Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel [Paperback]

William G. Dever (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2008

Following up on his two recent, widely acclaimed studies of ancient Israelite history and society, William Dever here reconstructs the practice of religion in ancient Israel from the bottom up. Archaeological excavations reveal numerous local and family shrines where sacrifices and other rituals were carried out. Intrigued by this folk religion in all its variety and vitality, Dever writes about ordinary people in ancient Israel and their everyday religious lives. Did God Have a Wife? shines new light on the presence and influence of womens cults in early Israel and their implications for our understanding of Israels official Book religion. Dever pays particular attention to the goddess Asherah, reviled by the authors of the Hebrew Bible as a foreign deity but, in the view of many modern scholars, popularly envisioned in early Israel as the consort of biblical Yahweh. His work also gives new prominence to women as the custodians of Israels folk religion. The first book by an archaeologist on ancient Israelite religion, this fascinating study critically reviews virtually all of the archaeological literature of the past generation, while also bringing fresh evidence to the table. Though Dever digs deep into the past, his discussion is extensively illustrated, unencumbered by footnotes, and vivid with colorful insights. Meant for professional and general audiences alike, Did God Have a Wife? is sure to spur wide and passionate debate.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William G. Dever recently retired as professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He has served as director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem, as director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and as a visiting professor at universities around the world. He has spent thirty years conducting archaeological excavations in the Near East, resulting in a large body of award-winning fieldwork. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: Eerdmans Pub Co (August 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802863949
• ISBN-13: 978-0802863942
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #412,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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102 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More provocative Archaeological Investigation from Dever, June 29, 2005

By 

Max Johnson "Neo-Whiteheadian Doctoral Student" (Claremont, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Did God Have A Wife? Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel (Hardcover)

Dever, a convert to Judaism and one of America's finest Biblical archaeologists, has written one of his most provocative and acessible pieces of ancient "detective" work to date. In the book he makes a strong argument for making a distinction between "elite," "priestly" Judaism (the source of most of the "Old Testament" writings) and "popular," or "folk" Judaism, and argues further that, while priestly religion may have been more or less "monotheistic" (or "henotheistic"), Israelite folk religion was essentially POLYTHEISTIC, and honored/worshipped Yahweh/El's divine consort, Asherah, IN ADDITION to Yahweh!! This idea is not "new," of course, but rarely has the argument been made by a professional archaeologist of Dever's stature.

These important "fightin' words" contribute to the growing body of ammunition for those Jewish and Christian feminist/goddess theologians arguing for the legitimacy of using FEMININE as well as masculine imagery and language in theological discourse (Muslim feminists might have a harder time, given the Qur'an's insistence that "God has no 'partner'"). Dever himself thinks of the book as a sort of "feminist manifesto by a man."

Dever has written NUMEROUS books and peer-reviewed journal articles AGAINST the anti-semitic "implications" in the archaeological work of others (such as the "Copenhagen School"), and he is well-known in the academy as an outspoken CRITIC of "postmodern" or "deconstructive" thought (he is sometimes unnecessarily and unfairly polemical, in my view), so the other reviewer's comments about Dever being a "postmodern anti-semite" are EXTREMELY bizarre and completely baffling!

In any event, Dever wrote this book for the interested layperson as well as for scholars, so ANYONE interested in ancient Jewish history and theology will find it fascinating reading, whether one accepts his argument or not. (I, for one, WAS convinced. And no, I am NOT a woman. At least I don't think so!)

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Theological Infidelity, August 25, 2006

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Virgil Brown (White Oak, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Did God Have A Wife? Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel (Hardcover)

One of the themes of the Deuteronomistic History is that Israel was occasionally guilty of theological infidelity; Yahweh was always the God of Israel and occasionally Israel would chase after "foreign" gods.

This time around Dever writes about what he calls the folk religion of the people and other scholars call popular religion. Folk religion is not the religion of the priests and the prophets who left us their deliberate ideology (Dever's terms) in the Hebrew Scriptures. I hope readers will wade through the first two chapters of the book in which Dever surveys definitions and surveys schools of approach to the Bible. Quite often Dever's critique of his fellow scholars is that "the vast archaeological data and literature are largely invisible." It is in these sources that one finds folk religion.

Dever is a scholar who does find historical value in biblical texts. He is not a revisionist who believes that the Bible was authored in the Persian or Hellenistic Periods. But the biblical texts have limits. One is that the biblical texts, in their present form, were written no earlier than the 8th century and so are distanced by centuries from the events which they portend to portray. Who knows what sources the writers had? The Bible mentions the Book of Jasher and there could have been oral traditions that had been carried down for centuries. A second limitation of the biblical texts is that its writers had to be selective. In a society where literacy was far less common than in our own, writers wrote for the elite. A third limitation of the biblical writers is that they did not maintain any sort of objectivity not did they make any pretense at doing so. Dever calls this "propaganda." I agree with the term, but it is one that is loaded. Fourth, the portrayal of Israel is an idealistic one. Fifth, the matter of whether the narratives of the bible are history is subjugated to the need of the writers to how they function. This point of Dever's is much like his fourth; fact and fiction are blended for their effect on their audience. The crucial point in this matter is that Dever thinks the archaeological data are more encompassing than the data from the biblical texts; archaeology deals with a "tangible, real world."

