In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, we examine the Deuteronomic Law Codes (Deuteronomy 12–26), which embody the divorce of Yahweh from the Mother Goddess Asherah. These laws are believed to originate during the Yahwist reforms of King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE, shortly before the Temple's destruction at the hands of the Babylonians.

2 Kings 22 recounts the discovery of a “Book of the Law” in the Temple, and the code’s focus on worship at a single central sanctuary matches Josiah’s religious centralization reforms of around 621 BCE.

While some Deuteronomic laws are unremarkable or unobjectionable, focusing on common morality or on dietary restrictions that signify tribal allegiance, many of the laws exhibit extreme misogyny, religious intolerance, and ultraviolence toward neighboring cultures.

This is the period when, I argue, the last vestiges of the old Bronze Age matriarchal traditions were being shut down throughout the region. In the Deuteronomic laws, we see the Asherah poles representing the Mother Goddess torn down, the male and female qedeshas banned, and women's sexuality tightly policed.

We also see the prohibition on blending wool and linen. It is a rule that seems very strange by modern standards (though observant Jews still follow it), but it makes perfect sense once you recognize that wool and linen represent the shepherds and the farmers — the patriarchal clans and the matriarchal clans — who had once been joined in the sacred marriage traditions but were now being torn apart in the monotheistic divorce.

The Garden of Eden story, with its denunciations of goddess symbols (serpents, farming, the tree of knowledge, female submissiveness, etc.), was likely written in the same general period as these laws of Deuteronomy (perhaps before or after the Exile).

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Let’s dive into the Laws of Deuteronomy…

Follow my laws, and the Promised Land will be yours.

Yahweh promises that if the Israelites follow his laws, he will deliver the Promised Land to them. The other nations will be driven out, and Israel’s territory will extend from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River — essentially the same maximalist Zionist vision as Greater Israel today.

Tear down the altars and burn up the Asherah poles.

Centralize the worship of Yahweh in a single temple, and do not serve other gods. The implication is that the people were doing exactly what is being prohibited here — installing Asherah poles next to the altar of Yahweh and worshipping on the high places. During the First Temple period, Yahweh was worshipped alongside Asherah, as seen in the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions (”Yahweh and his Asherah”) and in the Asherah poles installed in the Jerusalem Temple, as documented in the Bible itself.

Kill any prophet who encourages you to worship other gods.

Do not set up a wooden Asherah pole next to the altar of Yahweh.

Put pagan Israelites to death.

Do not engage in pagan practices: no child sacrifice, divination, sorcery, spells, mediums, or consulting the dead.

Offer peace, or plunder and kill.

If you attack a city, you must first offer peace and take the people as slaves. If they refuse, you are free to plunder the city, kill the men, and kidnap the women, children, and livestock. The Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, however, must be completely destroyed.

Captive brides, firstborn sons, and rebellious sons.

If you see a beautiful woman among your enemies, you can kidnap her and make her your wife, as long as you follow a few simple rules.

A man must honor his firstborn son, even if he despises the boy’s mother.

And if a son is disrespectful, he can be taken to the elders and stoned to death.

No wool and linen woven together.

Wool and linen woven together represent the blending of farmers and shepherds: linen comes from a farmed plant, and wool comes from sheep. This law is directly contradicted by Moses’s instructions for building the Tabernacle, which command that wool and linen be blended in the priests’ holy vestments and in the Tabernacle curtains.

Traditionally, this is explained as a way of distinguishing the sacred from the secular: the blend of wool and linen is said to be reserved for the priesthood alone.

I would like to offer an alternative explanation.

Blending wool and linen represents the sacred marriage between the shepherd kings — of Mesopotamia and of the Hyksos — and the peasant farmers who worshipped the Mother Goddess. We see the origins of this myth in the Sumerian epic poem The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi.

Separating wool from linen accompanies the divorce of God from the Goddess.

The Cain and Abel story reflects this divorce: Yahweh rejects the farmer Cain’s offerings of vegetables but accepts the shepherd Abel’s offerings of meat. The treacherous farmer Cain then brutally murders his good shepherd brother Abel in revenge, staining his reputation forever.

