in order to vilify Asherah. An
example, the contest of Elijah with the priest of Baal mentions Asherah’s
priests in the very beginning. And they vanish from the narrative because they
were a later addition to the text.
Cy Kellett:
All right, so there’s a lot.
First of all, Josiah, one of the kings of Israel, a king of Israel in the 600s
BC. So what do you make of that argument?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, so he’s got a bunch of
presuppositions here and you can kind of, if you’re not someone who reads in
this area a lot, it may not be entirely obvious what he’s claiming. But
basically he’s proposing a view that holds that the books of the Bible as we
have them were written at a later date than is commonly understood. And he’s
saying that there was an effort that originally the Israelites worshiped a
pantheon of gods, including Yahweh and Asherah. And that then at some later
date, this became marginalized. And King Josiah in particular instituted or
religious reform that was monotheistic, that just wanted to focus on Yahweh
alone. And this is a narrative that you find in some scholarship, but it is not
the picture that we find in the Bible itself.
Jimmy Akin:
Now, it’s certainly true
that there were Israelites who were polytheists. Just read the Old Testament.
The prophets are constantly railing on polytheism and telling the Israelites
that they’re messing up and they’re going to cause problems because they’re
going after other gods instead of sticking with the God that was their
traditional patron, who was also the creator of the universe. And so he’s
dealing with a revisionist narrative, he’s advocating a revisionist narrative
that doesn’t actually correspond to the biblical text.
Jimmy Akin:
Now there are passages in
the Old Testament that refer to additional celestial beings like Baal. Baal
would be the most famous, and Asherah and Anat and various other Canaanite
deities. The question is how do we explain these texts? Now, according to the
biblical narrative, what explains them is that originally God created the world
and mankind and made himself known to mankind. And in particular, he made
himself known to Abraham. But Abraham came from a polytheistic culture. He came
from Ur of the Chaldees, which is over in Iraq. And God revealed himself to
Abraham and Abraham began following God. And then God had a special
relationship with Abraham’s descendants. And we go through the Exodus
experience down in Egypt.
Jimmy Akin:
And all along the line,
there were temptations for the Israelites to worship other gods because they
were surrounded by other peoples. I mean, the Egyptians had gods by the
truckload. And even during the Exodus experience, we know because the Torah
talks about it, that there were Israelites who were worshiping goat idols. But
nevertheless, there was this orthodox correct stream of Israelite religion that
focused on the one true God and not on these other gods. However, there was
also a cultural matrix that the Israelites found themselves in of people who
did worship other gods. And so there was kind of a hybrid situation between the
worship of the true God, Yahweh, and the worship of these other gods.
Jimmy Akin:
And so the traditional and
historic understanding of the matter is that there was normative Judaism that
worshiped only the true God. And then there were renegade forms of Judaism that
worshiped these other gods. And at times one or the other would have the upper
hand. At times, according to the Old Testament, they even put idols in the
temple itself in Jerusalem, even into the temple period. And then eventually
they get taken away to Babylon. And when they come back from Babylon, this
problem has been cured. Jewish people don’t really have this temptation anymore
to worship other gods. The fire of the exilic experience and being taken into
other lands really cured them of this. And so after this Jews tend to be much
more orthodox in their approach to their religion.
Jimmy Akin:
What this gentleman is
proposing is something different. He’s proposing that there wasn’t originally
this orthodox normative form of Judaism that focused on Yahweh, that it’s a
later edition. But the problem, or one of the problems, as I’ve mentioned, is
that just doesn’t fit the biblical text. This guy is having to pick and choose
his evidence and dismiss things. You notice, for example, he mentioned that in
First Kings 18 in the encounter of Elijah with the prophets of Baal, that
initially there is a mention not only of the prophets of Baal but also the
prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table. And then they don’t get
mentioned later on in the text.
Jimmy Akin:
And his proposal for how to
explain that is that it’s a later addition to the text that was introduced to
marginalize the worship of Asherah by making her associated with Baal and the
enemies of Elijah. A problem with that is, well, if you’ve stitched in a
reference to the prophets of Asherah at the beginning of the text, why don’t
you stitch them in later too? If you really want to marginalize Asherah, why
don’t you do that consistently? So I don’t think that’s a very good
explanation. That’s just him picking and choosing his evidence. And it’s kind
of grasping at straws.
