In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we have reached the end of the First Temple period; it’s a big, important moment in the timeline. For nearly 400 years, the Hebrew temple dedicated to Yahweh had stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem before it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The followers of Yahweh were radical reformists who had worked hard to overthrow existing religious traditions, centralize worship around one god, and institute enormous cultural changes, with varying degrees of success.

The Yahwists objected to child sacrifice (among other things) and fought against the gods, particularly Baal, who demanded it. Baal had been the incumbent king of the gods for the Israelites and Canaanites going back centuries to the time of the Hyksos. Yahweh and Baal competed for the love of the northern kingdom of Israel, and in the 9th century BCE, Yahweh won the fight for the throne, but the broader pantheon of gods remained intact. Yahweh never ruled Israel alone; it was always a pagan nation until its destruction by the Assyrians in 722 BCE.

Yahweh’s home was in the southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital of Jerusalem. Yahweh had more success consolidating worship in Judah, but for most of its history, Judah remained stubbornly pagan as well. At no point were the Hebrews monotheists in the First Temple. Yahweh had not yet been merged with his father, the creator, El Elyon, “God Most High,” and the goddesses Asherah, Astarte, and Anat remained as popular as ever.

The Yahwists also objected to the goddesses and particularly the ritual sex traditions, rooted in farming, that were thought to make the flowers grow. The goddesses and the qedesha priestesses, along with the transgender qadesh priests, represented the old Bronze Age tribal matriarchies that built families around mothers and celebrated women’s sexuality. The Yahwists were firmly patriarchal, so they needed to shut these traditions down and make the women submit to the new Iron Age order.

King Josiah (discussed in the last episode) attempted to push through the most dramatic reforms, shutting down all pagan religious practices and moving hard against the goddesses, but he was killed in battle in 609 BCE, and his reforms died with him. Judah immediately returned to its pagan ways, much to the chagrin of the Hebrew prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Nebuchadnezzar II became the king of Babylon in 605 BCE; he was the greatest emperor of his era and looms large in the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar led a great renaissance of Babylon and made many renovations and restorations to the city, including reconstruction of the great walls, the grand processional boulevard, and the lavishly decorated Ishtar Gate. At this time, Babylon was the biggest, wealthiest, and most cosmopolitan city in the world.

At the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and his allies completely devastated the combined armies of Egypt and the remaining Assyrians, leaving the Babylonians as the undisputed power in the region.

Prophet Jeremiah

Jeremiah was a prophet in Judea during the time of Josiah. He was the son of the high priest Hilkiah and may have been one of the Deuteronomist writers. Jeremiah witnessed the fall of Jerusalem, the burning of the Temple, and the exile to Babylon. Jeremiah was the chief mourner for King Josiah and was deeply troubled by the prompt return to pagan practices the moment Josiah passed.

Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet; he preached that Judah would be destroyed by invaders from the north because they had forsaken Yahweh by worshipping adulterous goddesses, committing idolatry, and all the rest of the sins of the Canaanites. Jeremiah preached social justice and advocated for the poor against the depredations of the rich and powerful.

Scholarly consensus is that there was a historical Jeremiah, and that some of the writings in his book were by him, but the overall book was edited and redacted numerous times.

The prophet frequently used the metaphor of divorce to describe the fealty Yahweh demands.

Jeremiah preached that the Babylonians would defeat Judah, which was an unpopular message with the king and considered treasonous.

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Cannabis Mentioned as a Burnt Offering in the Temple

This passage suggests that burnt offerings of cannabis were made to Yahweh in the Hebrew temple. The typical translation of calamus or sweet cane does not fit the context as a burnt offering, but cannabis does perfectly.

Yahweh was angry and rejected the Israelite offerings as too little and too late; they were too far gone in their sins. Cannabis from a distant land implies that they were not growing cannabis in Judah – but were trading for it.

Judah persisted in worshipping the Goddess; they made offerings to Astarte, the Queen of Heaven.

Yahweh’s disgust with child sacrifice is again stated by Jeremiah. Here it says that Yahweh never commanded child sacrifice, a claim debated by scholars. Arguably, in earlier centuries the Yahweh cult had also participated in the practice, but by this time, they were firmly opposed.

597 - 586 BCE - Destruction of Jerusalem

During the time of imperial unrest, Judah rebelled against Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar answered in 597 BCE by invading Judah and laying siege to Jerusalem, turning it into a vassal state.

Nebuchadnezzar marched up to the gates of Jerusalem, and the king and the entire royal family surrendered. Nebuchadnezzar stripped the Temple of its valuables and sent 10,000 elites into exile in Babylon, including the soon-to-be prophet Ezekiel.

The last king of Judah was Zedekiah; he was installed by Nebuchadnezzar and ruled for 11 years. Zedekiah was pagan and of no value to the Yahwists. Against the warnings of Jeremiah and other advisors, Zedekiah rebelled against Babylon in his ninth year and allied with Egypt.

Jeremiah warned Zedekiah that Babylon would defeat Judah and the Egyptians would not be able to save them. Jeremiah was arrested, accused of being a traitor in favor of the Babylonians. Jeremiah was then thrown into a mud-filled cistern in an attempt to kill him, but he was rescued by allies.

Nebuchadnezzar responded by invading Judah again and laying siege to Jerusalem in 588 BCE. The siege lasted 30 months, and great suffering befell the people. Jerusalem fell for good in 586 BCE.

When Nebuchadnezzar finally succeeded in taking Jerusalem, Zedekiah and his family attempted to flee but were captured on the plains of Jericho. The last thing Zedekiah ever saw was the execution of his sons – his eyes were then put out, and the last king of Judah was taken as a blind captive to Babylon and imprisoned.

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Solomon’s Temple Burned

The Hebrew Temple was burned, and the rest of the people were exiled, leaving behind only the poorest of the poor. All of the valuables that remained were brought back to Babylon.

The destruction of the Temple was the ultimate loss for the Israelites; Solomon’s Temple was the heart and center of Hebrew spiritual life.

Solomon’s Temple had also been the center of a spiritual conflict over fundamentally contradictory worldviews. Traditional folk beliefs held that the Heavenly Father and the Earthly Mother were husband and wife. King Solomon understood this, but the Yahwists preached that the Heavenly Father ruled alone.

Of the 373 years that Solomon’s Temple was in Jerusalem, an Asherah pole stood by the altar for roughly two-thirds of the time, worshipped by the traditional farming people, according to Hebrew scholar Raphael Patai. The Mother Goddess Asherah was El’s wife, but the Yahwists wanted a divorce, and they got it.

Monotheism leaves no room for the Goddess. The Yahwist reformers pushed her worship out of the Temple and condemned it. Yahweh then took all the powers of nature and reproduction for himself. The women in the community who were dedicated to the Goddess were neither consulted nor did they approve; monotheism was forced upon them.

Jeremiah Argues with the Women about Astarte

Jeremiah was freed by the Babylonians and told that he was free to live wherever he wanted. He could go to Babylon with royal support, but Jeremiah chose to stay behind in Judah. There were disputes and conflicts among the remaining Judeans, and the group decided to go to Egypt.

Jeremiah counseled strongly against leaving Judah but was taken against his will with the group of exiles. In Egypt, Jeremiah had a big public dispute with the exiles, particularly with the women whom he blamed for worshipping Astarte, the Queen of Heaven.

The women responded to Jeremiah with great anger and indignation. They argued that life was good when they made their offerings to the Queen of Heaven; they had plenty of food and suffered no evil. It was only after they stopped making offerings to Astarte that they began suffering from sword and famine.

The women clearly believed that Astarte offered them more protection than Yahweh.

This following passage from Jeremiah 44 is one of the most important references to the Israelite goddesses in the entire Bible, highlighting disputes that had been playing out for centuries and offering important details about how they baked cakes in the image of the Goddess and poured out drink offerings to her — practices also seen in Babylon.

The women angrily made clear that they had no intention of abandoning the great Goddess. Jeremiah was angry but conceded, saying, “Do what you want, but Yahweh will do you harm.”

The archaeological record shows that the Israelites in Egypt continued their polytheistic ways. Letters from a 5th century BCE Jewish temple on Elephantine Island in Egypt reference Anat-Yahu and are thought to be a pairing of Yahweh and Anat.

Prophet Ezekiel

The prophet Ezekiel lived in Judah during the Babylonian defeat of Jerusalem, and he departed with the first wave of exiles, a decade before the final destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Five years later, Ezekiel had a divine encounter by the rivers of Babylon and began his prophetic work.

Ezekiel’s vision is famous and awe-inspiring; some say it was drug-induced.

Yahweh called Ezekiel to prophesy against the exiled Israelites for their stubborn and obstinate behavior. Ezekiel accused Israel of breaking the covenant, saying Jerusalem would be attacked again and the Temple destroyed.

Ezekiel had a vision of pagan worship in Solomon’s Temple. He saw women weeping for Tammuz, the dying-and-rising god, Astarte’s husband. Tammuz was the equivalent of the Sumerian Dumuzi, and the Greeks knew him as Adonis. One of the months in the Hebrew calendar is the month of Tammuz.

A day of mourning and weeping was an important part of the dying-and-rising god rituals celebrated throughout the Ancient Near East.

In Ezekiel’s vision, Yahweh orders that the idolaters be killed with impunity in an act of mass murder.

Ezekiel condemned the women prophets, who can be understood to be the qedesha, with their magic charms and veils of anonymity. Ezekiel says the qedesha had the powers of life itself, killing those who should not have died and sparing those who should not have lived, in defiance of Yahweh’s judgment.

These prophets were continuing in the spirit of Gilgamesh, who rejected the goddess Ishtar’s seductions in his famous epic. Gilgamesh recounts her mistreatment of past lovers and also reaches for bird imagery, describing how she broke the wing of a former lover whom she turned into a bird, leaving him crying in the woods.

Through Ezekiel, Yahweh chastises Jerusalem for her unfaithfulness, but the words can be read as God speaking angrily to his wife, the Goddess, exerting his dominance and authority.

Yahweh talks like an abusive husband.

In this long passage, Ezekiel uses sexual language and imagery similar to Hosea. The prophet heaps blame and scorn on the Judeans for practicing their traditional religions, and then claims that Yahweh is responsible for getting foreign kingdoms to punish them.

Greek and Roman writers described the custom of Near Eastern women giving gifts to their lovers.

In a separate story, Ezekiel describes the behavior of two promiscuous sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, and Yahweh’s judgment against them. To Ezekiel, the entire city of Jerusalem was a prostitute, and his profound misogyny is on full display.

The First Temple has been destroyed, and the people have been scattered. The first crucial era of attempted pagan reforms is over, and the next chapter begins.

Next episode, we will be in Babylon, where we will meet the legendary Persian King Cyrus, who liberated the Hebrews from their exile and allowed them to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple, now known as the Jews. Under the influence of the Persian Zoroastrians, pure monotheism emerged and was crystallized in 2nd Isaiah, the first time it is said that “there are no other gods.”

We will also meet Ezra the Scribe, who brought the Book of the Law back to Jerusalem early in the Second Temple period. Ezra condemned mixed marriages between Israelites and Canaanites, forcing the Jewish men to divorce and banish their foreign wives and children, completing the divorce of the Mother Goddess.

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In this episode of Goddess Bible Study we dig into one of the most turbulent periods in the long fight against the Mother Goddess. The dramatic reforms of King Hezekiah.

See the full write-up here:

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I invite respected philosophers such as panpsychist Philip Goff, Phil Halper, Alex O’Connor, and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, as well as theists, atheists, and anyone who would like to engage in this discussion.

We need to take dualism more seriously — not simply the substance dualism of David Chalmers, the mechanical dualism of Descartes, or the hierarchical dualism of Plato — all of which are conceptually asymmetric, with one side privileged — but the idea that the cosmos is fundamentally a dyad and not a monad, with two active principles of mind and matter that come together to create reality, as described by the Hindu model of Shiva-Shakti, or the Egyptian Isis and Osiris.

I will make the case for duotheism: that both God and Goddess must be reconciled to create a coherent model of the cosmos, similar in some respects (but not all) to Alfred North Whitehead's dipolar God.

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The current zeitgeist on consciousness generally sticks to one of two positions.

Scientific materialism (or physicalism) holds that we live in a purely material world where consciousness emerges as a product of evolution and complex biology. There is no spiritual realm, God, or a soul, and most religious belief is largely superstition. Materialism is fundamentally atheist.

The usual alternative is idealism: matter arises from mind, and consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality. Idealism suits a monotheist worldview, in which the one true God creates the material world. This is the typical position for Christians and Muslims who describe an omnipotent and all-knowing God who created the universe.

These arguments have gone around in circles for centuries: monotheists vs. atheists, materialists vs. idealists, with neither side winning a convincing victory. I find both perspectives unconvincing and incomplete — and believe that neither offers a coherent worldview.

I enjoyed the recent discussion on Phil Halper’s philosophy channel by a group of physicalists who attempted to debunk Philip Goff and panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is pervasive in the cosmos and is the underlying substrate of the material world.

I did not find their critiques convincing, and I would be happy to discuss why with them.

To me, panpsychism should be understood as a dyad: the cosmos has two interacting parts — though most panpsychists, like Goff, are idealists. I disagree with both the physicalists and the idealists. I believe both sides are incomplete.

