El and Yahweh: The Two Gods of Israel | Edward Dodge

[Music] Well, hello everybody. Welcome to another live stream fish podcast. Today I'm joined by Edward Dodge, and he is the author of "A History of the Goddess from the Ice Age to the Bible." Link to purchase his book in the description.

And today's topic, we're talking about El and Yahweh, the two gods of Israel. Yahweh and El were originally two separate gods, and several scholars have acknowledged this fact for a very long time. Although some try to make arguments that they were the same god, the same god, regardless of the fact that there is evidence showing otherwise. Many scholars are recognizing, and others are coming to the conclusion as well, that they must have been originally two separate gods.

So, Adaj, it's been a long time since you've been on the show. Welcome back. And can you tell us a bit about El and Yahweh and their origins and their being originally two separate gods?

Yeah, Jacob, hey, you know, it's great to be back. It's great to be with you. I've taken a little bit of a break from podcasting, so this is my first show back in a little while, but it's great to be here. It's always good to talk to you.

Um, yeah, so El and Yahweh as two separate gods really comes back to the, uh, just the basic principle that the Israelites were polytheistic prior to becoming monotheistic. That they were, they were a pagan people for a very long time, just like everybody else in the Near East. Um, you know, they were effectively Canaanites. They had the same Canaanite pantheon as everybody else. So, El was the high god, um, the equivalent of Anu from Mesopotamia, the father of the gods. And we know that this was the god of the Israelites because that's where they get their name, Israel. El, uh, means wrestles with El. And when, when Jacob, you know, in Genesis, gets the name for the first time, the first thing he does is go over to, uh, I'm sorry, I'm trying to find the quote here. He goes over to Bethel, the town of Bethel, which means house of El. And he builds an, uh, builds an altar. And on the word, on the, on the altar, he writes the words, "El, Elohe, Israel." Um, which means "El is the God of Israel." Uh, with no mention of Yahweh anywhere. And this is, uh, deep in the Bronze Age, or deep in the second millennium at some point. I mean, that's when these stories take place.

Um, and, um, and there's, you know, we have lots of evidence of El. El is a very well-known, well, uh, well-documented god from across the Near East. Um, like I said, the same as Anu from Mesopotamia. He's the, he's the high god above the pantheon, the father of all the gods. And his wife is the, is the mother goddess, is Asherah. That's his mate. That's his spouse. Um, and their son Baal was the king of the gods, uh, just like the Canaanite Zeus, basically, or the Canaanite Marduk. Um, so El, uh, according to various traditions, including the Bible, it says El has 70 sons, or El and Asherah together have 70 sons. And those various sons, the way I see it, are the various, uh, kings of the gods in the various communities. So Marduk is one of them in Babylon, and Ashur is another one over in, uh, in Assyria. Um, you know, Yahweh is is one of the sons of, one of the many sons of El. Baal is one of the many sons of El. Uh, for the Greeks, they describe Kronos as being the equivalent of El. And so Zeus is another one in this line. Indra over, over in India. So there's a bunch of them. Um, and you can see this pattern repeating over and over again. U, but El still stays the same. He's always the same guy. He's very distant and he's very ancient. Um, and he's been around forever.

Yahweh does not appear on the scene until much, much later. I mean, El is around the entire second millennium, and he's worshiped all across the Canaanites. He's worshiped by the Hyksos. Um, there's like no disputing El's presence in the second millennium BC. Yahweh is nowhere to be seen. I mean, he may be, he probably is, in fact, a, a minor tribal god somewhere. Um, there's various obscure references to, may be Yahweh during the second millennium, but basically, he doesn't appear. He doesn't even appear in the biblical narrative until Moses.

Keep in mind, all the stories we read were written as we read it today. When you read about Abraham talking to Yahweh, it's because the stories we read are written by Yahweh centuries later, where they take the old stories and retroject Yahweh back into them earlier in the historical timeline when he actually would have been there. So when you have Abraham talking to Yahweh in the stories, that's a story written by the followers of Yahweh. Um, but the historical, the historical Abraham, such as it were, if there was a historical Abraham back in around, you know, the time of Hammurabi, 1800 BC is when Abraham would sort of fit on the historical timeline, um, there's no Yahweh back then.

So Yahweh in the biblical narrative comes to Moses at the burning bush during the Exodus, and that's when Yahweh appears on the scene. And the way I see it, um, this is around 1200 BC, 1250 BC, depending on when you want to date the Exodus. And this is the Bronze Age collapse. This is when Egyptian power has fallen apart, when all the powers of the Near East are collapsing. And we enter into a 300-year dark age from basically 1200 BC to 900 BC, when the, when the Mycenaean Greeks collapse, uh, the Hittites in Turkey collapse, um, all the different cultures. The Assyrians withdraw all the way back to Assyria. The Egyptians are forced to withdraw out of Canaan because they had been controlling Canaan for 400 years up until that point. But this is when Egyptian powers, after a series of wars, uh, with the Sea Peoples, um, they are forced to withdraw from Canaan. And this is the point when all the Israelites, not just the Israelites, but this is when the Philistines, the Sea Peoples settle in the Gaza Strip as the Philistines. This is when the Moabites, the kingdom of Edom, the kingdom of Moab, the kingdom of Judah, kingdom of Israel, they all appear on the scene at the same time around 1175 BC. The way, in the, in my reckoning, after the second big war with the Sea Peoples, um, the second big Egyptian war with the Sea Peoples that weakens Egypt enough that causes them to, uh, lose control of Canaan. This is when Moses is coming on the scene, and this is the time of the Judges in the biblical narrative, uh, when the Israelites go back into Canaan and and wage war.

And on the historical timeline, what we're seeing is that this is like a couple centuries of complete lawlessness, complete chaos, and it's a, uh, complete illiteracy. Um, so there's no written records from this time period from 1200 BC to like 900 BC. There's, there's not much in the way of any kind of writing. Um, and so Yahweh first appears on the scene, I, I believe, in the context of the Exodus, which I believe was a historical slave revolt, not with six, not with millions of people or anything, but, uh, you know, enough to, to be noticed. Enough people to be noticed, an entire town or something, something to that effect. Um, they settle in Canaan. They're followers of Yahweh. And but it's just, he's just another pagan god. Uh, just another son of El. And the full pantheon is being worshiped. Baal is is the incumbent king of the gods, Asherah. And then the three goddesses, Asherah, Astarte, and Anat, who I contend are triple goddesses, that their identities are fungible, their identities are fluid because it's all part of this big mother goddess tradition that I defend, even if today's scholars don't, uh, don't, don't quite see it that way. So, um, Asherah, Anat, they are the big goddesses. You've got Baal, Yam, and Mot. That's, uh, the equivalent of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. Uh, Yam being the god of the sea, like Poseidon, and Mot being the god of death, like Hades. This is the pantheon. This is how we know it from the Ugaritic texts and the Baal cycle story.

Um, and the way I see it is that there was a revolution against Baal, that, um, the Baal culture really did practice child sacrifice, these Moloch sacrifices. They used to call them sacrifices to Moloch, but there is modern scholarship has demonstrated there was no god named Moloch. It's just the, it's been mistranslated and it's actually just the name of the type of sacrifice. It's called a *mulk*. Uh, because the original Hebrew has no vowels. Um, and this is a sacrifice that a practice that continued all the way into Carthage centuries later, where they also worshiped Baal because Baal and El, this whole pantheon is a Phoenician pantheon. And so they took it with them to Carthage in North Africa, that was fighting with the Greeks and Romans later on, centuries later. They're worshiping Baal. They're worshiping El. And they, um, are doing these same child sacrifices, the *mulk* sacrifice. And the Greeks and Romans write about it in the same with the same disgust and contempt as the biblical writers write about it. Um, that they were completely thought that these traditions were quite horrific, and they thought the Phoenicians were pretty gross.

Um, so I believe that there was a revolution against Baal, and that it, it begins only after the establishment of kingship. So you got, uh, like I said, 1200 to 900 BC is the Bronze Age collapse. King David takes Jerusalem, took Jerusalem as a historical event, um, around 1000 BC, 1, 104, 106, somewhere in there. Um, now scholars will debate whether King David actually existed, but I don't think there's any debate that the Israelites took Jerusalem, um, at this time, and there they had a temple there, presumably, um, whether it already existed or, you know, David and Solomon built it, um, a temple in the Phoenician style because they say themselves in the Bible that they are friends of the Phoenicians. So King Solomon is definitely not a, uh, monotheist. He is very clearly a pagan, worshiping Yahweh in the pagan manner and worshiping all the goddesses because the biblical writers are incredibly critical of him for doing so.

So here we see, oh, and then the golden calf is also important because the golden calf is that they destroy after Mount Sinai with Moses, and then, um, uh, again, the, the golden calf was still there the entire time, and that is a symbol of these old traditions of El. El is the bull of heaven. That's one of his titles. Uh, the bull and cattle are are, uh, uh, a symbol of the men and the male principle, the male fertility principle, if you will, in these old, uh, these old Neolithic religions. And so you see cattle worship going all the way back to Çatalhöyük and and earlier, and it kind of male represents the male principle. And so the golden calf, um, is this old tradition of El. And so, um, again, there's one in the town of Bethel. Um, and the biblical writers call it Jacob's sin that they were continuing to worship El. Um, but yeah, they were had this old practices, these old pagan practices where the mother goddesses are super strong. So, it's got all the sex rituals. Um, the drug and sex rituals are going strong in that era. And there is a revolution against it.

So, I believe that the revolution kicks in, um, historically, it kicks in after kingship. So after King Solomon, after his son Rehoboam, who is also clearly a pagan, the northern kingdom of Israel gets formed. It was pagan its entire history. The biblical writers, they make no, you know, uh, they, uh, they point this out repeatedly, like they're very unhappy about the ongoing paganism and the evil kings in the northern kingdom. So, um, and the golden calf stood in Israel. There were two of them, one in Bethel, and one in Dan, and they stood the entire time. So El was just continuing to be worshiped on his own as his own independent god, um, alongside Yahweh for a very long time.

Um, the question becomes for biblical scholars is that we do know that Yahweh and El ultimately get fused into one God because we got, this is why we have two names of God in the Bible. You've got, or you've got God and the Lord, because God in English translates back to Elohim, which is plural for gods, and then Yah, the Lord, which is always capitalized, translates back to Yahweh. And this is why you've got both words and both names is because they're originally two separate gods. And you also see the name El all over the place in the text, um, just used standalone, El Shaddai, aside from these town names. Um, El Shaddai is one of the titles. And so, um, um, yeah, so El was being worshiped there.

Um, so then you've got this revolutionary cult, um, and at some point, El and Yahweh get fused together. And certainly by the time you get to the written Torah in the Second Temple, they've already been fused, but nobody really knows at what point they've been fused. Biblical tradition maintains that they were fused all the way immediately at the time of Moses. So that would be in the 13th century BC. Um, a lot of traditionalists will debate, will assume, anyway, that they were syncretized early on. I'm frankly not convinced that they were syncretized early on, um, or even syncretized in the First Temple at all. Maybe they were in the minds of some of the radical Yahwists. Um, that may well be, but it would have been later in the history of the First Temple, like after the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah. Um, and it would only have been in the minds of this one small cult, because El was a widely worshiped god all the way through the first millennium. So even if in the minds of the Yahwists, they've fused Yahweh and El, they're just a minority little group, um, in one small country, just in Judah, which is just like a small little place.

Um, the, um, I personally don't think that they were syncretized early on. I, I think if, when you just look at the biblical narrative on its own, they make it pretty clear that, um, they start the reforms in the 9th century. That's when they start overthrowing. There's three, there's three queen mothers that get overthrown in the 9th century. So in the 800s BC, the first one is done by King Asa. And this is the beginning of the reforms. I believe he's the grandson or great-grandson of, of King Solomon, and he overthrows Queen Maacah because of, who is the queen mother, because of her, uh, creating a graven image for Asherah. And so she's explicitly overthrown and deposed because of her Asherah practices.

A little bit later, it's still in that same century, in the northern kingdom, King Ahab is the leader of Israel. His wife is Jezebel, the most reviled woman in the Bible, Queen Jezebel, the Phoenician queen. And she very clearly, uh, is the patron of a temple of Asherah. They make that very clear. You, they have that battle on Mount Carmel with the prophet Elijah against the prophets of Baal and Asherah. Um, and Elijah prevails. This is all during the kingship of Ahab, who was a historical person, mind you. Ahab is a well-attested historical figure. He was an important leader at the time. He's no chump historically. He was a pretty, pretty accomplished, uh, warrior king. And so, and Jezebel was a historical figure as well.

So, on the battle of Mount, Mount Carmel, you know, Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh, or no, it's, it's not Isaiah, it's Elijah. Sorry, get my prophets confused. It's Elijah. Um, he prevails on Mount Carmel. It's a famous story. And then they proceed to kill the 400 prophets of Baal, but they don't mention the prophets of Asherah, who presumably go unmolested because they were so quite powerful. Um, so that is Yahweh fighting with Baal. You can't say Yahweh has been fused with El when he's still waging this coup against Baal, because like, Yahweh is trying to become the new king of the gods. He, uh, he's got to take out Baal first, and then he's going to take Baal's titles, rider on the storm. He's going to take, he's going to take the title of Lord, because Baal was Lord. It used to be that you said, uh, they talked about this in the book Hosea. The prophet Hosea talks about this that he says to his wife, "You will no longer call me my Baali. You will call me my Ishi." And that was like a Yahweh term, but my Baali means my lord. Baal was a, uh, a term of phrase for lord that that they used all the time, and, and that they're a common figure of speech for those folks. So, you know, they're, they're using the term all the time.

And, um, so Yahweh, the cult of Yahweh is trying to overthrow this cult of Baal in the 9th century and still fighting with Baal. So I don't think you can make the case that he's been fused with El at this point in history.

So, um, King Ahab dies. Um, his, uh, Jezebel becomes queen mother. Their child is now the king. And there's a coup waged by Jehu, who is a Yahwist. Um, and he assassinates both the kings of Israel and Judah. And he assassinates Jezebel quite famously. Has her thrown out of a window. Very famous story in the Bible. And Jehu takes over. Now Jehu is definitely Yahwist. His name, Jehu, as, like I'm not an etymologist, I'll leave it to others. But that's a Yahweh name. That's got the YH, the Yah. That's a Yahweh cognate. So he's a Yahwist. But he's a pagan Yahwist, because he leaves the temple, the, he leaves the, um, the golden bull still standing, the golden calves in Bethel and Dan, and the biblical writers are very critical of this. They say, "Jehu, he was a Yahwist, but he didn't go all the way. He didn't really do it right." So he wasn't really a true reformer, but he, his, you know, he has a full life, and then his sons are kings of Israel for like a century or something. And, um, and so, like, they just go on being pagan up there.

Uh, in the southern kingdom, in Judah, Jezebel's daughter Athaliah had become queen mother. So, in all of these assassinations, in all of these, uh, political machinations, Athaliah takes the throne. She kills off a bunch of folks. She's like, you know, she's no, uh, angel either. Um, so she becomes queen mother in Judah and rules for six years, the only woman to rule Jerusalem as a queen in these stories. And then she gets assassinated by Yahweh. So that's the third queen mother, all of whom are associated with Asherah. And, um, and three of them get deposed. I frankly think that is a historical and, b, symbolic, like none of that's there by accident. I actually think that these are all real people, and that these are real, real, that the book of Kings is, it's propaganda, but it's, it's actual history. These are all historical figures, and it's actual events being put through the Yahwist propaganda lens, but it's actual history in my opinion.

So that's all in the 9th century. Um, they're still fighting about Baal and Asherah. The Asherah pole continues to stand. And then you get, like, a full century later, um, the Assyrians have come through. They've wiped out, in 722 BC, I believe, is the year when Assyria destroys the northern kingdom of Israel and wipes out and wipes out the 10 tribes, and they disappear. And then they attack Judah. King Hezekiah is now the king, and he's one of the, one of two great reformers that's all Yahweh, um, that wants to put down the other cults. And, um, at this point, Assyria is overthrown, and he's a young man, a young king. All the refugees come fleeing into Judah. This is a time of quite up, time of great upheaval. Um, and it's a few years later, or even 20 years later, that the Assyrians attack Judah and attack Jerusalem. And they sack the entire country, um, they totally lay waste to all the towns, and they get all the way to Jerusalem, and Hezekiah is penned up inside the walls of the city, and they lay siege to the city. This is a very important part in the story in the, the book of Kings. But ultimately, the Assyrians, um, they withdraw. Whether they, you know, they take a huge bribe, they take all the gold out of the temple, um, and a huge payoff and decide to depart and leave Hezekiah alive.

Now, at this point, if the Assyrians had sacked the city and sacked the temple of, of Yahweh and killed Hezekiah, at this point, the entire religion of Yahweh would have disappeared, and there would have, we never would have been heard from again. Um, if they had, it gotten down to like, just one single candle, um, like literally, like barely anything left of this, what became monotheism. But at this moment, at this particularly crucial moment in time, it was down to just a whiff. U, but the Assyrians did withdraw. Hezekiah does survive the day, and he's hailed as a hero, hailed as like, you know, the next Moses practically. Um, and so the Yahwists get a big head of steam thinking that they've like, you know, that they survived, that they were really favored by Um. And so Hezekiah, the reforms had already happened. He had led a whole series of reforms. They cut down the Asherah poles, and they smash altars to Baal, and they smashed the temple to Baal, and they sm Oh, they smashed the, the nest. I can never pronounce it correctly, but the bronze snake that that Moses had made. This is again clear symbolism that the earlier Israelites were totally pagan, because the snake is an incredibly powerful symbol of, particularly in the goddess traditions, of mystical wisdom, power, and authority. But in terms of the goddess traditions, it's a symbol of regeneration. That's why they like it, because their traditions are all about life, death, and renewal. And so, um, and so the snake is a very powerful symbol. And they had been using it. Moses used the snake staff. And so this had been a powerful symbol for the pagan Israelites that in the reforms they get rid of it, you know, and this is, uh, ties back to the Garden of Eden story where the snake has turned into something bad, which was stands in complete contrast to all the religions of their era, where the snake was was highly, uh, important and positive religious symbol.

So the reforms of Hezekiah come through. Um, Hezekiah lives and dies. He dies an old man. But these reforms were not popular. Hezekiah was popular on a personal level because of saving the city. But these reforms were not popular, because as soon as he dies, his son, who I believe is Ahaz, he goes right back to the paganism and, um, brings back the Asherah pole, puts one in King Solomon's temple. And in fact, even, um, I think it's Ahaz. He even goes and, um, you know, goes in subservience to the Assyrians and brings back an altar to Asherah and puts it in the temple of Yahweh. That really upsets the biblical writers. They hate that.

Um, so some time goes by, and then you get the second big reformer, which is Jer, which is Josiah, which is in the late 600s BC. That's like a century later. He's like the, uh, grandson or great-grandson of Hezekiah. And it's nearly a century later when Josiah has the second big set of reforms. And these ones have been unearthed by archaeologists. Like these reforms really happened, because the temple of Tel Erad in Israel that they dug up, this is kind of controversial, but they found, you know, in the Holy of Holies. It's one of the only temples they've ever found that actually matches the type of temple as the, as the temple on the Temple Mount, as the Jerusalem temple. So it's got the same layout, the same tripartite, tripartite layout, and with the smallest room as the Holy of Holies on the inside. And in that temple, they found two standing stones, presumably for Yahweh and Asherah, and, uh, two incense altars. And they had been carefully laid over and buried. Deliberately buried. All this stuff was like, they weren't destroyed in a fight. They were deliberately buried by hand with shovels, um, laid on their side, not broken, laid on their side and buried. And so these are either from the reforms of Hezekiah or the reforms of Josiah. Either one. The carbon dating isn't that accurate.

And so, um, and on one of these altars, the smaller of the two incense altars, the one that goes with Asherah, there was residue, incense residue on it that just recently in the last couple years, they analyzed that incense and found it to be cannabis. They found it to be hashish. And so that again goes back to my whole argument about cannabis being very important to the Asherah traditions, and that this is an actual piece of archaeological evidence, not just textual evidence. It's very powerful, and it's powerful that it was thrown out as part of the reforms.

