i call it : dever gets spanked!!
Did God Have a Wife?” is a sexy title
to sell a book, but it is also a pivotal
question in the author’s treatment of
folk religion in ancient Israel. By the
end of the book, I was not convinced
that YHWH, the God of Israel (often
written Yahweh*), had a wife. On the
other hand, I am not sure that he did
not have a wife at a certain earlier phase
in his history. The archaeological as
well as textual evidence is ambiguous,
although I believe the scales tip toward
a negative answer.
The author is a well-known American
archaeologist, with a fluent pen, who
writes a readable book, with bits of gossip
here and there, sometimes winking knowingly
at his audience. He begins his book
as a teacher, with an air of ex cathedra
self-appraisal. He grades colleagues, some
of them his former students, for their
studies in religion, archaeology, anthropology
and feminist studies.
In his introduction he declares that
“This is a book about ordinary people
in ancient Israel and their everyday religious
lives, not about the extraordinary
few who wrote and edited the Hebrew
Bible ... My concern in this book is
popular religion, or, better, ‘folk religion’
in all its variety and vitality.” He defines
the difference between establishment
religion and folk religion (or religions,
as he prefers) in such a way as to sever
from the study of religion any speculations
on the divine, that is, theology. He
restricts himself to the study of the religious
practice of ordinary people. But
this severance is almost impossible; even
ordinary people, unsophisticated though
they may be, have their own speculations,
however crude they might be,
about God(s). Otherwise these ordinary
people would not bother to practice
their religion.