Cy Kellett:
Because the prophets of Baal
are actually humiliated by Elijah. Wouldn’t you want to include Asherah in that
humiliation if you were really trying to do that?
Jimmy Akin:
Exactly. So I don’t think
this is a very good explanation. You’ll also notice that he says that we don’t
have any texts prior to Josiah or the Babylonian exile that marginalize
Asherah. Well, okay, number one, that presupposes his dating of these events.
Also, even if you grant his dating, we don’t have any texts before that time
that approve of Asherah. So if you want to say this happened at a certain point
in history, notice that they start talking down Asherah, they start trash
talking her at a certain point. Well, if you want to say it was normative prior
to that to worship Asherah, where’s the text praising Asherah? Where are the
texts that support that? You don’t see that. So this is, again, just him
picking and choosing. And if you pick and choose, you can make anything out of
the evidence.
Jimmy Akin:
So I don’t think it’s a
reliable methodology. And I understand that there are liberal scholars who take
this position. But it’s all very speculative and it’s based on picking and
choosing. So I don’t grant the premises. Now, what we might do is talk about so
like who was Asherah and what’s this alternative worldview. So in the first
place, Asherah is barely in the Old Testament. There are like 40 references to
Asherah and 33 of them are clear references not to the goddess but to a
ceremonial object that was used in connection with the goddess. They had what
are sometimes called Asherah poles. And sometimes these might take the form of
a kind of stylized tree, or they might take the form of a stone pillar. But
they most commonly seem to have been upright wooden poles that were somehow
used in pagan worship.
Jimmy Akin:
And until the 20th century,
it was common to hold that these poles were just, that’s what Asherah was. It
was one of these cult objects. It was one of these poles. It wasn’t actually a
goddess. But then in the 20th century, we found a bunch of texts in Syria at a
place called Ras Shamra. And the Ras Shamra texts are written in Ugaritic,
which is one of the languages that was spoken by the Hittites. And they fill in
a bunch of additional information. They tell us about the Hittite Pantheon,
which was also shared in varying degrees by the Canaanites, the people who were
living in Israel before the Israelites.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, they did have a
goddess. Now, they called her Athirat. But Athirat, when you bring it over into
Hebrew, would become Asherah because of the way the languages are related. And
basically she was like the consort of the high god, El. El is just the Hebrew
word for God. And the high god was called El and then lower gods were also
Elohim. But the high god had this wife called Asherah. And she was the goddess
of the home, basically. She was associated with weaving. She was associated
with cooking. She was associated with doing housewifely things. And she was
portrayed as the goddess who was the wife of the high god.
Jimmy Akin:
But when Hebrews got ahold
of this concept, they began to, since they regarded Yahweh as one of the names
of the high god, you had them beginning to associate Asherah as the wife of
Yahweh. And these were renegade forms of Judaism. This wasn’t the Orthodox
form. But you have references to like Yahweh and his Asherah in the Old
Testament. And originally, because so much of the time Asherah is used to refer
to the cult object, the Asherah pole, it was thought that maybe this is just a
reference to Yahweh and pole. But in light of the Ras Shamra discoveries, it’s
clear that no, a few of these passages aren’t just references to the pole. They
are references to the goddess. And so you did have some Israelites who
worshiped Asherah as a goddess. You also had them worshiping Baal.
Jimmy Akin:
Baal was the storm god. And
he was in the Canaanite Pantheon kind of the second-in-command. You had the
high god, El, and then Baal served as his regent. So El is kind of retired and
not taking an active role in things anymore. And so he is letting the storm god
run the show. Well, the Orthodox Israelite response to that was to say, no,
it’s all Yahweh. And so what you find in the Old Testament is not only
references to El as the high god, but you also find references to El or Yahweh
with all of the Baal imagery transferred to them to make it clear that no,
there is no separate god that is serving as regent. There is just the one God
who’s doing the whole thing. And so you find biblical authors referring to
Yahweh, or El, as in charge of the storm and having set the boundaries of the
sea.
