Did Jehovah Have A Sex Change?

[Heimdall]

In a recent debate/argument with a Christian on another website the following much edited “conversation” took place between myself and her:

 

Bella Angelique:

The roots of Christianity can be traced back directly to ancient Sumeria, and there is no religion known that is older than theirs. The beauty of this line of religion is its ability to adapt and change, and it has changed and adapted numerous times through out history. I fully expect it to continue to do so in the future and it is now in the present.

Myself:

Please trace this route back to the ancient Sumerians.... Christianity is based on Judaism which recognizes only one god who is not nature bound, so how can you trace Judaism back to Sumer and keep a straight face?

Bella Angelique:

Easily. The texts that they use to study the evolution of spiritual understanding states that is where its roots lie, in ancient Ur,

Myself:

Ur only dates to the early 3rd millenium (approx 2600 BCE), at that time the Egyptian religion was well over 2400 years old....then you have the thought that various 10000 year old settlements in Turkey show a well developed "Mother Goddess" cult, along with a "Bull cult" and a "Leopard cult"

Bella Angelique:

It is open to debate…It would be a good archeo thread, what is the oldest civilization of earth. Lots of folks might have good tidbits to add

Myself:

Actually it all hinges on what you mean by civilization…if you mean cities and priest kings and extreme organization then it would be Mesopotamia and Egypt. They both flowered at about the same time (although Egypt seems to be a few centuries earlier). However, if you are speaking of highly organized social units, then your attention must be directed to Anatolia, Syria and Palestine. Between 8000 and 5000 BCE at varied places; Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, Munhatta in Syria and Jericho in Palestine, large villages of 10,000 people or more came into being. These social units were highly organized, well built with human comfort in mind, and fortified with entry into the village in much the same manner as the Anasazi (early Puebloans) of the New World - by use of ladders. All houses were connected and had no paths or walkways existing at ground level, the roofs were the thoroughfares of these towns. The inhabitants had a very complex system of beliefs and religion, originally worshipping a male and a female deity, along with various animal cults that I mentioned earlier. Over a span of a millennium or two, the male deity disappeared from their daily life and the female (the Mother Goddess) came to the fore of their religion. Sometime around 7000 and 5000 BCE emigrants from this culture settled Cyrus and quite probably at a slightly later date settled Crete and intermingled with the native culture, laying the foundation for the later Minoan society. This is a demonstration that while it is possible that Judaism is a much mutated offshoot of the Sumerian religions, it is equally possible that it is a very mutated offshoot of the Neolithic religion of Anatola and the Levant. One in which the monotheistic Mother Goddess underwent a sex change in order to appeal to patriarchal nomadic herders, the ancestors of the Semitic peoples…At the time Sumer, Akkad and Ur came into being, the Neolithic village culture would have been nearly 5 millennia old. Makes you think doesn’t it….it is entirely possible that YHWH/Yahweh/Jehovah is the Neolithic Mother Goddess after a quick trip to Denmark (only the old timers will understand that allusion)

 

Maybe I am on to something here….could YHWH actually be the Mother Goddess after a trip to Denmark? What do y'all think on the matter? - Heimdall

[Antlerman]

Maybe I am on to something here….could YHWH actually be the Mother Goddess after a trip to Denmark? What do y'all think on the matter? - Heimdall

Possible. I had heard that at one point YHWH had a wife in early Judaism but was gradually pushed to the side? Maybe YHWH was the Mother Goddess husband and is now both genders, a hermaphrodite God. How else could you have God the Son, without God the Mom?

[mwc]

Well, all signs point to a bull cult of some sort (from the artifacts I've seen pictures of). This is when YHWH was proto-Jewish/Canaanite. In my opinion, prior to this you had the area pretty much controlled by the Egyptians more than anyone else but despite this I think there's more Sumerian influence in YHWH than Egyptian (although there's a lot of Egyptian influence in the rituals and the temple).

