The Bible’s Buried Secrets – and God’s Wife
Posted by NT Wrong on November 19, 2008
Jim West summarises the contents of PBS’s The Bible’s Buried Secrets (first screened Nov 18, 2008), composed during a ‘live blog’.
The program is available to watch in its entirety on the PBS website.
It sounds as though the program by-and-large followed the Bible’s own story of a opposition between “our” monotheism and “pagan”, “foreign” polytheism, painting polytheism as a corruption of the “serve Yahweh only” ideology of “early Israel”. That is, the program simply repeats the Bible’s own ideology. Whereas, historically, worship of only one God came relatively late in the Levant, after Yahwistic polytheism (ca. the fifth century BC). Polytheism is not a corruption of monolatry in Judea, but its antecedent. Polytheism is not “foreign”, let alone (the ridiculously inappropriate term) “pagan”, but polytheism is authentic ‘Israelite’ and Judahite religion. And monotheizing tendencies are in evidence everywhere amongst Judea’s neighbours, when it finally does happen. The “foreign corruption” may have been “corruption” towards worshipping Yahweh alone.
Here’s a segment about God’s wife, Asherah, which displays this same (biblical) bias:
2 Responses to “The Bible’s Buried Secrets – and God’s Wife”
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N.T.WRONG 
Scott Ferguson said
“What was a Pagan (*gasp*) idol doing in an Israelite household?”
Dudes, it wasn’t Pagan at the time!!!!
I also liked the clip where they pass the same (two, three?) figurines across the screen while intoning that hundreds have been found.
richard said
since the biblical accounts say the israelites were worshiping both Yahweh and Asherah, i’m not sure what the big deal is. the video clip even admits that was the case. i would have liked to see the whole show, too bad i missed it.