Um, so at this point, El and Yahweh may be fused at this point in history, the seventh century. El and Yahweh may be fused in the minds of the Yahwists. But nonetheless, like, as I was saying before, um, that the still the majority of the people are still pagan, and El and Baal are still being worshiped by the Phoenicians and the Canaanites all around the country. Um, so, you know, El had been fighting with Baal to take all of his titles, rider on the storm, and all those things. And, um, so Josiah gets killed. Um, he wasn't, you know, wasn't too much favored by God since he gets killed on the battlefield. Um, and then again, the reforms don't stick. As soon as Josiah dies, the following kings all put the, go right back to the paganism. And then it's not much longer after that the Babylonians come through in 586 and and sack Jerusalem and destroy the temple of Yahweh and send everybody in exile. Not everybody, but send the elites in exile to Babylon, where they spend the next 150 years. And that, it's during that time in Babylon that they really, that they put the Torah together. I mean, there's all these old texts and old traditions. And it's during that time in Babylon that they have that, once they're, the Persians defeat the Babylonians, and the Persians are are nice to the Israelites, give them are favorable toward them. And so they sponsor them to rebuild the Second Temple and to write their sacred texts. And so they're able to like employ scholars like Ezra to do the actual scribal work of stitching together the Torah we read today. I don't think it was finished in five, in, in that, in that time period, but I do think that that's when, like, uh, the traditional dating is 458 BCE is when Ezra, presumably according to Jewish tradition, brought the, uh, completed Torah back to Jerusalem for the, um, for the Second Temple at the beginning of the Second Temple period. And that in that point, they're monotheists. At that point, they're Jews as we know them. But the First Temple, they were never Jews. They don't call themselves Jews. They never use that title. They're either Hebrews or Israelites. There's no rabbis. There's no Torah, um, in the First Temple. So, First Temple, all pagan. Second Temple is when they're monotheists. And the transition takes time. Um, but it would have begun, presumably, at some point during these reforms late in the First Temple. And then the idea of monotheism really comes together in Babylon. The scholars actually date it. Um, I don't have the passage in front of me, but it's somewhere in Second Isaiah. There's a specific passage that the scholars say is, um, you know, the first time you really see El and Yahweh having been fused. I have to find that passage, though.

Anyway, I think that's a bit up for me. I can take a break and, uh, and whatever questions you've got there. Jacob, we do have a couple of super chat questions. Uh, the Muslim apologist, thank you for your super chat. Is there evidence of Yahweh being a distinct god from Elohim? Where does Asherah worship come into the picture?

All right. So, yeah. So, Elohim is this, my, my take on the word Elohim. Elohim is plural, and my take on it is that it means all the gods. And so, when they come up with this frankly revolutionary idea of monotheism, um, it's a real, like, intellectual breakthrough in many, in many respects. They, they take El and Yahweh and they come up with this new word, Elohim, which means "all the gods." My, our God is all the gods. And so, you know, that's dating. I mean, I don't know when they start using that term Elohim, uh, instead of El and Yahweh separately, but I believe that is, you know, that is that is it, like, that's when they start calling them Elohim. That's when they've been fused together.

Now, Asherah worship comes into the picture because she is the popular religion. That is the religion of the common folks. The goddesses are the popular religion, the dying and rising god. These are all the nature-based traditions that seek life, death, and regeneration. And these are, these are really popular religions all across the Near East, and they, uh, have a revolution against it. So when they're getting rid of Asherah and the cutting down the Asherah poles repeatedly, and then the people put them back up, and the, uh, they cut the Asherah pole down, this is a reformation. This is a fight. It's kind of like the Protestant Catholic Reformation that played out over centuries in, you know, the Middle Ages in, uh, you know, in Europe. Um, you know, this re, re, this reformation, this revolution against the traditional paganism plays out over like four or five, actually, I think it plays out over 200 years, but really in this context, it's four or 500 years that they're, that they're really fighting about it. And so right up until the end of the, uh, First Temple, when they go into, into, into exile, there's a big confrontation between Jeremiah and some of the women, um, and this particular group has gone into, into exile in Egypt, not in Babylon, but and nonetheless, it's like in the immediate wake of the destruction of Jerusalem when they're the refugees. And the prophet Jeremiah castigates the women for their worship of the Queen of Heaven. And the women are like, "Hey, what are you talking about? No way. This is, uh, Jeremiah 44. Everything was fine when we worshiped the Queen of Heaven. It was only when we stopped worshiping the Queen of Heaven that we suffered from famine and bloodshed." And they tell Jacob, or they tell, uh, Jeremiah to shove it and go away. And he does.

Um, and so Asherah was the popular religion. And but it's a religion that's full of sex and drugs. It's a religion of the old matriarchies where the women have, one of the big things they're fighting about, um, with Asherah and why this reformation is in place is because, in my opinion, the argument I'm making in my other, my other work, is that Asherah is from the old tribal matriarchies when the women, when you built your families around maternal bloodlines instead of paternal bloodlines, and this was the default for most of humanity, most of our history, um, in 80, 90% of indigenous people, indigenous tribes, and historical tribes are maternal. You trace your bloodlines to the mother. It only makes sense because to trace your bloodlines to the father obligates you to police the women's sex lives and control the women's sex lives and make sure that the girls stay virgins until they're married, and the women are monog, the wives are monogamous to the men, even though the men are not monogamous at all. And so that is not the default of humanity. The default of humanity is to build your families around the mother's maternal bloodlines. And in those cultures, the women's sex lives are not being policed. And the women, and they celebrate women's sexuality. They celebrate women's sexuality as a source of life. And so they have, they have tons of sex traditions. And, you know, the Dionysian and and Bacchic cults that came right through Greek and Roman times were all part of this. Dionysus is worshiped alongside Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries. He's totally gay, and they totally, you know, and it's not just about sex. Sex is part of it. It's, it's about the full cycle of life. So they, they will, there's a whole, they will the god will die tragically, and they will mourn. They spend an entire day mourning and crying about the god who died, and then the next day, the god is miraculously brought back to life by the powers of the Great Goddess, and they'll all celebrate. And then they'll celebrate with music and dance and feasting, and ultimately, you know, and drugs is all a part of it, and then ultimately with sex, like they have a great big feast, and then everyone that wants to has sex. And so, and these are celebrations. And if the girls get pregnant, so be it, like it's not a problem because they're not tracking paternity. And but if you want to track paternity, you got to shut these old religions down. You can't have these traditions going on. They, they completely violate any tenant of paternity. And so this is the era when the Greeks and Hebrews both put these traditions, when they shut them down. Um, and well, they, or at least the Greeks reformed them, and the Israelites shut them down completely. Um, but they've got to reorder these old matriarchal traditions to make them fit in a, in a patriarchal context, because by the time we get into the Iron Age, the whole world has shifted into patriarchy. Um, but it hasn't been patriarchy since all of history. Most of human history is patriarchy.

Let's get to the next super chat. Jericho, thank you for your super chat. What's the best way to prove El is distinct from Yahweh? The late Dr. Michael Heiser has written that Deuteronomy 32 and some Psalms aren't enough textual evidence. Thoughts or up-to-date resources?

I mean, I would say that it's just that El is like clearly his own god. I mean, El is clearly being worshiped all across the Near East. He predates Yahweh and he post-dates Yahweh, because like the Carthaginians were still worshiping him. He didn't, he never went away. He never went away. This is, this is the core argument. You can call, I mean, the Yahwists can say whatever they want, but not everybody followed Yahweh. Yahweh was a minority cult. This is like, Yahweh is totally a minority cult. Um, so what they can have their own opinions about their god. They can syncretize their god with Yahweh if they want to. More power to you. That's the beauty of paganism. There is no orthodoxy. Every community was free to rewrite the traditions how they wanted to. But it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be popular or stick around. And it's the ones that, it's the traditions that stick around are the ones that, um, you know, that have like deep meaning for the culture. U, but just the simple fact that El will continue to be worshiped all across the Phoenician lands, continued to be worshiped right into Greek and Roman times, that the Greeks talk about him. The Greeks say they talk, they write about the Phoenicians and say, um, they describe El as being the same as Kronos. I mean, they specifically say El is Kronos. And so that's like way after the First Temple, like way later. So that, that's my basic argument. U, I don't know. Like I said, in the, in the strictly biblical context, we don't know at what point the Yahwists fused, um, El with Yahweh, but I, but the tradition says that the reformation begins with Moses. I don't actually think there was a religious reformation in the 12th century. I think the Exodus happened as a slave revolt, but I don't believe there was a religious reformation until centuries later.

Vesper, thank you for your super chat. What role did Darius the First play in Jewish monotheism?

I don't really know who Darius. Darius the First being a one of the, uh, uh, Persian kings that fought against Alexander the Great. Is that right? Um, that's after Darius the First was, I don't know, earlier. The Great. Oh, okay. Um, is he's a Persian king. The one I, the only one I know is Cyrus the Great, and then there's a couple that come after Cyrus, because Cyrus didn't actually live that long, per se, after, uh, um, the events where he takes Babylon. Um, and then his sons continue to be favorable towards the, uh, Israelites. But I don't, I don't, I don't know their names. There's a couple of them, though.

So when do you date this Exodus slave revolt that you were talking about?

So my personal pet theory, and this is not the academic consensus, because we've got the Merneptah Stele, which is 1209 BC, which is the first mention of Israel anywhere in the, uh, historical record, the archaeological record, and it's a victory stele by the Pharaoh Merneptah from Egypt, and he mentions Israel in terms of defeating them, says, uh, you know, "their seed is no more, Israel is laid waste, their seed is no more," and he also mentions sacking a couple of towns in Canaan, uh, in Gezer and a couple other towns. And so it's, it's, it's clear evidence of a couple things. First of all, that Israel exists at that point, 1209. And also that Egypt was still in firm control of Canaan at this point. So they could not have gone into, um, in, in, into Canaan in any kind of for, in any kind of major force while the Egyptians were still there. Now, there are hilltop settlements, you know, that become, they come identified as Israelite hilltop settlements that are there at this point already. But they're still pretty new. So, [Music] um, we're talking sometime around around that, around 1209. Most scholars are saying it's, you know, before that, so 1250 or something. And that 1209 is a mention that they're already in, in, in, in Israel proper.

Now, the other oldest piece of evidence we have is textual, and that's from the Bible, and that is the Song of the Sea from, or the Song of Miriam, which is the one of the, one of these, um, one of these really oldest passages of of Hebrew that comes from that archaic Hebrew that comes from the oral tradition, pre-writing. And so there's a few of them. There's the Song of Deborah, the Song of Miriam, the Song of Jacob, I believe is another one. There's a couple of them that are really old, and scholars date them back to the same time period, the 12th century, 1100s BC. And the Song of Miriam is, uh, the Song of the Sea is the, um, it's not very long, and it's the, and it's the first mention of the Exodus, and it's the only one, it's the oldest passage we have that details any, gives us any details about the Exodus. It's the first piece of evidence, the oldest piece of evidence, and it's, it's, it's only, and it only gives us a couple details, but it tells us that there's a military encounter with the Egyptian army, that the Israelites escaped by the skin of their teeth with the divine intervention of Yahweh, um, that, you know, some of the chariots fell in the sea, and that they were able to escape into the desert.

So I started thinking about it. Maybe the Song of the Sea and the Merneptah Stele are referring to the same event. That they, it's just a theory. But the dating works. The dating actually works really, really well. Um, so the Israelites are telling a story that, you know, "we escaped by, you know, we barely escaped. You know, the Egyptian army was ready to run us down. We fled, um, and we barely escaped by divine intervention and the grace of God." The, the Pharaoh responds to the same event by saying, "I got rid of those guys. You'll never hear from them again." You know, everybody writes propaganda. Everybody tells their version of events. I kind of see this as two sides of the same story. It's not the way most scholars see it, but I kind of see the Song of the Sea and the Merneptah Stele referring to the same event because for a couple of reasons. Like I said, the dating works because it's about, it's 30-some years prior to the, the second war I mentioned, 1175. That's, you know, like, why did they flee into the desert and not go into Canaan for 40 years? Because they couldn't go into Canaan because Egypt was still firmly in control. It's not until this next big war a generation later that Egypt loses control, and then all the characters from the, uh, Old Testament show up. The, the Moabites, the Philistines, as I was mentioning, they all show up at the same time, and it's after the second big war.

Um, so I really think that that time period between the two wars, which is, it's not exactly 40 years, but like, it's 30-some years, like, it, I think it's, I think it's, uh, I think the dating works. And I think just think the idea that Pharaoh, his version of events of the Exodus, it's, it's a big enough group of people that he can't not respond. It was a big enough group of people that he did, in fact, send a, you know, a battalion of chariots or whatever after them. But something happened. Something happened on the road that the Israelites were able to escape. You know, things happened. Um, and so, I mean, that's the way I see it. I think it's like, you know, an entire town's worth of people. The Bible says it's 600,000 people plus, you know, all the wives and children and stuff. I take all my numbers in the Bible and take two zeros off. So instead of 600,000, it's just 6,000 plus their, you know, wives and kids, like 15,000 people. That's actually a reasonable. That's actually a much more reasonable amount of people. Like that's an entire town. That's a number of people that fit in a, uh, in a basketball arena, you know? I could imagine that. Um, it would be a big enough thing that Pharaoh would be forced to mention it. He couldn't just like ignore it, but at the same time, um, you, yeah. I mean, that's just, that's kind of how I see it. Um, but I don't think it's a religious reformation.

So, how long did polytheism continue in ancient Israel before it was completely obliterated?

Interesting enough, there's evidence, there's solid evidence that folks who left Israel continued to be polytheistic, um, up until the Second Temple period, because you've got these Elephantine Papyri from Egypt. Some of the refugees, they went to Egypt, and they set up, uh, an Elephantine is an island, um, I believe, right? Um, correct me if I'm wrong on that. And there is, there's texts from like 300 BC where they talk about Anat and Yahweh. Um, because again, these goddesses, their, their identities are pretty fungible. So they'll swap Asherah, Astarte, and Anat around pretty endlessly. Um, and there, this is a tradition. It's called in Hinduism, this is a tradition. It's called Shakti. Um, and it's a super ancient part of the Rigveda that is still practiced today. Okay. In Hinduism, they're very clear that all the goddesses derive from one primordial, primeval source called Shakti. Um, and that all the goddesses' identities are are interchangeable. And so, especially these triple goddesses, and so I, that's why I believe you see such easy and ready synchronization among goddesses across the ancient Near East, uh, because people recognize that it's all, it's all a common tradition, and it's very, very old, and very widely dispersed, and very popular.

Do you think that there was a historical Moses that led that slave revolt?

Couldn't say. Um, you could see that you could see it being written multiple ways that he could be a composite character or something. Um, I'm frankly inclined to believe there was a real Moses. I'm inclined to believe there was a real King David and a real King Solomon, too. Um, like I said, I think his identity, you know, one of the things I argue in my book is that the Moses we have, that we read about, is not would not have been the same as the historical Moses. The historical Moses was a very different character. Still pagan, um, burning ganja, like this whole cloud of smoke thing, um, pillar of smoke. So I do think that they, he's got the snake, um, the *shatnez* is another thing where he instructs linen and wool to be blended together, but then later reforms, they, they take the linen and wool apart. This is a part of the divorce of the mother goddess from the god, because the linen and wool were, um, linen comes from plants, wool comes from the animals, from the farmers and the shepherds. These are these two different groups of people. The old tribal peoples are the farmers. They live in the cities and they have this goddess worship, and the shepherds are these pastoralists, but also the shepherd kings from Mesopotamian traditions who are these patriarchal ruling class that come and impose themselves on existing tribal populations that were already there. The

Cities were already there before the kings arrived, like the Aruk and these other great cities from Mesopotamia. They'd been there for like 2,000 years before the first kingship. And so they'd been self-governed under indigenous standards, um, prior to the Bronze Age and this new class of warrior kings imposing themselves as a new patriarchal ruling class on top of the existing indigenous peoples.

And so, initially, like in the third millennium BC, they're ingratiating themselves. The shepherd kings are, you see this in Mesopotamian mythology, they're ingratiating themselves with the people. But over the course of the second millennium, they are, you know, starting to, uh, there's a lot of stress showing between these independent women who are not falling under patriarchal authority. And then in the first millennium, after the Bronze Age collapse, they shut it down altogether, and it all goes full patriarchy, and all the women are no longer allowed to have any independence whatsoever because the matriarchal tribes, the women own their homes.

So you have matrlocal marriages where the man goes, moves to the woman's house. You see this all over: Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah. Jacob goes and lives with the women's family because this is how they call them beina marriages or matriarchal or matrilocal marriages. This is a marriage where the man goes and lives with the woman's family. And then what happens is, so the women never, never leave home. They stay with their mothers and sisters and aunties, and they, they own the homes. They own the property. The generational wealth and inheritance is all passed through the mothers, passed through the daughters.

And, um, so I believe that in the second millennium BC, you're having patriarchal tribes and matriarchal tribes coexisting. They're living side by side, but the patriarchal tribes are growing and eventually the patriarchal tribes take over altogether. But it takes a while. It takes 2,500 years for this, for this whole thing to play out. This is what my, my new book, this is what I'm working on.

And so the, um, um, I mean, I forgot the original question, but anyway, the, um, anyway, I lost my train of thought there. How long do you think, um, actually, let me rephrase the question. Do you think that even after they started merging El and Yahweh as the same God, do you think that even way after the texts were written, that some groups resisted that identification? And if so, how long did that resistance carry on before it was eventually dispersed? I mean, all the Phoenicians certainly didn't agree with it.

No, I think that, um, after, I think, well, here's a perfect example. Here is a perfect example of that. When, when Ezra, um, brings the Torah back, 458 BC is what the date we're putting on it, symbolic date. We, you know, we can, the scholars will put different dates on it, but for the sake of argument, 458 BC. Um, he goes and he reads the book of the law. This is in the book of Ezra in the Bible. He reads the book of the law to the people, and there's a big assembly and everything. He's in Jerusalem now. And then he sees, he observes that the men have been marrying the Canaanite women. They've still been marrying the Canaanite women, and he's so upset. He falls to the ground. It's a big, big show, a big history. He tears his shirt and he beats his back and he's crying and putting on this big show of, "How could you do this? How could you marry these women?" I remember thinking to myself, the first time I read it, like, "What is wrong with these women?" Like, "Why do you care so much?" And, um, and Ezra forces the men, "If you're going to be a Jew, you have to divorce these women and leave your women and leave your families." So you have to divorce your wives and abandon your children, or you cannot be a Jew. And from here going forward, you can only be a Jew if you are born to a Jewish mother. You cannot be born to any outside woman.

So clearly, at this moment in time, 458 BC, there was still plenty of paganism among the Israelites. But as they, as they consolidate and take on the identity of Jews, they're monotheists. If you call yourself a Jew, you're a monotheist. But everything prior to that, um, if you're just a Hebrew, that's not so much. Um, and if you're an Israelite, not, it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean monotheist at all. And so, you know, I'm not a scholar of Second Temple, so I can't say to like, what extent there was splinter groups in the Second Temple, outside of the one in Egypt that I mentioned that was definitely still there for a while. Um, I don't, I don't really know how long, um, pagan Yahwism continued as a social movement of any recognition. You don't really hear about it in, in, in the text outside of that one piece I mentioned. So, I don't know.

Um, there's so many also so many wars during this time period that, you know, there's just one, one military empire after another coming sweeping through that, you know, a lot of folks get wiped out, and it's very, it's a very like chaotic few centuries there. So I think by the time, you know, the Jews consolidate themselves, they consolidate certainly as monotheists.

And do you think that any memory of El and Yahweh originally being two separate gods had, uh, any effect in, in on the New Testament? Do you think there's hints of it in the New Testament at all, in your view?

Well, absolutely. I mean, the whole context of this father-son pattern continues right through with Jesus, just another son of, of God, um, just another son of El. So, yes, absolutely. And the Gnostics made this abundantly clear. Um, the Gnostics were open about this. They call it, uh, mo, you know, uh, the, the, the Monad and the Demiurge. So, the Monad is the high god. That's El, the one who actually, the creator of the universe, but who doesn't actually have anything to do with people because, like, he's distant and out in space and forming the cosmos and black holes and all that kind of thing. He doesn't have time to deal with his people, little humans. So, like, that's why he dispatches his children to be the gods that actually, you know, are around with people. Um, so, but yes, this pattern of the father and son, it just continues right through Christianity. And again, the Virgin Mary is just this same pagan mother goddess, but she's been demoted. She's got the same title. She is the Mother of God, the Virgin Mother of God. This is, this is one of the classic, one of the classic tropes of all of these old mother goddess traditions is this whole virgin mother, um, title. And, um, that the priest, the priestesses were called virgins, the goddesses were called virgins, and that the idea that the entire universe was born of a primordial mother who was all alone. So she had to give birth to her own mate. This is Gaia and the Greek traditions, gives birth to Uranus. But that's not the only one. And they, in turn, give birth to the next generation of gods. Um, but that's not the only one. In the Mesopotamians, it's, it's Nammu, who is the salt waters, who gives birth, uh, to everything. She is the prime, the primordial salt waters from which everything else emerges. Um, and her husband is the freshwaters. Um, that's in the Sumerian. And then the next generation, the Babylonians, or I mean, the, uh, yeah, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, they, uh, in the Enuma Elish, which is the next, you know, a thousand years later, they rewrite the story so that Nammu has now become Tiamat, but she's bad, and so they have to destroy Tiamat, the old mother goddess. Um, and then there's the waters in, in Genesis 1, you know, and God created the heaven and earth, and the earth was formless and void, and, um, the spirit of God hovered over the waters. Um, uh, you know, the waters that, that again, that's a, they've taken the name away, but that is still the same primordial mother goddess because you'll notice in Genesis 1, God does not create the waters. God creates the heaven and the earth. The waters are already there. Um, just another little thing. Um, so, yeah, the, um, these patterns just repeat over and over again. Um, you know, all the iconography of the baby Madonna and, and baby Jesus is all repeated, repeated iconography from Isis and, and, um, Horus, which is not to say it's, it's the exact same as Isis and Horus, but they're, they're definitely reusing symbolism, uh, and imagery for sure, and iconography. And so, yes, it absolutely goes right through Christianity, the son of God. I mean, he's just another son of God. There's been many of them.

