Interesting to read that the BBC’s new face of religion believes that God has a wife. I suppose this is of no real significance for non-Christians but for those who do have faith it is really annoying to see our belief so undermined by the State Broadcaster.
GOD’S WIFE
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the bbc, take it or leave it, one can’t help but hate it.
An article written in the past tense, interesting.
One wonders if the programme named ‘The Bible’s Buried Secrets’ will refer to the Biblical promise of the land of Israel to the Jews.
Nah!Probably not.
This is actually a bigger deal to Jews than to Christians. Saying that a female goddess was worshipped in the Holy of Holies is very controversial. It’s not controversial to say that other gods were worshipped in the region at the time, and continued to be. That’s why the Second Commandment exists, and why we got the Biblical stories of conflict with idols among the patriarchs and matriarchs.
It’s also not controversial to say that the Jews back in the day accepted the existence of other gods. It was just that the Hebrew God was the best and baddest of the lot, and don’t worship the rest of them. He’s a very jealous God and all that. Not a big deal, except maybe to the black hats.
The wife deal, though, is controversial. What this new BBC darling leaves out is that the bit from Kings is really about people wrongly erecting Asherah poles, and getting busted for it. Not the same thing at all as the idea that a female deity was worshiped as standard practice at the Temple. Completely the opposite of how she portrays it, in fact.
For example, Kings: 22-24 (“Judah” means the Jewish kingdom):
Judah did evil in the eyes of the LORD. By the sins they committed they stirred up his jealous anger more than those who were before them had done. They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.
This is obviously meant to show that Asherah worship was an aberration, not standard procedure. I’ll leave it to others to make a joke about the BBC and male shrine prostitutes.
Tanach (the Jewish term for the Old Testament) is full of passages about Jews being instructed to tear down stuff used to worship Asherah, or using materials from destroyed poles to make proper materials to worship the Hebrew God. Again, this means that, while the Jews acknowledged the existence of other deities, they were not to be worshipped. The exact opposite of what this Beeboid seems to claim. Is this what they teach at Oxford these days?
There’s some weirdness in Kabbalah about God having both male and female halves, used as some sort of metaphor for the holiness of marriage, but that’s a whole other deal.
Shouldn`t this lady be doing some New Age ashram twaddle on the inner Goddess for the likes of Germaine Greers disciples cast adrift by the Spice Girls theology movement of 1997?
Typical of the BBC to confuse dream catching girls with the right etnicity and(of course) Oxbridge contacts with a suitable candidate to lead Religious Broadcasting.
Get Michael Grade-his excellent ” Variety ” show means that he probably has more religious empathy than some Oxbridge harpie who has listened too much to Jenni Murray and Vera Brittain!
This will also upset the feminists who believe either that God is sexless or maybe, just maybe, God is a woman. This person has deliberately decided to upset believers but instead may also have upset some fellow left-wing travellers.
Well quite. It’s very insensitive of our Bettany Hughes-alike here not to refer to her ‘discovery’ as “God’s Significant Other” or “God’s Life Partner Of The Opposite Gender-Though-That-Doesn’t-Mean-That-God-Is-A-Male-Oh-No!-Nor-That-Non-traditional-Personal-Relationships-Aren’t-Equally-As-Valid-Or-Possibly-Even-More-So-Oh-No-It-Doesn’t-Stop-Heckling-At-The-Back-You-Insensitive-Beasts.
Maybe it is unimportant but in Christian theology God is sexless. He is masculine and feminine and finally transcendent of both.
I wonder if the BBC will do a drains-up on any other religious book.
I think we need to relax a bit here lads. Its not like this woman is claiming god had a wife or anything is it? 🙂
But on a serious note, I guess anything possible. I guess its possible that back in the dark old bad days that a male and female gods could have been worshipped as equals but over time it was the male that took precidence until eventually the female fell out of favour and became heresy.
Finally, I guess its only with time and once this womans work has been thoroughly reviewed will we get a better understanding if she is nothing more than a new age quack or she is a female brian cox!
Regards
Mailman