Gendering God

One of the things I’ve struggled with in The Boat Children, is how to honor Judaism’s history of Goddess worship. It’s easy to assume there was no such thing, because, after all, it’s not in the Torah. But the reality is that the codification of the Torah was part of the erasure of that earlier history. I talk about some of these issues in my blog post from 2021, The Female God.

In the time period when the Exodus supposedly took place (in Judaism, we generally place that at 1313 BCE), the Hebrews (the early Jews) worshiped God and Goddess. But by the time the Torah was written (about 1000 years later), we are left with only hints of our history.

For the purposes of my novel, my goal is to treat the Torah as factual. Or at least as much as possible. I use midrash and Talmud and other sources to flesh things out, and I’ve made changes where they make sense, but mostly, I try to tell the story as is (I mean, to a point. It’s fantasy after all, complete with magic and time travel). I actually believe that Torah is our stories, our mythology, with only some of it based in history.

The novel is also, in many ways, historical fiction. I’ve tried my best to be accurate with how Ancient Egypt would have been in 1313 BCE and thereabouts. Even though there’s no historical evidence of an enormous group of Hebrew slaves, or of an exodus.

My struggle comes from the mismatch in the timeline. With few exceptions, Torah only refers to God as singular and male. There are no singular female Gods mentioned, though there is a hint of plurality and as God as two (or no) genders.

And God created humankind in the divine image,
creating it in the image of God—
creating them male and female.

Genesis 1:27

Yet we have a long history of Goddess worship. Not just in the regions where Jews lived, but within Judaism itself. This history is not absent from Torah and other parts of the Bible, but it’s obscured. The primary Goddess, the consort of the primary male God, Yah or El (names still in use by Jews), was Asherah. The name Asherah appears in the Hebrew Bible 40 times, starting with Exodus, where it appears once, though it is usually plural.

Mark well what I command you this day. I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

Beware of making a covenant with the inhabitants of the land against which you are advancing, lest they be a snare in your midst.

No, you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, and cut down their sacred posts;

for you must not worship any other god, because יהוה, whose name is Impassioned, is an impassioned God.

You must not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, for they will lust after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and invite you, and you will eat of their sacrifices.

Exodus 34:11-15. “Sacred posts” (also translated elsewhere as “wooden images”) is אֲשֵׁרָ֖יו or Asherim, the masculine plural of Asherah. This comes as part of several new rules God gives to Moses when he is on top of Mount Sinai completing the second set of Tablets.

What is startling to me with this passage, and the dozens of later ones that are similar, is the twist the mythology gives to our history. If you take Torah as completely factual, then Jews came from the land of Israel and from our patriarch Israel (formally Jacob) who, with his entire family (then 70 people) immigrated to Egypt where (in 400 years) they became perhaps a couple million people who immigrated back to the land of Israel and had to murder and destroy all the other peoples living there.

The core myth is that we, as Jews, arrived en masse to Israel around 1273 BCE and “took” the land from the non-Jewish Asherah worshippers who were living there. The reality is that Canaanites were our people and Canaanite was our language. I’m not sure about the other people’s mentioned but they were, at the very least, our cousins. There’s no evidence of a mass arrival (of an Exodus from Egypt or anywhere, aside from the later return from Babylon, see below). We were already there. The Asherah worshippers were us. The wiping out of the “not us” peoples was in reality the systematic destruction of Goddess worship from within.

These are the laws and rules that you must carefully observe in the land that יהוה, God of your ancestors, is giving you to possess, as long as you live on earth.

You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worshiped their gods, whether on lofty mountains and on hills or under any luxuriant tree.

Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site.

Do not worship your God יהוה in like manner,

but look only to the site that your God יהוה will choose amidst all your tribes as God’s habitation, to establish the divine name there. There you are to go,

and there you are to bring your burnt offerings and other sacrifices, your tithes and contributions, your votive and freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and flocks.

Deuteronomy 12:1-6. Here, Moses is relaying God’s instructions to the Hebrews just before they cross the Jordan River and enter the land of Israel.

The sacred posts, wooden pillars, and the trees. All symbols of Asherah. The instructions are to destroy our own history.

As part of understanding all of this, I had a conversation with Shoshana Fershtman, who taught a course I attended on Hebrew Goddesses and the Sacred Feminine in Biblical Text. Her class and various communications informed my post greatly. I’ve also written up my notes from our conversation below.

Israelite villages came into being about 1000 BCE, in the time of king Soloman. Some say we were Canaanites that split off and became Israelite. What we do know comes from archeological evidence around 1000-1100 BCE.

Early Israelites had a Goddess-centered culture, with both Gods and Goddesses. Timbrels and other instruments are very much a part of Goddess iconography. New moon celebrations tie in to the feminine. Miriam’s Well is also feminine. There was Goddess worship both in the home and in the temple.

While Kabbalists (who came much later, around the 12th-13th centuries CE) said God was male and female, ancients said the God entity was a couple.  Yah was the primary God, even when there were several other Gods and Goddesses.  And Yah was male, with a female partner Asherah.

In 586 BCE, the Jews were exiled to Babylon. That is when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. When people returned from exile about 30 years later, there was a power shift and priestly elites wanted to centralize. They also wanted power under male authorities.  As the Torah was written and codified, all authority for women and Goddess worship was eradicated. Asherah was outlawed and Shekhinah (the divine feminine) emerged and later became the Kabbalist view.

References:

• Asherah pole. Wikipedia.
• Asherah. Wikipedia.
• 842. Asherah. Bible Hub, Strong’s Concordance.
• ‘ăšērâ. Blue Letter Bible, Strong’s Concordance.
• Personal correspondence with Shoshana Fershtman, JD, PhD, a Jungian analyst and psychologist. She is a member analyst and teaches at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and serves on the spiritual leadership team of Congregation Ner Shalom. Author of The Mystical Exodus in Jungian Perspective: Transforming Trauma in the Wellsprings of Renewal. Abingdon, Oxon, and New York, NY: Routledge, 2021.