Bear, thank you for your super chat. Do you think the early Upanishads influenced monotheism? Good question. Above my pay grade. Um, the Upanishads, I'm not sure the date of them. Um, my understanding is that the Israelites in Babylon were heavily influenced by the Zoroastrians. It's not something I've studied a lot because I don't really do Second Temple. I mostly focus on the mother goddess stuff. Um, but my understanding is that, you know, they're directly influenced by the Persian, Zoroastrians, and that that's where they really develop a lot of the, you know, monotheistic theology, the real like hardened theology, or really crystallizes. Um, my understanding that's mostly Persian influence along with their own, along with their own, uh, their own ideas. You know, some of that probably goes back to, um, Egypt and, um, what's his name? The first monotheist there, who was worshiping at Akenaten. Um, you know, some of the ideas probably go back to that.

And in my closing question, when do you think the final form of the Torah came into existence?

It's a good question. You know, I know scholars are debating it, and scholars are pushing the dating farther and farther into more recent history. Um, I'm with Margaret Barker. I, I do not, um, I, I think that the core of the Torah, you know, in terms of like, you know, the, um, the core narrative and the core meaning and the core symbolism, the core spiritual theology of the Torah comes together, in my opinion. Um, and I'm open to, I'm open to other arguments, but like this is the, certainly the tradition. Um, it comes together under Ezra in the fifth century. That said, I do believe they continued to work on it for centuries longer. Uh, and there's plenty of good data that that they were doing work on it in the Persian period. Um, and then you get the Septuagint, which is what's the date on the Septuagint? 2nd century, 3rd century. 3rd century BC. Yeah. So, that's in the 200s. That's when we know that it's codified into like, basically the form we have now. Again, it still was still like not 100% that way, but like, it's basically takes form at the time of the Septuagint. Some scholars are saying that that is when they, like, it really came together. I don't really have a horse in that, in that race per se. Uh, but things like dating the Song of Songs to like the Persian period, I don't agree. I think that it's a very, very old story that was probably updated in the Persian period, but written originally, just like invented in the Persian period. No way. I don't believe that at all. But updated for sure. Updated for sure.

So this is part two of a previous discussion that we've had on Yahweh on Yahweh and El, the two gods of Israel. So where would you like to resume from where we left off last time?

I don't, I don't really have anything too prepared. You know, one thing I'll be doing in the coming weeks and months is preparing sort of my master slide deck of all of my evidence, but I'm clearing out a bunch of decks on, uh, clearing the decks on all these other projects I got to get done, including some other writing. So, um, um, but that's, that's going to be coming, but we can really start anywhere you want. Um, really, just the idea that, you know, one thing I've noticed is that the Orthodox believers will, are are quick to say, yes, they were doing idolatry in the First Temple, but they're very loath to use the words, you know, polytheism or paganism. They'll say henotheism, right? But anything to, like, they don't want to cross that line to saying, no, they were full tilt monotheists. You know, there was no Law of Moses at the time of the Exodus. Um, and then all, all that stuff comes later. They really want to hold on to that idea that they had monotheism in the First Temple, which I really just don't think they were. I think they were on their way to monotheism, and these ideas were being developed slowly over a period of centuries in the First Temple, but it wasn't even, it doesn't even, they don't get to complete monotheism when the First Temple is destroyed at all. And they were still fundamentally Canaanites fighting within the Canaanite pantheon about, you know, "Stop worshiping this old god Baal and those nasty practices, and start worshiping this new god, Yahweh, with our reform practices," and that they're really having a culture war. I'll let you ask some questions, Jacob, if you got anything specific you want to dive into.

Sure. Um, why do you think that they're so hesitant to use the term polytheistic for that time period?

Well, I mean, I think it's because they're defending Orthodox faith and Orthodox truth and Orthodox authority because at a certain point, you know, this, what the Orthodox have been wrestling with ever since the Enlightenment kicked in a couple centuries ago, is that all these, you know, the Orthodox used to be the source of truth. Up until 200 years ago, the Bible was the only source of evidence we had, really, unless you were like a super learned scholar who could read Greek and Hebrew or Greek and Roman, you know, Greek and Latin. Um, the Bible, for your average everyday person, including like educated founding fathers, the Bible was the only source of information we had about the ancient world. I mean, literally for 1500 years, this is the only information in the West that we had about history. And there was a lot of authority, cultural authority and political authority and like, you know, temporal real-world authority by people, by priests, by institutions that would, that rests on the Bible being the source of truth and the Bible being the source of authority. And so people do not want to give up that authority. And that's why this has been, ever since the Enlightenment and, you know, ever since, you know, people really started picking away at these claims of truths, you know, using science and evolution and Darwin and all this stuff for the last 200 years, going back to Galileo, even, um, you know, that's been picking away at the authority of the church, authority of the church, you know, and and it's been, it's been crumbling, right? And so, and it's picking up speed that they're losing authority. And so they don't want to give up on on any claims that they have. And so, like the idea that the, the law, that the, the idea of the monotheist is that, sure, they'll accept that they were polytheistic in Egypt because the Bible says as much. But, um, the idea is that Moses introduced the reforms at the time of the Exodus, and that they became monotheistic with the reforms of Moses, and that everybody that was after Moses that was not being monotheistic was breaking the law. Um, I don't think there was a Law of Moses. I think the Law of Moses, such as it is that we read, was probably written, you know, late in the First Temple by the reformers who were inventing the Law of Moses and reimagining Moses. Because I, I'll make the case in my book. I'm going to make the case very strongly that I don't know if there was a real Moses or not, but the Moses we have is not Gen One Moses. It's at least Gen Two, if not Gen Ten. Um, that Moses, the Moses we have is recapitulated over the earlier versions of Moses. And that it's very clear within the story that they changed the laws of Moses. You know, Moses has a snake and then makes the bronze snake, and then they smash the bronze snake. That's the Nehushtan. That's the most obvious one, but there's others too that I'll go into. So I think that the reformers are, and when I talk about the reformers, I'm talking about King Hezekiah and King Josiah, late in the First Temple period, who are historical people, at least Hezekiah is, um, and that we know these reforms actually happened because we've got his archaeological evidence of the reforms at the Tel-Arad temple. So we know that there was reforms in the 700s and in the 600s BC. Um, and so, um, the, uh, I think that's when they're, you know, they they recapitulate Moses, rewrite the stories of Moses, start changing things that Moses had said. Moses said, uh, a, a, I mentioned, but secondly, Moses and the laws of Moses says, "Take linen and wool and stitch them together and make the holy vestments." And then later on in the book of Deuteronomy, in the laws of Deuteronomy, they have a law saying, "Do not blend linen and wool together. Do not sew linen and wool together." It's called shatnez, and it's a rule that Jews follow to this day. They don't have a, it's like kosher. It's like kosher for clothing. They don't mix linen and wool in their clothes. It's called linen-woolsey, and they have special rabbis that go and inspect the factories to make sure the clothes are shatnez. The term is shatnez. They don't even know why. Um, I have an argument for a while. I'll talk about it in my book. It's part of the reforms though. Um, they want to not marry the, the farmers and shepherds. Anyway, that's a whole another story. But, um, uh, yeah, so I think these reforms come much later, and they're not completely fully baked into what we would call monotheism even at the time. I think it's more of a culture war, and, and that the philosophical ideas that we see in Isaiah 2, when, when it really does become monotheism, and again, I'm going to have a whole slide deck with all this stuff. Um, when we get to Isaiah 2, which is clearly during the Babylonian exile, that's when they're really at true monotheism as we know it now, but that's in the exile. That's after the First Temple's been destroyed, and it's when they come back in the Second Temple that they're Jews, uh, that they're, that they literally have the name Jews, and that they have rabbis and the Torah and, and things that we would recognize. But First Temple, completely unrecognizable. Um, all the way to the very end of it, they were still worshiping the Queen of Heaven, all the way into the exile. And, but to admit that, if you're an Orthodox person, to go back to the beginning of the question, to admit that that's to admit that there's a mother, that there's a, a Queen of Heaven and a Mother of God, and that she is part of our traditions, and you have to acknowledge her. Part of the Jewish reform that was so complete was that they eliminate the entire concept of goddess. They can eliminate the entire concept of the of the divine mother by eliminating the very word. There's no word for goddess in the, in the Hebrew language. Um, there is no concept of the feminine divine. And so, but if you go back to say, the First Temple and King Solomon and King David, you know, they were polytheists and they had a sense of the feminine divine. That's a radical theological, there's no depth to the importance of that theologically. I mean, that this is what got me started in all my studies is the idea that God had a wife or God has a mother. That that is, that shatters the entire concept of monotheism, and it shatters the, the any claims of authority that you know are still standing. Not that there's many claims still standing, but, um, it definitely shatters any remaining sense of the holism of, of orthodox worldview.

So, how do you think that they understood Moses before they created the Torah and attributed it to him?

You know, we could only speculate. I, I could only speculate. Um, I firm, part of my thesis, and I'll be making the case in my books. I firmly believe that there was a real Exodus as a non-supernatural, just as a, a was a legitimate slave escape. Um, and I, I'll make the case that the Merneptah Stele, now, this is not, this is not the scholarly consensus, but I think the Merneptah Stele is the Exodus in 1209 BC. It's the Pharaoh's side of events. He's saying, "I chased those guys out. You'll never hear from them again. Israel is laid waste. Their seed is no more." It's one line, right? I think it's Pharaoh's side of events that he's saying, "We chased him into the desert. You'll never hear from them again." And the Song of the Sea is, um, you, or yeah, the Song of Miriam, which is the oldest passage of the Bible, which is the oldest passage about the Exodus. It says, "We barely escaped by the, you know, the grace of Yahweh, by the grace of God, and, um, we escaped by the skin of our teeth and fled into the desert." So, I think that those two stories line up. So, I do think there was a very real slave escape, um, of Canaanite slaves, um, in 1209, and then they were caught in the desert because they couldn't move into Canaan because it was still under Egyptian control until 1177, which is when the next set of big wars happens, and then the Philistines, the, uh, Moabites, and the Israelites all set up shop. All the characters of the Old Testament show up after 1177. So, I think that the dating is very clear.

So, I think, um, so Moses, you got to take Moses, Miriam, and Aaron, all three together. Was there an original family that led this slave escape, or are they a, a fictional creation?

Um, well, they're a fictional creation. They're a fictional creation from the earliest days because the Song of the Sea is the oldest passage. You, it's from the oral tradition. Scholars date it back to the 1100s, 1200 BC, which is exactly the dating I'm giving. It's totally pre-literate time period. It's pre-literate Hebrew. It's, there's three or four of these old songs: Song of Jacob, the Song of Deborah, the Song of the Sea. Uh, there might be a couple others that are, you know, of that vintage, of this oral tradition, Bronze Age collapse era. So I think that, so if Moses, Miriam, and Aaron are fictional, then they're invented very, very early on. And it, and it doesn't change that the stories, and that doesn't change my argument that the stories change 500 years later, that, you know, half a millennium later, in a totally different cultural context, that the reformers of that era are, you know, trying to reimagine Moses to make him their guy. I mean, just imagine, just hypothetically speaking, imagine the Christian nationalists. There's a revolt in America. The Christian nationalists win. They take over America. It's, it's like, it's like a Christian version of Iran in America. And, and it's successful. And for 500 years, the Christian nationalists run America as a totally successful country. Just imagine 500 years in the future, in the year 2500. What would they be saying about George Washington? Would they be saying George Washington, the Freemason? No. They'd be talking about George Washington, the most pious Christian, you know, beloved by God, you know, third in line after Jesus Christ. And they'd be saying all this stuff about George Washington, the greatest Christian ever. And then when the archaeologists in the year 2500 go digging up the old, you know, raw material that George Washington, they'd find him on all these, well, why do we have him in this Freemason garb, you know, laying the cornerstone of the, uh, of the Capitol building in 17, you know, 95 or whatever. And, you know, the Christians hate the Freemasons. So, um, you know, the Christians would be all like, you know, stumbling over themselves to come up with an excuse for why they've got all this, you know, firsthand evidence of George Washington, the Freemason, when they're trying to talk about George Washington, the greatest Christian zealot ever. Um, and the winners write the history books. So, if the Christians are writing the history books, they're going to write history books about George Washington, the greatest Christian. And if it's somebody else who writes the history books, they're gonna write history books about George Washington, the Freemason who never talked about God in his public life, all of us ever. Um, so, you know, the winners write the history books, and I think it's that kind of thing with Moses that we see his story being recapitulated. We see it with Miriam. We see how Miriam just gets chucked out of the story just like, uh, because, you know, there's this story where she gets, Miriam and Aaron. Sorry, let's go to Aaron first. Aaron. Aaron can do no wrong. Aaron, everything he ever does, he makes the golden calf, but he's forgiven. Um, because the, the Levite priests draw themselves who become the dominant priesthood in, in Judaism 500 years later or what have you. Um, they draw their line, their lineage back to Aaron. So in their mind and in their stories they write, Aaron can do no wrong. Um, but they had rival priesthoods who rivaled, followed other people, and so they were writing different sets of stories where Aaron was making mistakes and doing bad things. Likewise with Miriam, she was the prophetess and the leader of the women. Well, when my whole argument is the women are being thrown out of power, when they throw out the mother goddess, of Miriam gets thrown out of the story. She gets, she and Aaron both get in this argument with Moses about Moses's wife, and we don't know what they're arguing about. Aaron, he doesn't get punished, but Miriam, she gets struck with leprosy and thrown out of the camp. And then we never hear from Miriam again, except when she dies. She's basically ex, you know, just exit stage left. You know, they, you know, it's like, it's like Vaudeville. They come up on the stage with a hook, yank her off stage, and we never hear from her again, except when she's buried, buried in the city of Kadesh, which is the same name. It just so happens to be of the Qedesha priestesses. And like Kadesh is the name of the mother goddess, you know, or one of the names. So Miriam is buried in the city of Kadesh. You think that's a coincidence? I don't really think so. So I think again, I think it's all part of these reformations that take place over centuries. They have to, like, they have these stories about Miriam. So they have to, like, edit them and they have to modify them. And so you can't eliminate Miriam completely because she's an important part of the story from the early parts. So they, you know, they modify the story at the end so that, you know, she loses her stature and Aaron is always forgiven for all the things he does. Um, I think that this is centuries, centuries of storytelling in additive layers, one upon top of the other. And you would have competing versions, you know, over the course of the First Temple when they're fighting about this stuff, and they're fighting between Yahweh and Baal. Um, they're going to have competing arguments about how the Exodus went down. They're going to have competing narratives, narratives we never hear about. We just know that we can infer from within the stories and from the scholarship that there were rival priesthoods um in the First Temple and that, but we only get the evidence from the one priesthood that that won. So we can only make inferences. All we know is the existence of these rivals. We just don't really know what the substance of what they are arguing about. So, um, I do, I do, um, yeah, I do sincerely believe that, you know, the Law of Moses that we read in the book of Deuteronomy, this, that conventional scholarship is that that's written by the Deuteronomist priests in the, you know, time of Josiah, you know, the people, you know, that the priests in the, in the, in the story in the book of Kings when it says they found the text hidden behind the altar or something, that they actually had simply written it at that time. It makes a lot more sense, which is in the 600s. Um, yeah, I think that's a time of reformation and a time of of of competition and a time of conflict within the community about the the moral future of of the community and their moral practices, not unlike the, you know, the, the Civil War in the United States. We're fighting over slavery and having very, you know, fundamental conflicts about the nature of morality and, and how we're going to structure our society. Um, and that ultimately were could only be resolved on the battlefield, and like ultimately one side had to like just simply defeat the other, or the history rolls on over enough time that certain ideas percolate to the top and ideas that are old, you know, they go away. I mean, I think we went into the Axial Age around the world around the year 500 BC in the mid-first millennium because all the old, you know, sort of shamanistic nature-based ideas had become inadequate, uh, for the time period, for the level of knowledge that people had at that time. But just as I think that we are going into a new, we're into a new era right now where we're going from the Iron Age into the Space Age. Um, so the Axial Age religions all come out of the Iron Age, you know, material time period. And we've been in the m, in the Iron Age from, you know, a thousand B for 3,000 years, from a thousand BC until now, until 20,000 AD, when we now we're in the Space Age. So now our old Axial Age religions are falling apart, and those ideas don't make sense anymore. And, but we don't have a, a new cohesive comprehensive worldview that makes a lick of sense going forward. Like, it's just confusion and chaos right now. Um, so yeah, I think there's a big reformation coming out of the Bronze Age collapse and into the Iron Age. Uh, and they fight about this stuff. And, and that I have no idea if there's actually a historical Moses or if he's a composite character, but I'm 100% certain that Moses, Miriam, and Aaron go back to the first generation of the stories, and that then the stories are changed at least once, if not multiple times over centuries until we get to the final written version we get to today.

Do you think as early as the end of the 13th century BC when the Merneptah Stele was created? Um, do you think they were also at at that time, uh, worshiping Yahweh and El in their pantheon, or do you think those, uh, those two haven't arrived in their pantheon just yet?

Oh, El, well, El and Baal are traditional gods of the Canaanites. So, they've been, I'm, I've not done scholarship on the Hyksos to like make this argument definitively, but I'm going to just go with the flow and say that the, the Israelites are in fact descendants of the Hyksos, and because the dating all works, that, um, you know, the Hyksos, they conquered Egypt at the right time period for like Joseph and those stories of the timeline to be taking place, and then they get, a century later, they get defeated and enslaved by the Egyptians, and then 400 years of Egyptian domination of Canaan is exactly the 400 years that the Israelites are said to have been enslaved in Egypt. So all the timing works perfectly for them to have been descendants of the Hyksos, and the Hyksos worship Baal and El. Baal was the king of the gods for the Hyksos, and El was the high god, um, the father of the gods. So those gods had always been around. And I think Yahweh, if you follow the Kenite hypothesis or the Shasu evidence, and I'm not, you know, making strong cases about any of that, but, you know, the evidence would point towards Yahweh being a tribal god out of Midian, out of the south, that was probably around for centuries as a tribal god, but as a minor god. Like, there's in the world, in the polytheistic world, there's no limit to how many gods you can have. You can invent a new god anytime you want. You, or you can give the old gods new names. You can have your own personal gods. Your own family can have their own gods. Um, there's no, there's no doctrine. There's no dogma. There's no one's telling you you can't invent a new god. So like any old tribe can have their old local tribal god. And so there's no telling how old Yahweh may have existed as a name or as a tribal god. But I think that what we understand from the context of the Bible stories is that he rises to prominence in the context of this slave escape. Um, so, you know, who knows, maybe Moses was just this random dude, you know, he was this random shaman or what have you, who saw the opportunity because of this, you know, military situation, Bronze Age collapse. There's war with the Libyans on the other side of the of the of Egypt, and they take the opportunity to flee, um, into the desert, and Baal is their high god, but Yahweh is their local god. So Yahweh is the one they're following. They worship Yahweh and Baal. And so Yahweh rises to prominence in this context. He gets a following. And then you get into the, uh, the 200 years of the Judges. Um, in the Bible timeline, it's the 200 years of the Judges between the conquest and, uh, and King David taking taking Jerusalem. Well, that's exactly the time period of the Bronze Age collapse that's totally anarchic and chaotic and illiterate in in Bible history. So, um, or, or, or in world history. So the, um, I forget where we started the, the original question, but, um, the, um, Oh yeah. Yeah. So I think, yeah, that's El and Baal had been around forever, so to speak. Yahweh comes along as a, as a, as a new god, a young god, or a minor god, rises to prominence with this, with the Exodus, and then in the context of all the fighting in the Bronze Age collapse and the time period of the Judges, you know, he's again continuing to build, build a following because there, the people following Yahweh are clearly succeeding, they're clearly winning on the battlefield. And then, um, and then at some point, it becomes a reform movement, like a, a hardcore patriarchal reform movement that is wants to centralize power with the kings, wants to centralize power into a, a, this, the, the central Jerusalem temple. You cannot underestimate that part of the reforms under King Hezekiah and Josiah was that they're shutting down the, the community altars. They're shutting down the, because paganism and polytheism was always a, a community-based thing. It was just like each local village had their own local altars that they built and they maintained, had their own local priests. There's no central, no centrality to it. It's only after kingship arrives that that the kings impose centrality on the religion and start shutting down the outside temples. And that's what the Yahweh movement becomes. And so this authoritarian patriarchal, um, religious movement arises over the course of the First Temple after the introduction of kingship. So I'm very clear about this. All the reforms, my thesis is that all the reforms happen after the beginning of kingship. So that's after King David, after King, clearly after King Solomon, and then after King Solomon's son, Rehoboam, who is by the biblical narrative bad, the, the, the reforms even in piecemeal begin after that with King Asa, has the first ones, and that's in the 9th century. That's in the 8, 800s BC, and that's when we get into the time period of King Ahab and Jezebel, who's a real person. These are all real people. Jehu murders, no, Jehu, who is a Yahwist, murders Jezebel in the mid-800s BC. Those are all real historical people. Um, I believe that's the battle of Mount Carmel with the prophet Elijah battling the prophets of Baal, um, in Israel during the time period of Ahab and Jezebel. I think that, I mean, I don't know what literally happened, but that I think that those kinds of things were happening where, like, you've literally got a temple of Baal with their prophets having disputes, having arguments in the street or up on the mountain or what have you with the prophets of Yahweh, and there was a full-on, like heated culture war dispute, um, going on for quite a while.