Jimmy Akin:
Another god was the sea god
Yamm. And Yamm and Baal had had a conflict in Canaanite mythology in which Baal
kind of set the boundaries for the sea. He triumphed over the sea. He pushed
the sea back into its place and made it stay there. And in the Old Testament,
we have that very thing referred to. Only it’s not Baal, it’s Yahweh who does
that. Yahweh is the one who determines the borders of the sea and says, “You
shall not go further. You shall not overwhelm the land,” things like that. And
so the biblical authors take the imagery that the Canaanites are using to talk
about their gods and subvert it and attribute it all to the one true God.
Jimmy Akin:
And so you do have passages
in the Old Testament that reflect the kinds of things you have in Canaanite
literature, but they nevertheless are monotheistic. They attribute this all to
God. One of my favorite examples of this is actually found in Genesis 1. Now,
Genesis is a text that the gentleman we heard from earlier would date fairly
late to the exilic times or after. But historically, it was attributed to
Moses, who would’ve lived, say, in the 1200s BC. I think the evidence supports
it being written a little after that. I think the evidence supports Genesis
being written around 1000 BC, around the time of King David and King Solomon.
Jimmy Akin:
But either way you go, in
the first chapter of Genesis, it talks about how God is setting up the world.
And he makes, among other things, the sun and the moon. But he doesn’t call
them the sun in the moon. He just says they’re lights. So it says God made a
greater light to rule the day and a lesser light to rule the night. Well, why
would he do that? Why would he not use the terms for sun and moon? Like Shamash
meant son and Sin meant moon. Or Yarikh would mean moon.
Jimmy Akin:
So why would he avoid the
names? Well, because they were deities. There was a sun god, there was a moon
god that people were worshiping. And so you said Yahweh made Shamash or Yahweh
made Yarikh to rule the night, it would be interpreted as God made the sun god
and the moon god. So the biblical author’s solution to that is to not mention
their names and just call them lights. And the result of that is the message
becomes these are just lights. They’re not gods. Don’t worship them. And so you
do have this interaction, but you have this much earlier, in my view, than the
exilic period, this much earlier attempt to dethrone Canaanite deities and say,
no, it’s just the one God. He’s unique. He’s the creator. He did all of this.
Cy Kellett:
So when I hear you speak
about that, I mean, one thing that I think that you are conceding there is that
even in the ancient times, all the way maybe from the time of the patriarchs
themselves, I don’t know, all the way up until the exilic period, there would
be a kind of competition of folk religion, different practices, different ways
people understood their Judaism. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say yes,
there were probably Jews who worshiped Asherah. But that doesn’t mean that
Asherah is a god of the Jews.
Jimmy Akin:
Correct. It’s just like
today. We have the Catholic church, but not all Catholics are faithful
Catholics. And in parts of the world, there are Catholics who synchretize
Catholicism with other religions. Like down in Haiti, you have voodoo, you also
have Santeria where you have a mixing of Orthodox Catholicism with unorthodox
ideas and worship practices. And the same thing happened in Israel. You had the
prophets, and at least during various periods, the temple authorities
supporting the orthodox view of we’re just worshiping this one God. But then
you also had a temptation to worship other gods because of the mixing with the
Canaanites, which is one of the key themes in the Old Testament is how Israel
needs to be distinct. It needs to not follow the ways of the people around it.
But they were in this cultural matrix and they were tempted to do that. And
some of them did.
Cy Kellett:
I would think also for the
person who comes across these things on TikTok and might not have a grounding
in scripture or history, there would be, and I don’t want to say that this is
the agenda of the person speaking, but it might be the agenda of the person
speaking. There’s a certain way that this has a discrediting effect, an
undermining effect, to say that the Jews’ story of themselves, which is the
story that God called Abraham, that they were a people who stayed in a
relationship with this one god, that that one God is also the God of Moses who
called them out of the land of Egypt, saved them, established them in the land,
that all of this would suggest that’s kind of one made up story that won.
That’s not really the true history of the Jews.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. There is a subtext to
this kind of discussion that is transgressive. It’s like, oh, let’s be naughty.