The dyad offers a coherent worldview with a simple model. Just as a human has a mind and a body, each influencing the other, so too does the entire cosmos. This comports with ancient and widespread traditions of polytheism and animism — and specifically with God and Goddess, mind and matter.

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In Goddess traditions, the Mother Goddess is the material world (Mother Nature, Mother Earth), while God the Father is immaterial; he is mind, the source of ideas, the creator.

Mother is matter: the words share the same Latin root, mater.

The terms God and Goddess are poetic symbols; we could just as easily say mind and matter, but gods provide more avenues for storytelling, and it is easier to remember a story than a theory.

The Hindu principle of Shiva-Shakti describes this dyad in detail. This view is ancient, surviving millennia of philosophical debate and violent rejection by Muslim and Christian monotheists alike — and yet the ideas remain standing, as strong as ever.

In this worldview, Shiva is pure, eternal source consciousness, permeating the cosmos, neither created nor destroyed.

Shakti is source matter — chaotic and formless in her raw state, yet fundamentally circular: the eternal cycle of creation and destruction.

In Hindu terms, Shakti is the mass, energy, and physics of material science, endlessly cycling. This circularity is a decisive distinction from Western thought, which leans towards linear thinking.

As a general rule, Hindus present their deities in male-female pairs. The female is Shakti, and every goddess is drawn from this same source.

The male deity is mind, the immaterial source of forms, rooted in ideas, as Plato described.

Without matter, mind is powerless and impotent — disembodied, unable to act on the material world. And without the mind, matter remains chaotic and formless.

They need each other; physics meets the Platonic form, and reality is the emergent property.

God is the creator; Goddess is the raw material.

She is the chaotic waters of creation in Genesis 1, also seen in Egypt and India.

Everything he creates, she ultimately destroys.

Both are active; both have power and authority of their own.

Together they form an axis — like a cosmic hurricane spinning around an infinite column of fire, expanding and contracting through the eons in circular time.

The Maya measured time this way; so do the Hindus.

God is linear and hierarchical, bringing centralized authority. Goddess is circular and horizontal, bringing decentralized cooperation. They join to create the whole. Nature demonstrates that both hierarchy and cooperation are active principles in the web of life.

In this model, God is not omnipotent; there are limits to his powers, a position that Philip Goff has presented, and that I believe resolves many of the philosophical problems with monotheism, such as the existence of suffering and death.

I am both a dualist and a non-dualist — I embrace the paradox. Hindus teach that a singular reality, Brahman, connects us all, but reality is a fabric woven of warp and weft threads: mind and matter, both active and pulsating.

These are some of the ideas we discuss in Goddess Bible Study, and I’d welcome the chance to explore them with more philosophers.

Reach out to join our chat group on Signal.

lostgoddess.io@gmail.com

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we continue with the three most important kings in the late First Temple period, and the final, most sweeping revolt against the goddesses.

Last episode, we covered King Hezekiah, a nearly messianic figure who saved the Temple and the entire Yahweh movement from near-extermination at the hands of the Assyrians. Hezekiah was one of the great Yahwist reformers, working to remove the goddesses and all the pagan traditions and centralize worship in the Jerusalem Temple.

But Hezekiah's reforms did not outlast his reign. They were reversed as soon as he died.

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698-642 BCE - King Manasseh

Hezekiah died a few years after the Assyrian siege and was succeeded by his son. King Manasseh had Judah's longest reign, holding the throne for fifty-five years — but the Book of Kings only mentions him briefly.

Manasseh reversed Hezekiah's reforms and reinstated pagan worship, placing a new Asherah pole in the Temple. He is condemned in the Bible as one of the worst kings of Judah, but the historical record shows that his reign was a time of stability and trade.

The Yahwist reforms had never been popular with the people, who wanted their community altars back and desired the freedom to worship as they pleased. As soon as Hezekiah died, the Asherah poles and high places were restored. The Canaanites also continued their idolatrous superstitions and child sacrifice, and Manasseh is said to have sacrificed his own son in the fire.

The people probably thought highly of Manasseh, as he brought peace and prosperity to Judah. Manasseh was a loyal vassal of Assyria and is listed in the records of multiple kings as an ally. Judah had favored trade relations with Nineveh, and there were profitable exports of olive oil and wine to the empire.

The reinstatement of folk religion was likely a smart political move that earned the loyalty of the people, but the Bible does not see it that way. In Rabbinic literature, Manasseh is said to have murdered the prophet Isaiah, and his idolatry is blamed for Jerusalem’s later destruction by the Babylonians.

The great rhetorical feat of the Bible and later tradition was to reframe invasions by outside military forces as being caused by Yahweh. It is hard to imagine anyone alive at the time taking seriously the claim that the mighty Assyrians, or the Babylonians, were following Yahweh and not their own, much more powerful gods, Ashur and Marduk

The Book of Chronicles adds another chapter to Manasseh's story, in which he is roughly captured by the Assyrians and taken prisoner to Babylon. In his distress, Manasseh prays to Yahweh, finds deliverance, and is restored to his throne in Jerusalem. Having found Yahweh, he proceeds with his own reforms, removing altars and foreign gods (2 Chronicles 33:10–17).

Neither the Book of Kings nor any Assyrian records mention these incidents, and the Book of Chronicles is clearly revisionist history throughout. It is always interesting to note which historical details get revised in Chronicles, like the smoothing over of rough edges in both David's and Solomon's biographies, because it demonstrates the points of sensitivity and embarrassment in the narrative. The success of Manasseh's reign was clearly a sore spot for the biblical writers — a good pagan king was a contradiction they couldn't leave standing, so Chronicles quietly rewrote him into a penitent one.

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640–609 BCE King Josiah the Reformer

King Josiah was a grandson of Manasseh and took the throne at the tender age of eight. His father, Amon, had reigned only two years before being assassinated by his own officials. The "people of the land" then killed the assassins and placed young Josiah on the throne in his place (2 Kings 21:23–24).

Josiah was the second great Yahwist reformer, and he is hailed in the Bible for his fealty to Yahweh. Some say he is the greatest king in the Bible because he hit the trifecta, following Yahweh with all his heart, soul, and strength.

The reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah are the high-water marks for the Yahwists during the First Temple period. King Josiah had a large influence on the writing of the Bible, as significant portions were likely written during his rule.

When Josiah was eighteen, he ordered renovations to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the work, Hilkiah the high priest discovered the lost book of Moses, the Book of the Law, which we now see in the biblical Book of Deuteronomy. Modern scholars agree that a 600-year-old scroll couldn't have been suddenly discovered intact, and most believe it was actually written during Josiah's reign.

The lost book of Moses was brought to the king and read aloud to him. Josiah was deeply moved by the words and immediately commenced reforms to bring his nation back into the grace of Yahweh. Josiah banned all other forms of worship and began a campaign to once again wipe out the pagan traditions and centralize worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.

After finding the scroll, the priests then did something interesting: they consulted a prophetess named Huldah to confirm that the text was legitimate. She confirmed that the wrath of Yahweh was upon them. Huldah is one of only seven prophetesses in the entire Jewish tradition. Not much is known about her, but the Huldah Gate on the Temple Mount still bears her name today.

This generation of literate priests, including the prophet Jeremiah, is known colloquially as the "Deuteronomists" by contemporary scholars. They wrote the laws of Deuteronomy and preserved older texts from both Judah and Israel, later carrying them to Babylon during the Exile. They are thought to have written the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which share a common voice throughout. I personally believe this same generation also produced the Garden of Eden story — the divorce papers for the Goddess — as part of these reforms.

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Josiah's reforms were far-reaching. The Asherah pole installed at Solomon's Temple was cut down, burned, ground into powder, and the dust scattered over the graves of her own worshippers. The burning of incense on the high places is condemned, as is the worship of Baal and other gods.

Josiah removed the male qadesh, but pointedly does not mention the female qedesha, who were presumably left alone. The priestesses were always a much tougher target.

The text mentions that the women in the Temple did sacred weaving for Asherah. Using cannabis hemp, perhaps? Fabrics and tapestries were commonly used in temples of the period to create separate rooms, tents, and pavilions to house guests, vendors, or perhaps the qedesha themselves.

Josiah also desecrated the Topheth, the burial ground for infant sacrifice, so that it could not be used again. Perhaps this is why no Topheth has ever been found in Israel today.

Josiah destroyed the high places Solomon built for Astarte and other foreign gods. Here the writers again refer to Astarte as Ashtoreth, "the shameful Astarte," the vile goddess of Sidon, confirming that King Solomon had once worshipped her.

Josiah even pulled down the altar at Bethel, a center for the worship of El, and the great rival to the Jerusalem Temple. The altar at Bethel was first established by Jacob and called El Elohe Israel ("El is the God of Israel"). It was also the site where Jeroboam had built one of the golden bulls to El after Israel split from Judah.

Josiah defiled the ancient altars by digging up the nearby graves and burning the human bones on them. The king condemned the shamans and spiritists and eliminated household-god worship. Archaeologists have found shrines from this period that were deliberately overturned and dismantled — evidence that appears to confirm the reforms of Josiah and Hezekiah, as we discussed in the last episode.

The household gods mentioned may be connected to the small pillar-base figurines archaeologists have found all over Israel. These figurines were popular in the 8th–7th centuries BCE, during the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah, and continued to be made right up until Jerusalem was overthrown and the Hebrews exiled. Though obviously feminine, scholars are not entirely sure what these objects were for, but they were common in households throughout Judah.

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609 BCE — Death of Josiah and the End of the House of David

Josiah witnessed the fall of the Assyrian Empire and the sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE, which we discussed here. All of a sudden, the landscape of political alliances shifted — but this turn of events did not work out well for Josiah.

In 609 BCE, Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt marched his army up the Mediterranean coast to assist the Assyrians in their fight with the Babylonians. The Egyptians attempted to cross through the Jezreel Valley and appealed to Josiah for permission to pass. Necho was not looking to fight Josiah, but the king rejected the Egyptian appeal anyway, as he was allied with the Babylonians for reasons that remain unclear.

Josiah was killed at Megiddo, the only king of Judah ever killed in battle. This episode is considered a genuine historical event, even though no extrabiblical evidence naming Josiah has ever been found.

The Bible actually preserves two versions of his death, and the differences are telling. The account in 2 Kings treats it almost as an aside — a brief mention that Necho killed Josiah at Megiddo. The account in Chronicles, however, turns it into a full dramatic scene, filling in emotional and theological detail that Kings leaves bare.

Apparently, King Josiah's dedication to Yahweh provided him no protection in battle and no assurance of victory. God, in this telling, was on the side of Egypt. Josiah's death brought an end to fealty to Yahweh in Judah. Egypt installed new vassal kings, all of them pagan, and a few years later Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians.

Josiah’s death at Megiddo marked the end of Judean independence and, for all practical purposes, the end of the House of David. The Yahwist reforms — even at their most sweeping and sincere — were not enough to spare Yahweh’s people from destruction and exile.

Next episode, we discuss the prophet Jeremiah, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the exile to Babylon.

I have a beef with contemporary academia when it comes to scholarship on goddess traditions and matriarchies. I actually have a beef with academia on many subjects, but we'll stick to goddesses for now. Specifically, I have a beef with the atheist postmodernists who dominate Western academia in the 21st century and who delight in deconstructing religious and mythological narratives without offering anything coherent in return.

Scientific materialism has been the lingua franca of academia since the Enlightenment. This worldview holds that the cosmos is purely material, science is the only source of truth, there is no God, soul, or afterlife, and any mention of non-material reality is illusion. According to this view, religion is archaic, a relic to be left in the dustbin of history, and mythology teaches us nothing. Critical theory is then used to dismantle these notions and show that they are untrue. In the 21st century, atheist postmodernism has additionally come into vogue, asserting that there is no firm foundation to reality at all; it's all just a social construct determined by those who hold power.

Atheist postmodernist academics don't believe in God, and they're not interested in Goddess either. I believe in both, recognizing that this poetic symbolism helps describe the nature of reality.

Today's academics are completely failing to see what the evidence is telling us regarding goddesses, matriarchies, ritual sex, plant drugs, and transgenders. I view all this collected data as evidence of one big cross-cultural religious tradition of the Mother Goddess. The academics are familiar with this argument, but they reject this conclusion with hostility and derision.

The atheist postmodernist academics are wrong on this point.

There most certainly are cross-cultural traditions of the Mother Goddess. These traditions are alive and well in India, where they are known as Shakti, and paganism never disappeared in the West either. In fact, pagans arrived in America in the 1620s and fought with the Puritans in Massachusetts. These Mother Goddess traditions blend seamlessly, then and now, with indigenous traditions in North and South America.

I came across the blog of Dr. Andrea Sinclair, an archaeologist and Egyptologist. I had never heard of her before this week, and this critique isn't personal, though I disagree with her worldview and conclusions. Dr. Sinclair's technical work is excellent and covers much of the material I'm interested in, which is why I'm highlighting it. More than that, she's a perfect representative of the current academic consensus on these subjects.

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Dr. Sinclair has a series of articles on her blog dismissing claims of goddess traditions, sacred prostitution, and drugs in the ancient world. These articles do a terrific job of presenting the core evidence on these subjects, and I recommend them to anyone interested, even though I dispute her conclusions. (All the following quotes are from these posts.)