The monotheists are shepherds only, and they intentionally eliminate the sacred marriage ritual and ban the blending of wool and linen that represents it.

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It is extremely important to control women’s sex lives to preserve patriarchal bloodlines.

No cross-dressing. No eunuchs or people of illegitimate birth may enter the assembly of Yahweh.

No qedeshas.

The law below specifically bans the qedesha priestesses and the qadesh priests, calling them a whore and a dog, respectively. The qadesh were transgender people or eunuchs, like the Galli priests of the Mother Goddess Cybele in Rome, and they were clearly despised by the patriarchal Yahwists who chased them away.

Many contemporary scholars, such as Stephanie Budin, reject the association of the qedesha with sacred sex, even though that translation has been consistent since at least the Septuagint in the third century BCE. It is true that we don't know the finer points of these traditions, and specific sex rituals have not been documented for the qedesha, but scholars are too quick (in my opinion) to dismiss the accounts of ritual prostitution recorded by Herodotus, Strabo, and Lucian in the centuries following the Exile. Scholars also give short shrift to the story of Judah and Tamar, in which Tamar is explicitly identified as a qedesha after sex, and to the idea that Gomer, wife of the prophet Hosea, was likely a qedesha.

Sacred sex was common in goddess cultures and remains so today. Many of these practices continue in the Shakti goddess traditions of India, which include the devadasis (temple prostitution, banned in the 20th century but still practiced illegally), ritualized Tantric sex, and the transgender community known as the hijras.

My argument is that the Israelites, the Canaanites, and neighboring cultures were originally matriarchal and celebrated women's sexuality. They believed that sex makes the flowers grow and encouraged it as a benefit to agriculture. Farming metaphors for sex are extremely common in the literature of Inanna, Ishtar, and related Bronze Age goddesses.

Matriarchal family lines allowed women sexual freedom, and the transition to patriarchal families in the Iron Age required that these old sex traditions be constrained or shut down.

Public ritual sex was well known in the Dionysian and Bacchic traditions of Greece and Rome. The Romans finally banned the Bacchanalia in 186 BCE because the rites were sexually licentious and politically seditious. The Hebrews were simply ahead of the Romans by some 500 years.

A man can divorce his wife for almost any reason.

A man can divorce his wife for basically any reason and send her away. In a patriarchal world, this is very harmful to women, who are left with no resources and may have children to care for. In matriarchies, it is the man who is sent away in a divorce, while the woman stays in her home with her children and her wealth.

And finally, perhaps the weirdest of all the Old Testament laws — and not a great one for women either.

Next episode, we will return to the Greeks and show how their mythology, contemporary with that of the Hebrews, exhibits the same transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. The Iron Age Greeks reordered their pantheon to make most of the goddesses submissive to Zeus, and wives submissive to their husbands.

This week, panel member Joshua Vander Plaats tells how teenage spiritual experiences led him to the Orthodox priesthood, out of the church, and finally to the Mother Goddess.

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In this talk, I lay out the God-Goddess Cosmological Model — a framework for understanding the cosmos as Mind and Matter, where the Heavenly Father and Earthly Mother are eternal, co-equal partners. Many polytheistic cultures see the world this way.

Monotheism is the exception: a worldview where the Heavenly Father rules alone, with no partner or rival, omnipotent and unlimited. This required divorcing the Mother Goddess and pushing her out of the way.

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I trace the divorce of God from Goddess through the Hebrew Bible and the Koran and into the modern day.

This is the subject we explore in Goddess Bible Study — here is the full slide deck summary of the argument.

I’m happy to give this presentation on podcasts or in person.

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You can find Lisa at:
therenegademystic.com

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In this episode of Goddess Bible Study, the scene shifts to the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. This is the critical moment when monotheism finally emerged as a coherent intellectual concept. The divorce of the Mother Goddess was final, and Yahweh declared in 2nd Isaiah, “there are no other gods.”