Let’s talk about this other stuff. And I’m sure there are scholars who are
sincere and convinced of their views, but there’s also this transgressive
subtext that also is present in this and that especially comes out on social
media. And I can’t say in this particular gentleman’s case what his motives
are, but he does come across as way too definite and way too adamant in
proposing his views. The evidence just does not support them in that way.
Cy Kellett:
And so, as Catholics, would
we kind of be required to accept the traditional view that Abraham was indeed
called by God out of the land of the Chaldeans and that that God stays in
relationship with the Jewish people. Sometimes they’re faithful, sometimes
they’re not, sometimes some are faithful and others are not. But that we as
Catholic Christians accept that that story in its essence is true. That
actually happened in history.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. The core of the story
is definitely true. God did enter into a relationship with the Jewish people.
They had varying degrees of adherence to him. But he really did make a covenant
with the Jewish people. He really did enter into a special relationship with
them. And the rest of this is not something that we need our faith threatened
by because the Old Testament acknowledges that there were Jews who were not
faithful. And that’s obvious if you read the Bible. It’s obvious when you read
the Old Testament. And so it’s not anything we need to be afraid of. It’s just
a reality.
Jimmy Akin:
But what we don’t want to do
is exaggerate it and pick and choose the evidence to make it sound like this
was normative at one point and that the true God did not have a special
relationship with Israel and that’s only something that came up later. The core
of the story, that God entered into a special relationship with the people of
Israel and then maintained that even when they were not faithful to him, that
is true. And that is what the evidence in the Old Testament indicates. It’s
only when you pick and choose and say, “Well, I’m not going to listen to this.
I’m not going to listen to this evidence that the text is presenting me with,”
it’s only when you do that that you get this alternate rival story.
Cy Kellett:
I guess being transgressive
is maybe the psychological, there is something kind of exciting about
transgressing. Maybe that’s why.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I got the new secret
thing that you don’t know.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. Before we
finish, I just want to ask you about Josiah, who was mentioned, is kind of a
key figure in what this scholar was saying. He is an important person in the
history of Israel in the sense that he does have an agenda, which is to call people
back to the proper worship of the one God.
Jimmy Akin:
Right. And that’s something
that… So Josiah became king as a very young person, and he did institute a
religious reform. And he did understand himself as calling people back to the
worship of the one true God. He wasn’t trying to introduce a new concept. He
was trying to restore faithfulness that had lapsed. And so that’s also
consistent with the overall biblical narrative.
*******
This goddess was named
Asherah, and she is mentioned at various places in the Hebrew scriptures.
The claim is made that we
have no biblical texts that can be confidently dated prior to the reign of King
Josiah (640-609 B.C.) that condemn the worship of this goddess.
Before that time, it was
allegedly normative for Israelites to worship Asherah alongside God.
How accurate are these
claims?
Not very.
It’s true that there was a
goddess named Asherah that was worshipped in the Ancient Near East, and it’s
true that some Israelites worshipped her.
But it is false to claim
that this was a normative practice among Israelites—and that we have no texts
from before the time of Josiah condemning the practice.
To understand the situation,
we need to understand how the Israelite religion developed.
As a nation, Israel was
descended from the patriarch Abraham, who came from “Ur of the Chaldees” (Gen.
12:28)—meaning he was from Mesopotamia, or modern Iraq.
As a native of Mesopotamia,
Abraham was raised in the religion of the area, which centered on various
eastern deities.
But the Bible records that
eventually the true God—the Creator of the universe—called Abraham to leave
Mesopotamia and come to the Promised Land of Canaan.
This is discussed in the
book of Joshua, which states:
Joshua said to all the
people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Your fathers lived of old
beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they
served other gods.
“Then I took your father
Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan, and
made his offspring many” (Josh. 24:2-3).
The Bible thus acknowledges
that—before God appeared to him—Abraham worshipped other gods, which was the
normal practice of people in the Ancient Near East.
When Abraham came to Canaan
it was filled with its own people, who also worshipped a variety of gods.
Later, when Abraham’s
descendants spent time in Egypt, they also lived among a polytheistic people.
Being surrounded by
polytheistic people meant that the Israelites were tempted to join their
neighbors in worshipping other gods, and they sometimes did so.
