Worth Watching: Did God Have A Wife?

I just finished watching this documentary. Part of the BBC's "Bible Secrets" series, "Did God Have A Wife?" shows compelling evidence that early Judaism was polytheistic, an offshoot of Canaanite religion, and featured a powerful and holy goddess figure who was a counterpart to good ol' Yahweh.

The parts are on YouTube and can be watched via Unreasonable Faith.

The whole show is really interesting, but the part that I found the most compelling (though horrifying) concerned Asherah, El's wife and the goddess of life and fertility. According to Dr. Stavrakopoulou, some of the first scholars to get their hands on Asherah took one look at her exaggerated breasts and vulva and decided that she was, essentially, a porno goddess and that her followers had all succumbed to their love of teh secks.

Really, guys.

I can only try to communicate my disgust at this reaction. For me, Asherah is a beautiful, wonderful figure. She represents the fact that once upon a time in the history of the religion that shapes our world, a woman's organs were considered holy, not obscene. They were a source of power, not shame. They were more than the value assigned to them by our modern society, who has the presumption to look back on them and decide that she must have been a horrible character not from evidence but because of their own filthy misogyny.

I guess what I'm trying to say is Asherah is every woman. As Dr. Stavrakopoulou expresses at the end of the video, her erasure from the pantheon and subsequent (though cleverly concealed) demonization represents nothing less than the fall of womanhood from its rightful place as an equal way of being to a state of less-than-human. It enables laws that make a woman responsible for her own rape if she does not cry for help, laws that turn that woman into a piece of property who must be bought from her father, the continued absence of laws to accommodate a painful and awkward time in the life of most working women, the treatment of women as "bitches" or "chicks" who exist to lavish love and attention upon men, and the sickening double standard that forbids women and only women from baring their nipples in public.

While men make representations of themselves for various uses, erect large phalluses in each other's honor (see the Washington Monument), and get together to brag about how many holes they've stuck their penises into, women are told to cover up the same parts of their body that were once venerated as wonderful and necessary to humanity or else they'll get into trouble.

It's sick. Just sick. To repurpose a quote, my vagina is offended.