Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel

I will preface my review by admitting that I love William G. Dever. He doesn't kid around but approaches the question with tenacity. He relentlessly exposes the absurd positions of both extremes (generally the Biblical minimalists and the "believers") and does not let either ideology or religion get in the way of his search for the truth. He comes across as a gruff, irascible sort who has no patience for fools, and his approach is refreshing. He is unafraid to point to his own pioneering work on the subject and why not? He has earned it.in "Did God Have a Wife?" Dever examines what he calls "folk religion" in ancient Israel. This is to be differentiated from "book religion" - the official position of the Bible, which is that of a literate and patriarchal elite. What Dever is looking for here is the religion of the hearth and home, the religion of women, but also men, of the simple piety of the common folk who made up over 90% of the population of ancient Israel. It is not, as he says at the outset (p. IX) in his Introduction, "about the extraordinary few who wrote and edited the Hebrew Bible." An appeal to the book itself will clarify matters here:Some reviewers have suggested that my "Book religion" (following van der Toorn; below), which I have set up as a counterfoil to the more pervasive "folk religion," is late in the Monarchy, emerging only with the 7th-6th century B.. Deuteronomistic reform movements. Thus they argue that for the earlier period in the Monarchy, not to mention the "Period of the Judges" (12th-11th cents. B.C.), I can reconstruct nothing but "folk religion." This overlooks, however, he consensus of mainstream biblical scholars that behind the admittedly late written tradition there is a long oral tradition. The major theological motifs of canonical Scripture, although I have downplayed their popular appeal, did not appear suddenly overnight. These themes (see Chapter VII) had a long tradition among the literati who later wrote and edited the Hebrew Bible; so "Book religion" merely represents their final crystallization (p. xv).This single paragraph is a good example of Dever's writing style and his approach to the problem. He uses very clear and concise language to get his point across. He very frequently points to other parts of the book (below, Chapter VII, etc) so that you know where a particular point will be picked up and continued. This eliminates for the reader the otherwise inevitable unspoken "Yeah, but..." He frequently cites the work of other scholars and his areas of agreement and disagreement with their assertions and in fact, much of the book is a discussion about the views of various schools of thought on any particular point. He offers a fairly thorough review of previous scholarship, which is welcome, but without the use of footnotes. I love footnotes, but I cannot deny that Dever does an excellent job of working without them (and a section at the end of the book called "Basic Sources" fills some 15 pages with a carefully assembled list of the works Dever examines in the text, all divided by topic: "Folk Religion," "Asherah as Goddess," "Archaeological Handbooks," etc).I'll offer the Table of Contents as part of my review because it is one of the things I look at immediately when pulling a book like this off the shelf:I. Defining and Contextualizing ReligionII. The History of the History: In Search of Ancient Israel's ReligionsIII. Sources and Methods for the Study of Ancient Israel's ReligionsIV. The Hebrew Bible: Religious Reality or Theological Ideal?V. Archaeological Evidence for Folk Religions in Ancient IsraelVI. The Goddess Asherah and Her CultVII. Asherah, Women's Cults, and "Official Yahwism"VIII. From Polytheism to MonotheismIX. What Does the Goddess Do to Help?There is also, at the end, an index of Scriptural references.On the whole, Dever's writing style is engaging and easy to follow. Some nonfiction, particularly stuff written by experts in their fields,suffers from unreadability. We have all seen quoted passages in languages we can't hope to translate ourselves and with no translation offered. You won't find that here. But Dever accomplishes this without "dumbing down" his writing. This is a book that is accessible and it is a pleasure to read. I brought it with me everyday to read in the car while waiting for my son to get out of kindergarten classes.If I have any complaint at all about the book it is with how the illustrations are presented. I would have liked them to be labeled (figure 1, figure 2, etc) and referenced in the text. I like to flip from the discussion to the image without searching for an illustration of the object being discussed. But this is a minor complaint and really did not lessen my enjoyment of the book.I titled my review "A Brilliant Corrective" and I mean a corrective to extreme points of view on both sides, the minimalists and the "believers," the one group basically erasing even the possibility of knowledge of the past, and the other limiting it to the viewpoint of the few who wrote the Hebrew Bible. I think Dever has done his job well. Those at both extremes will likely be displeased but then nothing but complete surrender to their point of view will ever please them and Dever is not the man to deny the facts to make anybody happy, and this is what I admire about him the most. Even if you end up disagreeing with him, he pulls no punches. History is not always the way we would like it to be, but it does us no good to live in denial of the facts on (or in) the ground. I'll take the facts, warts and all, over pious history "as it should have been" rather than was.Highly recommended, as are all Dever's books.