And when do you think that culture, that that that cultural dispute came to an end?

I mean, never really came to an end altogether, but I mean, they were still fighting about it all the way through the destruction of the First Temple because we see it with Jeremiah. Um, so Hezekiah does his reforms in the 700s. So, Israel gets destroyed, 722. Let's put the time period here. Israel is destroyed, the Northern Kingdom of Israel is destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC. Um, it had never been monotheistic. Even there were Yahwists there, but there were Yahwists who were doing pagan Yahwism. So, King Jehu, who I just mentioned, he's a Yahwist. His name, Jehu, is a Yahweh name. I'm not an etymologist, but that's a Yahweh name. Um, and he's a historical figure. Um, but the Bible is clear. He was not true monotheist. He still kept up the golden calves in the temple in the towns of Bethel and, and, and Dan. And those golden calves are the old pagan altars for El because El is like the golden bull, the bull of heaven. These are all, um, all the cattle narratives are all this old, um, that's that represents the father, the bull of heaven. So that was clearly happening. So, so Israel gets destroyed, 722. The refugees come down to Jerusalem, come down to Judah, the Southern Kingdom. King Hezekiah is a young man, like maybe even a child, and then he becomes king, and he is the first of the really great, according to biblical writers, great reformers, um, who is true to Yahweh alone, and he does his reforms in like the early 700s. He's definitely a historical figure because he left all sorts of marks on Jerusalem. He built walls. He dug this incredible underground tunnel where they like 700 meters long where they dug underground starting at two different ends and met in the middle, um, for a waterway to run a creek into Jerusalem behind the walls. Um, and tourists can walk through that tunnel today, and it's called Hezekiah's Tunnel. It's a very real thing. It's actually quite a remarkable engineering feat because no one really knows how they did it. It's like 710 BC. It's like a long time ago. Um, he does his reforms, but his reforms are not popular. And, um, so the Assyrians attack Jerusalem as well. This is all documented in, in Assyrian records. They lay waste to Judah. They, Hezekiah is pinned up, um, as the Assyrians say, like a bird in a cage, where he's just stuck in, in behind the walls in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem apparently is a pretty tough town to crack, a pretty tough nut to crack, because, um, I forget the Assyrian king's name, decides to take the bribe and leave. But Hezekiah is forced to give him all the money that he's got, all the gold from the al, from the temple, from the, from the royal palaces, and all his wives and all his daughters and concubines, gives him all, all the treasures of Jerusalem, gives gets given to the Assyrians, and then, and they leave. And the Assyrians document this in their records, and it's documented in the Bible. They basically tell the same story. Um, and so King Hezekiah goes on these reforms after that. I think that from the biblical writer's perspective, like this could have been the end of the entire Yahweh movement. If, if the Assyrians had busted down the walls of Jerusalem at that time and had killed Hezekiah and then sacked the temple of Jerusalem at that time, we would have no monotheism. There would never have been a Bible. There never would have been Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It never would have survived had Hezekiah been, had been killed at that time. Um, but as it was, it was like, you know, this barest of a one little flicker of a candle flame, you know, if, if today's monotheism is this raging inferno all over the world, at that moment in time, it was just nothing but a, you know, a candle flickering in the wind, lucky to not be blown out. So, but he does survive, and Yahwism does survive, and that guy is seen as like this, you know, this great hero, like this great, you know, messiah almost, uh, for the, for the Jews at that time period. And so they think that they've really got it going on, that, you know, that they're really blessed. Um, he goes and does his reform, starts centralizing religion, very unpopular. And as soon as he dies, they put back the Asherah pole. So the Asherah poles, the mother goddess pole, they chop that down. It's one thing they like to talk about. Um, but as soon as Hezekiah dies, the Asherah poles come back up. The community altars all come back up. The following king is King Manasseh. He has the longest, most successful reign in the whole history of Judah. He rules for like 45 years. The Assyrians talk about him. They've got favorable trade relations with Judah and Assyria. Um, and he's a total pagan, 100% pagan. Um, and then it's like his grandson or something is King Josiah, who's the second great reformer, and he's in the early 600s. Um, and that's when the Deuteronomists are, that's when the prophet Jeremiah is alive. That's when they find the book of what becomes the, what they call the Law of Moses, the, what becomes the book of Deuteronomy, all those laws. Um, all that stuff is getting done. That's clearly a literate time period. They're talking about writing. They talk about having scrolls. We have written evidence from that time period. Um, but Josiah's reforms are also unpopular. And as soon as Josiah dies, they also go back to directly back to the polytheism. And Josiah dies in like 605 BC, I want to say, and he's killed by the Egyptians. It's a whole story unto itself. The Egyptians now rule, put in their own vassal king, who was one of Josiah's sons, I guess, impose him and install him as a vassal king, and he's polytheistic, and they remain polytheistic until the Babylonians, who defeat the Assyrians, and then they come and sack Jerusalem in 586, and the whole temple is destroyed in 586 BC, and they get sent into exile, and they're fighting with the prophet Jeremiah about worshiping the Queen of Heaven in Jeremiah 44. There's a whole big argument, we've talked about it before, um, where the women are, Jeremiah blames the women for worshiping the Queen of Heaven, for the bringing the destruction of Jerusalem, and the women say, "Hell no, it's not our fault. Everything was fine when we were worshiping the Queen of Heaven, and we're going to continue worshiping the Queen of Heaven, and piss off Jeremiah." And he says, "Fine, do what you will." Um, again, I need the slide deck to give that one justice, but it's a great passage in Jeremiah 44. So clearly they were fighting about it all the way along. And then we know that they were still polytheistic deep into the Second Temple. At least some Jews were, because the Elephantine Island in, in Egypt. They have some of the exiles went to Egypt. Jeremiah did, um, and they set up shop on Elephantine Island and continued to worship in the polytheistic fashion deep into like the 300s or the second 200s BC. They were writing letters back and forth to Jerusalem. We have letters from Elephantine Island in Egypt in the 300s talking about Yahweh and his 'Anat and talking about all this old-school polytheism that is totally anachronistic from what was going on with the rabbis in Jerusalem. So we know that the polytheism never completely went away. And obviously, the Jews are a minority people in a polytheistic world. It's still a polytheistic broader social environment. The Greeks, the Romans, it's all polytheistic until Constantine, and it becomes Christian a thousand years later. So, um, so yeah, it's, polytheism is still the norm. Um, the Jews are slowly but surely formulating, and they're not alone. There's actually, there's a lot of Platonism, and there's a lot of philosophy that's moving towards this more high-minded transcendental monotheistic worldview and getting away from these, you know, sort of, uh, more rudimentary notions of these pagan gods. And so the whole world is much more becoming more intellectually sophisticated. So it's not just the Jews. They just happen to be more codified about it in writing the Bible, and also we have this written evidence because they wrote the Bible. But, um, but the move towards monotheism is a broader intellectual philosophical movement taking place over centuries. Um, you know, the whole world, even in China, they move away from shamanism. Um, so the whole world moves away from these older Neolithic and Bronze Age ideas and into the, the Iron Age.

Ideas, the Axial Age ideas. It's not just the Jews, but they, they just happen to have given the most crystallized version of it. Uh, but polytheism never clearly went away. They're still pagans today. There were pagans all the way through European history. There were pagan colonists in the 1600s in America. We don't hear about them much, but read up on the Merry Mount colony in Massachusetts. There were pagans in the 1600s, wide open pagans in America in the 1600s. So, it never went away.

Um, there's always been people worshiping Mother Nature and Mother Goddess. It's just been on the fringes for the last 1500 years. What else do we know about, um, Jews that were still holding to the polytheistic beliefs in the Second Temple period? And how did they deal with monotheistic Jews who believed that there was only one God in that period?

Yeah, I honestly don't know and I frankly don't think there's all that much evidence. And you probably know as much as I do on this, Jacob. Um, because I don't really study Second Temple that much. And I would love to know more if there was. I don't think there's a whole lot of back and forth between rabbis. I think we just have these couple of letters that are totally anachronistic that kind of throw the scholars for a loop, but we don't have enough context to them. I don't, what, how much do you know about the Elephantine Island stuff?

Jacob, are you asking me about the Elephantine papyri? Yeah. Yeah. I know some, like I know that I know that there's text about, uh, about Anat-Yahu, a consort of, of Yahweh, who doesn't appear to be understood as the same as Asherah in the, uh, Yahweh and His Asherah inscription.

Well, my whole argument about that is that they have a fluid identity and you can swap them around as much as you want. H, but in the Canaanite pantheon, aren't Anat and Asherah regarded as two distinct goddesses? It's the same in the Hindus. Parvati, Durga, and Kali. It's the same triple goddess motif. Parvati, Durga, and Kali have their own stories. They have their own individual characters, but they're also clearly identified as one, as manifestations of Parvati. And, uh, I, I, I think it's all the same. You see it with the goddesses in general that they're just their identities are always readily syncretized. Like they're swapped around all the time, much more than the male gods. You don't really see it with the male gods as much. Here and there are very specific cases of syncretization with male gods, but with the goddesses, it's like hot and heavy and like loose and sloppy. Like they're swapping identities around all over the place with goddesses. So, in other words, um, they're the same and sometimes they're not the same. It depends on the on the context. One goddess, infinite manifestations.

So, did they view Baal or Ba'al as being a different form of El in certain circumstances? Because Anat is typically understood as Ba'al's consort. So I want to make this so that triple goddess is one thing. One thing I, people like, I really want to get in on this, is the co-regency idea. Father and son are both king of the gods. Um, El is the grand, it's like the father and the grandfather. It's like, and it's the same thing with human kings. Like, one guy would become king and, and a king in the ancient world is like, you literally have to lead the troops into battle and win battles. Like you have to win. You have to, if you're not man enough to lead the charge into the enemy, kill a bunch of guys and survive yourself and lead the troops. Like that's how you become king in the ancient world. And if you're not man enough to become the king, then the other guy who's man enough to do that is going to kill you and he's going to be the king. And that's just the way it works. But when you're like, you know, you do that when you're age 20, 22, you become king, right? But when you're age 40 and you've already won all these battles and now your son is age 20. Well, now you don't have to prove yourself anymore because you've already done it. Now your son is coming of age. So you make your son co-regent. You see a ton of this in the biblical scholarship when you try to suss out the dates of the biblical kings. A lot of scholars think a lot of the, a lot of them are co-regencies, which is why the dating gets so sloppy. Um, that the older guy, he's like, "All right, my son has come of age. He can lead the troops in battle and I don't need to go risk my neck anymore." So they're both kings and they rule as co-regents and eventually the older guy is going to die off and the younger son's going to take over. And so you see this over and I see, I think this is being reflected in the gods. El is one universal high god above all the gods. Everybody recognizes that their king of the gods is a son of El. So if you're a Canaanite, Ba'al is your king of the gods, co-regent with El. But if you're over in Babylon, Marduk is your son of El, your king of the gods, who's also like a brother to Ba'al. Ashur up the road in Nineveh. He's yet another brother. Um, Zeus, although he comes along later, is the same thing. Kronos is El. The Greeks say explicitly Kronos is El. So Zeus is yet another one of these brothers. It's a co-regency.

Um, now different eras and different cultures will present these stories differently. The older versions, El is a nice guy. You know, Zeus and the Hellenistic Greeks, who are a later reform era. You know, they're kind of, they don't kill Kronos. You know, Zeus defeats Kronos, but Kronos never went away in Greek mythology. He was still around. He was never defeated. He was never killed. There were still people who continued to worship Kronos all the way along. Um, he just wasn't that prominent. And so I, I, I, I really want to hammer home this idea of father and son. Same in Christianity. Jesus and the Father are both God. They're one and the same, even though they're two distinct characters. And, and I think that's the way it is with all these guys. I think El is the same my god we've got today. I think it's been the same guy for 50,000 years. We just keep having this running conversation about it. And so it's always been the same El and then you just give them different names. Anu god, um, Allah, and then he's got, you know, countless sons that are, um, that are the local rulers of that local kingdom. Um, and so in Sumer, it's Enlil, and then Marduk gets replaced with Marduk. So that's my theology. That's my view of this whole thing is that father-son co-regents, that they'll, they'll share symbols. They'll both be called the bull. The golden calf again, as I said, it's a, I mention it's a worship of, of El, but it might as well be El and Ba'al together. Um, and because they both get called the bull, they both use the bull symbolism. Um, co-regency, father-son co-regency. I'm firmly believe that. It's a firm part of my thesis.

What do we know about Yahweh's role in the Canaanite pantheon? Did he, is there mythological stories of Yahweh having conflicts with the Canaanite gods long before he became the monotheist? No mention of Yahweh before 1200 BC. Well, not in the context of, I mean, there's these mentions of his name. So like with the Shasu and stuff. So like we have this notion of him existing, but no stories, no mythological stories of Yahweh that predate the Bible. Um, the only stories we have that predate the Bible are of Canaanite mythology, are the Ugaritic texts, which were unearthed relatively recently. And there you, there you have all the characters, all the pagan characters from the Bible. You've got El, Asherah, Astarte, Anat, Ba'al, Yam, Mot. All these, you know, Yam and Mot are not so much gods in, in for the Hebrews, or they don't appear as gods in the Bible, but that is the Hebrew word for, um, uh, for ocean and, and death respectively, because Yam is the god of the sea, like Poseidon, and Mot is the god of death, like Hades. Um, and Ba'al is the king of the gods, like Zeus, and their brothers. Um, so, but we know that Mot, and we know that Yam and Mot are like the, we know since those are the Hebrew words for, as I said, those are the Hebrew words for ocean and, uh, death, we know that those are again, all coming from the same cultural backdrop. So the Canaanite Ugaritic texts are incredibly insightful. And again, you know, it's only one piece of evidence. So, we have to be clear how much where we draw it together, but it's pretty clear that it's, it's certainly the story of how Ba'al becomes king of the gods, and it's Ba'al's resurrection story, and it follows this classic, you know, dying and rising god motif that's so common, um, in, in goddess life, death, renewal traditions, which these were trying to reform against. So it all fits the context that, um, that we, that we can, that we see the Ugaritic texts as the, as what was the pre-existing Canaanite mythology before Yahweh comes on the scene and then wages a coup, literally a coup against this existing pre-existing religion. Um, so, yeah, I think Yahweh, Zeus too. Zeus is not a Bronze Age god. Yahweh and Zeus, for all practical purposes, are not Bronze Age gods. They are Iron Age gods. They come in in the first millennium BC, but they're not a feature of any of the mythology from the 2000s BC, from the second millennium. None of them appear in any meaningful way in any actual story from the second millennium. They're strictly, which is the Bronze Age. Then we have the Bronze Age collapse and go into the Iron Age. So first millennium is Iron Age. Zeus and Yahweh and their religions are Iron Age, Axial Age, reform religions. Um, and they are very clearly both of them, when you read mythology, are making it very clear that they are rebelling against the old religion and old, ugly practices that they no longer thought worthwhile in society, like human sacrifice.

Let's see if there's a couple of questions from the audience. This is not exactly a question, but let's throw it in here. Theophilus09 says, "Triple goddesses may be related to the three phases of the." Definitely, definitely related. It's all part of the same, it's all part of the same bigger milieu of, of goddess, um, stuff. And so, um, the moon worship is so Diana, Luna, and, um, and Hecate is yet another one of these triple goddesses that's more Roman era and then persisted into, uh, medieval Christian Europe. And so, um, Luna is the mother, Diana is the maiden, and Hecate, who's also, uh, part of the Greeks, she is the death or crone. Um, so the crone one is complicated. So, we've got this three phases. And when it's, when you're picturing it as women, like human women, you would have a young woman, you know, a mother, and then an old woman. So, you call that woman the crone. But women don't actually like being called crone. Like, I don't, I've never heard of a single female yet who thinks crone is like a nice, affirming name. So, I would prefer any, pretty much any name other than crone. Um, we can just call her the old lady or call her the mother, maiden, matriarch. Any, anything but crone. Um, though not knocking, like the commenter, the commenter didn't make this up. This comes from Robert Graves. Um, so, but when it comes to the goddesses, you know, Kali is the death goddess. We've got her, or Anat. You wouldn't call her a crone either. Um, she's a little more, more fearsome than that. So, I refer to mother and death when I'm talking about the goddesses. Uh, but I'm open-minded. I'm open-minded if someone's got a better name than death. Um, because it's really about life, death, and renewal. So, I don't know. I'm open-minded on the terminology. I don't, I don't use the term crone because I just, I, I personally just think it's just not a, like a, a nice sounding word. Um, and it's not a word that women made up for themselves. So, I'll wait for the women to say what term they would prefer. Um, but it's, but the commenter is exactly right. This, the, the, the phase of the moon, the phase of the moon being linked to women's menstrual cycles, which is something that we've kind of lost sight of in industrialized society because with all the electric lights and everything, we're not tied to, um, lunar cycles anymore. But in agricultural peasant villages for millennia upon millennia, um, women's menstrual cycles would be very much tied to the moon and, and, um, and tied to one another too, um, when you're living in the same household. So these, um, that whole cyclical thing is really potent. And the woman, the feminine being associated with the moon is really, really old. And, um, not just symbolic, like literally, it's like, it's like a physical, tangible connection when you talk about the menstrual cycles.

Could you expand on that? The, the physical tangible connection you were just mentioning? Not a woman. Um, so I'm not, I'm not really here to speak on women's, um, health issues. Um, I just know, um, I know a thing or two. Um, actually, question, I wasn't trying to ask about that specifically. I was trying to ask about, um, that's it. You, you said or you mentioned earlier about the Kadesh? Yeah. About Miriam in the Old Testament being buried in the, uh, city of Kadesh? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Yeah. So that was an amazing detail. Um, I think there must be multiple cities of Kadesh. Um, I'm not an expert on this, but the word Kadesh means holy. So it means the holy ones. And so there's a couple of whole, there's, there's one I know there's one in Syria, but it doesn't really make sense that Miriam would have been buried in the city of Kadesh in Syria. There must have been another city of Kadesh down where they were. And I think there is, but I'm not an expert on all this geography. Um, but the word means holy. And so the Kadeshah, the priestesses, and the Kadesh, the male, they're the holy ones. And so there were these, these are, these are holy cities. And, um, so, um, these were known, there's a couple of them. I, I do believe, and I'd love to get another scholar who could detail this, but I do believe that these are like known temple sites and like pilgrimage sites in the ancient world. These are holy towns. Um, and so, yeah, so Miriam in, in, it's, it's in, it's in Exodus, I guess. Um, Numbers, Exodus. I don't know. I'll have to pull up these. It's in my book. Um, the whole story is detailed in my book. I've got a whole chapter on it. And it's, um, but yeah, they have this dispute with Moses about his wife. It's not clear what the dispute's about. And it's not clear who his wife is. Um, because Moses is famously married to Zipporah. You know, that's a big part of the story in the early time of Moses that when he first flees from Egypt before the Exodus, and then he goes to Midian and he meets Jethro and he marries Jethro's daughter, who's Zipporah. And Zipporah is a very important character and she's the mother of his child. And, um, and so she's from Midian. Ethiopians say she's from Ethiopian. She's a very important part of, Zipporah is very important to Ethiopian traditions. Um, but then later on, you know, there's a time gap and we're in a much later part of the story and it doesn't explain the context. It just says that Miriam and Aaron got into a dispute with Moses about his wife. And then so they argue with Moses and God strikes Miriam down with leprosy and sends her out of the camp. And then we don't hear from her again until it says she was buried. Miriam died again. Another time gap and it says Miriam died and she was buried in the city of Kadesh. Um, but we don't know the nature of this dispute. We know that Aaron doesn't get punished. Aaron doesn't get punished at all. Only Miriam gets punished. And so in the Bible, it doesn't name the wife. The wife never speaks. We don't know what the dispute's about. Um, but in some of the rabbinical literature, some, some of the midrash from like second century, like really old stuff, um, talks about the dispute being that Moses had all of a sudden become. All right. All right. Let me back up. So the traditional explanation of this story, the traditional explanation of the story was that Miriam was mad about Moses marrying somebody from outside of her tribe and that basically Moses, or Miriam is being punished for being racist, effectively. That is the traditional argument. And this, what the Ethiopians would say was that, um, in Coptic traditions, was that, um, Miriam was simply being nasty to Moses' Ethiopian wife because, like, you know, Miriam and Aaron had been in Egypt all the time. So Moses all of a sudden shows back up leading the Exodus and he's got this new wife that Miriam didn't appreciate. And so that's a traditional explanation is that Miriam gets punished for being nasty to Moses' wife and presumably a little bit racist. And so the moral message is don't be racist, which is a fine moral message. I'm all for that moral interpretation of, you know, don't be racist and accept people from other tribes. Like that's a fine interpretation, but I just don't think that's the actual story.