 

Having said all that I don't know if I'd agree that YHWH is simply the mother goddess (like Asherah) with a sex change. If it were that easy then the competition wouldn't be so fierce between them but it's easy to see the patriarchal society wanted to usurp her role with their new male diety making him the sole creator instead of the female (or combination male/female) as was more common. I see YHWH as the typical bull god (depending on the time frame) and he usurped the roles of those gods of the people his followers encountered. Think of the xians and pagans. Yule is now xmas and so on. YHWH simply swallowed up the surrounding gods and conquered those who didn't relent quietly (as the Israelites gained power after they came down from the hills around 1200BCE...after the Sea People, or something, decimated the cities making for easy converts to their way of life and eventually their god a few hundred years later).

 

I suppose I should have thought this out a little better but that's the gist of things. Hopefully it makes a little sense.

 

mwc

[Lycorth]

Well, he's always depicted acting like a big bitch

[Mythra]

Hmmmm.. Interesting ....

 

This brings new meaning to the phrase....

 

 

GO FUCK YOURSELF, GOD.

[Amethyst]

When I was in the process of deconverting, I read that Wisdom was once considered to have been a Goddess and Jesus' bride, but that it was later watered down in the bible. (There's some stuff about it in...the Song Of Solomon, I think it is.) Also, I've read the same thing about the holy spirit, that it was originally meant to be sacred feminine but was later neutered.

[godlessgrrl]

Merlin Stone's "When God Was a Woman" covers this whole thing in depth. The archateological researches of Marija Gimbutas, while controversial, are intriguing as well. You might also reference Riane Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade", and a book called "The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" (the author's name slips my mind at the moment on that last one) for additional perspectives.

 

Stone makes the argument that the emergence of Levantine male deities - and ultimately Yahweh, then Jesus later - was a very long process that had a lot to do with th interaction of settled, agricultural, largely goddess-worshipping civilizations (such as at Catal Huyuk, and later at Sumer) vs. an influx of displaced Luwian priests who worshipped either a volcano god or a sky god (or a god who represented both). One theory is that the Luwian types were displaced after the fall of the Hittite empire, and they wandered around the Levant collecting other displaced and nomadic peoples until they came up with what ended up as the 12 Tribes of Israel. After that it was all simply a matter of religious competition, with the patriarchal warrior priest guys gradually eliminating all traces of goddess worship over the next couple of milennia or so, until the last pagan temple (to Artemis) was finally destroyed in the 400's AD, and Xianity took over for good.

 

It's an interesting read; and, if true, then Yahweh was just a local deity the Luwian priest caste latched onto as being most like the thundering, fire-and-brimstone volcano god they themselves had previously served. There's a further implication that they took everything over because they were a pampered, priestly social class, and they were just used to being served by everybody anyway... so they convinced others to serve them too, and ended up becoming the pampered, exclusivist Levites later on.

 

In any event, there's a lot older religions than those of Sumer; your friend doesn't even take into account any Asian animistic traditions, or Hinduism, which is possibly the world's oldest organized religion still practiced today. Goddess worship is probably older, but it's harder to piece it together as being something organized, if it was at all, or figure out how widespread it was or even what the practices of its adherents were.

 

Anyway. Some interesting tidbits.

[chefranden]

I read a tome some time ago that made a case for the E part of the OT being female in origin.

I don't remember the title or the author.

[Heimdall]

Chef, look in my blog...I wrote that some time back and don't really remember which one it was, but think it was the one on the Holy Spirit....Heimdall

[mwc]

Okay, I'm changing my answer a bit. After doing a little more reading about Canaanite gods I'm thinking that perhaps YHWH may have been both male and female at some point. My reasoning for this is Baal had a feminine form which was Baalat. Perhaps YHWH also had a similar form that has been lost to time and we only have the various hints in some of the texts pointing to this female aspect (things like "wisdom" are feminine and now attributed to jesus but they are more Greek in nature and may not play into any of this)? Strong's lexicon doesn't indicate male or female for the name so it appears that YHWH is androgynous based on name alone (at least what we now know of it which isn't much).

 

This doesn't mean I think that at any point YHWH was ever fully female then switched to being male but I do think that it is possible that YHWH could have fully encompassed male and female traits and, as such, been seen as wholly male or female at the same time (and as a result been worshiped as male or female independently...although all signs, that I can find, seem to indicate that only a masculine version was ever followed so perhaps the feminine went by a different name we're not aware of?)

 

mwc

[chefranden]

I was wrong, it being J that has been suspected of being feminine.

 

This is the book I read