They even did so during the
Exodus, as Moses was leading them out of Egypt and back to the Promised Land.
This is illustrated by the
golden calf incident (Exod. 32) and by Moses’ instruction to offer their
sacrifices to God, saying, “they may no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to
the goat-idols after which they were prostituting” (Lev. 17:7, LEB).
While people did engage in
these practices, they were not acceptable. Thus, after the golden calf
incident:
Moses’ anger burned hot, and
he threw the tables out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.
And he took the calf which
they had made, and burnt it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered
it upon the water, and made the sons of Israel drink it.
And Moses said to Aaron,
“What did this people do to you that you have brought a great sin upon them?”
(Exod. 32:19-21).
It was similarly recognized
that, upon returning to Canaan, the polytheistic inhabitants could tempt the
Israelites into being unfaithful to God. Concerning the Canaanites, God says:
You shall make no covenant
with them or with their gods.
They shall not dwell in your
land, lest they make you sin against me; for if you serve their gods, it will
surely be a snare to you” (Exod. 23:32-33).
Also, God made a covenant
with the Israelites that they would worship only him. This requirement is
explicit in the Ten Commandments:
“I am the Lord your God, who
brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
“You shall have no other
gods before me.
“You shall not make for
yourself a graven 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”
(Exod. 20:2-4).
The Bible thus depicts
orthodox Israelite religion as involving the worship of God alone. However, it
frankly acknowledges that unorthodox Israelites could and did worship other
deities.
The struggle against this is
a major theme in the Bible, and the prophets regularly condemn Israelites for
worshipping other gods. You cannot read the Old Testament without repeatedly
encountering this theme.
So what about Asherah? She
was a goddess that was worshipped by the Canaanites—as well as other people in
the Ancient Near East—and she was often regarded as the wife of the high god.
In the Canaanite pantheon,
the high god—the head of the pantheon of gods—was named El, which is the Hebrew
word for “God.”
El was also named Yahweh,
and some Canaanites regarded Asherah as the wife of Yahweh.
Under the influence of their
Canaanite neighbors, some Israelites did worship her—just as they worshipped
other gods, like Ba’al and Milcom.
But according to the Old
Testament, by doing this, they departed from the normative, orthodox Israelite
religion and did things they were not supposed to.
What about the claim that
this was normative before the time of King Josiah? Two points need to be made.
First, the theory depends on
a very late dating of the biblical texts. There is good evidence that the books
of Exodus and Leviticus were written around the time of David and Solomon (c.
1000 B.C.)—long before Josiah.
Furthermore, we have other
texts before Josiah condemning the worship of Asherah.
For example, Isaiah 17:8
prophesies that a time is coming when the Israelites “will not have regard for
the altars, the work of their hands, and they will not look to what their own
fingers have made, either the Asherim or the altars of incense” to pagan gods.
The Asherim were pole-like
religious objects used to worship Asherah, and even liberal scholars
acknowledge that Isaiah 17 was written during the time of the prophet Isaiah
(8th century B.C.), well before Josiah (7th century B.C.).
Even earlier was the event
recorded in 1 Kings 15:13 that King Asa “removed Maacah his mother from being
queen mother because she had an abominable image made for Asherah; and Asa cut
down her image and burned it at the brook Kidron.”
Asa reigned between 912 and
870 B.C., and while 1 Kings wasn’t written until later, it records events
repudiating Asherah that took place long before Josiah.
Second, the “Asherah worship
was normative” view is just cherry-picking Old Testament texts.
If—at one time—it was
orthodox for Israelites to worship Asherah, where are the texts praising her?
There aren’t any.
Advocates of this view must
argue that any texts that were positive toward her were removed, and new,
negative passages were introduced after Josiah.
That’s simply
cherry-picking. You can prove anything you want—on any subject you want—if you
get to pick evidence you think favors your position and ignore all evidence to the
contrary.
For example, you could
“prove” that the original thirteen U.S. colonies were founded by Russian
immigrants by saying that—later on—all the references to Russian immigrants
were mysteriously removed from our historical documents and replaced by
references saying they were founded by English colonists.