There's Jewish midrash from the second century that says the, the nature of the, that explains the nature of the dispute and says the nature of the dispute is that Moses had chosen to become celibate and had broken off sexual relations with Zipporah against Zipporah's wishes and that Miriam was going in defense of Zipporah to say, "Hey, you know what's up with this? You can't just all of a sudden do that to your wife, uh, without even, like, what she's supposed to do, right?" So, like Miriam in this, in this argument is, is righteously defending, or she's defending as a leader of the women, she's defending the righteous Zipporah. Uh, and that Zipporah has been, been wronged by Moses all of a sudden becoming celibate. Now, this is Jewish midrash. This is rabbinical literature. Um, and, and so that was the nature of the dispute. So in that case, that makes a lot more sense in the context of the religious forms I'm talking about where they transition from, you know, goddess worship, which is like loaded with sex, to a more, um, because like celibacy does become a thing in, in, in transcendental monotheism. Like a lot of people embrace celibacy in Hinduism and Buddhism. Lots of people embrace celibacy as a way to, um, you know, focus your energies and focus your spirit and not be distracted. There's nothing wrong with celibacy in and of itself. It's just a little unfair to your, to your partner, um, who, you know, who didn't, you know, make the same decision. Um, so, you know, celibacy is obviously a thing people do that has value from a meditative spiritual perspective. And I'm not trying to knock it, but in the context of a culture that celebrates sexuality, in a context of a culture where you've got priestesses that do sex and encourage sex and, um, when, you know, when the men all of a sudden start saying like, "I'm going to stop participating in your sex rituals that empower your female authority and I'm just going to be celibate." Um, that's taking something away from the women and that's like taking something away. Now, I'm not talking about them having just having fun. I'm talking about the fact that sex leads to, to life and generation and procreation. That was the source of women's power and authority in society. So sexuality was incredibly powerful to women because that was the source of life and women are the source of life and they need that seed from the man to create the life-generating processes. And that's what all these rituals were all about because they're always fundamentally about fertility and, and, and, and growing plants. These are agricultural traditions. So when you take away the sex to focus on high-minded philosophical, transcendental philosophy, the women are like, "Hey, you know what's up with that?" Like, we like the old ways better. Um, and then the men who are like, "Well, I actually want patriarchal dominance and I don't want the women to have any authority at all." That only doubles down on the idea that you should, uh, get away from all the sexual stuff. And so I think that's, I think that's what's happening. Now, I don't know if there was actually a dispute between Moses and Miriam or if that story was written 300 years later. Um, we have no idea. I mean, and it smacks of a story that was written later, frankly, that Miriam probably had a great career as a, as a prophetess and leader of the women, and that as I was describing these, um, rival priesthoods, you know, the priesthood of the priesthood of Miriam, presumably would have been the Kadeshah priestesses that they're getting rid of. And so you want to squash Miriam's, um, her reputation, her authority, you know, the notion that she ever did anything good. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta neutralize anything good she did by doing by having her do something really bad. Um, and have her be punished and that makes her line of priestesses that followed in her line, it negates their authority. So that's what I think is is happening in that story. But that is not scholarly consensus. That is my interpretation.

JC, thank you for your super chat. Why was, why was saffron the incense offering to us? I'm not aware of saffron, but there's loads of sacred plants. And I'm not saying it's not saffron. There's loads of texts. I focus on cannabis stuff, but they've got lilies and frankincense and myrrh, and there's no shortage of of aromatics, um, that they loved. And they celebrated, um, the diversity of plants. And so there probably was saffron in the incense, but I'm not aware of any specific texts, um, but not disputing it, but they love sacred plants.

Jason, thank you for your number super chat. What flowers were associated with the deity? Quite well, the one that I know for certain is the one that's in the images of Kadesh, where so there is a Canaanite Egyptian synchronization of Asherah that they call Kadesh, the deity Kadesh. Again, the holy one. And she's, she's, she's got, it's three gods. I can pull up the image. Um, actually, hold on because this is my favorite image and the one I'll be using when I get a chance to use this one as like my, uh, logo. Um, but long story short, she's holding a lily. I'll show you the picture. She's got a snake in one hand, a lily in the other. I believe it's lilies, and she's riding a lion. She's naked. She's got the hair of Hathor. This is how you know it's an Egyptian synchronization. It's one of the details. Uh, but secondly, she is, um, there's three gods there. And on her right is the Egyptian god Min, who's like a fertility god. And on her left is the Canaanite god, Resheph, who's a kind of a death god. And so it's again, another one of these life, death, renewal, except in an Egyptian form. So it's got males and females. Ah, here it is. It's not the best picture of it. Let me see. Can you see that? I can see it. Yeah. So, anyway, there she is. She's standing there. She on her hair. See, that's Kadesh and who the scholars say is the same as Asherah. Below her are inscriptions of Anat. That's one reason why they know it's the same is because these are paired with inscriptions of Anat. Um, to her right is the fertility god, and you can see why Min on her right, by the lilies of her right hand. Um, and so that's, you know, the sacred plants and that is, you know, fertility and, and rebirth. The lion is a symbol of her power and authority. Her hair is Hathor's hair, which is deeply symbolic in Egypt for being very, very, you know, she's beautiful. Hathor is like the Aphrodite of Egypt. And so her beauty is legendary and her hair was like symbolic of her beauty. And so that's Hathor's hair. And she's got, like, the headdress on top of that is like another Egyptian one with a moon and a horn. I think Isis might even wear that. At any rate, in her left hand, you'll see a spear and a serpent. And the god standing there who's kind of caught up in the fold of the book, can't see him so well, is the Canaanite god, Resheph, who I was saying is a death god. He's kind of like a, a Canaanite. I don't know that much about him, but I've heard him described as like a, a Canaanite Apollo, except like a little bit dark. Um, he has a bow and arrow and shoots flaming shoots flames that cause disease and stuff on people. Um, and then standing in the line. And so, yeah, so that's, this dates from, there's a bunch of these images. That's not, that one's not alone. There's a bunch of similar ones and they date from pre-Exodus. So mid-second, they're Bronze Age or sec, all second millennium. So between 1800 is when the Hyksos entered Egypt and begins this syncretization of Egyptian and Canaanite gods. Um, and then, um, or that's what 1700, and then they rule till 1600. Then from 1600 to 1200, the Egyptians are dominant again. It's in that time period that you see all this syncretization between Canaanite and Egyptian gods and then, um, and specifically of Asherah, Astarte, and Anat being syncretized with Hathor, Bastet, and Sekhmet, who are the Egyptian version of the triple goddess. Again, rotating identities. They, their names can be swapped around. Hathor is the mother. Bastet is the maiden. Sekhmet is the death goddess. She's like Kali, except for Egyptians. They've all got animal heads. So, she's got like the head of a, she might have the head of a lion. Sekhmet. And she's the one who can destroy everything and destroy everybody. And when she is unleashed, she just like is devouring, you know, entire populations until there's all these stories about Sekhmet being the most powerful force in the universe. Um, so the, I mean, the original question was about the plants. And one thing about ancient texts is that plant names are very, very difficult to decipher. At least in Mesopotamian, it is because they use all these crazy names like the flower of Anana and the, the beloved of, you know, Marduk or whatever. So they'll have all these, like all these names that we can't decipher what plants are talking about. And they're, they're used in all these spells and recipes and, um, so we know that they took a great deal of attention to plants and that they knew a lot about plants, but we only know a fraction of what they knew because we can't really translate. I mean, I don't, I'm not, I don't do any of the scholarship myself, but the scholars, plant names are notoriously difficult. Long story short, to decipher, um, certainly from Mesopotamian, but I believe it's true from Egyptian as well, especially when talking about like medicinal plants and like subtle subtleties among different medicinal plants, very, very challenging to decipher.

So JC says here, the flower to the left of Min is identical to crocus iconography from Greece to Mesopotamia. The item next to the flower is the cone that on deities hold over the tree of life. Thank you. Thank you for that information. Um, and, and this is he's reiterating a lot of what I say, like these symbols are very fluid. Um, one thing a lot of today's scholars are very, very reticent or very reluctant to draw connections. They call it parallel mania. And granted, there's been a ton of bad parallel mania over the years. So I understand why scholars are, you know, a little bit reluctant to like draw certain connections between things, but I personally, personally think they're way too reluctant and way too conservative. This current generation of scholars are way too, um, they're so deep into the weeds that they're not seeing the forest for the trees. Basically, they're, they really have a difficult time putting obvious connections together. So, there's a lot of fluidity to the symbols and a lot of commonalities to the culture across the engineeries. I don't think that the people in Syria have different beliefs than the people in Babylon. They just have, they just name the gods differently. And I don't think they have a radically different worldview from the people in Anatolia or Canaan or anywhere else. I think the worldview is pretty common among these neighboring cultures and certainly the ones that have, um, very contiguous cultures. Um, I think that, you know, they change the names of the gods, but I think that the, the basic understanding of how the universe works is pretty common. And I think the Egyptians have a lot of unique stuff going on. But as we get from the second millennium and especially in the first millennium, there's just this huge rush to, um, syncretize Egyptian and Indo-European ideas, certainly after Alexander the Great. Um, and so you see just this, I think there's more commonalities than distinctions, frankly, when you look at it from a more spiritual perspective and that the, the material differences become less and less important because you just see the commonality of the symbols and how the symbols are being used over and over again.

Scott Kerr says, "When Mr. Dodge says Zeus was not worshiped until the Iron Age, I wonder if that goes for most of the Greek pantheon." Yes, the entire Hellenistic pantheon is very explicitly Iron Age. So, because one thing that happens in the Bronze Age collapse is the Mycenaean Greeks were ruling Greece up until the Bronze Age collapse. Mycenaean Greeks have a different pantheon than the Hellenistic Greeks. They have some of the same names, but there's no Zeus. Poseidon was the king of the gods, and it's not clear if it's really the same Poseidon who's the sea god for the Hellenes. They have a goddess named Athena, but it's not clear it's really the same one. The Mycenaean Greeks had a very, it's an earlier iteration, but it's a very distinct culture and religion from the Hellenes that come later. And the Hellenes are very explicit about this because you get the Bronze Age collapse, the Mycenaeans leave Greece, and it's a new group of people, I think it's the Dorians or something, that come in. So from 1200 to 900 BC is considered the Greek Dark Ages. There's no literacy, there's no language, there's no like authority. It's all over the entire Mediterranean basin is complete wipeout. The Mycenaeans leave Greece, at least some of them become part of the Sea Peoples who invade Egypt and then become the Philistines. Have their own story. The Trojan War is the same time period. It's, it's the same time period roughly speaking as the Exodus. And so, um, this is also in the city of Ugarit where we get texts. All the stuff is going down at the same time that these cities are being wiped out. There's a 300-year dark age in Greece. The Mycenaean Greeks, the Trojan War is supposedly about the Mycenaean Greeks, but the version we read is written by Homer, who's a Hellenic 500 years later, who has, I mean, actually the story comes down through oral tradition. We don't know who Homer is, but by the time it gets written down in the 700s, it's been written down with Mycenaean with Hellenistic gods in the place of Mycenaean stories. So, um, you get this weird mix. There's these very, very weird details in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, that are reflective of older Mycenaean traditions, like the fact that kingship is passing through the women. Like, um, the reason why Helen of Troy is surprised isn't just because she's beautiful. It's because she was the heir to the throne and her husband Menelaus had become king by marrying her. Odysseus becomes king by marrying Penelope. All these men become kings by marrying these various princesses because these are older Mycenaean matriarchal bloodline traditions that we see in Egypt, that we see other places. The Hellenistic Greeks don't have matriarchal bloodlines. They do patriarchal bloodlines. And so they have a very clear reform. So a big part of my book is that I'm arguing that the Greeks and the Hebrews are going through a parallel contemporary reform from tribal matriarchies into kingship-led patriarchies. And the Greeks reorder the goddesses to make them fall under. The Hindus do the same kind of thing at the same time period where they still have goddesses, but they make them subservient to the patriarchal authority. So all the goddesses are going to be subservient to Zeus. Um, and this is a big part of what the older goddesses were not subservient to the male figures. Ishtar, Anana, Asherah, none of these goddesses are subservient to the patriarchy. They're not. That's why they have to get rid of them. Um, so the Greeks don't get rid of them all together, but they do kind of water them down and reorder them and kind of rejig them all so that they all fall under the authority of Zeus. The one exception being Demeter, who is Zeus's older sister, and that's the Eleusinian Mysteries, and she's the only goddess in the entire Greek mythology that I'm aware of that can challenge Zeus and make Zeus, um, you know, go back on what he wants to do, but his wife Hera certainly never does. Um, so the, um, yes, the, the Hellenistic Greeks, so the stories we get from Hesiod, who's the other great Greek writer writing in the 700s. So there's no literacy. Cuneiform writing breaks down. The Phoenicians invent the new phonetic alphabets that both the Greeks and the Hebrews copy. So again, part of my argument, contemporary cultures doing contemporary stuff. At at the same time, by around 800 BC, they have both the Greeks and the Hebrews have invented their own, or maybe by 900 BC, they've both copied the Phoenicians and invented their own phonetic alphabets. What becomes Greek and what becomes Hebrew. Um, and they're both writing their own stories talking about the overthrow of the previous traditions and they both create a new religious pantheons. Now, the Jews do it as monotheism, and the Greeks do it as the Hellenistic pantheon. Um, but the Hellenistic pantheon is quite a bit differently. When you look at it from the perspective of the goddesses, you see clear distinctions. And as I was saying, in the Hellenistic pantheon, all the goddesses are subservient. None of them challenge Zeus. Aphrodite, the most important one, is Aphrodite. Um, Aphrodite is drawn directly from the lineage of Inanna, Ishtar, and Astarte in the Bible. Those are goddesses of love and war, who are warrior goddesses and who are like the high goddess. They're the queen of heaven. They're the high goddess of the entire land. U, and they're war goddesses as well as sex goddesses. But in the Greeks, they split those powers in half. Give all the powers of war and wisdom and all of the righteousness to Athena, who is very distinctly chaste, asexual, and she is born directly from Zeus's skull. And sits at Zeus's right hand. This is an invention of the Hellenes that they would have Athena born directly from Zeus. So is Diana, Isis born directly from Zeus out of Zeus's leg because they're recapitulating all these traditions. They're taking an older tradition and recapitulating them to be under the authority of this new Zeus-led authority system. And so they rewrite these old myths and recapitulate these old gods. That's what I'm saying they do. I'm saying that in contemporaries among the Hebrew prophets are doing the same thing with Moses. Um, they recapitulate these stories after so many centuries. And so, um, they very clearly recapitulate Ishtar and so they break up all of her powers. So Ishtar was a queen of heaven, goddess of love and war. She has the, the, the dying and rising god story. All of that stuff gets spread apart among all the different goddesses. Demeter, who as I mentioned before, she gets the dying rising god story. And that story is clearly that whole tradition of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which we could do an entire episode about. Is the one part of Greek tradition that the Greeks themselves said was predated the Hellenes, that it came from the Mycenaeans. It came from Crete and was an already existing tradition when the Hellenes came along. Likewise with Aphrodite, the Greeks say that she's one of the oldest goddesses. She is of the generation of the Titans and that she is, um, comes from the east, that she's imported from Asia. The Greeks are very clear about this because, and the, and the archaeology is very clear that Aphrodite is drawn from Astarte, who's an eastern, you know, east of the meaning she comes from Asia, meaning she comes from the Middle East. Southwest Asia, whatever terminology we want to use. Um, she's older, but she gets recapitulated. So, Aphrodite, there's two different Aphrodites. Aphrodite Urania, who's the original Aphrodite, who has all the powers of war and prophecy and wisdom and sex and beauty. That's Aphrodite Urania. She gets knocked down and replaced with Aphrodite Pandemos, the common Aphrodite. She's just the goddess of beauty and sex and prostitution. And in the Iliad, the way Homer writes it, she has no war powers at all. She comes out on the battlefield once and she gets wounded by a man. She gets cut on her wrist and she flees and cries and Zeus says, "Don't come out on the battlefield anymore. That's for Athena." That's, that's a line from from the Iliad. That would not have been Ishtar. Ishtar would have been leading the troops in battle. So, um, the Greeks, they take these powers, they split them apart. They give the powers of war and wisdom to Athena. They leave just the sex and beauty with Aphrodite. The queen of heaven title, mind you, is then given to Hera, who's Zeus's wife. For the Bronze Age, Queen of Heaven was not the wife of the king of the gods. She's an independent character and she's not subservient. So when Ishtar is the queen of heaven for the Babylonians, her husband is not, is not Marduk. She's not married to the king of the gods. She's not married to Marduk. She's married to Tammuz. Um, and, and she's most certainly the dominant figure in her marriage with Tammuz. But when you make her married to the king of the gods, you have her be married to Zeus instead. Well, now she's got to be subservient to her husband because that's what the Greeks wanted. They want their wives subservient. And so they create this character Hera. Hera is actually an older goddess, too. But they recapitulate Hera to make her into this whiny little, um, powerless. The only power Hera has is to go. So basically Zeus has all these infidelities. He goes and rapes all these women. And every time Zeus has an affair, Hera's response is to go hunt down and persecute the women that Zeus has sex with. Even if the women were raped and didn't want to have sex with Zeus in the first place, Hera in all of her stories is always chasing down Zeus's various paramours and tormenting them. And so that's what Hera gets reduced to is like this jealous scold, um, who doesn't prevent her husband's infidelities but then just goes and chases the, you know, the, the other, the young girls that Zeus tricked into bed. Um, and, you know, and this becomes the model for the patriarchal marriage. You see this exact same thing in the relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton, where Bill Clinton is the total dog. Goes and chases all the women he wants and every time he has an affair and gets busted, Hillary Clinton goes around and ransacks the women, ransacks Monica Lewinsky or Jennifer Flowers or anybody else. She never takes Bill to task in public. She takes the women to task. And that's how these marriages have been functioning ever since then. Um, and so that's a recapitulation that's happening. And the Greeks are actually very quite proud of like their marital traditions. They make a big deal of how they invent marriage and how they invent, not that people weren't getting married in the past, but they just weren't getting married in these sort of monogamous. The woman is locked down, the man is not. The woman is expected to be completely virginal and monogamous, you know, because they want to have patriarchy. If you want to have patriarchy, you got to control the women's sex lives. Otherwise, you don't know who the baby daddy is. The only way to have paternity is to completely control women's sex lives until you get the modern day of medicines. But, you know, historically speaking, so that's why it becomes so important to control the women and that's why it becomes so important to get rid of these goddesses that encourage women to be harlots or encourage women to be independent or encourage women to be nonsubservient or encourage women to be, you know, warriors. Um, you get rid of all these traditions if you want your women being subservient. And so we're told patriarchy goes back forever and ever and ever. It's just not true. Um, patriarchy follows kingship. Kingship is only 5,000 years old. We've got 250,000 years of human history. So, most of the time we lived as matriarchal tribal peoples, the way most indigenous people live today. Um, where women have a lot more independence, a lot more freedom. It's not to say female dominance, it's just female independence. That independence gets taken away in the Iron Age. Um, they start losing in the Bronze Age, but it gets completely taken away in the Iron Age. And that's what we're seeing in both the Greek and the Hebrew writings from, you know, 800 to 500 BC is this celebration of the overthrow of the old matriarchal tribal traditions.