This real world is the world of folk religion which is the religion of the hearth/home/women. Interestingly, though Dever appeals to feminine studies, he does so by asserting that "those men were in power." Men typically think in terms of political power whereas women typically think in terms of what is best for the family. At the beginning of chapter 4, Dever describes folk religion as difficult to systematize but having its locus in "any place deemed holy" such as shrines, high places, or local temples. For Dever the archaeological data of these show a basis for folk religion.

Since the 1920s excavations in Palestine have unearthed a number of images of Asherah. The biblical writers find ways to ignore or belittle them. Dever sees this as a deliberate suppression of any reference to Asherah. However Dever still finds some clues. In 2 Kings 18, King Hezekiah attempts a reform that removes the high places, cuts down the Asherah, etc. Yet Hezekiah's son, Manasseh sets up a graven image of Asherah in the Temple. (page 212) Now we are in a better position to understand Yahweh's admonition in Deut 16,21.22 not to set up an Asherah besides the altar of Yahweh.

Dever is highly persuasive in his portrayal of the pervasiveness of Asherah in ancient Israel's folks religion. The idea is not a new one. Dever gives praise to Raphael Patai's _The Hebrew Goddess_ published in 1967. At that time Patai's book was considered somewhat heretical. But I have to agree with Dever that with the archaeological data we now have, it makes a world of difference. It's hard to dispute such facts.

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting thoughts on ancient folk religion, November 11, 2005

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FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Did God Have A Wife? Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel (Hardcover)

I have long been a fan of William Dever's scholarship. This is not to say that I agree with all of his interpretations or his conclusions; on the contrary, there is much that I disagree with in regard to this part of his work. However, I never fail to learn something new, and never fail to be presented with new interpretations and possible explanations for the archaeological and historical data being presented. Taken together with other scholarship (Dever would be one of the first to encourage further research and reading beyond his own works), it helps to give insight into possible alternatives, and a fuller sense of the history and society behind the Biblical texts.

In this book, Dever looks more specifically at the phenomenon of folk religion that existed in ancient Israel prior to and during the time of the Hebrew biblical times. In the first few chapters, Dever explores what is meant by the term 'folk religion' and how this fits with more modern ideas of religion and theology. Dever also looks at the issues of historical method and content - this includes an overall assessment of previous scholarship in the field. Dever also looks at the issue of sources - how is it that we know what we know (or what we think we know), and what are the limitations of using these sources? In particular, Dever concentrates on the sources of the Biblical text, the extra-biblical texts that have survived from the same period, and archaeology. Dever highlights the limitations of archaeological method, and decries any attempts at complete objectivity ('not since the death of 19th-century "positivism" have any respectable historians been naïve enough to think that they could be entirely objective'), and any attempts to foist 'objectivity' upon others.

Dever delves into an area of keen interest for many scholars in looking in detail at the issues of early polytheism in Israelite culture (that there were issues can be highlighted in the first of the commandments, and that the major and minor powers surrounding and penetrating ancient Israel were polytheistic), and the early cults of the Asherah. The biblical text itself alludes to if not directly references many instances where the 'official' religion and political powers had to crack down on continuing folk influences in the land - with the advent of several new kings, the beginning of their reigns announced 'the cutting down of asherah poles' (which means, of course, that during other reigns or times, the asherah poles kept being rebuilt).

Dever explores the development of monotheism as an idea, and it is perhaps here that his work becomes the most controversial. Dever states that when he was a graduate student, most biblical scholarship taught that monotheism was an early dominant idea in Israelite religion, but that current scholarship sees monotheism as a later development; the idea that Israel had and was to have one god did not mean there were not others. 'Monotheism did not arise out of folk religion, out of common practice, but rather out of theological reflection after the fact. This reflection on experience, including disaster, is what informs the Hebrew Bible.'

Dever seems to invite controversy by making statements like, 'The Bible is thus "revisionist history", revised on the basis of the lessons that the authors presumed to have drawn from their own stormy history.' Perhaps there is a portion of this that begs the question - any history is necessarily selective, and any history can thus be counted as revisionist to some extent. However, Dever sees a theological purpose behind the writing and redaction of the biblical text, which makes the Bible for him an intentionally revisionist text, and Dever calls upon us to understand what that intention was to better understand what the text means, and the society and culture that produced it.

This is a book more for students or general audiences than for scholars. It is very spare with regard to footnotes/endnotes. It has a basic bibliography and basic indexes (author, subject, biblical citation/reference), but these not in great depth.

William Dever is professor emeritus of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is the author of numerous books and articles on archaeology and biblical studies, and is a frequent contributor to magazines, newspapers, and television programmes on archaeological and historical topics. Apart from this volume, his major works include a four-volume analysis of excavation projects at Gezer in Israel, and major books entitled Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research and Recent Excavations in Israel. Recent book in addition to this one include 'What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel' and 'Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?'