Outdated Archeology #6: The Mother Goddess and prehistoric matriarchy

The myth of sacred prostitution in Mesopotamia, or another reason why Herodotus needs a clip behind the ear

We begin with a fundamental, methodological disagreement: do myths have anything to teach us? In modern parlance, myths are seen as fiction, but that's a misunderstanding. Quality mythology uses poetry and symbolism to portray the structure of the cosmos and humans' place in it, within a given culture's understanding. Good myths contain many deep layers of meaning, but you'll get in trouble in academia if you attempt to use any of them as data points.

Anyway, the Great Mother Goddess is not even a myth — it's a living spiritual and metaphysical tradition; it’s a worldview.

Matriarchies are not a myth either; they’re a common family structure seen among tribal peoples around the world to this day. Matriarchies are defined by maternal family lines and matrilocal marriages, where the man goes to live with the woman’s family. These family dynamics result in societies that are more egalitarian and cooperative than patriarchal ones. By contrast, building family lines through the men means women’s sex lives must be carefully and systematically controlled, resulting in societies structured as domination hierarchies.

Matriarchies are not societies where women dominate and emasculate men, since there’s no evidence that such societies have ever existed. Women don’t want weak men; matriarchies cultivate warriors who can defend them, as we see across Native American cultures.

Matriarchal cultures celebrated women's sexuality as the source of life and creation, and were not shy about it. Women are not required to submit to men, and their goddesses do not submit to the male gods either. We see powerful, non-submissive goddesses throughout Bronze Age cultures, especially in figures like Ishtar, who is extremely sexual and domineering. These goddesses were all brought to heel in the Iron Age; the Israelites left us their diary of the events in the Bible.

A discerning reading of mythological texts tells us a great deal about how those cultures saw the world.

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Dismissal of mythology is why academics hate Graham Hancock so much, since he takes mythology seriously and uses the stories as a springboard for his research. For example, the Biblical flood stories of Noah are repeated across cultures with varying names and details. Graham Hancock sees this as evidence of a cataclysmic, mass extinction event in history, but mainstream academics do not. They argue that there is no evidence of a giant flood in the time period these stories were written (which is true for the third millennium BC), and categorically dismiss the idea that the flood stories could be memories of events much further back in history.

Hancock argues (and I am persuaded to agree) that the flood stories are a memory of a mass extinction event caused by meteor strikes at the end of the Ice Age in the Younger Dryas period (12,800 ya), causing widespread flooding from suddenly released ice water. This emerging theory is gaining more widespread acceptance every year.

One's presuppositions about the value of mythology likely predetermine whether you're willing to entertain the Younger Dryas comet-impact hypothesis. This theme repeats with the casual dismissal of ancient writers like Herodotus as liars and frauds (which some are) whenever their work runs counter to today's accepted shibboleths.

The first mention of the Great Mother was categorically not in 1849 by some random academic in Victorian England. The Mother Goddess has always been around. She never went away, and the basic precepts have always remained the same.

The European version of the Mother Goddess arrived in America with the first colonists in 1622, two years after the Puritan Pilgrims settled nearby in Plymouth, MA. Thomas Morton, the Pagan Pilgrim, helped establish Mount Wollaston in today's Quincy, MA, but then overthrew its leader when it was discovered the man was selling indentured servants (white folks) into slavery in Virginia.

Morton organized a coup in 1626, freed the remaining indentured servants, and renamed the colony Merrymount, for Mary, the Mother of God, combined with merriment, joy, and revelry. The name was a pun intended to annoy the virulently anti-Catholic Puritans. Morton was proudly pagan and wrote poetry to the goddesses.

Thomas Morton was close friends with the local Algonquian tribes and a sworn enemy of the Puritans. He wrote in his book, "I found two sorts of people, the one Christians, the other Infidels; these I found most full of humanity, and more friendly than the other."

The Puritans saw America as the new Israel from the start; Morton’s vision was for a new Canaan.

Thomas Morton loved America — its landscapes, forests, and wildlife — writing about them floridly in his book New English Canaan. He was very fond of the Natives, spending a great deal of time with them, showing them the greatest respect, extolling their values, and encouraging his people to intermarry. Morton also sold the Natives guns, enraging the Puritans, and built a thriving fur trade business. While the Plymouth colony struggled to survive, Merrymount prospered.

In 1627, Morton erected a huge 80-foot maypole, visible from the sea, to guide visitors to Merrymount. Then he and the colonists brewed beer and threw a raucous May Day party with the Natives, filled with song, dance, revelry, and Morton's ribald poetry to the goddesses.

Needless to say, the Puritans were not pleased. After Morton repeated the festival in 1628, the Puritans burst in, arrested him, and sent him back to England. They then burned the entire colony to the ground in 1630. Legal dramas played out over the following years, and both sides wrote books detailing their versions of events, so this chapter of American history is well documented — though rarely taught in schools.

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Dr. Sinclair carefully lists all the important writers from the mid-19th century onward who influenced the discussion of the Mother Goddess, and systematically dismisses every one of them as uninformed racists, misogynists with prurient sexual imaginations, or naively misguided charlatans.

She details her objections to James Frazer's The Golden Bough, Jane Harrison, and Arthur Evans, who excavated the great palaces at Minoan Crete, with their feminine, bare-breasted murals. Dr. Sinclair lists many sources I wasn't familiar with (thanks!). She devotes special attention to Robert Graves, whose books, including The White Goddess, captivated her in her teens but which she now sees as painfully tenuous and bogus.

She does not hide her disdain, writing “...insert exasperated *facepalm* here ...”

To be fair, I don't think any of these writers are above criticism — they were all products of their times and worked with much more limited data than we have today.

Dr. Sinclair criticizes sources I learned a lot from, and whose work I believe still stands up, including Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957), Carl Jung, and James Mellaart, who excavated the famous Neolithic site Çatal Höyük and identified figurines of the Triple Goddess. Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman, which was formative for me, gets a shoutout. She is especially critical of Marija Gimbutas, who was the last prominent academic to champion the case for cross-cultural mother goddess traditions until her death in 1994.

Dr. Sinclair completely dismisses any significance of the Triple Goddess, without even attempting to offer an alternative reading of the evidence, simply writing off the entire concept as a product of the male sexual imagination.

It is really too bad, since Dr. Sinclair is an Egyptologist, because the Triple Goddess has its roots in Egypt with Hathor, Bastet, and Sekhmet, who combine as the Eye of Ra. This symbolism is so potent that it was transmitted across cultures and is still used today. Modern Hindus see her in the form of Parvati, Durga, and Kali.

Between ancient Egypt and modern India, we see the Triple Goddess in many important cultures. The Greeks had her as Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate, who were central to the Eleusinian Mysteries — the most important and profound religion in all of classical Greece, attended by the majority of its great leaders and philosophers.

Even more importantly, the Triple Goddess appears in both the Bible and the Koran, where the prophets divorced the goddesses in favor of monotheism, the religion of the father alone. The Israelite/Canaanite Triple Goddess was Asherah, Astarte, and Anat, while the Arabian was Allat, Uzza, and Manat. Check out Goddess Bible Study, where we go into the details.

Dr. Sinclair questions why goddesses must be associated with fertility, seeming to forget that it is women who give birth.

She finds it mind-boggling that Mother Nature has been with us forever and that human beings have, for tens of thousands of years, consistently built spiritual and religious traditions around the cycle of life. It doesn’t seem weird to me — I rather like it.

She asks, “Why is it necessary to invert patriarchal monotheism and make ancient goddesses into an all-mighty mother?”

Because God has a Mother, and she is the most powerful force in the cosmos.

There are a few basic precepts of Goddess theology. First, it is rooted in Mother Nature and the cycle of life. Mother is the material world, and she is circular — the endless cycle of creation and destruction, the cycle of life. Since she can destroy all that God creates, she is the most powerful force in the cosmos.

Secondly, all the goddesses are, in fact, one super-goddess, sourced from the waters of creation. This theology is explicit, both in the Shakti traditions of modern Hinduism and in the Hellenistic Isis traditions of the Roman Empire. As an Egyptologist, Dr. Sinclair should know this.

The identities of goddesses are intrinsically fluid; they can be endlessly conflated, syncretized, and intertwined with one another. We see this pattern repeat constantly with ancient goddesses, whose names, symbols, attributes, and stories are commonly recycled and fused together.

Third, the most important and primeval goddesses are the Triple Goddess: Mother, Maiden, Destruction/Death. This trio repeats across cultures and is always popular. It is a metaphysical model of the cosmos representing the cycle of life.

Stories of dying-and-rising gods are all goddess mythologies; they are a genre, demonstrating her mastery of the cycle of life.

The goddess holds paradoxes in her hand. She is love and war, the virgin and the harlot, mother and destruction. She is all these things and more.

The title Virgin is applied widely to goddesses and does not mean they never had sex. In human terms, it means an independent young woman, childless and unmarried, or a priestess. For goddesses, it is a term of respect — as in the Virgin Mother of God.

When a woman becomes pregnant through ritual sex and the father is not tracked, it is called a virgin birth. There are countless examples in the ancient world, including Helen of Troy and Alexander the Great, both born of queens who claimed not to have been impregnated by their royal husbands.

Dr. Sinclair, and all of today's academics, write off temple prostitution. They completely misunderstand the nature of sacred sexuality and reduce temple offerings to mere commerce. They ignore the evidence of Tamar the qedesha in the Bible and Shamhat the harimtu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, both of whom engage in ritual sex at critical turning points in the narratives.

Let's not forget that ritual prostitution and sacred sex never went away — it still exists in India today in the form of the Devadasis, though they now survive in a degraded state on the fringes of society. Tantric sex, from Hindu Shakti traditions, is an advanced set of techniques for achieving ecstasy and communion with the divine through ritual sexual practices. Somehow, none of this data makes it into her analysis.

Dr. Sinclair throws around terms like "misinformation," "pseudoscience," "unsound," and "embarrassing," making it clear that we should all simply defer to the academic "experts."

I have studied these "experts" in some detail, and I find these 21st-century postmodernists to be woefully lacking.

Dr. Sinclair carefully engages with all the source material, yet routinely dismisses the authors as liars with a wave of her hand, just because they don’t fit her ideological position — without offering any better accounting of the data.

Contemporary academics routinely engage with this material in bad faith and take the least charitable readings at all times, minimizing and cherry-picking the data. They don’t even try to make sense of the data — they just label everyone they dislike as unsophisticated racists and misogynists, whether in the present day or the ancient past.

Endless critical theory dismantles narratives and leaves behind nothing but rubble; it does not result in truth.

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I interviewed Bernie Taylor, who is a naturalist, author, and cultural astronomer. He has written two books: Biological Time (2004) and Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero (2017). Bernie’s work centers on Paleolithic cave art (back to 40,000 years), which he believes encodes humanity’s earliest astronomy, self-realization, and biological knowledge — material that still shapes religious practice and story today. He gives many talks to academic and private audiences and has appeared on over 200 podcasts.

Like me, Bernie stumbled into the mother goddess material, which he discovered by studying the city of Ephesus, a critically important city in mother goddess traditions. Ephesus is on the Aegean coast of modern-day Turkey and was once a major pilgrimage site as it was home to the grandest temple and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the famed temple to Artemis.

Ephesus and this temple are also important in the history of Christianity. The Apostle Paul visited the temple in the Book of Acts and nearly started a riot after insulting their traditions. Later Christians destroyed the temple in 401 AD after paganism was banned in the Roman Empire, and the site was razed to the ground with all the stones hauled off for other building projects.

Yet the goddess traditions in Ephesus did not die off, they were absorbed into Christianity. By tradition, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is said to have lived in Ephesus with the Apostle John after the resurrection. In 431 AD, the Catholic Church sanctified the Virgin Mary, with Ephesus serving as the home of all Marian traditions, which continues today.

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Artemis is a complex character as she syncretized different goddesses from Anatolia and the Greek pantheon. Anatolian Artemis was the supreme matriarchal mother goddess who was never created and had always existed since time immemorial.

The Greek Artemis, on the other hand, was a young goddess and submissive to patriarchy, she was the daughter of Zeus and twin sister of Apollo. In the Hellenistic era after Alexander the Great’s conquest, these two disparate Artemises were combined into one, leading to theological disputes that carried on into the Roman era.

Bernie prepared a presentation that traces the symbolism of Anatolian Artemis back through the most ancient Neolithic sites in Turkey, Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe, demonstrating the continuity of mother goddess traditions from the first settlements at the dawn of agriculture.

We touch on some of the evidence at Göbekli Tepe, including the motif of the seated woman giving birth, flanked by lions. This symbolism has been commonly misinterpreted by scholars who have failed to recognize that these are birth scenes and have instead made ridiculous claims about sex and detached penises.

Bernie also introduced me to some interesting new DNA studies (published January 2026) on Çatalhöyük that provide hard evidence of matrilineal society in the Neolithic. A genetic study of 395 individuals buried under Çatalhöyük homes found maternal lines (mother-to-daughter-to-daughter) determined the burials and that women/females received more grave goods than males.