Let's take another super chat. JC, thank you for your super chat. What do you think is depicted above the menorah to the left of the Holy of Holies on the Beth Shean mosaic? What about the arkway? Beth Shean mosaic. So, give me a second. Um, I might know. I might, I just don't know it by name. I might know it, though. One thing I talk about, but I don't like, make a big deal about, but I do make the argument that the menorah could very could be cannabis. Um, I don't make a big deal about it. Let me see. I'm pulling up this mosaic now. And that's not it. Uh, let's see. I'm not sure which image. All right. Maybe it's this one. Let me see if I can share this. Can I? Is this for? Are we talking about the same thing here? Are you seeing this? Let me, let me add it to the stage. All right. Are we seeing the same thing? Yeah, I'm seeing the, I'm seeing the menorah. Um, I see a menorah and then there's some kind of plant. Um, I'm not an expert on plants. Um, but there is, um, I mean, there's plant motifs are sometimes just decorative and then sometimes the plant motifs are like explicitly sacred and I don't know what. I'm not, I would only be guessing if I tried to say what that is. Um, fifth to seventh. All right. So this is 500 AD. Um, so it's way later. So this is like, you know, I mean, this is like, you know, Jews, regular Jews. Um, I don't know. I could only be guessing. I would only be guessing. Does anyone else have any ideas? I'm open to suggestions.

JC says here, "Does it look like a crocus and saffron?" All right. Crocus and saffron oil. Oh yeah, maybe. I don't know. There is a deep discussion to be had. There's like, you know, plants of the Bible, people who spend entire careers, um, going into this stuff, and it's not, it's not my focus of, of expert or, you know, of of study. Um, I'm just not that good. I mean, I like to grow plants, but I'm not that good at identifying them. Um, so, I'm sorry if that's not a, it's a very satisfactory answer, but like, I'm, to me, it's clearly a plant of some sort, but it's not my strength to identify plants. You want me to go ahead and just remove this? Yeah, you can take that off.

Ray Oroshima says, "It's the same icon as the olive tree symbol for Asherah. Jews made it to be something else." Yeah, probably. Yeah, absolutely. Um, that I can agree with. Um, yeah. I mean, the old goddess worship is just chalk full of a zillion sacred plants. I mean, there's not any one sacred plant. There's loads of them. So, which is why it's not hard to make an argument about cannabis being a sacred plant because like I think there's lots of sacred plants. Um, so, um, yeah, olive trees are obviously very, very important. Um, so I, I, I think I don't think they're shy about like every plant that they liked, um, was.

was free to be incorporated. I I don't think there's any these. I think these folks, I mean, they celebrate gardening as a function of, like, just a core cultural tradition. You know, the highest in Mesopotamian traditions, one of the greatest things you could be would be that, you know, to be the to be a gardener, to be the king's gardener, or or kings themselves would brag about being gardeners.

So, um, and yes, and obviously after they get rid of Asher, then they're not going to talk about Asher anymore. But they do keep these little messages. They do keep poking through, like the Song of Songs. It's just these, there's still elements that they take away the name of the goddess, but, you know, they still like the, you know, there's still messages that people liked and and and kept kept around.

Let's take a couple more, then I think we can close. Not seeing anything here that comes to mind. Take a, let me take a look just a little longer. No, I don't always see the chats. You don't see it? No, I see him now. Well, usually I put it full screen. So, um, then I don't see him. I'm looking at him now, though. Poppies. Yeah, Poppies is there. Uh, for sure. Um, wheat, you know, wheat is, um, I don't know. Have you ever talked to Brian Morescu about the, uh, um, you know who I'm talking about? Um, with his whole thing with, uh, um, psychedelics and and mysteries. Um, and so he makes the point, and and I'm not, I think he's generally like on the right track, even if I don't agree with every single point he makes. Um, the wheat, wheat, wheat, the whole argument about wheat and beer, and then also wheat and, um, um, um, the fungus that grows on wheat they make LSD from, which is, um, the name is urgot, urgot fungus.

Um, so the argument that that Morescu makes, I think, is quite compelling. And that one thing that, you know, uh, sociologists or whatever, is this debate of like, at the beginning of the Neolithic, was it bread or beer that got people to start growing wheat and got people to start cultivating wheat? Because there's a really strong argument that it was beer first before bread, because beer is actually easier to make to a certain extent. All you need, you because you get the, for folks like that, you would get the yeast just from your hands. And so just by taking wheat grains and getting them dirty from your hands and then putting them in water, you would get a very rudimentary sort of Neolithic beer that you would get intoxicated from. And so there's an argument that that's what people first started coming together, you know, bringing these communities together for. In the beginning, was to party, you know. Um, and so then, and then, you know, with some of that fungus, some of that wheat gets a little bit of urgot fungus on there, now it becomes heavily psychedelic, and now it's like the urgot can be really, really potent. And so, and that those traditions could go back 10,000 years, you know, right to the dawn of the Neolithic. And so Morescu makes the argument that that's what's going on in the Eleusinian mysteries, that this in turn is central to mystery traditions, that that in turn is part of, you know, if Christianity is Romanized Judaism, that's the Roman side coming in. Um, the pagan side is coming straight out of these mysterions and bringing in some psychedelic experience. You know, that's his argument. I'll let him make his own argument about that. Um, but the notion that all these psychedelics are being used, and that there's a just a robust apothecary that they had drugs and knew how to use them. And certainly by the time you get to the, uh, the first millennium BC, like people have been messing with this stuff for a long, long time. And so, um, I think they had a full apothecary of all these drugs, and they weren't shy about using them. The term "strong drink," the audience should know, when you see the word "strong drink" in the Bible or in any sacred text, that is drugs mixed with alcohol. Like that's how they would serve drugs in wine and beer. You know, it didn't have capsules. You know, they would mix up a potion. The, you know, the potion maker was usually a woman, would mix up a potion of plants into wine or beer or milk, and they would call it "strong drink," and it would be potent. It'd be like, it'd knock you on your floor. And so, uh, yeah, that's what the term "strong drink" means. And so, yeah, these people had loads of drugs. Um, it's hard to know exactly what they were doing with them or how prevalent they were or just exactly what, but they definitely had, you know, the basics, opium, cannabis, the other ones.

So, let's close with this from, uh, Carry on Chrysler. Oatmeal would come before bread logically, and it would ferment quickly from that form. It's plausible in my opinion, but that's oats. That's not wheat. So, um, yeah, like, uh, these Neolithic farming techniques. It's not, uh, it's not something I've read deeply into, but it's, um, I I know that the bread versus beer debate is a very, is a very, um, uh, it's an ongoing topic in those circles, academic circles.

Well, let's recap for those that don't know anything about the topic we're discussing. And for people that have never heard of you, have seen your previous videos or, um, or your book or read, read, or for anyone that hasn't read your book, can you tell us about which goddess are you talking about? And then after that, my second part to that question is, who is L?

All right. Well, great. And so, um, yeah, so my book, "History of the Goddess," is all about it's rooted in the story of Asher, um, who modern scholars are saying now is was the wife of God. Um, so she's a character in the Old Testament. She is a, uh, she's a Canaanite goddess. And today's scholars don't really make a big deal about her character and her identity beyond just saying she was the wife of God. Uh, but I, when I heard that, um, you know, I'm an amateur scholar here. I don't, this is not how I make my living. Um, but when I heard about Asher being the wife of God, I thought that that was just a really remarkable, a remarkable statement. I'd grown up in church, and I'd never heard of Ashar, much less heard of a wife of God. And so I was really quite, uh, I was quite intrigued by what that might mean and what that might mean theologically, because I couldn't really make sense of it theologically. Um, but I have a lot to say on that now. But a couple years ago, when I first discovered it, um, so I started digging in, and my my first questions about Asher was, um, now she's mentioned like 30 or 40 times in the Old Testament, um, mostly as an Asherah pole, which is a, uh, like a totem pole, a carved wooden pole. We don't know exactly what they looked like, but it was a, you know, a totem pole of some sort that the Hebrew prophets, who were always railing against her, saying she was very bad. Um, because this is part of the bad Canaanite stuff that the Hebrew prophets were trying to get rid of. Um, Hebrew prophets like to chop down the Asherah pole, but the Asherah was very popular. So, the people would put it right back up again. And, and they're fighting about this throughout the First Temple period. So, we're talking about historically, we're talking about the First Temple that actually existed. Um, you know, King David took Jerusalem in roughly a year, a thousand BC, 1040, 6, something like that. Uh, even if King David's not a historical person, we do know that Israelites were there. Um, we know that there was a First Temple on the Temple Mount, that was built, you know, by Bible tradition around 970 something BC, and then destroyed by the Babylonians, and I believe it was 586, so a little shy of 400 years. Um, and we know that happened because we have the Babylonian records of them destroying the temple. So that, that's called the First Temple period, those 400 years. And, um, if you read the stories, the Israelites are mostly being very bad. According to the biblical writers, the Israelites are bad, bad, bad. And most the kings of Israel, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, um, Jerusalem being in Judah, the, um, all the people and most the kings are very bad, except for a handful of reformers that the B, the biblical writers really like. Um, Hezekiah, who's a real person, King Josiah, who is also probably a real person. Um, but the Hebrew prophets, who are in this time period, are go on and on and on at you know, in varying ways about how bad the, you know, the Israelites are being, and how bad the Canaanites are. Um, and one of the things that they really dislike, aside from child sacrifice, which is a different conversation, but I think was real. Um, and they were getting rid of it, is these goddesses, Asherah. There's actually two that are named, Asherah and Astarte. Um, but I came to figure out that there's a third one there too, whose name is Anat, who's like, uh, behind me, the death goddess. So, this is a mother, maiden, and death triple goddess, which is a repeating motif. We see it over and over again, including in modern Hinduism. Um, so Asherah and Astarte are the two that are named. Asherah is the mother goddess, and she is the, uh, the wife of L. And then Astarte is the maiden. She's like Ishtar or Aphrodite. She's the, she's the, the, the love goddess, the goddess of love and war. She's the most beloved one. She's the most popular one. She's Venus. Um, so, and, and, and she's called the Queen of Heaven. And so they mention the Queen of Heaven in the Old Testament. Jeremiah talks about the Queen of Heaven, um, in a bad way. They say she's bad. Um, they talk about how King Solomon worshiped Astarte, but that that was bad, and that King Solomon only got tricked into doing it basically when he was an old man because he had so many wives, and so his wives lured him astray from pure Yahweh worship. But the historical reality is probably that King Solomon was just a pagan, and he worshiped all these goddesses, and that later writers, centuries later, are doing a bit of propaganda spin to say, you know, trying to like take the rough edges off, so to speak, say, "Oh, King Solomon only did it at the end of his life." When really, if you read the story closely and carefully, you can see that he was doing it all along.

Um, so, so who are these goddesses, and then, and what's the bigger picture? Um, the other part of the story is that the God of the Bible, the, the Israelites in this time period are just simply, they're not monotheists. They're not monotheists at all. I don't even think they have a conception of monotheism. They are totally pagans. And the archaeology has completely confirmed this. Modern-day Jewish scholars do not have a problem with it. You go to, uh, Israel and talk to the scholars there, and the Israel Museum, they don't really have a problem with the idea that the First Temple was mostly pagan and just a little bit not pagan. Um, whereas Christians kind of take issue with this. They don't like that idea very much at all. But Jews, Jewish scholars don't have a problem with it. So, it's really not a controversial argument at this point among the scholars that an entire pantheon of gods was being worshiped, and that these goddesses were very important. And then also that the God of the Bible is actually two separate gods that have been merged together. So, L and Yahweh. So, we've got, this is why you have two names of God in the Bible. Um, Elohim, uh, God, and the Lord in English. God translates to Elohim, or sometimes just L, um, in the Hebrew, while the Lord translates back to Yahweh, or the YHW. I'm going to just go ahead and call it Yahweh. Um, people get different thoughts about how to pronounce the word. I'm just going to say Yahweh, but it's the YHW. Um, and so, um, um, these two gods who eventually become the singular monotheistic God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. My position is, we're completely separate for the entire First Temple period. They were two separate gods. Yahweh was just another god in the pantheon, and that his cult, his followers, the followers of Yahweh were reformers. They were like a, uh, it's like a reformation, and they're, they want to change cultural practices, and they want to, they want to overthrow the existing king of the gods, which was Baal. Baal is also mentioned many, many times. B A L. He's mentioned many times in in this part of the Bible. The book of Kings, we're really mainly talking about here. Um, Baal was the main god that the Canaanites were worshiping. And so they were, the Hebrew prophets were, um, you know, multiple times over multiple centuries, because it plays out over 400 years, um, at multiple times, they're sacking Baal temples and burning down Baal temples and trying to get rid of Baal and install Yahweh in this place. And this is why Baal and Yahweh have very similar, they're both storm gods. They're both thunder gods. They have very similar, they have a lot of the same appellations and and honorifics that are applied to them, because Yahweh is the young usurper god trying to overthrow the older god. The exist, the incumbent king of the gods, if you will, was Baal. And this reformed cult is trying to overthrow him. And then later on, much later, like maybe they had this idea during the First Temple, I'm not even convinced that they did, but these ideas may have started. The idea to merge El and Yahweh may have begun in the in the First Temple, but not many people were doing it. It's clear that they were still pagans, as they, because they're still arguing about it with the prophet Jeremiah as they go into the exile, after Jerusalem's been sacked and they're all being forced out into either Egypt or Babylon. Um, they're still fighting about this paganism, and there's other archaeology that indicates the paganism continued on into the Second Temple. Um, so this stuff wasn't sorted out for a very long time. Um, and so, yeah, so El and Yahweh were separate gods. It's not till, I think it's in Isaiah, Second Isaiah, I think, is it somewhere where they start to have prayers and psalms that, uh, are really merging the two together. And that's during the exile. And, uh, so in the mid-5th century BC, um, so like 500 BC, 600 BC, is when, um, when, uh, you know, monotheism really begins. But prior to that, they were a, they were a pagan tribe, pagan peoples. The Israelites were just, they didn't call themselves Jews. They weren't monotheists. I don't think any of the early, I don't think, um, King David was a monotheist. I don't think that King Solomon was a monotheist. I don't even think Moses was a monotheist. I'm inclined to, I'm open-minded that there was a real Moses. And I, and I definitely think there was a real exile, or, you know, a real Exodus in terms of a slave escape from Egypt. I'm willing to make this case and present the archaeology why I think it's true. Um, I don't think it's actually that big a deal to imagine a slave escape during the context of the Bronze Age, esca, Bronze Age collapse. Um, I think they're all pagans, though, and that, um, it's later reformers that, uh, that that invent the idea of monotheism much later on. And so these goddesses are very, very important. The mother goddess, uh, the divine mother, is a, is a theology and a religion of its own that never went away. It's still around in Hinduism. Um, there's a lot to be said on the subject, but I think I can pause it here. Maybe Jacob, you got another question. Um, or if you want to pick in on a particular theme there.

Sure. Um, do we know anything about, um, how Yahweh was understood back when he was, um, understood to be the son of L? What role did he play in the, in this polytheistic Judaism prior to the rise of monotheism?

