He was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Abi the daughter of Zechariah. And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord , according to all that David his father had done. He trusted in the Lord , the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him.
Nevertheless, they did not depart from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, which he made Israel to sin, but walked in them; and the Asherah also remained in Samaria. If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.
And build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, with stones laid in due order. In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts! A Psalm of David. Ascribe to the Lord , O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord , over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon. And his prayer, and how God was moved by his entreaty, and all his sin and his faithlessness, and the sites on which he built high places and set up the Asherim and the images, before he humbled himself, behold, they are written in the Chronicles of the Seers.
Nevertheless, some good is found in you, for you destroyed the Asherahs out of the land, and have set your heart to seek God.
His heart was courageous in the ways of the Lord. And furthermore, he took the high places and the Asherim out of Judah. Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he finished his entire house. He built the House of the Forest of Lebanon. Its length was a hundred cubits and its breadth fifty cubits and its height thirty cubits, and it was built on four rows of cedar pillars, with cedar beams on the pillars. And it was covered with cedar above the chambers that were on the forty-five pillars, fifteen in each row.
There were window frames in three rows, and window opposite window in three tiers. All the doorways and windows had square frames, and window was opposite window in three tiers. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.
John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Hear, you peoples, all of you; pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple. For behold, the Lord is coming out of his place, and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains will melt under him, and the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. All this is for the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel.
What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem? My people inquire of a piece of wood, and their walking staff gives them oracles. For a spirit of whoredom has led them astray, and they have left their God to play the whore. The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven. And they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger. He will not look to the altars, the work of his hands, and he will not look on what his own fingers have made, either the Asherim or the altars of incense.
For the Lord will have compassion on Jacob and will again choose Israel, and will set them in their own land, and sojourners will join them and will attach themselves to the house of Jacob. And the peoples will take them and bring them to their place, and the house of Israel will possess them in the Lord 's land as male and female slaves.
They will take captive those who were their captors, and rule over those who oppressed them. The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of rulers, Before the rise of Israel, Asherah was the wife of El, the head god of the Canaanite pantheon.
According to the archeological evidence, the people who became Israelites were mostly native Canaanites who settled in the hills of what is now the West Bank, while it seems that small but influential groups also migrated there from the south in the Midian in and around the Araba Valley in Sinai. As the Bible itself testifies, that is where Yahweh veneration appears to have originated, and, in a process that in this respect resonates with the Moses story, the migrants introduced Yahweh to the native Canaanites who were becoming Israelites.
Over time, El declined and merged into Yahweh. As part of that process, Yahweh inherited Asherah from El as his wife. The Hebrew Bible refers to Asherah directly or indirectly some 40 times, always in negative terms so she must have been a challenge.
Most references are indirect, to the asherah poles that symbolized her, but a number of them clearly enough refer directly to the goddess Asherah e.
The Yahwist and the other biblical writers could not accept the presence of this goddess as a deity in Israel, much less as the wife of Yahweh, who they specifically depicted in non-sexual terms. These tactics are apparent in the Eden story, from the kinds of symbols used and the trajectory of the narrative. These symbols include the garden sanctuary itself, the sacred trees, the serpent, and Eve, herself a goddess figure.
The serpent is in its common guardian role, in an erect posture. The Garden. Originally in the ancient Near East, the Goddess was associated with and had jurisdiction over vegetation and life, which she generated herself.
People partook of the first crops including fruit as her bounty — indeed her body and her divinity — and set up her sanctuary with garden of crops for this purpose. Garden sanctuaries of gods and kings evolved later, when religion became more patriarchal, sky gods came to dominate, and goddesses were substantially devalued. In harmony with the seasons, trees embody the life energy and symbolize the generation, regeneration and renewal of life. Similarly, the divinity of the male deity was accessed through vertical stone pillars, e.
In the Eden story, the two sacred trees of knowledge of good and evil and of life allude to this traditional role of sacred trees, but the meaning is turned upside down.
In the story, Yahweh even creates the trees. In ordering Adam not to partake of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, by implication Yahweh was telling the audience not to venerate sacred trees in the traditional fashion.
And in any event, the theretofore divine knowledge of good and evil that was acquired through eating the fruit is linked with Yahweh, not any goddess. In the ancient Near East, serpents had both positive and negative connotations, and in the Eden story the Yahwist played on each. In its positive aspect, the serpent represented the divine force itself, responsible for creation, life, and rebirth, as symbolized by its constant shedding of its skin. This and the fact that it lives within the earth the netherworld made for a natural association with the Mother Earth Goddess.