We also talked about Amazon warriors and various possible interpretations for the breast-like features on the coat of Anatolian Artemis that have long intrigued researchers.

And more! Enjoy the conversation with Bernie Taylor. You can find his work at:

https://beforeorion.com/

You can also see the interview on YouTube:

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study we dig into one of the most turbulent periods in the long fight against the Mother Goddess.

King Hezekiah

King Hezekiah was one of the most important Hebrew kings and one of the great Yahwist reformers who worked to eliminate the goddesses and pagan idols. He was considered a near-messianic figure, remembered for his dedication to Yahweh and his success in holding the Assyrians back from destroying Jerusalem. Hezekiah ruled Judah from 715 to 686 BCE, and he is exceptionally well attested by archaeologists, having left permanent marks on the city of Jerusalem that can still be seen today.

As a young man, Hezekiah witnessed the destruction of Israel at the hands of the Assyrians, and he spent much of his reign contending with that same aggressive empire. Refugees from the fallen northern kingdom streamed into Judah during this period, including followers of the northern prophets.

Hezekiah was preceded by his father, the pagan King Ahaz, who had built an altar to Ashur inside the Hebrew Temple itself. Ahaz was condemned by the prophet Isaiah and by the biblical writers generally as a committed pagan — he worshipped Baal, sacrificed his own children, and made offerings on the high places. His son Hezekiah wanted nothing to do with any of it. He didn’t merely decline to follow in his father’s footsteps; he refused Ahaz even a proper burial.

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Yahwist Reformer

Hezekiah was one of only two biblical kings recorded as being fully committed to Yahweh. He carried out dramatic religious reforms and set out to exterminate pagan religion in Judah entirely, with the prophet Isaiah serving as his mentor and adviser throughout. Hezekiah smashed the sacred stones, cut down the Asherah poles, and destroyed the high places used for community worship.

Hezekiah reopened and repaired the Temple and reinstated the Passover Festival. He closed the public altars, smashed the idols, and cut down the Asherah poles across the kingdom. These reforms went far beyond the symbolic — Hezekiah sought to centralize worship entirely at the Jerusalem Temple, ordering that all offerings be consolidated into the hands of the temple priests.

This centralization of worship was a critical step in the formation of the Judeo-Christian traditions. It marks the first real attempt by temple priests to consolidate all religious worship under their own authority.

Paganism had always been a do-it-yourself religious framework, rooted in family and community, where anyone could build an altar and make an offering. The introduction of religious authorities who mediated all worship — who stripped ordinary people of the independence to create their own sacred spaces — would become a defining feature of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions that followed.

Smashing the Bronze Serpent

Among Hezekiah’s reforms, one act stands out as especially striking: he “broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made.” This was the bronze serpent Moses had fashioned in Numbers 21:6–9 to heal the Israelites from a plague of snakes sent by Yahweh. By Hezekiah’s time, the relic had been kept and venerated for roughly 500 years.

In Hebrew, “Nehushtan” means something like “a mere piece of brass” — a derogatory, dismissive label, though English Bibles typically present it as simply the object’s proper name. This is one of the great flashpoints in the long divorce between Yahwism and the older religious world it grew out of, and a clear example of a goddess-adjacent symbol being deliberately purged by monotheistic reformers working to push its worship underground.

It is safe to conjecture that the Garden of Eden story with the serpent as villian was written in the same general time period as part of these reforms.

Israeli archaeologists have found evidence of Hezekiah’s reforms. We have discussed Tel Arad previously, it is the only temple site ever recovered in Judah from the First Temple period. The holy of holies in the Tel Arad temple had been carefully dismantled and buried by hand with sand. The pair of altars and pair standing stones were laid over on their sides and not broken.

These pairs correspond to Yahweh and Asherah, and simultaneously demonstrates Israelite paganism, and also the reforms of Hezekiah. Residue on the incense altars were analyzed in 2020 with the larger altar to Yahweh having frankincense, and the smaller altar to Asherah containing cannabis.

Archaeologists excavated Lachish, which we will discuss more below, and they found something unusual, inside of a shrine, they found a commode alongside smashed altars. This also appears to be evidence of Hezekiah’s reforms, and tracks with the events during King Jehu when they desecrated the temple of Baal and made it into a latrine in 2 Kings 27.

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Hezekiah’s Tunnel

Hezekiah rebelled against Assyria and stopped paying tribute, allying himself with Egypt instead. Knowing full well that Jerusalem would face an Assyrian siege as a result, he undertook major building campaigns to prepare the city, fortifying the Broad Wall of Jerusalem and constructing towers along it.

Hezekiah also commissioned one of the most impressive engineering achievements of the ancient world. Jerusalem’s water supply came from the Gihon Spring, which lay outside the city walls — a serious vulnerability in the event of a siege. To protect the water and deny it to the Assyrians, Hezekiah had a long tunnel cut through solid rock to channel the spring’s water directly into the City of David.

The tunnel runs 583 yards (533 meters) and was excavated by two separate teams working from opposite ends, meeting almost perfectly in the middle — a feat that required remarkably sophisticated engineering and measurement for the era. Modern scholars still haven’t fully determined how the two teams managed to find each other underground.

The tunnel was eventually sealed by an earthquake sometime in the Middle Ages, but archaeologists later rediscovered it, and visitors can walk through it today. An inscription carved into the tunnel wall commemorates the exact moment, over 2,700 years ago, when the two digging teams broke through and met.

It was Hezekiah who blocked the upper outlet of the Spring of Gihon and channeled it down to the west side of the City of David. And Hezekiah prospered in all that he did.

-2 Chronicles 32:30

Attack on Judah

In 701 BCE, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, attacked Judah, laying waste to the countryside and capturing every fortified city in his path. Lachish, a heavily defended fortress roughly 80 miles from Jerusalem and the second most important city in Judah, fell to the Assyrians in a major and decisive victory. Sennacherib was proud enough of the achievement to commission huge stone reliefs celebrating it, which now reside in the British Museum — the same reliefs we discussed in the last episode.

The biblical writers, tellingly, barely mention this catastrophic defeat. What they do record is that after Lachish fell and its people were slaughtered, Hezekiah’s envoys went there to meet the Assyrians and offer tribute. Hezekiah stripped the Temple and the royal treasury of all their gold and silver to pay the Assyrians off and spare Jerusalem a siege.

This meeting between Hezekiah and Sennacherib was independently recorded by the Assyrians themselves. Sennacherib’s own inscriptions describe laying siege to Jerusalem and departing only after extracting heavy tribute, boasting that he left Hezekiah trapped in his own palace like a bird in a cage.

The Assyrian account inflates the silver figure from 300 to 800 talents and adds Hezekiah’s daughters and concubines to the tribute list, but is otherwise strikingly consistent with the biblical record. This account survives on the Taylor Prism, a large six-sided cuneiform inscription detailing Sennacherib’s campaigns, unearthed in the ruins of Nineveh and now held in the British Museum alongside the Lachish reliefs.

Hezekiah’s Despair

The biblical narrative doesn’t end with the tribute payment. According to the text, Sennacherib accepted the payment and departed, only to return and threaten Jerusalem’s destruction a second time. This time, the city was said to be saved through direct divine intervention.

Upon hearing that the Assyrians had returned, Hezekiah despaired. He put on sackcloth and went to the Temple to pray for deliverance, arguing before Yahweh that every other god the Assyrians had destroyed was nothing more than wood and stone — while Yahweh alone was the one true God.

The Miracle

According to the Bible, Yahweh heard Hezekiah and saved Jerusalem.

The Assyrians left no record of any such catastrophe — though it’s fair to say a decimated army isn’t the kind of thing an empire tends to memorialize in its own annals. Interestingly, the Egyptians preserved a strikingly similar legend about the very same campaign: they claimed Sennacherib was repulsed in Egypt when his army was decimated in a single night by a plague of field mice that chewed through their bowstrings and shield-thongs, rendering them defenseless.

Whatever actually happened, the outcome is not in dispute: Jerusalem survived and was never sacked by the Assyrians, even as the rest of Judah was laid waste around it. This deliverance became the foundation for a powerful and lasting belief among the Hebrews — that Yahweh was a truly great God, and that Jerusalem itself was inviolable, protected by divine decree. That confidence held strong for more than a century, until the city was finally burned by the Babylonians.

Sennacherib on the other hand, came to an untimely end. He was murdered in 681 BCE in his palace at Nineveh, killed by his own sons as punishment for his sacrilege — the desecration of Babylon’s sacred temples and the flooding of the ancient city.

Next episode we will continue in the book of Kings with the pagan Manassah, the longest lived and among the most successful kings of Judah, and his grandson, the second great reformer, Josiah, who was not as long-lived and successful.

In this period, the Yahwist prophets confronted the traditional religion of Baal and the mother goddess Asherah, while the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were embroiled in ongoing wars with their neighbors and turbulent royal succession.

This episode focuses on the prophets Elijah and Elisha, whose influence inspired the bloody coup by Jehu that overthrew the House of Omri in Israel. Queen Jezebel — the most vilified woman in the Bible — was famously assassinated, as was her daughter Athaliah, the only woman to ever rule Jerusalem in her own right.

We are joined in the discussion by our resident pagan priestess Lisa, and the apostate orthodox priest Joshua.

In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we dig into the brutal and theologically fascinating history of the Assyrian Empire, the dominant military force of the early Iron Age. The Assyrians destroyed the nation of Israel in 722 BCE and sent ten of the twelve tribes into exile, never to be heard from again.

The Rise of Assyria

For three centuries, from 912 to 612 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the most powerful the world had yet seen, and sophisticated in its own way. The Assyrians exercised a highly political theology where their god Ashur was the greatest power in the cosmos and ordained them to rule as his servants. Brutality was the will of the gods, divine punishment for the failure to submit.

The Assyrians built a model of leadership and bureaucracy that later empires would study and imitate. They were the first to mass-produce iron weapons, superior in every way to the bronze arms of their rivals. Their army was disciplined and professional, their tactics advanced, and their siege engines were the pride of the empire — purpose-built machines engineered to breach even the mightiest walled cities.

The Assyrians earned a reputation for extraordinary cruelty, and it was a deliberate, well-documented policy. The palace reliefs at Nineveh, Nimrud, and Khorsabad depict flaying captives alive, impaling rebels on stakes, and stacking severed heads into pyramids outside conquered cities — carved in intricate detail as boasts, not incidental battle scenes.

Amputating limbs and gouging out eyes, then leaving victims alive to wander as walking warnings, was a calculated strategy to instill fear and ensure submission, not cruelty for its own sake. Assyrian kings framed these campaigns of terror as carrying out the will of Ashur: the king executed divine judgment on rebels who, in Assyrian ideology, had broken their sworn oath to the god.

Assyria’s reach extended across the major trade routes of the ancient world, dominating Babylonia, western Persia, Anatolia, and the Levant, with its territory eventually stretching as far as Egypt. Israel and Judah, sitting astride vital trade corridors, played an outsized role in this imperial story, and the Assyrians appear throughout the biblical record as a result.

This is one of the best-documented periods in the ancient Near East — historians and archaeologists have corroborated the biblical account against the records of Israel’s neighbors, so we can read these conflicts from both sides.

Assyria’s achievements weren’t limited to war and theology. Building on medical foundations laid by Babylon, and absorbing the knowledge and talent of every people it conquered, Assyria made real progress in medical science. Ashurnasirpal II (884–859 BCE), who consolidated Assyrian rule across the Levant and Canaan, went so far as to compile the first systematic lists of plants and animals in the empire, bringing scribes along on his campaigns specifically to record new discoveries.

Assyrian expansion along the Mediterranean coast began in earnest under Shalmaneser III (859–824 BCE), who extracted tribute from the wealthy Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon during the years Ahab and Jezebel ruled Israel. Assyrian records confirm that Ahab’s successor, King Jehu, submitted to Shalmaneser III and paid him tribute. We showed the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser in the last episode.

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Ashur, Supreme God

Assyrian religion offers a striking parallel to the religious transformation underway in Israel and Judah. The Assyrians practiced a form of monolatry that approached, and clearly influenced, later monotheism. They insisted their god Ashur was the supreme power in the universe, but they didn’t ban the worship of other gods outright — they simply recast every foreign deity as another manifestation of Ashur himself. It was shrewd political theology, allowing the empire to maintain religious and political consistency across its territory while avoiding the destructive conflict that comes with forcibly suppressing local temples.

Assyrian military dominance was treated as self-evident proof of Ashur’s supremacy, and the imperial propaganda machine made sure everyone knew it. The Assyrians believed Ashur had chosen them as his people and granted them the divine right to rule over other nations — a belief that directly shaped Assyrian identity, ideology, and military expansion.

Theology and empire grew in lockstep, and the theology was actively rewritten to justify political dominance. The empire wanted Ashur acknowledged as supreme, not other gods erased — monolatry was a political project first. Tellingly, Ashur’s cult disappeared entirely once Assyria collapsed; the god had no independent life apart from the imperial project that created him. His theology was so thoroughly a political instrument that it had no staying power once the political structure it served was gone.

Assyrian religion was part of a broader current running through the ancient world in this era — the Axial Age — which pushed cultures toward higher, more transcendent conceptions of the divine. Hebrew monotheism, Zoroastrianism, Chinese Taoism, Confucianism, and strands of Greek philosophy all emerged from this same current, each rejecting the older, more immanent understanding of the divine found in nature worship and shamanism.