Yeah. So, you've got the divine council. They, so, we've got Canaanite mythology that's been dug up. This book is one version of it, uh, by Mark Smith and Michael Coogan. There's a couple different ones that translate the, the Baal Cycle is the big important mythology. It's important to recognize that, um, up until just like really 50 years ago or so, or certainly 20th century, we didn't have any Canaanite writing or any Canaanite mythology at all. So the only notion we had of these people is what comes from the Bible. And it's only in recent years, in the last century, and and even recently, that archaeologists have been digging up and making all sorts of fantastic discoveries all around Israel and the whole region that has, you know, unearthed the old gods, so to speak. And so now we actually have some full stories that that describe Baal and L, um, in their in their native habitat, you know, if you will, prior to Yahweh coming on the scene. So L is the high god, the source god. He's the one who's like out creating the universe, but he's like distant and far away. So he's not dealing with us, you know, puny human beings. He has sons that are, and he has many sons, and they are the lords of their local realm. So in the ancient pagan world that we're talking about, Baal would be the king of the gods for, and these these these guys are the king of the gods in their local region. So Baal is one of them. Zeus is one of them. Marduk over in Babylon is a king of the gods. They've all got this father god or and a grandfather perhaps, but it's the same guy because it's, it's these are repeating thematic motifs. Um, there's a separate one from Egypt, but even they have a lot of parallels. Um, and so, um, there's many kings of the gods, and people understood there's many kings of the gods, but there's only one real source god, one high god. That's God Most High, El Elyon. And that's who L is. And so Baal was being worshiped all through the, uh, the second millennium BC. So like the, uh, um, so like between 1000 BC and 2,000 BC, like somewhere in there, Baal, he's contemporary to Marduk over in Babylon, and he has this very long run. He's the, he's the god that the Hyksos are worshiping when they invaded Egypt in like the 1600s BC. He continued to be worshiped by the Carthaginians, by the Phoenicians, and then the Carthaginians when they were fighting against the Romans in what, when did, when did Carthage get destroyed? 130 BC or something like that. Um, so for like 1500 years or something, Baal has this pretty long run as a king of the gods. Um, Yahweh, I believe, comes along as a, is his his origins are murky in the Bronze Age, um, late Bronze Age, but he is a, um, a tribal god of some sort. And if you just follow the story, he's the god that the Israelites who escaped from slavery in Egypt and come to the land of Canaan, they're following. Destruction of Carthage was about 146 BC. I put that. Yeah. They were worshiping Baal. They were Baal worshippers. Hannibal, the famous general who attacked Rome, you know, he's named for Baal, Hanni-Baal. Um, so, and that's where you see the the continuity of the child sacrifice traditions is you see it where the Baal worshippers were. Um, and so, um, I believe one of the things that the Yahweh cult is doing, I mean, in their own words, they say this, is that they're trying to put an end to child sacrifice. And the Greeks and the Romans write about the Carthaginian child sacrifice with the, in the same describe it in very similar terms as the as the biblical writers do. And they have the same level of contempt and disgust for the practice. And they also reject it the same way the Hebrew prophets rejected it. So, I do think that this is a real cultural reform of their era, that you've got one group of people that's been doing this child sacrifice for centuries, and they believe that that's the thing you do. And you got another group coming along and saying they're reformers, and they're saying stop doing that, and they have an argument. They have a dispute, like we fight over racism and slavery today. These disputes play out over centuries, not just one generation, but centuries. And so I believe they are fighting about child sacrifice for the entire First Temple period. And that's one of the things that is driving the Yahweh cult is that they want to put an end to that practice. They also want to put these goddesses out of business too. And their cults, these priestesses that who are named the Qedesha, um, that's the Hebrew word for the priestesses in the Bible. It gets translated as temple prostitutes. Um, I, for one, believe that there was sexual stuff going on, because that's part of these mother goddess traditions. They celebrate women's sexuality as a source of life. U, they celebrate all the material pleasures of of the world. Um, so they want to put an end to those practices. And one thing about these old Bronze Age goddesses is that they're not submissive to the men. They're not submissive to the male gods. So, Astarte, who's the second one I mentioned, she is a cognate of of Ishtar in Babylon, and also Inanna of the earlier Sumerians, and then later Venus in the Roman times. Um, and then more Durga in modern day India. She continues on as Durga. Um, she is explicitly not submissive. Um, she is not submissive to her husband, if she even has one. She's not submissive to her father. She is obstinate. She is sexually free. She's a warrior goddess. She'll just as soon kill you. Um, so if you are, part of my thesis is that the whole world goes from tribal matriarchies to kingship and patriarchy. That patriarchy follows kingship. And that kingship in the grand scheme of things is not that old. Like kingship is only 5,000 years old. Like going back to 30,000 BC, early Bronze Age. Prior to that, we have no evidence of kingship prior to the invention of the Bronze Age. Um, and that's when we start to get city walls and ongoing warfare. And this is when I believe, and you know, have scholarship to support this, that, um, these newfound warriors start to impose themselves as a new ruling class on top of tribal, you know, indigenous peasant communities that have already been there for a long time for thousands of years in very large settlements, um, in me, all over Mesopotamia. The city of Jericho was very old. Um, people had been living in these places for thousands of years without kings, and just living however it is that they lived as indigenous democracies, or however it is that they managed their affairs, but they, there's no evidence of like warfare or city walls or slavery. That stuff comes along later. And so my argument is that these powerful goddesses, these not submissive goddesses, are a product of these older tribal matriarchies. And as the entire society of which the Bible is telling a version of this story, because they go from the 12 tribes to the kings, the Israelites do this themselves. They transition from tribal peoples that have independent women to patriarchal kingship people. And, and in part of that process, they elect to eliminate these goddesses altogether. The Greeks do a similar thing because their mythology is contemporary to this, and they're going through a similar cultural shift at the same time period in the early Iron Age. Um, uh, those centuries between a thousand BC and 500 BC is a big transition time, um, as kingship gets established in these communities. And, um, and, and so the Greeks reorder the goddesses to make them less powerful and make them all submit to Zeus, basically. Long story short, but the Israelites take it a step further. So they eliminate the goddesses altogether, and they eliminate the concept of goddess. Like there's not even a word for goddess in the Hebrew language. It's just Elohim, just God. And that is all-encompassing of male and female gods. So they don't even have a concept of of the divine feminine in, uh, in the Hebrew language. So that is like a huge cultural leap, because these goddesses were very important culturally. They're not just like, uh, these aren't just cardboard cutouts, you know, they represent very real things in people's lives. And specifically, they represent the material world and the cycle of life, nature, mother nature, mother earth, but so much more than that. But also the products of nature. So all the food, the grapes, the wine, the grain, which gives us bread and beer. So all the alcohol, the plant drugs, the sex, the music, the dance, the feasting, all this stuff, these are all goddess traditions. And if you go back and look at the festivals, the most popular festivals from the ancient world, whether it's Greece or Mesopotamia or all over the place, yes, they have gods and they celebrate the male gods too, but the really popular ones are goddess festivals. Um, Demeter in Greece was at the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries and some of the most important festivals there. Um, and so all these, because they're, because when you're having all the the feasting and the dancing, um, those are all products of of these mother goddesses. And so we've kind of lost touch with that in the modern world, or and our, you know, um, world of monotheism, right? Hold on. I got to do with my dogs. Sorry about that. Um, no problem. The, uh, um, yeah, so like the sexual stuff in the temple prostitution, the ritual sex, I totally believe it's real. Um, that it was a staple of of these ancient cultures. I definitely Mesopotamia, there's plenty of evidence for it there. Herodotus talks about it. A lot of modern scholars like to think Herodotus is a liar. I don't think he's lying. He may be presenting stories that are secondhand that he's, you know, might not have all the details right, but that the temple prostitution, I think in varying degrees, is totally existed, and it makes sense in a matriarchal world where you track your family lines through the mothers and not through the fathers, and there's just no shaming. Because, um, that's one of the key differences between patriarchy and matriarchy is that tracking your family lines to the father versus tracking your family lines to the mother. When you track your family lines to the father, which is what we do today, it's very important to control the women's sex lives. It becomes very important that women remain virgins before they're married. It becomes very important that your wives remain monogamous to their husbands, even if the husbands aren't monogamous at all, because you're controlling for paternity. This is a very important theme in the Old Testament. This is why you've got extended lineages of paternal patriarchal lineages that are taken all the way back to Adam. That's like a repeating theme in the Old Testament because they're trying to establish the importance of paternity. Period. Because that in and of itself was a cultural shift. Um, that a lot of the people weren't doing that. And so when you see all the Hebrew prophets railing against the Canaanite people, the book of Hosea is a perfect example of this. The quintessential example of is Hosea, but also Ezekiel does quite a bit of this, where they just page after page after page of criticizing the sexual behavior of the Canaanite women. And I always, I remember thinking to myself, even as a kid in church, being like, "Wow, what were these people getting up to?" You know, like, it doesn't really make sense. Like the entire society is like totally depraved. Like, it doesn't really make sense when you talk about an entire society being depraved. But then when you compare it to modern-day indigenous people and the interactions between missionaries and settlers, whether in North America or the South Pacific, where you also saw women having, you know, unconstrained sex lives, not to say they didn't have sexual ethics of their own. I'm sure they did. But compared to the Christians that were meeting them for the first time, these women seem completely sexually free. And then you start to see a parallel. What's the parallel? Maternal bloodlines in both cases. Um, if you've got matriarchies, the women can be much more sexually free. And so that makes sense when you, when you want to try and figure out what are the Hebrew prophets upset about and why, what are they trying to change? This makes sense in terms of something they're going to be fighting about for like 500 years, that they got a small group of people saying the default of most of society was this matriarchal stuff, and the women are running around non-submissive. But if you're trying to bring the women to heel, um, and you want to control them, and you're trying to get them under control, well, you got to take away the various things that give them, even spiritually, give give them empowerment. So, this is exactly what Hosea is doing with his wife Gomer in the book of Hosea. He's, she is a, a, what do they call her? A, a woman of promiscuity, or a woman of adultery, or something. Um, she's either one of these priestesses, or she's symbolic of a Canaanite everywoman. It, it, the story reads the same either way. Hosea is says very explicitly, "I'm going to shut down your festivals. I'm going to shut down your traditions. I'm not going to let you run around with other lovers, um, and take my money and take their money. You got to come live with me and just be me alone." And it's, it's noticeable that Gomer is her name, that she never speaks. You never hear what she has to say. You only hear what Hosea says, and you never hear her response. You don't find out what happened either. Whether Gomer actually stuck around, or if Gomer told him to piss off and left. Um, that the story of Homer and his, of Go, of Hosea and his wife is unresolved. But it's very clear that she's one of these goddess worshippers, and that he's shutting her down. Um, and, and, uh, who the book of Hosea is meant to be some of the oldest actual writing, because for the first parts of the Old Testament, they are still illiterate, and they don't become a literate people with the Hebrew language until around 900 BC, and then as you go forward from there, the evidence gets better, um, because we have more writing. And Hosea is living at the end of Israel. So he witnesses Israel's destruction by the Assyrians, and I believe, and, um, so that's this, that was destroyed in 722. We know that as a firm date, 722 BC, and so Hosea was living prior to that. So say from 750 to 720, that's when he's, he's making these arguments. And scholars believe that that's one of the oldest legitimate passages of the Bible, that's like the entire book was like actually written back then, and is not just like bits of poetry, stitched together, but like actually like that was a real guy. Hosea was a real guy, and he actually wrote this stuff down, and it was actually relatively well preserved. Um, and so you can put this on the timeline, um, call it 750 BC for the sake of discussion, that they are actively actively fighting about this, these family matters, and these sexual matters, and, and what represents normative sexual behavior, because I do not believe that they are simply all bad. I think they just have a different type of society, and with a different set of rules. And when you understand the options of family structures, um, that these are competing narratives for family structures, I think it makes a lot of sense. And then you can, you can track that back back through Mesopotamia, that they were actually fighting about this stuff for like more than a thousand years. Um, these family stuff. So, um, yeah, I think that's what the Yahweh cult is, is this reform cult. And they, um, you know, they have wins and losses, wins and losses, wins and losses. And then the whole temple gets destroyed in 586. They all get sent into exile. And at that moment in 586, when they get sent into exile, they were still mostly pagan, and still mostly fighting about all this stuff. And these rules that we take for granted today of patriarchy and paternal lineages, that stuff gets locked in around that time period, by say 500 BC, it's pretty well locked in. Also for the Greeks, the Greeks also celebrate this transition in some of their mythology, um, the, uh, uh, the Oresteia being a very important example of all that. I won't get into all that right now. Um, but yeah, that that this transition from tribal matriarchies to kingship and patriarchy, and that the Yahweh cult is like the tip of the spear of this, this reform movement, then at some point, somebody gets a clever idea of, let's merge L and Yahweh together into one single God, and make him, that's the God we worship. But I don't think they had, I don't think they had developed that idea even at the time that they had exiled. Other people have different opinions on this. Um, other people will argue that L and Yahweh were merged together at an earlier date. I just, I just, the way I read it, I, I don't, that's not the way I read it.

Where exactly are we told that Yahweh and L are two separate gods in the text?

Well, L is clearly his own god. I mean, L continued to be worshiped by the Phoenicians, by the Carthaginians. Um, so L is clearly his own god, even after, even in, in, I mean, L goes, L lives on. L is L is a separate god. I mean, he never went away. It's just that within this one cult, this one group, this one, you know, cultural group, they, uh, they decided to merge him together, but everybody else was still worshiping L as his own thing. The Greeks call him Cronus. Like the Greeks are very explicit. L is Cronus when they're talking about the Phoenicians, because all these people are interacting, right? The Phoenicians are up in Lebanon. They're like some of the most important people of that era. Um, they're the, they were the first people to dominate the Mediterranean, uh, prior to the Greeks, prior to the Romans. So they were big rivals of the Greeks and Romans. And we have plenty of literature from the Greek and Roman perspective talking about the Phoenicians. We don't have really Phoenician writings of their own, unfortunately. From my understanding, everything they did was on on parchment, and none of it survived. Um, because they're the ones who invented these phonetic alphabets that the both the Greeks and the Hebrews copied. Um, the Greeks and Hebrews both say that they copied it from the Phoenicians. So the Phoenicians were literate people, but their writing didn't survive. So all we really know about them is what their enemies were saying about them. But even that gives us a certain amount of details. And the Greeks are very clear. L is Cronus, and um, he's the father god, and the Greeks talk about how they sacrifice babies to Cronus. Cronus eats his children in the Greek mythology. Um, and so, yeah, I think there was, make, I think those child sacrifices, it's in the Baal cult, but the sacrifice was actually made to L. And so I think that's part of the reform is that they're trying to recapture L. Um, and sort of, uh, also, if you read the, the Canaanite stories about L, he is a bit of a buffoon sometimes. Like he's a dr, he gets in one of the stories, he gets wicked drunk and like urinates and defecates on himself and has to be helped to bed, and he's given a hangover cure by by Astarte and Anat, which, believe it or not, they call it the "hair of the dog," which is an expression that survives to this day, which I thought was remarkable. Um, yes, they give him this hangover cure called "hair of the dog." So, I think there's a lot that's disreputable about L, um, by the time you get into this reform movement. And so, I theorize, I hypothesize that they're also trying to rescue L. They want to reboot L, so to speak, and give L a makeover and make him more respectable. Um, because the high god was, uh, you know, had a, had become somewhat disreputable. Um, and that the child sacrifice, especially, was was disreputable. But El and Yahweh are definitely, and then the fact that we have two separate names of God in the Bible. And when you read the biblical text, and in your mind, every time it says "God," you read it as L. And every time you see "the Lord," and you read it as Yahweh, and think of it in terms of two separate gods, you can actually really start to pry it apart. And, um, now, some of the stuff, the book is written by Yahwists, um, and they're taking old texts, stitching them together, and doing some editorializing, and sometimes they interject Yahweh back into older stories, especially stuff about Abraham. Abraham wouldn't have known Yahweh. Um, and historical Abraham wouldn't have known Yahweh. Um, he would have come along much later. The original Abraham, the original Israel, when Jacob gets the name Israel, they're followers of L. That's what the, the country, the name Israel is named for L. Israel. Um, wrestles with L, or however you want to translate it. Um, but it's clearly about L. It's not about Yahweh. It's not "Isra-el." It's "Israel." And, um, so you can really see it. Once you see it, and you read start reading the text with this understanding, they're two separate gods, it really illuminates, at least for me, how I read the text, and what I, what I get out of them, and how I interpret these stories. Um, but yeah, like, because there's a whole, there's, there's so many stories that are just about, there's so many texts, especially older ones, where it's just talking about L, or Elohim, or El Shaddai, or El Elyon. Um, and it helps to use, I use BibleHub.com. I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but you can use the computers, the glory of, uh, 21st century digital scholarship, is that BibleHub, BibleHub.com, or other similar tools will give you Hebrew translations word for word. And so you can word search by Hebrew words, and you can, you can get the translations and see where the same word shows up in other parts of the text, and you can do word searches and such. And, um, if you're interested in, you know, in prying stuff apart, and you're not a, you know, you don't read Hebrew, it's really, really handy. And I can't recommend BibleHub, BibleHub.com enough. It's like a free tool for everybody. Multiple, you know, six separate translations in English side by side, so you can compare English translations, and then the Hebrew and the commentary, and Greek too, I guess, for the New Testament. Really fabulous. And so when you start digging in and doing the word searches for L, or for Asherah, or for the Qedesha, and you see where they show up, and how these words get translated, because sometimes words get translated different ways, um, inconsistently, um, you can really, you can really, you can pry it apart. You know, scholars of scholars who are far more sophisticated than I am, who have done a much more thorough job of, you know, picking these things apart, have really, you know, figured out a lot of it. Um, and, and, you know, you can put the stuff on the historical timeline. Um, we know when literacy begins, which is like around 900 BC, and we know that prior to that, it's oral tradition. And then you can then you can see that like there's an oral tradition there, and then a later group of writers like added some bits and pieces to it. You see this with David. You see this with Solomon, that like, like David, in my opinion, is like not a purely fictional guy. Like there was a real man there who did some questionable stuff. And so later historians who are propagandists are like saying, yeah, David did this stuff, but it's not so bad because of this and this and that. But if he was a purely fictional character, you would have made him much more, um, one-dimensional, one much more pure. Same thing with King Solomon. Why would you, if you're inventing King Solomon in 500 BC, or in Alexandria, or someplace centuries later, why would you have these details about him being a goddess worshipper, only to write in the details of like trying to excuse it away? You just make him not a goddess worshipper at all. This is what they do with the book of Chronicles. When you compare the book of Chronicles versus the book of Kings, which are largely telling the same historical stories, the book of Chronicles is written centuries later. They're clearly cleaning up all these rough details about these characters I was just mentioning that are unflattering. You know, all the all the bad details about King David, you just don't hear about him in the book of Chronicles. You don't hear about King Solomon's goddess worship in the book of Chronicles. You only hear about, you know, the, the polished version that they want to present. It's very interesting when you compare the histories, when you read Chronicles and Kings right next to each other and look at the same stories next to each other and see what details that they change. And it's these little subtle details, but it's these always these, and the original detail that they're getting rid of, always points towards that First Temple paganism. Um, almost every time it'll point towards First Temple paganism, and, and how in centuries later, that they're embarrassed by it or trying to cover it up. Um, but the, but yeah, my position is firmly, their First Temple was pagan all the way through, and that, um, that they have a similar pantheon to the rest of Mesopotamian pantheons, and similar to the Greek pantheon, and that, um, a lot of today's scholars are really afraid to, they like to pick these stories apart and and show how, um, these narratives don't have any truth, or that, you know, these narratives don't have authority. Um, they really like to pick the pick the data apart, pick the stories apart. Um, but they don't seem to want to put them back together in a different way. And I'm trying to put it back together in a different way. Say that when you take the archaeology plus the text, that a new story emerges, a different story, um, that gives us different insights. And that this, what my whole central thesis of all my work is, that there's a divorce of the mother goddess in the Old Testament, and that this divorce is central to the definition of monotheism. That monotheism is religion without mother, and by definition, um, the only way you get to one God is you got to get rid of goddess. And that the Hindus never lost her. And so, these traditions, and a very, and not in a superstitious way, but as like a very mature and philosophical cosmology. Like Hindu cosmology is not unsophisticated. It's very sophisticated, and it does not have a problem with science, and it does not have a problem with monotheism. Monotheism has a problem with the Hindus. Hindus are perfectly can perfectly reconcile their worldview back to monotheism. It's just, it's the monotheists who can't do it in reverse. And the big thing that's different is is these goddesses, what the Hindus call Shakti. Does, you there's no reconciling this feminine, um, which is the material world. Um, you can't reconcile that back to monotheism because monotheism very explicitly got rid of it. And that, that's what this divorce is. But all that stuff that they criticize in, in, in Hebrew prophets, including idolatry and stuff, it's alive and well in India. You can go see everything they say not to do in the new, in the Ten Commandments, you know, in terms of like making art, or, you know, all the religious stuff. I'm not talking about murder, but all the religious stuff they tell you not to do, alive and well. Alive and well, including the ritual sex, including temple prostitution. I mean, it's not common. It's on the fringes of society, but they call them the Devas. Devi being the word for goddess, the Hindu word for the Sanskrit word for goddess is Devi. So the Devas are the, and they're not particularly sacred anymore, but in theory, they are the, the sacred sex, and, um, they've been so degraded, and they're on the margins of society nowadays, but they still exist. The traditions are still alive. Transgender people too, were totally a part of this tradition. Um, I was mentioning the Qedesha. Well, there's the Qadesh as well. The Qadesh are the male equivalent.

of the Kadesha. Kadesha gets translated as temple prostitute. Well, the Kadesh are, I argue, are transgender people because they're totally common. They're totally common. They're all over Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome.

Um, we have loads of literature from Rome about men casting themselves in the service of Cibil, which is the mother goddess in Rome. One of them, there's a lot of mother goddess in Rome. We have loads of literature on eunuchs and transvestites um in Mesopotamia with the Cycians. Um, Herodotus calls them hermaphrodites. That's where we get the word hermaphrodite. It's, uh, the gods Hermes and Aphrodite had a baby who was, who was an intersex, you know, a chick with a dick. And um, and so you've got these statues of the god Hermaphroditus from ancient Greece who's like, you know, a lady boy, right? Or what? I'm trying to get the proper language here. Sorry if I'm being rude. Um, um, but yeah, a transsexual um or and a um so that's where they, it was really common. It was all over the place. And they were the priests of the mother goddess. And so when they got rid of these mother goddesses, not only do they get rid of the temple prostitution, not only do they get rid of the cannabis and the temple drugs, they get rid of the transgender people too.

So my argument is very explicitly is that the male Kadesh, which is the holy ones, if I didn't mention that, they're the holy ones, um that those are the male ones. And rather than being translated as temple prostitute, they're translated as dog. They're saying you will not bring in the in book of Deuteronomy, it says your daughter will not be a Kadesha. You will not bring the wages of a into the temple. Well, that's pretty clearly they're talking about temple prostitution. And they say, "And your son will not be a Kadesh. You will not, uh, you will not allow them to be a dog." Like, they're being very insulting because, like, they're insulting the trans people. It's actually the same insults that you still see in the modern day. So, these attitudes, some of these cultural attitudes have been around for a really long time. And I argue that this is the beginning of shaming. That it's the beginning of, you know, transgender people being pushed to the margins of society, though they never went away. They were just pushed to the margins.

Um, yeah, it's these big cultural forms and that these, these goddess traditions were actually very rich and they were very popular and they were popular for a reason because they were a lot of fun. Uh, big feasts, sex and drugs, rock and roll. Um, they were popular. This is popular religion. This is popular culture and you've got these, uh, you've got these patriarchal men coming along who want to shut down the party and, um, it's, uh, and then you, and then you see these attitudes carry through for the next 2,000 years, right into the modern day. Um, a lot of these attitudes really have remained exactly the same.

We got a couple super chat questions. Let's start, let's start with John Gear. John Gear, thank you for your super chat. Does L in the Bible always refer to a particular God or is it sometimes generically used for God? It's an excellent question. It's a perfect question. Um, because Hebrew is a new language. So they use the word Elohim. Now, sometimes they do just say L. There's a whole bunch, if you do word search for just L or El Shai, which is one of his titles, means L most high. There's a couple other ones. Lion. You can do word searches for just plain L. Moses calls out to just L more than one occasion. So you will find references to just L. But his question is about Elohim, which is the Hebrew word which just means god, which means which is generic word for God, like with a lowercase G, same as we use it today. You got uppercase G, God, and lowercase generic gods in general. So the word Elohim, um, the Hebrews use it in both ways. And so sometimes they're referring to the high god, like capital Elohim, if you will. And, uh, although I don't think they use caps, um, and lowercase Elohim, generic god. It's an excellent question and it's and it's, um, a legitimate question, but it's part of their theological. My argument is that it's part of the Hebrews' theological project to, as they're moving towards monotheism, to, um, a there's no feminine version of the word Elohim. It's just the male version or just a unisex version, if you will. So they don't distinguish between goddesses. Um, and, um, and certainly by the time we get the text that we read today, they have become monotheists, right? So the final authors are writing this stuff in the context of crafting it towards monotheism. And so they are using the word in a monotheistic way. But, you know, you've got 500 years of writing or more between 900 BC and, you know, when we presumably get the final. I mean, the Septuagint, I mean, I'm persuaded that the Torah was still being worked on in Alexandria, um, like in the 300s BC, the 200s BC. So I am persuaded that the final drafts are taking place in Alexandria and that, um, by that time, you know, they've got a pretty sophisticated understanding of what they're trying to accomplish. But, you know, that's five, six hundred years and so you've got a lot of different stories written at different time periods that are stitched together by different writers, obviously, and so different cultural context, different stories, and so you got to really be kind of, got to take each story by, in its own, in a vacuum, you know, to get to the bottom of it.

All right, let's go to the next one. Source of plow sharers, pick super chat. The names in First Enoch are all L, Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel, Azazel, etc. None are Yah. Could this suggest an earlier date of First Enoch prior to Yah? I haven't really studied Enoch. That's not really been part of my, uh, my focus. So, I don't really have. I know Enoch's very popular with some people. So, I don't really want to get hesitate to get in any of that. Um, because I don't really, I don't know the context of Enoch when when it might have come from. Um, but I do think I will say this much. The northern kingdom of Israel wasn't really worshiping Yahweh too much. All the kings, the northern kingdom of Israel, all the kings were pagan. So, you have a Yahweh cult in Israel. I mean, Jose is in Israel. You got, uh, Jehu, who kills, uh, uh, um, what's her name? Um, kills Ahab and, uh, the woman. You know what I'm talking about. Uh, the queen, um, Jezebel. That's a, a, a king Jehu who who murders Jezebel and her and her family and he becomes new king. His name is a Yahweh king, but he was also very clearly a, a pagan, a pagan Hebrew, pagan Israelite because biblical writers are very critical of him. Um, so, but so every king in in the northern kingdom of Israel is a, is a pagan and a lot of them, I think, would not even have been members of the Yahweh cult. They would have been Baal worshippers. They clearly were Baal worshippers. And so you've got these rival cults. And so for the Baal worshippers, they're going to be writing Psalms to L and praising L here and there. And there would have been no mention of Yahweh at all. So, there are, there are a handful of texts, um, you know, they talk about documentary hypothesis and the J text and the E text, the J text being Yahweh texts and E text being Elohim texts, um, and they do say, now, there's a lot of different ways to slice and dice the documentary hypothesis, but as far as the E text, that's like the smallest batch, um, of text. And so texts that just say L all by himself, self, that don't talk about Yahweh in any capacity at all, even interjected later on, um, that's a very distinct group of texts. They're all mostly pretty old and, um, but they're there, but they are there. They're definitely, they're definitely texts that are written just, and, uh, because they were the Israelites, but not everybody worshiped Yahweh. Some of them were worshiping Baal.