We meet the legendary Persian King Cyrus, who liberated the Hebrews from exile and allowed them to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple. Persian Zoroastrianism had a major theological influence on the development of pure monotheism.

We 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 Jewish men to divorce and banish their foreign wives and children, completing the divorce of the Mother Goddess.

We have solid archaeological evidence for this period. The Al-Yahudu Texts ca. 572-477 BCE), roughly 200 tablets discovered in Iraq, provide a window into the life of the Judean exilic community in Babylonia, where they lived as tenant farmers. In exchange for the land, they had to pay taxes and were expected to provide some labor and military service, but were generally free to integrate into the broader society.

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The Babylonian empire fell apart quickly after Nebuchadnezzar II died. Cyrus II of Persia, also known as Cyrus the Great, defeated the Babylonians and created the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, the largest empire the world had known at that time. The Persian Empire stretched from India to Egypt and dominated the Near East for two centuries, until its defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great.

Cyrus marched into Babylon in 539 BCE and was welcomed with open gates and celebrations: the previous king, Nabonidus, was an apostate who had ignored Marduk and the other traditional gods in favor of worshipping the moon god Sin alone.

Cyrus was hailed in his time as a wise and benevolent ruler. He earned the goodwill and loyalty of local populations by rejecting the raw brutality of the Assyrians and Babylonians, promoting religious tolerance, and returning exiles to their homes.

For the Jews, Cyrus was a near-messianic figure who freed them from exile, allowing them to return to Jerusalem and re-establish their community and temple.

After the Persian Empire came to power, the Israelite priests in Babylon were sponsored by a series of Persian kings to return to Jerusalem, restore the temple, and compile their sacred texts. King Cyrus kindly returned the golden treasures that had been seized by Nebuchadnezzar.

Cyrus established Babylon as his administrative center. He made a great declaration of peace and demonstrated his commitment to religious tolerance. Cyrus allowed for all the gods to be restored to their temples, not just Yahweh. The proclamation was written in cuneiform text on a large cylinder and put on public display in Babylon.

Archaeologists found the Cyrus Cylinder. It uses language remarkably similar to the Bible’s, except where the Bible credits Yahweh, Cyrus credits Marduk.

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Cyrus Loses his Head to an Amazon Queen

In an ironic twist of fate, King Cyrus was reportedly killed in 530 BCE by the Massagetae Scythian Queen Tomyris; she took his head as a war prize, in revenge for the death of her son. The Scythians are the Amazons of Greek legend, nomadic horse-riding people whose women fought alongside the men.

The account comes only from Herodotus, and it is controversial, since other ancient historians give different accounts of Cyrus’s death. Nonetheless, it’s a fun tale for Goddess Bible Study.

Cyrus, after conquering most of the Near East, turned his ambitions toward the Massagetae — a nomadic, Scythian-related people living beyond the Jaxartes River in Central Asia, ruled at the time by Queen Tomyris, a widow who had taken over from her late husband. Herodotus says Cyrus first tried simply to marry her and absorb her kingdom that way; she saw through it and refused, so he invaded instead.

The campaign turned on a piece of trickery: Cyrus left a lavishly stocked camp of food and wine undefended as bait. The Massagetae weren’t wine-drinkers — Herodotus says they favored getting intoxicated on fermented mare’s milk and cannabis, which they burned in enclosed tents while inhaling the smoke. A detachment under Tomyris’s son Spargapises took the bait, got drunk, and was slaughtered; Spargapises was captured and, once sober and disgraced, killed himself.

Tomyris then sent Cyrus a warning that she’d give him his fill of blood. She met him in open battle and won decisively. She had Cyrus’s corpse decapitated, and his head thrust into a wineskin filled with blood, saying, “Now I make good my threat: you have your fill of blood.”

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Monotheism, Finally!

The Persians allowed the Israelites to practice their religion and encouraged their return to Judea (renamed from Judah), where they became “the Jews.” Until then, they had been Israelites and Hebrews — never Jews.

A succession of Persian kings sponsored the Jews to write their sacred texts and provided gold to build the second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were heavily influenced by the Persians and their Zoroastrian traditions, which feature the nearly-monotheistic god Ahura Mazda.