This shift had consequences that fell disproportionately on women. Assyria was a deeply patriarchal culture. Women’s legal and property rights were severely curtailed compared to older Mesopotamian cultures, and their sexuality was tightly controlled by their families.

Tiglath-Pileser III

Assyria had fallen into civil war before Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BCE) seized power and revitalized the empire. Many scholars regard his reign as the true beginning of the Neo-Assyrian Empire proper. He reorganized the military into what became the most effective fighting force history had yet produced. In 729 BCE, he marched into Babylonia and captured the king of Babylon himself. Tiglath-Pileser appears directly in the biblical text as the conqueror who brought Israel to heel and demanded heavy tribute from Samaria.

King Ahaz and the Altar of Ashur

In Judah, King Ahaz became a vassal of Tiglath-Pileser, paying tribute and allying himself with Assyria against Israel and Syria. Ahaz was thoroughly pagan in his practice, embracing Assyrian religion wholesale. He even built an altar to Ashur and installed it inside the Temple of Yahweh itself — an act that scandalized the biblical writers. Ahaz went further still, sacrificing his own children, placing him among the most offensive kings in the biblical record, second only to Ahab and Jezebel in the eyes of the Deuteronomistic historians.

Ahaz’s submission to Assyria was total and self-interested. Facing pressure from Aram and Israel, he turned to Tiglath-Pileser directly for rescue, stripping the treasuries of both the Temple and the royal palace to pay for it.

The altar itself has a remarkable origin story. Ahaz traveled to Damascus to meet Tiglath-Pileser in person, and while there, he saw an altar that impressed him enough to send detailed construction plans home ahead of him.

The image is hard to miss: the altar of Yahweh is physically shoved aside to make room for the altar modeled on Assyrian religion, with the king of Judah himself performing the sacrifices.

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The Siege of Israel

Tiglath-Pileser III died in 727 BCE and was succeeded by Shalmaneser V. King Hoshea of Israel, perhaps sensing weakness in the transition, stopped paying tribute and allied himself with Egypt against Assyria in 725 BCE. It was a fatal miscalculation. Shalmaneser responded by invading Israel outright and laying siege to Samaria for three years. Hoshea himself was captured and imprisoned.

The fall of Samaria in 722 BCE brought a permanent end to Israel as an independent kingdom. Its people were deported across the Assyrian Empire, scattering into history as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

The Assyrians were not indiscriminate about resettlement— deportees were allowed to bring their families and possessions and were settled on new land, while people from other conquered territories were moved in to replace them. Once a conquered population submitted to the central authority, the Assyrians treated them as Assyrians. Resettlement served as a form of forced assimilation, and those who complied were treated relatively well, while resistance was met with slaughter.

The biblical writers, naturally, tell a different story about why Israel fell. For them, the cause was not Assyrian military superiority but Israel’s failure to worship Yahweh properly — even as the Assyrians themselves credited their victories to the superior power of Ashur.

Biblical writers performed the ultimate theological judo when they successfully recast the destruction of Israel, and later Judah, by outside powers as Yahweh’s punishment of Israelite polytheism, rather than victories for the Assyrian Ashur or Babylonian Marduk.

The list of offenses reads like a checklist of everything the Yahwist reform movement was working to stamp out: idols, golden calves, an Asherah pole, worship of the starry hosts, worship of Baal, child sacrifice, and divination.

In the aftermath, the king of Assyria repopulated the towns of Samaria with people brought in from Babylon, Kuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, who took over the towns the Israelites had left behind.

After Samaria: Sargon II to Ashurbanipal

Shalmaneser V died suddenly during the siege of Samaria and was succeeded by Sargon II, under whom the empire reached its greatest political and military heights. Sargon II was followed by Sennacherib (705–681 BCE), who campaigned widely and ruthlessly, devastating Judah and laying siege to Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah.

Sennacherib made the ancient city of Nineveh his capital, building there the famed “Palace Without Rival” along with a vast library. Nineveh was dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, and many scholars now believe that Sennacherib’s grand palace gardens at Nineveh were, in fact, the true “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” — since no trace of that famous Wonder of the Ancient World has ever been found in Babylon itself.

In 701 BCE, Sennacherib sieged the Judean city of Lachish, a critical fortified city. The loss of Lachish was devastating to King Hezekiah, but the Bible gives the event only a brief mention. The victory was important enough to Sennacherib that he commissioned an enormous carved relief detailing the battle in all its bloody glory for his palace in Nineveh.

The relief covers the walls of a large room and measures 39 feet long and 16.7 feet high and currently resides in the British Museum. These contrasting accounts, Biblical vs Assyrian, is one of the clearest examples of how the Book of Kings is total political propaganda. We will explore this event more fully in the next episode on King Hezekiah.

Sennacherib’s ambitions eventually turned toward Babylon, which he invaded, breaking its canals and flooding the city before looting its ancient temples — an act of sacrilege so extreme that even his own people considered it beyond the pale. Sennacherib was ultimately assassinated in his own palace by his sons, who saw his crimes against the old Babylonian gods as unforgivable.

His successor was Esarhaddon, one of those very sons, who secured the throne by killing all his brothers and rivals in a brief civil war. Esarhaddon went on to expand the empire into Egypt and secured vassal treaties across the region.

The last great king of Assyria was Ashurbanipal, who reigned from 669-631 BCE and is remembered above all for the extraordinary library he built at Nineveh, sending envoys to every corner of the empire to acquire texts for preservation in the Royal Library. Ashurbanipal is famed as a scholar king who spoke many languages and was highly literate.

After Ashurbanipal’s death, the empire began to unravel. It had grown too large to govern effectively, and its outlying regions began breaking away one by one. In 612 BCE, a coalition of Babylonians, Persians, Medes, and Scythians sacked and burned Nineveh, massacring its residents. The destruction of Nineveh was complete and systematic - it seems Assyria’s enemies truly hated them. Ashur’s cult center in Assur was plundered, and the temples desecrated. Worship of Ashur disappeared along with the empire he championed.

In Nineveh, the largest city in the world at the time, the brutal combat went house-to-house, and the temples to Ashur were completely razed to the ground. The king was killed, and a new Assyrian king attempted to hold on in exile for a few more years before finally falling at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon at Carchemish in 605 BCE. We will also discuss this event in more detail when we get to King Josiah.

There is a strange grace in how the story closes. The fires that destroyed Nineveh baked its clay tablets hard and buried them beneath the rubble, preserving them for millennia. The catastrophe inadvertently produced one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in history when the ruins were unearthed 2,454 years later, in 1842 CE. The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal yielded a treasure trove, vast quantities of art and some 30,000 cuneiform tablets, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, and also clear evidence of the ritual use of cannabis.

In the next couple of episodes, we will get into the great kings of Judah, the Yahwist reformers Hezekiah and Josiah, and the successful pagan Manasseh. This is a critical period in the development of radical Yahwist theology and the fight with the goddesses.

Goddess Bible Study continues with one of the most colorful and pivotal chapters in the divorce saga of the mother goddess, the marital dispute between the prophet Hosea and his wife, the qedesha Gomer.

The biblical book of Hosea tells the story of the prophet who lived in Israel during the kingdom’s final days. This short book reads on multiple levels, between the prophet and his wife, Yahweh and Israel, God and Goddess. Unfortunately, it is a heated argument that ultimately ends in divorce.

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Hosea is the first of the twelve minor prophets, and his book is considered one of the oldest texts in the Bible, written around 760–720 BCE. Hosea preached doom for the nation of Israel, warning that if the people continued their pagan worship and failed to turn completely to Yahweh, destruction would follow.

At the center of Hosea’s story is his marriage to a woman named Gomer, described in the text as a “woman of adultery.” Gomer was most likely a qedesha, though the text does not say so explicitly — at the very least, she was a matriarchal Canaanite woman. Their marriage was contentious. Gomer bore three children, but only the first was fathered by Hosea.

Gomer is typically regarded as a cheating wife and a sinful woman, an assumption rooted in the idea that her culture shared the same patriarchal norms of marital monogamy that we take for granted today. That assumption deserves to be challenged.

Gomer is better understood as representative of the broader society of her time — a Canaanite everywoman, and most likely a holy woman of the qedesha tradition, who would have had considerably more latitude in matters of sexuality and childbearing than an ordinary married woman. Qedesha were free to marry, but they were known to make difficult wives precisely because of their independence.

In the allegory of the book, Gomer’s “adultery” functions as a metaphor for the spiritual adultery of Israel — a nation that worshipped many gods and goddesses rather than Yahweh alone. The Book of Hosea is a layered poetic allegory that operates on several levels simultaneously: it is a conversation between the prophet and his wife, Yahweh and Israel, and Yahweh and Asherah. At its deepest level, this is the argument that leads to divorce - the final declaration and paperwork come later.

The names of the three children are symbolic and carry the weight of this allegory. The first son is named Jezreel, after the location of Jezebel’s palace — the very place where the military commander Jehu massacred her family during his violent coup. Though Jehu was a Yahwist, his treachery and bloodthirstiness were remembered with shame.

The second and third children, who belonged to Gomer alone and were not fathered by Hosea, are given the names “Not Loved” and “Not My People.” Yahweh applies these names to Israel’s children because they lack the proper father, and the names almost certainly reflect Hosea’s own feelings toward his wife’s children as well.

The extended passage in Hosea 2 is, at its core, a declaration of war against the goddess traditions. “Rebuke your mother!” Yahweh announces that he will put an end to the Mother Goddess’s celebrations, terminate her festivals, and punish her people for burning incense to Baal.

The Yahwists want to shut down the goddess traditions entirely — and with them, put the qedesha out of business. The charge of bearing “illegitimate children” is leveled because the society practiced maternity rather than paternity: lineage ran through the mother, not the father, and the Yahwists found this intolerable.

The story of Hosea and Gomer mirrors this conflict at the domestic level. Hosea seeks to end Gomer’s independence just as Yahweh seeks to end goddess worship and her nature festivals, her carousing, and her sexual rituals. When Hosea plans to shut Gomer in and cut her off from her lovers, it is simultaneously Yahweh declaring that the Goddess will also have no lovers — and that he intends to contain her.

The language Yahweh uses to describe the new order is telling. Ishi means “my husband” and Baali means “my lord” — the latter having been a conventional Canaanite greeting and term of devotion. The Yahwists banned its use entirely, scrubbing even the word from acceptable speech.

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From there, Yahweh moved to absorb the powers of nature and creation that had belonged to the Goddess, claiming them as his own. The word Jezreel means, “God plants” or “God sows,” while also being a town name.

In the third chapter, Hosea approaches Gomer with valuables — barley and silver, since coinage did not yet exist — in an effort to win her back. These verses are often read as Hosea purchasing Gomer from another man, but the text does not explicitly say who received the payment. Given that the qedesha were masters of their own behavior and kept the gifts they received in exchange for their favors, it seems more likely that Hosea gave the gifts directly to Gomer to win back her affection. He then tells her she must be sexually faithful to him, and pledges the same in return.

The book does not record her response - Gomer never speaks at all in the book. For all the reader knows, Gomer may have demanded a divorce and left with the children. She never appears again after chapter 3.

The dispute described in Hosea was not only a cosmic event between Yahweh and the Goddess. It was a rupture within the human community itself — a divorce between men and women, between the Yahwist priests and the priestesses who were their own wives, daughters, and mothers. The sacred traditions these women carried had to be repressed and expelled.

The book goes on without Gomer, and Hosea continues to complain of Israel’s sins.

He pledges to “destroy your mother.”

The hostility toward the feminine divine that runs through Hosea is not unique to him — it is a defining feature of the Biblical prophetic tradition. Other prophets of Yahweh would continue to use stark, often brutal sexual language to condemn Israel and Judah for their matriarchal and pagan ways.

The Yahwists wanted to normalize the patriarchal family structure and eliminate the older tribal customs that preceded it. The general hostility to the feminine divine pervades the Biblical texts, with the notable exception of the works attributed to King Solomon.

The contrast with the Greek world is instructive - both cultures imposed firm patriarchy and mandated marital monogamy for women. The Greeks reordered their Olympian pantheon and demoted the goddesses, subordinating them to Zeus and a male-dominated divine hierarchy. The Yahwists went further: they eliminated the goddesses altogether. The erasure was so complete that the Hebrew language developed no word for “goddess” at all.

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Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel

The prophet Isaiah was a contemporary of Hosea and was active in Judah during the reigns of Kings Ahaz and Hezekiah in the 8th century BCE. Like Hosea, Isaiah predicted doom for the Hebrews if they continued in their idolatrous ways — and his condemnations extend explicitly to women who enjoyed lives of independence and adornment.

Isaiah’s misogyny runs deep, and it is not incidental to his theology; the subordination of women and the suppression of goddess worship are two sides of the same campaign.

We will revisit all three of these prophets at length later on, here is a sample to show the continuity with Hosea.

Jeremiah was a critical reformer who lived late in the first temple period under King Josiah and witnessed its destruction by the Babylonians. Jeremiah issued the divorce papers and had the final argument about the Queen of Heaven as the people were all walking into exile with Jerusalem on fire behind them.

