Ancient Israelites Worshipped God and His Wife

Asherah, or Ishtar, on 2nd millennium BC terracotta relief.

Findings that the ancient Israelites worshipped Asherah ~ the wife of Yahweh, the Israelites’ god ~ is gaining new prominence among biblical scholars. Accounts of Yahweh and Asherah are in the Old Testament’s Book of Kings.

The first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah was Raphael Patai in 1967. The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter.

According to Discovery News:

"You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him," writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. "He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many ... or so we like to believe."

"After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife," she added.

Stavrakopoulou 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.

Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.

J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News that he agrees several Hebrew inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah."

"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant."

Asherah ~ known across the ancient Near East by various other names, such as Astarte and Istar ~ was "an important deity, one who was both mighty and nurturing," Wright continued.

Click here for the complete article.

Familiar Situations Provoked Athens' Downfall

Artist's conception of Athens in its glory.

Ancient Athens imploded during the 4th century BC amid a crippling economic downtown as its army fought unpopular wars on foreign soil and immigrants surged across its borders.

Cambridge University professor Michael Scott in his new study entitled From Democrats to Kings, contends that the collapse of Greek democracy and of Athens in particular offer a stark warning from history which is often overlooked.

"In many ways this was a period of total uncertainty just like our own time," Scott told PhysOrg.com. "There are grounds to consider whether we want to go down the same route that Athens did.”

According to PhysOrg.com:

It was not the loss of its empire and defeat in war against Sparta at the end of the 5th century that heralded the death knell of Athenian democracy ~ as it is traditionally perceived. Athens' democracy in fact recovered from these injuries within years. Instead, Dr. Scott argues that the strains and stresses of the 4th century BC, which our own times seem to echo, proved too much for the Athenian democratic system and ultimately caused it to destroy itself.

"If history can provide a map of where we have been, a mirror to where we are right now and perhaps even a guide to what we should do next, the story of this period is perfectly suited to do that in our times," Dr. Scott said.

"It shows how an earlier generation of people responded to similar challenges and which strategies succeeded. It is a period of history that we would do well to think about a little more right now ~ and we ignore it at our peril."

The name of "democracy," for example, became an excuse to turn on anyone regarded as an enemy of the state. Scott's study also marks an attempt to recognize figures such as Isocrates and Phocion ~ sage political advisers who tried unsuccessfully to steer Athens away from crippling confrontations with other Greek states and Macedonia.

Click here for the PhysOrg.com article.

Post originally appeared on my Ancient Tides blog.

"Did You Hear the One About . . . "

A man buys a slave and a little while later wants to return him. The seller wants to know why and the buyer says because the slave is dead.

"By the gods," answers the slave's seller, "when he was with me, he never did any such thing!"

You might recognize this joke from a 4th Century AD joke book as reminiscent of the popular Monty Python sketch involving a man returning a dead parrot to a pet shop. The 1,600-year-old Philogelos: The Laugh Addict is one of the world's oldest joke books. Many of its 265 gags prove that sex, dimwits, nagging wives and flatulence have been topics of jokes for centuries.

According to a Reuters report:

In many of the jokes, a slow-witted figure known as the "student dunce" is the butt of the jokes. In one, the student dunce goes to the city and a friend asks him to buy two 15-year-old slaves: "No problem," responds the dunce. "If I don't find two 15-year-olds, I'll get one 30-year-old."

In another, someone asks to borrow the student's cloak to go down to the country. "I have a cloak to go down to your ankle, but I don't have one that reaches to the country," he replies.

The manuscript is attributed to a pair of ancient comedians named Hierocles and Philagrius. Little is known about them except that they were most likely the compilers of the jokes, not the original writers, according to Reuters.

Other one-liners in Philogelos may baffle a modern audience, such as a series of jokes about a lettuce, which only make sense in light of the ancient belief it was an aphrodisiac.

Click here for the Reuters article.

This post appears on my Ancient Tides blog.

Excavations Point to Expanded Stonehenge

Archaeologists keep learning more about Stonehenge and are shedding more light on the Neolithic religion that prompted construction of the mysterious 4,600-year-old monoliths.

Current excavation work is funded mostly by the National Geographic Society and performed under auspices of six British universities. The project began in 2003 and its current focus is excavation of the largest Neolithic village ever found in England. Known as Durrington Walls, the site is less than two miles from the well-known monoliths.

Recent digging has shown that Durrington Walls had earthen banks and ditches enclosing rings of huge wooden posts set in the same pattern as Stonehenge’s giant stones. This is leading archaeologists to believe Stonehenge and Durrington were closely connected and the builders of Stonehenge likely resided in the village at Durrington Walls.

So far, eight houses have been discovered and many more suspected to have existed in the area. Each house was built of woven sticks and crushed chalk, with a hard clay floor, central fireplace, and was only about 16 feet square. Excavators have unearthed messy debris everywhere inside the houses – broken pots, shattered jars and a litter of animal bones. Two houses on the west side of the village, however, separated from the others by a wood fence, are free of debris, leading some researchers to speculate they were shrines or something similar.

While Stonehenge is believed to have been a place of worship of an ancient solar cult because of the astronomical alignment of the giant stones, it’s now clear that even the roads of the period had similar purposes. A road paved with flint at Stonehenge lines up with the summer solstice sunrise. A similar road recently discovered at Durrington (shown at right in National Geographic photo) lines up with the sunset of the summer solstice. Conversely, the giant stones on Salisbury plain are aligned with the winter solstice sunset, while the wooden circle at Durrington lined up with sunrise of the same day.

Radiocarbon dating puts the Stonehenge site as being built between 2600 BC and 2400 BC, while Durrington Walls is from the same epoch, sometime between 2600 BC and 2500 BC.

“The evidence shows us these two monuments were complementary,” Dr. Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield recently told the New York Times. “Stonehenge was just half of a larger complex.”