The fact is, the texts we
have in the Old Testament indicate that orthodox Israelites worshipped the true
God, that unorthodox Israelites also worshipped other gods like Asherah, and
that this practice was condemned from very early times.
*******
We also hear that God was "synchretized" from "El" and "Yah", that this version was 'synthesized' from two earlier deities, and thus, not authentic.
A reader writes:
Old Testament scholars like
Knauf and Romer make a case for YHWH being a storm god related to Qos and
Edomite religion, based on a linguistic case.
If their theory was
plausible and you had to accept it, how would you reconcile that with your
faith? Assume that their arguments are very convincing. How would you reconcile
that with orthodox theology?
Since most people aren’t
very familiar with the Edomites, let me begin my response with some background
. . .
Meeting the Edomites
The Edomites were a people
who lived in a region to the south of Israel. The Old Testament indicates that
they were related to the Israelites. Their patriarch—Edom, also known as
Esau—was the brother of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. The two peoples
are thus deemed as being related by blood.
Just as Jacob and Esau had a
sibling rivalry, so did the peoples that descended from them, and they often
found themselves in competition and conflict, though they also had a shared
sense of kinship that endured.
Thus one of the criticisms
of the Edomites in the book of Obadiah is that they took
advantage of Israel’s distress and even raided Jerusalem, despite the fact that
they were kinsmen (Obad.
10-14).
This sense of kinship
indicates a shared heritage that would likely includes religious elements. Thus
we find archaeological evidence of the worship of Yahweh in Edom. Bert Dicou
explains:
Evidence for an old
connection of YHWH with Edom can also be found in extra-biblical sources. Some
inscriptions found in Kuntillet ’Ajrud, mentioning the ‘YHWH of Teman’ besides
a ‘YHWH of Samaria’, may even be interpreted as suggesting that in Edom (at least,
in Teman) around 800 bce (the time of the inscriptions) YHWH was worshipped,
since the expression ‘YHWH of Samaria’ clearly refers to YHWH as present in his
cultic centre in Samaria (Edom, Israel’s Brother and Antagonist, 179).
The Deity Qos
The major Edomite deity was
named Qos, and scholars have wondered about the relationship between Qos and
Yahweh. Unfortunately, the Old Testament gives us virtually no positive
information, although some have tried to mount an argument from silence. Dicou
explains:
A problem within the
religion history of Israel and its neighbours is the puzzling absence of the
most important Edomite god, Qos, in the Old Testament. Whereas the gods of the
other neighbours are rejected as well as mentioned by their names, neither happens
to the Edomite god or gods. . . .
This can possibly be
explained by assuming that Edom’s Qos did not differ very much from Israel’s
YHWH—which must have made it difficult to reject him. It has been asserted that
there are important correspondences between YHWH and Edom’s god Qos (176-177).
Same God, Different Name?
One possibility is thus that
Qos and Yahweh are the same God being referred to by different terms.
This would not be
surprising, as in the Old Testament itself, Yahweh is referred to by multiple
terms: El, Elohim, Adonai, etc.
The same is true of other
deities in the Old Testament. Thus the generic term Ba’al (Hebrew, “Master”) is
also called Hadad, Chemosh, etc.
We often see how the same
deity could be called by different terms across linguistic barriers. Thus the
Latin-speaking Romans referred to the same deity by the names of Jupiter and
Jove that Greek-speakers referred to as Zeus.
Even today, language
barriers result in Christians all over the world using different terms for God:
- Spanish-speaking Christians refer to God
as Dios
- Polish-speaking Christians refer to God
as Bog
- German-speaking Christians refer to God
as Gott
- Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God
as Allah
- Finnish-speaking Christians refer to God
as Jumala
- Hungarian-speaking Christians refer to
God as Isten
You get the point.
Given all this
terminological diversity, it’s quite possible that the Israelites and the
Edomites, at least at times, simply used different terms for the same deity.
This is all the more
plausible since the Edomites didn’t speak exactly the same language as the
Israelites, and even in Hebrew, God can be referred to with terms as different
as El and Yahweh.
Maybe in Edomite he
was Yahweh and Qos.
This would explain why Qos
isn’t condemned in the Old Testament the way other foreign deities are.
Yahweh a Storm God?