The prophet Ezekiel lived in Judah during the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and departed with the first wave of exiles. Like Hosea, Ezekiel makes extensive use of sexual language and imagery — women’s bodies, infidelity, and prostitution serving as his primary metaphors for Israel’s religious unfaithfulness.

Yahweh called Ezekiel to prophesy against the exiled Israelites for their stubborn and obstinate behavior. Ezekiel accused Israel of breaking the covenant and warned that Jerusalem would be attacked again as a consequence.

Among his targets were the women prophets, who can be understood as qedesha — identifiable by the magic charms on their wrists and the veils they wore. Ezekiel’s charges against them are striking: he accuses them of holding the powers of life and death, killing those who should not have died and sparing those who should not have lived, in direct defiance of Yahweh’s judgment. This is not merely a condemnation of folk magic; it is an acknowledgment that these women wielded genuine spiritual authority — authority the Yahwists were determined to extinguish.

Ezekiel’s rebuke of the women is extensive and sexually graphic. This is a small sample.

Next Goddess Bible Study, we will return to the Book of Kings and pick up the story with the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, and the Yahwist reformation in Judah under King Hezekiah.

Watch the podcast discussion on YouTube.

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Goddess Bible Study continues in the 9th century BCE with the Book of Kings. In this period, the Yahwist prophets confronted the traditional religion of Baal and the mother goddess Asherah, while the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were embroiled in ongoing wars with their neighbors and turbulent royal succession.

This episode focuses on the prophets Elijah and Elisha, whose influence inspired the bloody coup by Jehu that overthrew the House of Omri in Israel. Queen Jezebel — the most vilified woman in the Bible — was famously assassinated, as was her daughter Athaliah, the only woman to ever rule Jerusalem in her own right.

Israel and Judah maintained an uneasy alliance while fighting wars with Aram, Edom, and Syria. Meanwhile, the shadow of the Assyrian Empire loomed on the horizon. King Ahab was a respected military commander, but was ultimately killed on the battlefield, setting off a succession of short-lived kings.

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The previous episode concluded with the Battle of the Prophets on Mount Carmel. According to the Bible, Elijah’s victory brought the rains back after three years of drought that had caused great suffering across the land. No archaeological record confirms the drought — but we do know that the Yahwists were ascendant in this period.

The story picks up with Elijah fleeing into the wilderness to escape Jezebel’s wrath, after killing the 450 prophets of Baal — while leaving the prophets of Asherah untouched.

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. He traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. There, Yahweh appeared to Elijah.

The Bible portrays King Ahab as weak, passive, and sulking, while Queen Jezebel is cast as dominant, manipulative, and politically shrewd. The historical record tells a different story — Ahab was a formidable military leader, actively engaged in the wars of his day.

Much of the Book of Kings reads as political propaganda, written to denigrate the enemies of the Yahwist movement regardless of their actual popularity or effectiveness as rulers. The Bible is especially vitriolic toward Ahab and Jezebel — which suggests they were real and serious adversaries.

Jezebel is blamed for introducing idolatry and foreign gods to Israel — but these gods were native, and Jezebel was defending the traditional religion of her people. From her perspective, it was the Yahwists who were the dangerous insurgents, armed with revolutionary new ideas.

In 1 Kings 21, Ahab covets a vineyard beside his palace, but the owner refuses to sell. Jezebel finds her husband sulking and mocks him: “Aren’t you the king? Get up — I will get you the vineyard.” She then conspires to have the owner falsely accused of blasphemy and killed, allowing Ahab to seize the land.

The prophet Elijah confronts them both for the crime:

This pivotal moment seals Jezebel’s fate in the narrative. Not long after, Ahab is killed in battle, and his son proves a short-lived replacement. In Judah, the Yahwist king Jehoshaphat succeeds his father Asa and continues his reforms — Asa being the king who, in the last episode, deposed Queen Mother Maacah for carving an image of Asherah.

Here we get one of the few references to the transgender qadesh being expelled from Judah — and yet again, the qedesha priestesses and the prophets of Asherah are left untouched. This culture war played out over centuries, and the priestesses proved a much harder target than the trans folks.

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Ahab's death is one of the more vivid stories in 1 Kings 22. He disguised himself on the battlefield, but a randomly fired arrow found the gap in his armor. When his chariot was brought back, the dogs licked his blood from the floor — fulfilling Elijah's prophecy exactly.

Young King Ahaziah proved less capable than his father and grandfather. After a serious fall inside his own palace, he sent messengers to consult Baal-zebub of Ekron — but a prophet of Yahweh intercepted them and announced the king’s imminent death.

The name Baal-zebub means “lord of the flies” — almost certainly a mocking distortion coined by the Biblical writers rather than the god’s actual name.

Ahaziah was succeeded by his brother Jehoram. Shortly after, the prophet Elijah died and was taken up to heaven in his final supernatural act, passing his mantle to the prophet Elisha.

Elisha was not nice to children.

Moab’s rebellion — which we covered last week alongside the Mesha Stele — is recorded in 2 Kings 3.

Elisha performs a series of healings and miracles before ultimately setting in motion a bloody palace coup that would claim many lives. Elisha instructed one of the Sons of the Prophets to go to the battlefield, find the Israelite commander Jehu, and anoint him king of Israel.

Jehu is a confirmed historical figure who ruled Israel from 841 to 814 BCE — the earliest king in the Biblical narrative to be verified in the archaeological record. His name is also one of the earliest theophoric names for Yahweh, meaning “Yahweh is he.” The emergence of theophoric names is a key marker scholars use to trace the spread of Yahwism as a cultural force. Jehoshaphat and Joash are two other Yahweh-rooted names from the same 9th-century BCE.

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (c. 841 BCE) depicts Jehu — or his envoy — prostrating before the Assyrian king, providing extra-biblical confirmation of his reign and its date. The original is held in the British Museum.

Even the Bible cannot fully rehabilitate Jehu. He comes across as treasonous and murderous, and his killing spree is remembered with shame by the later prophet Hosea (Hosea 1:4–5).

Upon his anointing, Jehu assassinated both the king of Israel and the king of Judah, along with Queen Mother Jezebel and their extended families — dozens of people in all. The assassination of Jezebel is particularly symbolic, as we will see.

Jehu was a committed Yahwist. He destroyed the temple of Baal and massacred everyone inside — but paganism did not disappear from Israel. The Biblical writers complain that the Golden Calves at Bethel and Dan remained standing, and the context makes clear that goddess worship continued and the qedesha remained untouched.

It is precisely this period that has yielded the most significant archaeological evidence linking Yahweh and Asherah.

Jezebel faced her death with dignity, taking time to paint her eyes and dress her hair before appearing at the window. She was thrown down by her own palace eunuchs, her blood spattering on the stones below. Her flesh was consumed by dogs — fulfilling Elijah’s grisly prophecy to the letter.

Her defenestration is one of the most loaded images in the Hebrew Bible: a great queen, hurled from her own window, devoured in the street. Over the centuries, Jezebel’s name has become synonymous with female treachery, sexual manipulation, temptation, and wickedness — a shorthand for everything the patriarchal tradition feared in a powerful woman.

She is comparable to the tragic Greek figure Clytemnestra, killed by her son Orestes in revenge for the death of his father Agamemnon, as told in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Both Jezebel and Clytemnestra were politically powerful queens representing older matriarchal traditions, recast as villains in Iron Age patriarchal narratives that celebrated their gruesome deaths as righteous justice.

Jehu was not finished. Having killed both kings of Israel and Judah in a single campaign, and the Queen Mother of Israel, he systematically hunted down and killed their families — all of them.

His most sacrilegious act came last. He invited every remaining servant of Baal to a great sacrifice at the temple, locked the doors, and slaughtered everyone inside. Then he desecrated the temple itself, turning it into a latrine.

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There is no clear archaeological evidence that this particular temple desecration occurred, but archaeologists did discover a Judean temple at Lachish that was desecrated by the installation of a toilet, confirming it was at least a known practice.

Jehu proved to be a successful king, establishing a dynasty in Israel that lasted four generations. And yet, once again, the Yahwists succeeded against Baal but made no headway against paganism more broadly. The Golden Calves at Bethel and Dan remained standing, Asherah worship goes unconfronted, and Asherah poles are not mentioned. The Divine Council was intact. In the 9th century BCE, Yahweh was still one god among many.

Our third and final Queen Mother in this tragic trilogy is Athaliah — daughter of Jezebel and Ahab, wife of the king of Judah, Queen Mother, and ultimately sole ruler of Jerusalem in her own right.

After Jehu killed her son, King Ahaziah, and decimated her family, Athaliah launched a killing spree of her own, slaughtering the remaining royal heirs to seize the throne. One infant survived, hidden away by a family member in the temple.

Athaliah is the only woman in history to rule from Jerusalem as a sovereign queen. She held the throne for six years, from 841 to 835 BCE — until the Yahwists assassinated her, installed the seven-year-old Joash as king, and tore down the temple of Baal.

Joash reigned in Jerusalem for forty years before being killed in a palace coup. Yahweh, it must be said, was never particularly reliable when it came to protecting his kings.

Next episode, we step away from the kings and into the world of the prophet Hosea and his wife Gomer, who is described as a woman of harlotry. I argue that Gomer is a qedesha — a priestess representing the matriarchal Canaanite tradition — and that the Book of Hosea is a poetic, symbolic confrontation between Yahweh and the goddess that ultimately ends in divorce.

Goddess Bible Study is an exploration of the little-known stories of the goddesses, priestesses, and prophetesses in the Bible. We place the Biblical narrative on the historical timeline, along with the neighboring cultures and the archaeological evidence, to bring forth a fresh perspective on these old stories.

Who knew that God had a wife?

And that the Bible tells the story of the divorce of the Mother Goddess?

I was shocked to find out. No one taught me this stuff in Sunday School.

Contemporary critical scholars do excellent work in archaeology, cataloguing the evidence and providing translations, but they do not engage with the material they study theologically.

What does it mean that God once had a wife?

What happened to her?

Who is the Mother Goddess?

What are her traditions, philosophy, and metaphysics?

What was lost when our ancestors got rid of her? Did she go away?

Why does the Mother Goddess matter today?

These are the themes we explore on Goddess Bible Study.

I want to thank our contributors: pagan priestess Lisa Adams, former Orthodox priest Joshua Vander Plaats, and Gnostic Bishop Nathan Wilson for contributing their time and insights to these fantastic conversations.

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This week on Goddess Bible Study, we are in the 9th century BCE, investigating the three Queen Mothers from Israel and Judah who were deposed in the Book of Kings for their worship of the mother goddess Asherah. This is the first of two parts.

Queen Jezebel is the most famous of the three and the most reviled woman in the Bible. She was assassinated by the followers of Yahweh, as was her daughter Athaliah, the only woman ever to rule in Jerusalem. The first to be thrown out was Queen Maacah, wife of Rehoboam, who was deposed by her own grandson, King Asa.

We will also dive into the famous Battle of the Prophets on Mount Carmel, where I argue that Elijah used stage magic to make his offering erupt in flames and defeat the prophets of Baal and Asherah.

We are now entering territory where scriptural history begins to align with hard archaeological evidence, as literacy emerged in the 9th century BCE with new alphabetic scripts copied from the Phoenicians.

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King Asa and the Deposition of Queen Maacah

King Asa was the grandson of the bad king Rehoboam and ruled Judah from 911 to 870 BCE. He is depicted in scripture as the first of the reformist Yahwist kings to actively suppress the worship of Asherah and other traditional pagan religious practices. There is no specific archaeological evidence of Asa or his reforms — we have only the Biblical narrative to go on — but the Bible makes it clear that these Israelites were polytheists fighting a culture war over the role of the old gods versus the new.

Among Asa’s most striking acts was the deposition of his own grandmother, Queen Mother Maacah, because she had constructed an Asherah pole. He also expelled the male qadesh — transgender priests translated in some Bibles as “temple sodomites” — from the land. Notably, he did not expel the female qedesha, who appear to have been a far more entrenched and difficult opponent for the Yahwist reformers.

Jehoshaphat, son of Asa, continued his father's Yahwist reforms, though paganism remained widespread throughout the land. He was also an ally of the northern kingdom of Israel and rode into battle alongside King Ahab — the very battle in which Ahab was killed. The qadesh were still present during Jehoshaphat's reign and were persecuted again, which suggests that the earlier expulsions had been only partially effective.

The Book of Chronicles tells this story somewhat differently. Written later than the Book of Kings, Chronicles clearly adjusts the narrative to present the Biblical heroes in a more favorable light, removing embarrassing details and amplifying their piety.

9th Century BCE: When the Bible Meets Archaeology

The 9th century BCE marks a turning point in the history of Israel, both politically and in terms of the historical record. This is the period when scriptural history begins to align with archaeological data, largely because writing — in both Hebrew and early Greek — returns at this time. Hebrew inscriptions and coins begin to appear regularly, giving historians solid ground to work with.