As a result, the serpent was venerated as having divine powers and was used in rituals, including in marriage to secure conception of children and to maintain health. Serpents were also considered wise and sources of knowledge, and thus were used in divination.
But the serpent also was represented negatively as unrestrained divine power, which produces chaos, which is evil. In the Eden story our author used this negative aspect, while parodying the traditional positive associations, which Yahweh appropriated. As a result, Yahweh was victorious over the serpent and chaos and, by implication the Goddess, in a mini version of the above-mentioned dragon fight motif. The Goddess. As noted by numerous biblical scholars, the Goddess is also seen in the figure of Eve herself, the last figure in our trinity of tree-serpent-Goddess.
At the end of the story, Eve is punished by having to give birth in pain, whereas goddesses in the ancient Near East gave birth painlessly. Indeed, Eve is even created from Adam! Here the Yahwist may be alluding to Goddess veneration, saying not to worship her.
As a result of these events, by the end of the story Yahweh is supreme and in control of all divine powers and functions formerly in the hands of the Goddess, and Canaanite religion in general has been discredited. The serpent has been vanquished, flattened, and deprived of divine qualities, and thus is not worthy of veneration, and enmity has been established between snakes and humans.
The Goddess has been discredited, rendered powerless, and is eliminated from the picture and sent into oblivion. But in fact she persisted, and her equivalents in the psyche inevitably have persisted to this day, as they must. Please subscribe to automatically receive my posts by clicking the Follow button on the top right. Becking, Bob, Dijkstra, Meindert, et al. Only One God? London: Sheffield Academic Press Billing, Nils. Uppsala: Akademitryck Dever, William. Did God Have a Wife?
Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans George, Arthur, and Elena George.
The Mythology of Eden. Lanham, Maryland: Hamilton Books The papal election is the 75th conclave in the history of the Catholic church since The voting cardinals will elect the th successor of St.
Simon Peter or Cephas is regarded as the first pope and founder, with St. Paul, of the see of Rome. Chanting the litany of the Saints and seeking inspiration from the Holy Spirit, the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel in a solemn procession.
They swear oaths of secrecy at the marble altar behind Michelangelo's Last Judgement frescoes. To vote, the cardinals sit on cherry wood chairs at specially built rows of tables which are covered in beige and bordeaux fabric.
The cardinals will cast their votes on a slip of paper. The placed into a small plate which is used to tip the paper into a silver and gilded bronze urn. Once the ballots are counted and recorded, they are placed in another urn on a wooden table to be burned. Despite these and other references associating Asherah with apostasy, contemporary discoveries have further indicated that, at least in the opinion of some ancient Israelites, YHWH and Asherah were appropriately worshipped as a pair.
The Canaanite association of Asherah with sacred trees is also found in Israelite tradition. If a correspondence holds, then the trees of life and of knowledge in the Eden narrative may also reflect Asherah imagery.
These cult objects are generally described as being in the shape of a pole or stylized tree. Like a pole or tree, they can be said to be planted, stood up, or erected.
Conversely, when destroyed, these cult symbols can be described as being cut down, hewn down, or uprooted; they can also be said to be burned, overturned, or broken.
According to the biblical record, these sacred poles or stylized trees associated with Asherah were erected by the Israelites throughout most of their history, especially during the premonarchic tribal period Judg —26, 28, 30 and during the period of the divided monarchy, both in the northern kingdom of Israel 1Kgs ; ; 2 Kgs ; , 16; ; and parallel references in 2 Chronicles and in Judah, in the south 1 Kgs , ; 2 Kgs ; , 7; , 14; and parallel references in 2 Chronicles.
These sacred poles were situated in various locations. In Judges 6 , a sacred pole of Asherah is said to have stood beside the altar of the Canaanite storm god, Baal. Both of these phrases are stereotypically used by the biblical writers to describe sites of idolatrous worship, implying, as does Judges 6 , that the worship of Asherah was an apostate behavior in Israel and improper for followers of YHWH. The sacred pole of Samaria, moreover, which was erected during the reign of King Ahab reigned — B.
Archaeological discoveries from the late s and early s have further indicated that, at least in the opinion of some ancient Israelites, YHWH and Asherah were appropriately worshipped as a pair. An eighth-century B.
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