Customer Reviews

In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth

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I found this book invaluable while researching sacred prostitution and Goddess religions in the ancient Near East for my Masters degree. Frymer-Kensky's articulate discussion of the texts from which we gain our (limited) knowledge of ancient religions exposes the frequently romantic or naive interpretations which have become accepted as history in too many Pagan or Goddess spirituality circles. Her work is scholarly but is definitely accessible to a reader who is interested in this topic. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Goddess religion, Biblical studies, or women's studies.

Frymer-Kensky is a feminist who also happens to be Jewish and feels that she is therefore obligated to defend what on the face of it is a collection of some of the world's most misogynistic writings. Her sense of loyalty is misplaced. Her thesis, such as it is, seeks to demonstrate that 'pagan' religions are bad for women, while Judaism is good. She does this by redefining 'pagan' as 'the civilized city-states of Sumer-Akkad', rather than 'the folk-beliefs of rural, agricultural or hunter-gatherer peoples', as scholars define it. She then defines Judaism exclusively by reference to the folktales contained in the early books of Genesis and Exodus. These stories depict strong women operating outside of rigid gender-roles precisely because they are 'pagan' folktales similar to such tales found all over the world, where gender roles like those we are familiar with from the monotheistic religions are virtually unknown. They were not written by the early Judaic reformers who codified the Judaic religion. These people's beliefs can be found in the added theological material that the folktales provided the background for and in the law-codes, which are frighteningly misogynistic and which have influenced all the major religions that have followed Judaism.
The deities worshipped by powerful city-states like Sumer-Akkad cannot by any stretch of the imagination be defined as 'pagan', since these were precisely the cultures that most profoundly influenced the development of Judaism. Nor can pagan folktales found in every culture on earth be defined as a novel proto-feminist religion created spontaneously in the seventh century BCE, however much Frymer-Kensky may wish for her ancestors to have shared her twentieth-century beliefs. Strangely, she acknowledges that the disappearance of female deities in Sumer-Akkadian religion was associated with the lowering of women's status, but does not follow through on the implications of this for a religion that banishes female participation in the divine altogether and forces women to approach god through male priests. She accounts for the misogyny in later historically attested phases of Judaism on the assumption that these were bad habits picked up from Hellenistic culture, but the halcyonic period of gender equality she envisages for the earliest phases of Judaism is simply the normal worldview of the folktales the Biblical compilers added to give body to their theological teachings.
All in all, this is a personal religious apologetic rather than a considered scholarly study.

This is an outstanding work for anyone interested in the goddess mythology of the Ancient Near East and how this was transformed, reinterpreted, and attempted to be eradicated by the Biblical authors. I have used this text as an undergrad, a doctoral student, and in teaching. Invaluable scholarship with excellent footnotes.

I read this book at about the same time as Merlin Stone's "When God Was a Woman", and the contrast is powerful. The author has an intriguing perspective on the influence of the Goddess cultures on the development on modern partiarchal religion. Her scholarship seems at times weak; however, overall it's an excellent read and definitely valuable to put the works of other authors into perspective.

Explains the development of the patriarchal system of the Bible and the decline of the goddess.