The reader referred to the
idea that Yahweh and Qos may have been storm gods, but we need to be careful
here.
In the Old Testament, Yahweh
is not presented simply as a storm god. He is the God of everything,
and everything includes storms.
Storms are very powerful,
and thus they make a good metaphor for divine power. It’s thus no surprise that
various Old Testament books use storm imagery in connection with Yahweh.
Despite the use of storm
themes in the Old Testament, the biblical writers did not conceive of Yahweh
simply as a storm god.
For them, he was the everything God—the
Creator of the entire world—and they also use fire themes, harvest themes,
healing themes, birth themes, death themes, battle themes, and many others. But
that wouldn’t let us reduce Yahweh to simply being a fire god, a harvest god, a
healing god, a birth god, a death god, or a war god.
Yahweh vs. Ba’al
There’s also another reason
to be careful about thinking of Yahweh as principally a storm god: When the Old
Testament uses such imagery in connection with him, it is often part of a
deliberate attempt to subvert Ba’al worship.
In the Canaanite pantheon,
Ba’al was the storm god. In Canaanite mythology, Ba’al also famously had a
conflict with the sea god, Yam, who he conquered.
During much of the Old
Testament period, Israelites were tempted to worship Ba’al (and the other
Canaanite deities), but the prophets make it very clear that
Yahweh and Ba’al are two different deities.
That’s why—if you’ll pardon
a storm-related pun—they thunderously denounce Ba’al worship.
We thus find the biblical
authors using Ba’al-related imagery to subvert Ba’al worship.
By using storm imagery for Yahweh, they are saying, “Ba’al isn’t the true lord
of the storm; Yahweh is.”
Similarly, the biblical
authors subvert Ba’al worship when they make it clear that it was actually
Yahweh who set the boundaries of the sea (Job 38:10-11, Prov. 8:29, Psa. 104:9, Jer. 5:22)—the
Hebrew word for which is also yam.
We thus have to be careful
that we recognize what the biblical authors are doing with storm imagery and
not simply reduce Yahweh to being a storm god.
Revelation, Loss, and
Clarification
The Bible depicts God and
man as experiencing an original unity. This implies that God revealed himself
to us at the dawn of our race.
However, as the Old
Testament makes clear, our knowledge of God became disfigured by sin, and the
worship of other gods was introduced.
The disfigurement became so
bad that, prior to the time of Abraham, the ancestors of the Israelites
worshipped the Mesopotamian deities (Josh. 24:2, 14-15).
But God began to rebuild
knowledge of himself by calling Abraham and giving him new revelation. This
knowledge was further clarified with the revelation given to Moses, and later
through the prophets and other biblical writers.
We thus see a process
whereby the original knowledge of God was largely lost, but God began to
reintroduce knowledge of who he was and thus clarify our understanding of him.
This process was gradual and
messy. At first, many of God’s people worshipped other deities in addition to
him (Gen.
31:34-35, Lev. 17:7, Josh. 24:14).
This continued even after God brought the Israelites into the promised land.
But through the prophets’
repeated calls, God made it clear to the Israelites that this must stop, and by
the end of the Babylonian Exile, the practice was definitively ended.
Avoiding Overreach
One of the difficulties that
scholars have in piecing together how this process worked is the small amount
of information we have about this period in history.
Aside from the Old
Testament, we have little literature about Israel and its immediate neighbors
(Edom, Moab, Midian, etc.), and the Old Testament does not give us a great deal
of information about many of these questions.
As a result, scholars are
often left to simply guess at many issues pertaining to these early periods.
For example, one scholar (M.
Rose) has proposed that Qos was not the same deity as Yahweh, and his worship
was introduced only later. Dicou explains:
Rose maintains that only in
later times, namely the eighth or seventh centuries bce, did the god Qos, of
Arabian origin, come to be known in Edom. Nothing is known about the god who
was worshipped before Qos, but it is not unlikely that it was the same god as
the one of the Israelites, namely, ‘YHW’ (178).
In other words, the Edomites
may have originally worshipped Yahweh, but later Qos was introduced and became
their most popular deity.
How would that transition
have happened? We don’t know.