I argue that the Jews could not possibly have developed the full concept of monotheism until the arrival of the Zoroastrians, whose religion was based on a completely different worldview than the nature-based paganism that was the norm across the region. It also helped that the Persians completely defeated the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, giving weight to the idea that those ancient pantheons could be overcome.

I personally find it hard to believe that anyone would have taken seriously the argument that Yahweh was more powerful than Isis, Ashur, or Marduk before the Persians came through.

Zoroastrianism is widely recognized as a predecessor to monotheism because it frames the cosmos as a dualistic battle between the forces of light, represented by the god Ahura Mazda, and the forces of darkness, led by Angra Mainyu, the “spiritual enemy.” This moral framework is carried through in Christianity, where we’re told that one is either with God or with the Devil.

This black-and-white framing of the cosmos replaced the nature-based, cycle-of-life traditions rooted in the Mother Goddess, in effect, pushing her out of the conversation. The Biblical text makes it clear that up until this point, the debate over the Queen of Heaven was at a fever pitch, but the introduction of this new spiritual framework enabled the Yahwists to finally get over the hump and establish their god as the one and only.

2nd Isaiah

The identities of Yahweh and El were formally fused into the single monotheistic God of the Bible in Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55). This secondary section of the book of Isaiah is widely understood by scholars to be the work of a later, anonymous author, appended to the original Isaiah. The original prophet was writing in Jerusalem, while this author wrote in Babylon.

This is the first time we see Yahweh clearly claim that there are no other gods in existence. It is no longer monolatry (one god among many); the prophets are proclaiming monotheism. Culturally speaking, though, the Jews remained polytheistic for centuries, until the Hasmonean kingdom in the 2nd century BCE.

In the following passage, El and Yahweh are merged in the Hebrew phrase “ha-El Yahweh” (God the LORD). In the Hebrew Bible, the direct compound title ha-El Yahweh, or the explicit juxtaposition of El and Yahweh, is quite rare. There are only three primary passages where they appear back-to-back as a direct compound title: Isaiah 42:5, Psalm 85:8, and Psalm 118:27. The Garden of Eden story also uses Yahweh-Elohim throughout, which is otherwise rare, though it is seen in the Book of Chronicles, which is a later text.

The next couple of passages mention Cyrus, and by Biblical tradition they are read as prophecies written before the Persians’ arrival. I read these as classic ex-post-facto prophecies — meaning they were written after the events occurred and later added to the text as though they were prophetic.

I am Yahweh, and there is no other; there is no God but Me.

Yahweh says,

The following passage mentions the gods Bel and Nebo. Bel is another name for Marduk, the great Babylonian king of the gods. This passage was obviously written after Cyrus had conquered Babylon. After this section, other gods are no longer (or rarely) named in the Bible, while in the earlier First Temple period many other gods are commonly named. Never again in the Biblical text do we see the names Asherah and Astarte.

Yahweh claims here that he is responsible for sending Cyrus, his “bird of prey from the east,” to conquer Babylon. Once again, we see the Biblical writers playing historical judo, claiming that foreign invading armies are actually following Yahweh’s call rather than their own gods.

The Humiliation of Babylon

Here we find another passage with a double meaning, addressing both the city of Babylon and the great goddess, presumably Ishtar. We see many attributes of the goddess — virgin, queen, sorcerer, spells, wisdom, and knowledge — and we hear more of the rough misogyny we heard from Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

I gave your mother a certificate of divorce. Send her away. The divorce is final.

Here we see the imagery of the deep waters and the leviathan, who is named Rahab. The word for “sea” is “Yamm,” the same as the Canaanite god of the seas. The “waters of the great deep” is “tehom,” understood to be a cognate of Tiamat, the salt waters of creation, the great Babylonian mother goddess. This word and imagery also appear in Genesis 1. Yahweh is demonstrating his mastery over the chaotic waters of creation, the source mother, and her pet serpent monster, symbols that appear across many cultures.