You mentioned earlier that there was no, um, feminine version of L, but what do you make of, uh, Elat, the the that which is the Hebrew word for goddess? How do you spell it? Well, E L A T as a transliteration, but Elot. Well, because in the Quran, you've got a lot like Allah and Allah. So, in the Satanic Verses, they mention these three goddesses: Allat, Uzza, and Manat. It's the same three goddesses. It's the same triple goddess. Manat is like Anat, who's like Kali, who's like Sekhmet, back from Egypt. So Manat is like Anat. Uh, Uzza is very clearly a, a Venus goddess, a goddess of love and war. Um, the scholarship is clear that Uzza is Venus and Allat is the mother goddess of these Arabian pagans pre-Islam. And Allat and Allah, Allat and Allah, A L L A T and A L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L A H, they're clearly going together. Um, so you got the father god and the mother god, mother goddess. So, um, I haven't studied the word Elot actually, and maybe we should take a closer look at that. Um, because mo, yeah, what is, what is the translation of Elot? Just the conventional translation. Oh, really? Yep. Okay. Well, maybe I was wrong about there not being a word for goddess in Hebrew language. I thought that there wasn't a word for God. It kind of, kind of reminds me of, in a sense, like in feminine form. Just throw that in there real quick. All right. Well, I, I'm always, I'll put in, you know, improving my scholarship here. I don't claim to be right about every little detail. Um, I claim to be right on the big picture, but I, I'll be corrected on the margins for sure.

We do have a super chat from Chrissy. Chrissy, pick your super chat. Do you have any peer-reviewed publications in credible academic journals? Curious to read some. Absolutely not. I do not. Um, I've actually spent a lot of time in academia. I'm a pretty educated guy. Um, I'm done a lot of stuff on energy and energy research. But, um, no, the academics don't like my work because I'm making a theological argument. And so, and in academia, it's purely materialist arguments. Um, and so the academics have generally been pretty hostile to my argument that the triple goddess in the Old Testament is the same triple goddess all the way through. They don't, they're hostile to the idea. They're hostile to the idea that Asherah is an Israelite mother goddess. Um, Dan McClellan, I'm going to pick on Dan McClellan a little bit just because he's a prominent YouTube academic who's pretty well representative of today's generation of scholarship. I mean, they're all postmodernists and, um, largely atheistic, largely atheists generally. Um, and so they don't want to hear theological arguments. They're making materialist arguments. And so the most they'll say about Asherah is that she's a goddess of weaving because she appears with the spindle here and there. They don't even want to make the argument that it's very controversial to say that the Baal cycle is the same mythology that the Israelites, that it's the same religion as the Canaanites in Israel. Like that is a very controversial in academic circles and and it's largely rejected. I think that they're wrong. I actually, I'm very critical of academia in a lot of, in a lot of stuff, man. I am hugely critical of modern-day academia in all manner of fields. You know, my main living is in clean energy and I think they're getting stuff grossly wrong in clean energy. So, um, but other fields, too. So, I'm, I don't, I don't, I want to be clear about this. I think the technical work that today's Bible scholars are doing with archaeology and translations, I think the technical work is outstanding. And I rely on the technical work. A guy like Dan McClellan, I give him A+ or Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, excuse me for mispronouncing the name. I give them absolutely A+es on the technical work. They are not wrong on the archaeology and translations and such. But if you're going to look at sacred texts from a purely materialist perspective and take it as a presupposition that spirituality and religion is all, you're not going to, in my opinion, read these, you get the full, full value out of these texts. And so if, and if your entire intellectual project is to deconstruct, deconstruct, deconstruct, um, then you just end up with a pile of rubble at the end of the day. You don't end up with, with a configuring a new story. What I'm trying to do is take these data, the archaeology and this the original stories and and and figure out what the new story is. So there's a new story here. Um, but as far as publishing in an academic journal, I wouldn't even want to. They would, they would reject my work and, um, um, I got, frankly, better things to do. Um, so no, the answer whether I've been published in academia, the answer is a big fat no and I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even try. But I'm happy to have a theological argument with anybody.

So when do you see L and Yahweh start getting merged together? This is an excellent question and I think it's totally up for debate even for my, even in my own mind. Um, plenty of folks would say it's like at the burning bush. I mean, that's a traditional narrative and so that, um, even, even, you know, if you want to be like a, say, a good Christian scholar who sees the archaeological evidence, sees the etymology, sees that these are originally two separate gods, you would say that they were merged when Moses introduces the name Yahweh at the burning bush. That would be a conservative reading of the evidence and that they were monotheists all the way through the first temple and that they're fighting about it. Personally, I'm not persuaded that's true. Um, I think the concept of them merging L and Yahweh may have happened in the in the first temple at some period for the hardcore Yahwists, but the hardcore Yahwists are like this tiny group of people. They're a subset of the broader society. So, for the broader society, for the popular culture, I don't think they're merged at all. I don't think they're merged at all. I don't think they're merged at all until the second temple. Um, I think that, uh, I think as far as the popular, the broader culture, I think they're totally separate. Now, this is my argument. Other people can present their arguments. Um, but my position is that as far as the popular Israelite culture was concerned, that popular Judahite culture was concerned, separate gods all the way until the exile and they get merged during, conceptually merged in in exile, but the idea may have been kicking around longer than that for a small group of people.

Can you talk about some of the Samaritan parallels to the Hebrew Bible? Well, the classic is the is the, the ark is the ark story, the flood and the ark where we've got three distinct versions of this. You've got a Samaritan version, a Mesopotamian version, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and then you get the biblical version where they're effectively the same story with just the names changed. Um, and and even in the Noah's Ark story in the Bible, it's clearly two different versions of the story stitched together because you've got, you know, 40 days of rain and 150 days of rain and a bunch of different details that are stitched together. Um, so, so that's clearly like a cultural touchstone for these people, for the, for the entire region that somehow people believe that there was a flood at some point in the past that wiped everything out and there was a time before the flood and a time after the flood and that mythologists and propagandists and kings and such were trying to position themselves saying we're so great that our lineage was from before the flood and then they, but no one really knows when the flood was in a historical way. They just know that there was a flood and actually I think there might be some some merit to that idea that there was an epic destruction at some point in time, distant time, that was so epic that it was remembered as like just this mythology. Um, but that, that is a very, very, that's a very important one that links Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and the Bible. But I would make an even more important argument, which is about the waters and the waters of creation. One of my arguments is that, um, the waters of creation is is the source mother. This is exactly what the Hindus say today that Shakti is, is the waters, the waters of the chaotic waters, and that all the goddesses in the Hindu pantheon, but I would argue it's all goddesses everywhere, but this is Hindu religion, contemporary Hindu religion today, that says Shakti isn't so much of a goddess of her own, she is like the raw primordial energy, mass and energy. And so all the goddesses in Hinduism are all avatars of Shakti. And so you can take all the goddesses, they have fluid identities with one another because they're all sort of like sisters and you can push them all back together into one super goddess called Shakti. So my argument is that this is a, is actually a common idea. And so in, um, the Mesopotamian cultures, they talked about the mother being the salt waters. And so in the oldest stories from Sumer, you get, um, the mother goddess, the great, the whole universe is born from this virgin mother who was all by herself. So she had to give birth to her own mates. And so she's the salt waters. And she gives birth, she's Nammu, and she gives birth to An and Enki. Now Enki is the god of fresh waters. He was very popular. And then you've got An and Ki. An is heavenly father, just like L. I argue that An simply becomes L. And Ki is the mother goddess. She's mother earth, mother nature, Gaia. Um, and so, um, as you go then a thousand years later, 2,000 years later, and you get into the Mesopotamian literature, when they're bringing along Marduk, which is a new culture and a new reform of that time, and they're getting rid of the old gods and bringing in a new pantheon and a new king of the gods, which is going to be Marduk. And they're introducing Marduk in the Enuma Elish, which is their creation story. Well, now those salt waters have become bad and they're they're named Tiamat. And so Marduk goes to war with Tiamat, um, to cleave her in half and build a world, a new world from her, from her corpse. And that's a metaphor in my mind for wiping out the old religion that was there prior. Some new invaders came along, Chaldeans, I guess, um, or whoever it was, and they wiped out the old folks and from the ashes of the old religion, they created a new religion.

I believe that Hesiod's Theogony in Greece is talking about the exact same thing that when they, when the Greek Olympians go to war with the with the Titans, what they're actually talking about is that the Titans were the older gods and the Greeks, who were the Hellenes, were a newer culture that came in after the Bronze Age collapse and they imposed their will on the people that were already there and had a reform movement of their own and introduced their gods. But they didn't completely eliminate the Titans. The Titans still continued to be part of the Greek pantheon. Um, so, so you get these three different versions of and then you get to the Bible. So you've got the oldest one is Nammu, a kind mother salt goddess, saltwater mother goddess. The second generation is Tiamat. She has now been turned into because now the men are asserting themselves, the goddesses are losing rank. Uh, now Tiamat's become a threat and so they go to war with Tiamat and she's bad. Then you get to the, the third version of this story, which is the salt waters. Well, they don't say salt, but the waters of creation. Genesis 1. The Bible opens up in the beginning, or at the beginning, everyone translates it. Um, uh, God created the heaven, the earth, and then the spirit of God, I'm going to misquote this because I don't have it memorized. God created the heaven and the earth. And then the spirit of God, oh, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the waters. I think they got that right. God. So God creates the heaven, the earth, but then there's these waters, these deep waters, and the and the spirit of God is hovering over the surface of the waters. They repeat the word surface twice, the surface of the deep and the surface of the waters. And the word deep is is tehom. And scholars, again, proper Hebrew scholars, not me. I take their word for it. Proper scholars will say that Tihom, the Hebrew Tihom, is a cognate of the Mesopotamian Tiamat, that this is, you know, this is a downstream of the same word. And so God is is hovering over the surface of the waters. It does not say that God created the waters. Many people agree with me. Many proper Christians will agree with me. God emerged out of those waters. Just as Ra in Egypt, Ra, who's the creator god in Egypt, he emerges out of the waters. Just as Vishnu, the the preserver, um, in in Hindu mythology, modern Hinduism, he emerges out of Shakti, um, out of the waters. So you've got these chaotic waters that the creator god then puts together, whether he is self-actualized the way Ra does, or whether he's born of a virgin the way other traditions describe it. It's the same. Either way, you start with the waters and then the then the creator god comes along and then forms the universe out of that chaos. Um, is a repeating motif. And so [Music] critical to my argument about the divorce of the mother in the Bible is that they mention the waters in Genesis 1, but they don't name the waters. They take her name away. They don't even give her an insulting name like Tiamat. They give her no name at all because by biblical tradition, excuse me for my cough, by biblical traditions, the power to name something is very, very important. Adam names all the animals, right, in the Garden of Eden. The power to name is incredibly important. God creates the universe with his word. But equally, taking a name away is also important. So by unnaming the waters in Genesis 1, they're like evaporating her identity. This also goes to the goddess Anat that we know now from the modern mythology. We know that Anat was part of the story because she's the consort of Baal and they talk about Baal all the time. And we know that Anat goes with Asherah or Asherate from the modern myth, from the what the archaeologists have dug up. But Anat's not named in the Bible. She does not appear in the Bible. Well, why wouldn't Anat not be named? Well, because Anat's like Kali behind me. She's terrifying. She is the most powerful deity in the entire pantheon. Because she is the one with the power to destroy all of God's creation. She has no respect for L. She has more power than L. When Anat goes and talks to L in the Baal cycle, she's not nice. She's not respectful. The modern scholars will be like, that Anat, she's very rude to L, man. She takes L. When she goes to L and she wants something, she says, "L, you better give me what I want, or I'm going to throw you down like a lamb. I'm going to smash your skull and I'm going to make your gray beard run red with gore." And she says that multiple times in multiple stories. Every time she approaches L, the father of the universe, the creator of the high god, she threatens to kill him. And what does, how does L react? Does he get mad? Does he get indignant? No. He says, 'Oh my darling, my daughter, no one as terrible as you. What can I do for you today?' And he gives her what she wants every time. He gives her what she wants. And her response is, um, you are very wise, oh L. She doesn't say, thank you. She doesn't say, praise be upon El. She says, you are very wise, El, for giving me what I wanted, otherwise it would have destroyed you. Other times, she says, um, do not be so confident in your house that you built, L, because I will tear it down with my mighty arms. Like she is quintessentially the most powerful piece on the chessboard. She is the power to destroy all of God's creation. That's what Kali does in Hinduism. She is the, she is the one who's going to come along at the end and devour the entire universe and set the stage for the next rebirth. Um, she is the most powerful piece on the chessboard. So she's more powerful than Baal. She's more powerful than death. She's more powerful than Yahweh. She's more powerful than L. So they don't name her. The only way to deal with with Anat for the biblical writers is to write her out of the story. Excise her from the story. Take her name away. By taking her name away, you take away her power. You take away her identity. You take away her existence. Um, because even to name her, you can't even insult her because now we've forgotten about Anat until modern day. But these stories had an audience when they were being written and the audience would have known who Anat was. Anat was still being worshiped for a long time. Um, I mean, she never went away. The Hindus still got her. They just changed her name. So people understood that this, this death goddess who has the power to destroy all of creation, that she's truly the most powerful deity of all. And if you're trying to establish a religion where your monotheistic god is unlimited and omnipotent and without peer, without rival, without partner, you can't have a goddess like Kali or a goddess like Anat running around. And so they don't name her. They take her name away. And so they take away the name of the waters in Genesis 1. They take away Anat. Um, they insult. They insult Asherah. They denigrate them. They disrespect them. But Anat, they're fundamentally afraid of because Anat is terrifying and Anat is more powerful. And so, um, but that's a theological argument and I would love to see an academic wrestle with that because that is fundamentally a theological argument and, um, and I don't think it passes muster for academics to make that argument. I mean, I'd love to see academics wrestle with it. Personally, I think it's a very strong argument and I'm willing to defend it. Um, but, um, yeah, so, uh, the connection with the Mesopotamians is very clear. It's very clear that, um, that this is, this reform movement of the Yahwists is is reforming traditions that have been around for a long time and that, um, that we can see being traced back to Mesopotamia, that the Canaanites originally came through Mesopotamia, then they got blended with the Egyptians. So there's a lot of Egyptian cross-talk and synchronization with Egypt by the time we get to the Bible story, by by the time we get to that period of history. Um, but yeah, so like it's, um, direct connections from Mesopotamia. Direct connections. It's why you see all the same symbolism of of the serpent and the snakes, um, the same goddesses. I mean, Ishtar is clearly directly in line from Anana, Ishtar, Astarte. You've got, oh yeah, another, here's another good piece of evidence. Um, Ishtar's wife, Ishtar's husband is Tammuz. And and then prior to that was Anana with Dumuzi. Dumuzi's name becomes Tammuz. Um, and this is a dying and rising god at the heart of these goddess traditions and these, uh, is a cycle of life and a resurrection story. They've all got them. That's what all these dying and rising god stories that people are talking about. I'm trying to tell people this is one big religion of the mother. Um, so, um, uh, yeah. So Tammuz is there in Israel. Ezekiel talks about the women weeping for Tammuz and in and his vision of the temple. Um, he says it's bad. It's one of the bad things that they're doing. They're weeping for Tammuz. This is actually part of the of their religious ritual, part of this dying and rising god. That's these festivals that get acted out over multiple days. One of the days is the god dies. Tammuz dies and then he comes back again, just like Epiphany for the Greeks. Um, well, the women weep. Part of the festival is on the death day, you give a funeral and everybody cries and everybody weeps and then the next day or a couple days later, whenever it is, he comes back to life and you have a big feast and a big festival and everyone celebrates. But one of the days of the tradition is this weeping and this crying, this ritual funeral. And so Tammuz is not only mentioned in the Bible, but he's one of the months in the Hebrew calendar. I think it's, uh, one of the names of one of the months is Tammuz. So it just goes to show that, you know, these pagan roots of of the Israelites.

So my final question before we close, um, see, I want to go back to what you were just saying about Anat. They talk about Asherah and they and they and they are very critical of Asherah as as you've discussed as we've discussed in the past. But what makes them really like not even address Anat or Anat at all? Yeah, I'm open to how you pronounce these things. I'm pretty much terrible with pronunciations in general. Um, I think it's part of the theological project. Their theological project is to create a monotheistic God that as the Muslims describe him, omnipotent, unlimited, without a partner, without a rival, um, without peer, without rival. There's nothing more powerful than God. Well, Anat clearly is more powerful. She is clearly more powerful than L. She's clearly more powerful than Baal and more powerful than Yahweh. Another thing she does is, um, she's quite brutal, you know. So, she's, you know, she's she's like like Kali. She's got the necklace of freshly severed heads. She's dripping in blood, the belt of human hands. She delights in slaughter. She bathes in blood. Um, but one of the things she does when, so when Baal dies in that story and Anat is the one who resurrects him and the way she does it is she goes and finds, um, the god of death, who's, um, so there's a cognate here between these Canaanite gods, Baal, the god of death is, uh, named Mot, and the god of the sea is named Yam. They're just like Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades for the Greek. So when I say the god of death, think Hades. And when you read about Yam in these stories, think Poseidon. And when you read Baal, think Zeus because Baal is simply a cognate of Zeus. And so when Hades, when Mot kills Baal, um, the way he gets resurrected is that Anat goes and finds Mot, Hades, grabs him by the collar and says, "Give me back my brother." And then pulls out a sword and slices him in half and grinds him up with a sieve and burns him with fire and feeds him to the birds, which is like an agricultural ritual and there's some agricultural significance to that whole, that whole presentation. But yeah, she literally just, imagine a god in the Greek pantheon, a goddess in the Greek pantheon, the Greeks were super patriarchal too, right? So imagine a goddess in the Greek pantheon who goes up to Hades, cuts him in half with a sword, burns him with fire and grinds him up with a sieve and feeds him to the birds and is more powerful than Zeus, more powerful than Poseidon. She beats up Mot, or she beats up Yam as well. So you've got this goddess running around that's more powerful than all the most powerful gods in the Greek pantheon. It's unacceptable. It's unacceptable. You have to change it. And but by the way, for the Greeks, they didn't have Anat. They had Hecate, who's a little bit different. She serves as the death role in the triple goddess. She's a little more gentile, not quite as terrifying as as good old Kali there. Um, so yeah, so I think I think that just from a theological, the logic of their theology, you can't even name her. If you name her, then she's real. And she does show up in place names and in people's names. So Anat, if you do a word search for Anat, you will find a couple times, but it's always in the context of a proper noun of a person or place name. But you know that she's there. We know that she was the consort of Baal. And so the fact that she's not named, I think, leaps off the page. Once you recognize that, that there's something missing here. And it's missing intentionally. I think it leaps off the page and it begs further discussion and it begs further scholarship. Um, and it begs an important question. You know, God says, "I'm a jealous God who will have no other gods before me." Well, who, as a practical matter, who could upstage God? I mean, just think about it. Who, the creator of the universe, who could upstage him? Well, these goddesses could upstage him because the Venus goddess in this case, she was the most beloved one of all. She's the most popular one. She's the one everybody desires. Um, and then Anat is is truly a threatening rival, one who can will literally pull out a sword and cut him in half. And so, you just can't have them. You can't have them culturally. Can't have, can't have her theologically. You just can't even, she just can't even be in the story. You can't even mention her to get rid of her. You just can't even mention her at all. And I think there's an important, there's really, really depth to that theological argument that's really worth. You could, you could do an entire thesis on that on that on that data point alone.

Well, thank you for joining me today, Edward Dodge. Thank you, Jacob. It's always a pleasure. Always appreciate you having me here. You're one of the few people that'll listen to me. So, thank you. Hello viewers. Thanks for watching this video from the History Valley YouTube channel. Please don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell. And if any of you wish to further support this channel, please consider checking out this channel's Patreon page, becoming a patron, and or donate through PayPal or through Super Chat during the live stream. Thank you.