Devers provides some great evidence and persuasive arguments, although he wavers a bit (maybe a lot) on a few issues, including whether or not to directly admit the idea that there was a Great Goddess, known by different names, who preceded the idea of an 'all-father" god, since fatherhood was learned, not natural. I would have also liked to see him tackle the Book of Ruth, wherein the post-exile writers tried to justify (and prove to the women) why they should change cultural habits--from having the man "cleave" unto his wife in her home, which she probably owned, passed down from her mother (a tradition from when the Hebrews lived in tents, which the women created), to having women follow the men to their homes, given the newer and growing idea of paternity as superior to maternity (also the main reason for all those patriarchal begets in Genesis--the writers had to hammer the idea of patriarchy into their readers/listeners).Such a transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is clear in many of the choices these elitist male-oriented writers attempted (and were successful in many ways) to impose on a previously maternal based culture. We always know who the mother is, knowledge which also gives birth to the idea of "immaculate" births, but learning to tell when you've become a father is difficult--hence an emphasis on removing the woman from her home and excluding access to her. Contrary to male-oriented beliefs, male lions are not Thinking of creating progeny when they kill the babies of the females who they want to pretend to control; they just remember who they had sex with, and kill the offspring of the females they have not yet had intercourse with, so there is no reason to assume human males were any different (many men still refuse to believe they are fathers today).Dever also errs in showing some of his own pervasive biases--assuming only women cooked and assuming no Israelite woman could read or write (despite archeaology illustrating that priestesses from nearby nations wrote letters and literature; if Ashera was worshipped in the Temple, there should have been Israelite priestesses, too), and he also demonstrates that innate fear many men have when discussing the Great Goddess (whom he insists is merely the Great Mother most of the time) because he refuses to entertain the idea that humanity began our spiritual worship by assuming there must be an all-powerful Goddess creating and directing life, since women--in their "magic"--were the only evident creators in early humanity.When did humans become conscious that males had a role in procreation and were not just reacting to women's magical sexual attractions? Cultural anthropology shows us that, even in tribal cultures, women made the homes, owned the crop fields, and the people believed the main creative divinity was female (and that the male was often either mischievous or tempermental). Even in other patriarchal religions, the male divinities have to overcome and often dismember the female divinity in order to create the earth or to create certain sustaining food sources. Dever ignores all this evidence to continue to support the patriarchy--something he cannot bear to eliminate all together. His fear of upending the patriarchy also means he's incapable of admitting he's a wannabe feminist--someone who believes that both genders are equal, even if sometimes different.It is foolish for a scholar to dismiss the idea of an original Great Goddess when there is so much evidence around the world that shows the feminine was revered not just for fertility, but also for power. That the Judean exile writers chose to push the masculine divinity to the forefront, moving him from a mere monolatry god to a universal one, was a conscious political choice to allow men to run roughshod over women.One other important error Dever makes is to imply that any scrutiny of the Judean religion as it is practiced today is anti-semitism. He eagerly points out the continued persecution of women in some Moslem countries (not all Muslims share that sexist view), but he crosses a line he should not have by calling some scholars anti-semitic, simply because they analyze and find wanting all or most Judean religious concepts.While I applaud Dever for his efforts in trying to set the record straight, even he doesn't do the issue justice.

Excellent book - starts with an over-long and rumbustious taking-to-task of virtually everyone else who has written on this topic. Followed by very solid and sensible take on Israelite folk-religion as juxtaposed with the religion of the Temple elite, reinstating Asherah as the female component of the Old Testament Godhead.One primary qualm is that Professor Devers does not address the theological work of Margaret Barker, and therefore his closing session on Temple theology is lightweight: if Josiah found a statue of Asherah, etc, in the Temple then the faith of the kings and priests was probably pretty closely aligned to that of the villagers and the Deuteronomists were a distinct and third point of view at odds with both - which is what they said they were.

Fantastic; the sort of scholarship I kept hoping for and only found at rare intervals. I am only part way in but reckon it will be important for my own views, too; several of which I had worked out for myself painstakingly. - This means that Dever is great because he agrees with me and shows great discernment accordingly. I believe it is a widely used criterion!

Exellent read and interesting subject. I had to read it and review it for my course, it was well balanced considering the authors background. Credit was given where credit was due to those of opposing opinions.

A very interesting reading. the book can be warmly recommended to others interested in this subject.

An excellent resource written by an experienced retired archaeologist and anthropologist.Academic in tone, it needs to be read in small doses. Having said that, it is enormously rewarding to plough through.