Omri became king of Israel in 884 BCE, establishing the new city of Samaria as his capital. His lineage is unknown, but his impact was immediate and lasting. He is one of the oldest Biblical figures whose existence has been confirmed archaeologically, and the royal house he founded became known as the House of Omri, just as Judah’s royal line was called the House of David. After roughly fifty years of civil war, Omri stabilized the political situation in Israel, forming alliances with Judah to the south and the Phoenicians to the north, while resisting the growing pressure of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Omri’s son Ahab succeeded him as king of Israel around 873 BCE and reigned until his death in 852 BCE. Ahab was a serious and formidable military commander whose forces were large enough to be mentioned by neighboring kingdoms. The Biblical writers, however, despised both Omri and Ahab for their devotion to traditional religion. Samaria under their rule featured a large Asherah pole and a temple dedicated to Baal.

Ahab Becomes King of Israel

The Battle of Qarqar, 853 BCE — The Kurkh Stele

In 853 BCE, King Ahab led a major military force at the Battle of Qarqar, one of the largest and most significant battles of the ancient Near East. The battle pitted the resurgent Neo-Assyrian Empire, led by Emperor Shalmaneser III, against a coalition of twelve kings fighting in resistance.

According to the Kurkh Stele — an Assyrian victory monument now in the British Museum — King Ahab of Israel sent the largest contingent of chariots among the resistance, though scholars dispute the exact numbers. The Kurkh Stele is one of the earliest extra-Biblical references to an Israelite king. Remarkably, the Bible makes no mention of the Battle of Qarqar at all, a notable omission given how significant the conflict was for the entire region.

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The Battle with Moab, 840 BCE — The Mesha Stele

The Mesha Stele is a victory monument erected by King Mesha of Moab, celebrating his successful war against Israel and Judah and the victory of his god Chemosh over Yahweh. It is the oldest known mention of Yahweh outside the Bible and also references the House of Omri, possibly the House of David, and King Ahab himself. The events described on the stele correspond to the account in 2 Kings 3:1–27.

The Biblical account includes a dramatic and disturbing turning point: when the king of Moab saw that the battle had turned against him, he sacrificed his own firstborn son and heir on the city wall — and the tide suddenly shifted in Moab’s favor. According to the Bible, the human sacrifice of a royal prince appeared to work.

Jezebel, The Phoenician Princess and Queen of Israel

Ahab’s queen was the Phoenician princess Jezebel, who died in 841 BCE and remains the most vilified woman in the entire Bible. She was the daughter of Ithobaal I — also known as Ethbaal — of Tyre and Sidon, who had been a high priest of Astarte before assassinating the previous king and seizing the throne. Ithobaal is an actual historical figure, documented to have lived from approximately 915 to 847 BCE. The royal marriage between Jezebel and Ahab served as the seal on a powerful political alliance between Phoenicia and Israel.

Together, Ahab and Jezebel built a new temple to Baal in Samaria, complete with 450 prophets, and erected a grand Asherah pole in the capital city. In Jezreel, they built both a palace and a temple to the mother goddess Asherah, home to 400 prophets, with Jezebel as their personal patron.

The story is generally told that Jezebel introduced foreign gods into Israel — but this framing is misleading. Baal and Asherah were not foreign gods. They were the incumbent gods, the traditional deities of the land. Yahweh was the new, young god, representing a radical break from established religious tradition. When Jezebel supported Baal and Asherah, she was defending the old ways against dangerous revolutionaries. It was Elijah and the Yahwists who were the insurgents.

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Elijah and the Battle of the Prophets on Mount Carmel

Elijah was a prophet of Yahweh in Israel and the chief opponent of Ahab and Jezebel. The Yahwist prophetic order — called the "Sons of the Prophets" — operated as his movement. Jezebel, for her part, actively persecuted the Yahwists and worked to eliminate them. Elijah confronted Ahab directly, declaring: "I will bring disaster upon you and wipe out your house." He also prophesied Jezebel's gruesome end:

The confrontation reached its peak at the Battle of the Prophets on Mount Carmel, described in 1 Kings 18:22–40. The contest was simple: each side would call upon their god to ignite a sacrificial bull on an altar, without the use of fire.

Elijah won — and in the aftermath, slaughtered all 450 prophets of Baal. The 400 prophets of Asherah, however, were left entirely untouched.

Elijah chose Mount Carmel strategically. There was an old limestone altar to Yahweh there that had been torn down, and limestone that had been burned changes chemically into quicklime (calcium oxide). His preparation was a three-step setup:

1. Rebuilt the altar from the old quicklime limestone

2. Salted the meat and altar with powdered sulfur

3. Drenched everything with what appeared to be water but was actually naphtha — “thick water,” a clear petroleum distillate known in the ancient world, imported from Persia

The combination of naphtha + sulfur + quicklime creates a violent, fiery chemical reaction — essentially the same technology later weaponized as Greek Fire in naval battles. A related recipe appears in 2 Maccabees 1:31–36, where “nephthar” (meaning purification) produces exactly such a fire.

Elijah was very clever — he challenged the prophets of Baal to a contest he knew they would lose because he was utilizing a magician’s trick.

It is notable that all 450 prophets of Baal were killed while the 400 prophets of Asherah were left entirely untouched. In this period, Yahweh was associated with Asherah, and would eventually be associated with Anat as well. This fight was between Baal and Yahweh — the goddesses remained, ready to align themselves with whichever male god came out victorious.

Jezebel’s response was fury. She sent a threatening message to Elijah: “May the gods punish me severely if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like one of them.” Elijah, afraid for his life, fled into the desert. Jezebel surely prayed to Anat for his slaughter.

Next week, we will continue the story of Jezebel, Athaliah, and their murders at the hands of Jehu the usurper and the followers of Yahweh.

We will discuss this topic on the Goddess Bible Study podcast on YouTube and soon on other platforms as well.

https://www.youtube.com/@goddessbiblestudy

Goddess Bible Study returns this week, and we dive into the histories of pagan Israel and pagan Judah during the First Temple period. For the next few sessions, we will be on the historical era of the First Temple as recorded in the Books of I & II Kings, along with some prophets, including Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

Today, we discuss some good kings and bad kings to kick off the journey.

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931 BCE - The Death of King Solomon

In 931 BCE, King Solomon died after a glorious 40-year reign. He passed fat, rich, and happy in his bed, surrounded by his many wives who loved him dearly. If his goddess worship angered any deities, they did not show it in his lifetime.

If anything, the goddesses wept for the loss of their favorite king.

Jerusalem was the spiritual home of Yahweh, but in the late 10th century BCE, the Israelites were entirely pagan, with a full pantheon of gods. Monotheism was centuries away.

Yahweh was worshiped as part of the Divine Council, alongside the mother goddess Asherah, Astarte (Ashtoreth) and Anat, and qedesha priestesses worked in the temple. The “Yahweh and his Asherah” inscriptions date from this period.

The Biblical writers claim that Yahweh chastised Solomon for his worship of the goddess and threatened to divide the kingdom of Israel. Yet the story itself does not illustrate such a tale, as we will see, the stated reasons for the breakup had nothing to do with religion.

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Solomon’s death and burial were recorded simply:

The Kingdom Splits: Rehoboam and Jeroboam

Solomon was succeeded by his son Rehoboam, a famously bad king who inspired ten of the twelve tribes to revolt and form the northern kingdom of Israel, leaving the smaller state of Judah with Jerusalem as its capital and the temple of Yahweh.

The founding of Israel and Judah remains a mystery to scholars. There is firm evidence that both nations existed as independent countries, a wide variety of coins and royal inscriptions have confirmed this. But there is no firm evidence of a united kingdom that broke apart, or of the kings Rehoboam or Jeroboam.

All the written evidence is from the 9th century forward. King Solomon lived in the 10th century BCE, an illiterate period before the new Hebrew written language was invented. We do know that Jeroboam II was a highly successful king of Israel in the 8th century BCE.

Egypt still recorded hieroglyphics on monuments, but the relevant records are damaged, as we will see below.

Jeroboam was a work supervisor under King Solomon and had objected to the heavy labor demanded of the workers. Solomon forced him into exile. Jeroboam returned when Rehoboam was crowned and attempted to mend fences with the new king.

The breakup of the kingdom was, at its core, a labor dispute, a workers’ revolt against a bad king. Biblical writers blame Solomon's paganism for the split, but the Bible describes a conflict over harsh labor practices.

Golden Calves at Bethel and Dan

The first thing Jeroboam did after breaking away from the temple leadership in Jerusalem was to establish pagan shrines in Israel, particularly erecting Golden Calves in the towns of Bethel and Dan.

Bethel was a rival worship center to Jerusalem’s temple and they did not like each other. Bethel represented the old traditions of El and Baal. It is home to the altar built by Jacob that reads “El Elohe Israel” - El is the god of Israel.

The northern kingdom of Israel was pagan throughout its entire 210-year history. Israel originally worshiped Baal as king of the gods, but the competitive Yahweh cult made inroads, competing for kingship. Israel was always polytheistic.

King Jeroboam built high places, new altars, and instituted new festivals to create political allegiance to his new kingdom, pulling the people away from Jerusalem.

Jeroboam erected Asherah poles across the land and appointed priests from among the common people. This did not please the Biblical writers.

Rehoboam, King of Judah

Meanwhile, the kingdom of Judah under Rehoboam was no more virtuous than Israel under Jeroboam. Judah too maintained its pagan practices - Asherah poles, high places, sacred stones, and even the male qadesh shrine priests all persisted under the House of David.

925 BCE - Pharaoh Shishak attacks Canaan

Pharaoh Shishak (Sheshonq I) is a historical figure. The Bible says Shishak attacked Jerusalem and plundered the wealth from the temple, perhaps conveniently covering for the fact that there never was any such wealth there.

Shishak really did attack Canaan in 925 BCE. His victory stele, recorded on the Bubastite Portal at the temple of Karnak, details his military conquests across Canaan. The portal mentions many towns that were sacked, but does not mention Jerusalem.

Many scholars believe this is evidence that Shishak did not sack Jerusalem because there was nothing of value there. But the stele is fractured, and the location where Jerusalem would appear has been rubbed away. It remains an enigma. If Jerusalem were clearly mentioned, it would help resolve the mystery of Solomon and the united kingdom of Israel.

Egyptian hieroglyphics were rare in this period, used only on royal monuments — not for day-to-day texts and letters. What survives is precious, and what is missing is maddening.

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Next time on Goddess Bible Study, we will continue in the Book of Kings. We will detail the fall of the Three Queen Mothers, Maacah, Jezebel, and her daughter Athalia. Along with the famous Battle of the Prophets on Mt. Carmel, and the palace coup by Jehu, who then committed a series of mass murders and desecrated the temple of Baal. This topic may spread across two sessions.

Queen Jezebel of Israel is the Bible's most famous villain — and its most reviled woman. Her name alone became a byword for wickedness, manipulation, and dangerous sexuality, an image that has endured for three thousand years. But from her perspective, she was behaving honorably and defending her traditions against dangerous revolutionaries.

Let’s learn more about Jezebel!

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Goddess Bible Study began nearly a year ago on a whim, and now we are having a great conversation where we are diving into robust theological and philosophical topics.

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This week’s Goddess Bible Study focuses on one of the most controversial topics in the Bible, the greatest sin committed by the Israelites and Canaanites (aka Phoenicians), child sacrifice.

The grotesque sin of child sacrifice was documented by Greek and Roman writers, in addition to the Hebrew prophets. These imperial rivals to the Phoenicians were universally disgusted by the practice, and it was a crucial distinction between their cultures.

We see evidence of child sacrifice in the cultures that worshipped Baal, particularly Carthage in North Africa, which was a Phoenician colony. The cult of Yahweh emerged in the Iron Age and challenged the primacy of Baal, the incumbent king of the gods. Child sacrifice was one of the most important issues they fought over.

The Greek story of Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia at the beginning of the Trojan War, as well as the Hebrew story of Abraham and Isaac, indicate that these practices were culturally familiar, but they were clearly rejected in the religious reformations of the Iron Age.

The Hebrews and Hellenistic Greeks saw themselves as superior peoples, in part, because they rejected the child sacrifice practices of their ancestors.

Sacrifices were made under different circumstances. There were obligatory sacrifices of firstborns, usually animals but sometimes children. Some infants were killed to honor a request being granted by the gods. In other cases, children, including royal children, could be sacrificed in times of danger and deprivation, such as a siege or famine, in hopes of saving the entire community.

This was an era of high child mortality, parents expected to lose many babies, and this is certainly part of the context for these ritual sacrifices.

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Child Sacrifice in the Bible

An early passage from the Bible indicates that child sacrifice had once been commanded.

One of the most famous stories in the Bible is the near-sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. God (El at this stage of history) ordered Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, and Abraham reluctantly agreed, but upon proving his faith, the demand was rescinded by Yahweh.

It is an interesting detail that the story begins with God demanding the sacrifice, while Yahweh steps in at the end to provide the deliverance. This indicates both the distinction between God (El) and Yahweh, who were two separate gods, and also the opposition to sacrifice by the Yahweh cult.

Many scholars believe the original story featured the death of Isaac and that it was later modified by Yahwists. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is similarly told in contradictory stories; in some cases, the girl dies, and in others she is saved by the goddess Artemis and replaced with a substitute.

Several Biblical kings are recorded to have sacrificed their children.

In one instance, Canaanite child sacrifice apparently worked to defend against an assault by the Israelites. Fortunately, we now understand that these sacrifices were a futile and useless superstition that our ancestors were correct to abandon.