Here is the fifth, and final, cannabis reference. Cannabis and its associated imagery never appear in Second Temple or later Jewish traditions. Cannabis went with the goddesses and was thrown out with them.

Scholarly commentaries, such as this commentary from Bible Hub on Exodus 30:23, have long noted that the word “qaneh” in these five passages is unclear. Qaneh is mentioned as a spice in Exodus 30:23; Song of Solomon 4:14; Isaiah 43:24; Jeremiah 6:20; and Ezekiel 27:17, but the term “aromatic cane” is vague, and it is not at all clear what plant species is meant. Most Biblical scholars have agreed on calamus; I and others argue that it is cannabis.

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Ezra the Scribe and the Return to Jerusalem

The Jews slowly began returning to Jerusalem after an exile of 70 years. In 516 BCE, they began construction of the Second Temple.

There were actually multiple temples to Yahweh outside of Jerusalem in the Second Temple period. We mentioned the temple on Elephantine Island in Egypt last episode. There was also the Samaritan temple to Yahweh on Mount Gerizim, which the Hasmoneans eventually destroyed, and scholars have suggested there were others.

The returning exiles rebuilt the altar on the foundation of Solomon’s Temple, despite their fear of the local people. There was a great deal of resistance and subterfuge from locals who remembered the Yahwists and did not want them to return.

Ezra the Scribe was sent from Babylon by King Artaxerxes with a treasury full of gold and silver and a royal proclamation of his authority to re-establish worship at the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Ezra is very important to the Jews — even a second Moses — because he brought the Book of the Law to Jerusalem and is the father of many Jewish traditions. Ezra grew up among the Israelites in Babylon who had been there for generations and had good relations with the Persians. There are many legends and myths about Ezra, but we don’t have space to get into them here.

By Jewish tradition, Ezra the Scribe is thought to have edited and compiled the final draft of the Hebrew Bible (the Torah) that we read today, bringing it to Jerusalem from Babylon in 458 BCE (though this dating is subject to scholarly debate).

This is the same year that Aeschylus debuted the Oresteia in Athens; both works of mythology celebrate the introduction of patriarchal law and the end of matriarchal tribal traditions. We will have a dedicated episode on the Oresteia.

I am persuaded by the modern scholarship of Russell Gmirkin and others who argue that the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, was actually written in Alexandria some 200 years later, in the third century BCE — but we will get to that in a later episode.

In the text of the Hebrew Bible, it does not actually say that Ezra brought the completed Torah; it says that he brought the “Book of the Law.” Scholars debate precisely what was included in the Book of the Law. Ezra read it aloud to the community in a single day, implying it was not the full 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, which is far too long to read in one sitting.

Nonetheless, the message was clear to the people. The Jews were to withdraw completely from the broader pagan world and live by their own laws and customs. They were not to mix with the locals, not to share customs or festivals, and nature worship was strictly forbidden.

Divorce the Pagan Women

But then Ezra discovered that the Jewish men had been marrying local Canaanite women with their detestable customs and having families with them. Ezra was outraged. Ezra prayed in despair. He forced the men to choose between their families and their God.

Ezra forced the Jewish men who had married pagan women to divorce their wives and children and abandon them. The pagan women continued their goddess worship and nature-based traditions, which was unacceptable to Ezra and the Jewish leaders. It is doubtful that much matriarchy remained at this stage of history; all the imperial cultures were fully patriarchal by the 5th century BCE. Matriarchy only continued among tribal peoples outside the walls of civilization.

The physical divorce of the Jewish men from their pagan wives was the final act in the divorce between the Hebrew God and the Mother Goddess that began centuries earlier, when King Asa first removed the Asherah pole from the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem.

This divorce was mythologically confirmed in the Garden of Eden story, which is the divorce papers signed, sealed, and delivered. No longer would the Heavenly Father and Earthly Mother be husband and wife.

For the next few episodes, we will shift our view to the ancient Greeks, who were operating in parallel to the Hebrews and also reordering the cosmos, making the goddesses submissive to Zeus, and wives submissive to their husbands. We will meet back up with the Jews in Alexandria in the third century BCE.

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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.

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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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