Would it even have been
clear to the Edomites from the beginning that Yahweh and Qos were different
deities? We don’t know that either.
Scholars of religion have
noted that there can sometimes be confusion about the identity or non-identity
of deities, and it can go back and forth.
Sometimes—for some
worshippers—Deity X will be regarded as the same as Deity Y. But other
times—for other worshippers—Deity X and Deity Y will be clearly distinct.
Thus in different streams of
Hinduism, the deities are sometimes considered to be separate, but in other
streams they are all considered aspects of a single, ultimate God.
Closer to home, the God of
the Bible was regarded by the first Christians as one, but heretics like
Marcion and the Gnostics came to think of the God of the Old Testament as a
fundamentally different being than the God of the New Testament.
A modern example of the same
phenomenon can be seen in the fact that many Christians today are willing to
acknowledge that God is also worshipped by Jews and Muslims, even if they have
an incomplete or partially erroneous understanding of him. But others will
vigorously deny that Muslims worship the same God as Christians.
The same phenomenon happened
in the ancient world. Not everybody had the same understanding of whether this god
was the same as that god.
Therefore, some Edomites may
have understood Yahweh and Qos to be the same, but others may have disagreed,
and the popularity of the two viewpoints may have gone back and forth over
time.
We just don’t know.
This is why we have to be
careful to avoid overreach—to avoid going beyond what the evidence allows us to
say with confidence.
Scholars may legitimately
speculate about how the identification or non-identification of various gods
developed over time, precisely how the worship of these gods arose and when,
etc., however we must always bear in mind that these are just speculations.
The truth is that we don’t
have the evidence we would need to be sure.
“Not Without Witness”
Although the biblical
evidence—as well as the archaeological record—makes it clear that man’s
knowledge of the Creator was strongly disfigured, the New Testament establishes
the principle that he did not leave himself without witness.
In Acts, Paul explains that
he did so at least through the creation itself:
In past generations he
allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways; yet he did
not leave himself without witness, for he did good and gave you from heaven
rains and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness (Acts 14:16-17).
He makes a similar point in
Romans:
For what can be known about
God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation
of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has
been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Rom. 1:19-20).
And thus people in various
cultures have reasoned their way to the existence of the Creator. This included
figures in polytheistic Greece, some of whom Paul quotes:
Yet he is not far from each
one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of
your poets have said, “For we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:27-28).
If God cared enough to make
it possible for us to always learn about him through creation—what is sometimes
called “general
revelation”—then it is reasonable to suppose that he also always
continued to give “special revelation”—that
is knowledge about him disclosed through visions, prophecies, etc.
This would apply even in the
dark times before Abraham and Moses and even in communities other than Israel.
Thus we find figures like
the Jebusite king Melchizedek, who “was priest of God Most High” (Gen. 14:18),
the Midianite priest Jethro, who rejoiced at what God did for Israel under
Moses (Exod.
18:9-12), and the Mesopotamian prophet Balaam, who prophesied
for Yahweh (Num.
22:8-24:25).
We thus see a knowledge and
worship of the true God outside of Israel in these early times.
At our remote date, we
cannot know the details of this knowledge and worship. It may have—and in fact
almost certainly was—partial and at times confused, for that is what we see
within Israel itself, as the struggles of the prophets indicate.
However, we can say that God
always preserved a knowledge of himself, however dimly he was understood in a
particular age, and however hybridized his worship came to be with pagan ideas.
We may be thankful that he
did lead the Israelites along the path he did, that he did restore knowledge of
himself, that he did clear away pagan confusions, and that he finally gave us
the full revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, his Son.
Summary
With the above as
background, I would offer a short summary of the response to the reader’s
initial query as follows:
- The speculations about Yahweh and Qos
being storm gods who were related is, in fact, not at all certain.
- However, even if it could be proved,
there are a number of ways to square this with an orthodox Christian
understanding:
- Yahweh and Qos may well have been the
same deity being worshipped under two names.
- Yahweh may have been the earlier deity
and Qos only introduced later.
- God has always preserved knowledge of
himself in the world. Even though it has been partial and overlaid with
misunderstandings, God eventually clarified it and gave us his definitive
revelation through his Son.
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