The battle featured in the following verse is a real historical incident. The Moabite victory was commemorated on the Mesha Stele from 840 BC, which happens to be the first appearance of Yahweh in the historical record. Mesha, the king of Moab, in an act of desperation, sacrificed his firstborn son, the crown prince, to appeal to the gods to save the city from imminent defeat and destruction. According to the Bible, the sacrifice worked, and victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat.

According to the Hebrew Bible, several kings, primarily of Judah, engaged in the ritual of child sacrifice. There are suggestions that other kings also permitted or participated in the practice.

Ahaz, King of Judah (c. 735–715 BCE):

Manasseh, King of Judah (c. 687–643 BCE):

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Phoenicians

Despite being a civilized and cosmopolitan people, the Phoenicians were deeply superstitious by Greek and Roman accounts, clinging to talismans and amulets that would help protect them from their malevolent gods.

Archaeology has confirmed that the Baalists did practice human sacrifice. Thousands of infant remains have been unearthed at Carthage in a huge “tophet,” a burial ground for charred human and animal sacrifices.

Smaller tophets were also found at Phoenician sites in Sicily, Sardinia, and Tunisia. Child sacrifice at Carthage took place continuously for over 600 years through good times and bad. No tophets have been found in Israel/Canaan, but they may have once existed.

The tophets contain a mix of animal and child remains carefully placed in urns, indicating that animals were used as well, or as substitutes for children. The fact that the animals and children were all buried together shows that these were not cemeteries, but ritual offerings to the gods.

Human sacrifice in the form of killing war captives and slaves was not unusual in the ancient world. Nor was it unheard of for an entire royal court to practice ritual suicide upon the death of the king or Pharaoh. These and other similar practices, including cannibalism, have been documented in many cultures around the world.

But the Phoenician/Canaanite practice of sacrificing their own children to placate the gods does seem unique in the Iron Age Mediterranean, and does not appear to have been practiced in any of the neighboring cultures like Mesopotamia or Egypt. The Greeks allude to child sacrifice in their mythology as an ancient practice of their uncivilized forebears.

Carthaginian child sacrifices are extremely controversial among academics, some refuse to accept that it was happening. Human sacrifice was part of their culture, and most of the literature describes the sacrifices as the fulfillment of vows and responses to prayers being answered by the gods. Apparently, people would offer a child if the gods delivered their prayer requests.

Dramatic Rituals

The method of sacrifice was dramatic, a bronze statue of a god with arms outstretched was stoked with a hot fire. The babies and animals were placed in the god’s arms and immediately consumed by the flames.

Greek historian Cleitarchus, who wrote a biography of Alexander the Great, also wrote about child sacrifice.

Children could be purchased from the poor for sacrificial purposes. It was a requirement that the parents of the sacrificed child do not shed any tears, or else the sacrifice was invalidated, the money lost, and the child would still be dead.

Greek historian Plutarch wrote:

Greek writers wrote for Greek audiences, and they routinely used the familiar names of Greek gods when describing foreign gods, which leads to some confusion among later scholars, who must take care to recognize which gods are being described. In the context of human sacrifice, the Greeks consistently describe them as sacrifices to Cronos, the cruel king of the Titans, the older generation of gods who ate his own children and was displaced by his son, Zeus. The Greeks clearly associate Cronos with El, the god of Israel.

El’s Sacrifice of His Son Ieoud

Very little Phoenician writing or mythology has survived, but bits from the legendary writer Sanchuniathon were preserved by Philo of Byblos and recorded later by the Christian Bishop Eusebius in his polemics against the hated pagans.

One Phoenician myth features El sacrificing his infant son Ieoud in a story reminiscent of Abraham and Isaac.

This story again demonstrates that the Greeks correlated El with Cronos.

Child sacrifices were made by the wealthy and elite, including the royalty. The practice fell into disrepute and corruption when the rich were allowed to purchase the children of the poor as substitutes for their own children. Carthage came under siege in 308 BCE by the king of Syracuse, leading to a political crisis and mass sacrifices.

Biblical Opposition to Sacrifice

The Yahweh cult began pushing its cultural reforms in the 10th century BCE, and child sacrifice was one of the defining issues. The issue was heated throughout the entire First Temple period. The prophet Jeremiah was particularly exercised about it.

Moloch/Mulk

In the Bible, the practice is usually described as sacrifices to the god Moloch, or as “passing the children through fire.”

It is possible that “Moloch” is actually a mistranslation and does not refer to a god but is simply a name for this particular type of sacrifice. Biblical Hebrew is written with no vowels, leading to many possible translations of the same words.

One reason is that there is no evidence in the archaeological record of a god named Moloch anywhere, he only appears in the Bible.

The Hebrew word used is “mlk” traditionally seen as the deity Moloch, but scholars now believe the word is “mulk,” the name used for the sacrifice in Carthage. If the sacrifices were not made to Moloch, that also strengthens the argument that the sacrifices were made to El.

Passing Thru Fire

12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides described a pagan custom of passing infants through fire, or a candle, that did not involve sacrifice, but was reminiscent of the Mystery religions, and the various myths where the goddesses Isis and Demeter put an infant in a fire to grant them immortality.

I believe all of us today can be thankful that child sacrifice was long ago abandoned.

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Next episode of Goddess Bible Study, we will return to the Book of Kings and the reforms against child sacrifice, and the goddesses.

In this week’s Goddess Bible Study, we focus on a special topic: trans folks. This is a hot-button political topic these days, with a lot of sensitivity around language choices. Some people may object to my language choices here, but I am going to stick to the most accurate language I know, and you can’t please everybody.

Transgender people have existed throughout history and across cultures, and they were highly celebrated in goddess traditions of the ancient world, often serving as shamans and high priests. They appear in both the Old and New Testaments, as well as in neighboring cultures.

Many of the great goddesses, such as Ishtar and Cybele, were themselves transgender. Gender bending represents the unification of paradoxes and the wholeness of creation.

Trans people had great names in the ancient world, a few examples include:

• The god Hermaphroditus from Greece

• Qadesh (Holy Ones) in the Bible

• The Galli priests of the great Roman mother goddess Cybele

• The Megabyzi at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus

• Gala priests in Sumer

• Enaree shamans with the Scythians, as mentioned by Herodotus

• Hijra in India and Kathoey in Thailand, who are still around today

• Ardhanarishvara is a Hindu god, a composite, androgynous form of Shiva and his consort Parvati (Shakti)

Merging male and female symbolizes the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies and the inseparable nature of consciousness and matter. It signifies that the union of opposites creates the rhythm of life, maintaining balance, unity, and harmony in the universe.

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Jesus Christ (New Testament)

Jesus Christ described the condition of male→female transitioners perfectly in the Gospel of Matthew when he said:

A eunuch is a castrated man, and was the common term in the ancient world that would describe today’s transexuals. Jesus describes three types: those who were born that way (biologically intersex, or hermaphrodites), those who were made by others (castrated without consent, generally to work in the palace), and those who choose it for spiritual purposes (voluntary transexuals and priests). There are also cross-dressers who maintain their sexual functions and serve in goddess traditions.

“Those who can accept this should accept it,” says Jesus.

Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)

In the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), the male transgender priests are called the qadesh, the “holy ones”, and they were the counterparts to the female qedesha priestesses. They were prominent in the earlier pagan Israelite traditions, and they were pushed out, along with the goddesses, in the monotheistic reforms.

The qadesh are only mentioned when they are being chased away and insulted. Their names are translated in a derogatory manner. In English texts, the qadesh are called “temple sodomites” and “dogs,” just as the female qedesha are called “temple prostitutes,” and “harlots” rather than “holy ones.”

The qadesh priests are uniformly condemned by the Biblical writers as a sign of sexual degeneracy by bad pagan kings. Their removal under the reformer kings of Yahweh is celebrated. Ultimately, laws were crafted by the Israelites that forbade the practice in sacred settings.

The qadesh appear in the Biblical narrative during the periods of religious reform, when the Yahweh-alone movement attacked and attempted to destroy the old pagan Israelite traditions. We will be digging into these stories in upcoming episodes of Goddess Bible Study.

Scholars generally associate the male qadesh as being the equivalent of the Roman Galli priests, who are well documented.

Scholars debate the historical usage of the terms eunuch, qadesh, and sodomite, and admittedly, these can be slippery. We can see in the contemporary debate on these topics how fluid gender identity and sexual practices can be, and it was every bit as fluid in ancient times as well.

We only have limited information to draw conclusions from, but we do know with certainty that gender-bending is an ancient practice and was highly celebrated in many societies. We also know with certainty that the patriarchal, monotheistic faiths that restricted the nature-based practices of the goddesses were hostile to anything that made men effeminate.

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Inanna/Ishtar/Astarte

Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love and war (Astarte in the Bible), was herself transgender and was one of the most popular deities in the Ancient Near East. Ishtar could produce a beard and present as a man when she went into battle. In one lamentation, Ishtar says,

One of Inanna/Ishtar’s most famous stories is her Descent to the Underworld, where she attempted to visit without permission and was struck dead. The goddess was rescued by sexless eunuchs and brought back to life. These characters were represented in the temples by the kurgarrū and assinnu, servants of Ishtar who dressed in female clothing and performed dances in Ishtar’s temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also had homosexual proclivities, and some were eunuchs.

During earlier Sumerian times, Inanna was served by priests known as Gala, who performed elegies and lamentations. Men who became gala sometimes adopted female names, and their songs were composed in the Sumerian emesal dialect, which, in literary texts, is normally reserved for the speech of female characters. Some Sumerian proverbs seem to suggest that gala had a reputation for engaging in anal sex with men.

Hermaphroditus

The Greeks and Romans recognized the intersex god Hermaphroditus, the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. He was a remarkably beautiful boy who was merged with a nymph who had fallen in love with him. Hermaphroditus was the god of androgyny and effeminacy and was portrayed as a woman with male genitals.

There are many examples of marble statues of Hermaphroditus from the Greek and Roman eras. Here is one example, displayed in the Louvre Musuem in Paris.

Galli Priests of Cybele

The best documented of the priestly eunuchs were the Galli priests of Rome who served Cybele, the mother of the Gods. The Galli were famous and controversial in the Roman Empire, they had long flowing hair, perfume, and bright, colorful clothes. They engaged in ecstatic rituals filled with song and dance, plant drugs, ritual sex, self-flagellation, and the blood of animal sacrifices. And in a dramatic moment of wild abandon, initiates castrated themselves with a sharp flint knife in service of the great goddess.

These traditions were incredibly ancient, they were formally imported into the Roman Empire from Anatolia (Turkey) in dramatic ceremonies at the height of the Punic Wars. Cybele was credited with helping the Romans defeat Carthage and become the mighty empire. Many temples were built in Rome to the Mater Dei, the Mother of the Gods.

Cybele’s mythology was steeped in stories of castrations and gender-bending. In a famous poem, the Roman poet Catullus detailed the shocking moment when a new initiate, lost in the frenzy of the wild, intoxicated celebrations, cut himself and bled on the forest floor, and turned from he into she.

Cybele’s Galli priests were both honored and marginalized. At this late stage of Roman paganism, hard patriarchy and machismo dominated the culture. The effeminate Galli contradicted all notions of Roman masculinity, and they were confined to their temple most of the year.

Megabyzi of Artemis at Ephesus

The biggest and most famous pagan temple in Jesus’s day was the Grand Temple to Artemis at Ephesus. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and was a major pilgrimage spot for centuries.

The Megabyzi were transgendered eunuch priests who served Artemis at the Grand Temple.

The temple of Artemis makes a cameo appearance in the New Testament when the Apostle Paul visited and nearly caused a riot. (Acts 19:24-31).

Scythian Enaree

The Enaree roamed with the nomadic horse-riding Scythians and their Amazon warrior women. Herodotus wrote that they were hermaphrodite shamans blessed by Aphrodite Urania, the Queen of Heaven, whom the Scythians called Artimpasa.

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Ardhanarishvara

Hijra of India - Kathoey of Thailand

Transgender traditions never disappeared; they lived on around the world and continue today. Some examples include the Hijra of India, and Kathoey (ladyboys) of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos.

Hinduism recognizes Hijras as a third gender category in law and culture. Trans people have been part of South Asian society forever, but Christian missionaries and the European colonialists viewed them as depraved and worked for centuries to have them criminalized and eradicated.

Christian colonialists and missionaries introduced new sexual mores to the Indian subcontinent that rejected and criminalized homosexuality and outward expressions of gender-bending. Today, the Hijras and Kathoey continue to survive, albeit living on the fringes of society and forced into begging and prostitution to earn money.

Trans people have been around forever, they have unique identities and proud histories. Sometimes venerated and sometimes persecuted, trans people have always been visible and held distinct roles in society. Whether as musicians, sex workers, shamans, or priests, trans people tap into possibilities that most people cannot access and should be given their space to flourish.

Next episode, we will continue with our third contained subject, child sacrifice, before returning to the Bible narrative. Ritual child sacrifice was a common practice in some cultures, including the Canaanites and pagan Israelites. Eliminating child sacrifice was one of the primary reforms the Hebrew prophets of the First Temple period were attempting to achieve.

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