Sophia and Goddess Worship in the Hebrew Scriptures
By, Anne Ellis
Bless Sophia
Dream the vision
Share the wisdom
Dwelling deep within[i]
When I was a teenager I left the church because I felt there was something missing. I did not know at first what it was I was looking for, but I did believe that I would not find it at church or within Christianity. After a lot of searching I discovered what I was looking for – the Feminine Divine.
At that time I believed that there was so such thing in Christianity. With all of its Lord, Father, Son, King language there was no feminine. No Lady, Mother, Daughter or Queen. I found what I was seeking in other faith traditions; traditions where The Mother, The Female, The Goddess sat in equality with The Father, The Male and The God.
Yet, it turns out that I just wasn’t looking hard enough to see the Feminine Divine hidden within Christianity or its deep roots in Judaism. She has been there all along hidden in the high places, quiet when the prophets speak, loud when her wisdom is sought, present when God dwells among his people. Throughout the ages she took many names – Asherah, Sophia, O Bride of Shabbat, Mary.
She melded with God and lent her aspects to him: Midwife, Wet nurse, Shekinah, and Hokmah.
This is the story of my rediscovery.
First off, some definitions; in my readings there were lots of ways the writers spoke about female and male, masculine and feminine. To some these words might be interchangeable, for others they carry extremely different meanings and connotations. To keep us all on the same understanding I will define what I mean when I use these various different terms.
I have chosen to follow a pattern of definition similar to what Virginia Ramey Mollenkott used in her book The Divine Feminine, “The female (or woman) and the feminine are two different things. The female is a person of a specific gender, whereas the feminine is an aspect of a person of either gender.” [ii]
For my purpose, this paper will use similar distinctions for both female -feminine and male – masculine. This distinction isn’t without its issues however. To discuss feminine aspects of a person or deity, one must conform to societies choices of what feminine aspects are versus masculine aspects which leads to the slippery slope of stereo-types. It feels a bit like backsliding to divide aspects of personality and human qualities in this way after so much work has been put into justice for gender issues.
However, stereo-types do exist for a reason whether we like them or not. Again for the purpose of this paper I will be using them; especially when talking about history and tradition. In the 21stcentury we may be attempting to disband gender stereo-typing, but this is a new concept and much of our history is defined by them. Their difficulties are however noted.
This story began one day in Winnipeg during the 2014 spring learning circle. It was the day we were doing work with Spirit and Sophia. We began with hymns – Spirit of Life[iii], Spirit of Gentleness[iv],and She Flies On[v]. All of these hymns speak to the feminine in Spirit. Even though two of them don’t actually use any feminine pronouns there is something ethereally feminine about them.
In Spirit of Life there is a line, “Roots hold me close, Wings set me free” which to my mind speaks of mothers embrace and a parents desire to both hold their child close and allow them to be free. This isn’t to say that father’s embraces are any less comforting, just that to me, I imagine a motherly figure connected to these lines.
Spirit of Gentleness also doesn’t contain any feminine nouns, yet again to me, there’s something about the tune that says feminine to me. I tend to visualize wind as feminine so all the wind references call to mind feminine images.
There is no doubting the feminine in She Flies On. All of the nouns in this hymn are female. I was never sure if the “She” in this hymn was a bird, an angel or Spirit. We sang it at the funeral of a woman I was very close to as a child and at the time I visualized the ‘she’ in this hymn as my dear friend becoming an angel.
This particular workshop wasn’t intended to have us all thinking of Spirit as female, yet for me that is what I took from the morning. This pondering continued as we moved into reviewing the selected quotes for this workshop:
“The Spirit continues to gather us in communion, creates understanding, bridges differences and distances, and creates deeply feeling and committed communities even today. This community, then, is the manifestation of the kingdom of god on earth” A Newly Emerging Spirituality, in Feminist Theology, edited by Ursula King.
“Spirit is wide-ranging, multidimensional term with many meanings built upon its physical base as the breath of life. We speak of a person’s spirit, their vigor, courage, or strength; of team spirit, the collective energy of the people at play; of the spirit of ’76, or the spirit of Tiananmen Square, the vitality the grit and resolution of a people banding together in a common cause to oppose oppression; of the spirited horse or the spirit of a sacred grove – animals, trees, and mountains can also have spirit. All these connotations are possible because of the primary meaning of spirit as the breath of life... the dust of the universe enlivened by the breath of God.” ‘God and the World’, in The Body of God: an Ecological Theology, by Salle McFague.
Again while there is nothing overtly feminine in either of these quotes, these concepts, ones of community, understanding, bridging differences and that of recognizing passion, life and the sacred of nature are traditionally considered feminine aspects of life. Women are (again traditionally) the community builders, those that tend the gardens and bring life into the world. The result is again a feeling of the feminine rooted in the Spirit.
One other quote stood out for me:
“Kneeling in a church that was so dark that I had an atavistic sense of being back in the womb, I saw something while moving in the flickering lights of the altar. When I went up after the service to have a closer look, I realized it was a white dove in a cage – put there to symbolize the Holy Spirit, as I was told. I went out of the church much saddened by what we do to the Spirit in the darkness of our minds and the narrowness of our thinking.” ‘The Concept of God & the Spirit from a Feminist Perspective’. Feminist Theology of the Third World: a Reader, by Marianne Katoppo, (Ursula King, ed.)
All of us in class were troubled by the caging of the Holy Spirit. So much so that we symbolically drew a picture of a cage with the door open and the dove flying free.
However I was moved by the first image, that of being in a church so dark it felt like the womb. It was a comfort for me to hear someone else speak of a church in this way. When my family and I travelled in France in 2012 we visited a church in Saintes Maries de la Mer – St. Mary’s of the Sea[vi]. The church there was a fortified church, complete with a well in the center aisle. It was a refuge for when Saracens attacked from the sea and it was dark; so very dark, but not in an oppressive sort of way. It was womb like to me. So comforting that I wanted to curl up and nap on the pew and feel the comforting presence of God and the Mary’s for whom the church is dedicated.
Of all the churches and cathedrals we visited in France this one was the most home like; probably because of the predominance of women icons and statues. St. Sara holds court in the Crypt and every year thousands of Roma make a pilgrimage to this church to honour and be blessed by their patron saint, Sara the handmaid of Mary, Jesus’ mother.
 Interior, Saintes Maries de la Mer |  St. Sara, parton of the Roma |
The whole day working with Spirit and Sophia was fascinating and comforting to me. At the end of that day I decided that I wanted to explore these two topics further and come to a better understanding of the importance and the history of Sophia within the Hebrew and Christian religions.
My research ended up taking two distinct and yet related forms. The first began with the book, previously mentioned – The Feminine Divine by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. Her book is a wonderful read of the many places in the Hebrew and Christian bibles where analogies and metaphors are made about God and even Jesus that are extremely feminine.
She begins the book by discussing ‘The Problem’ (the title of the first chapter). Initially I had some resistance to this title. This, to me, screamed angry feminist which I can at times find hard to take. I would call myself a feminist in that I believe in equality for men and woman. I recognize that my position and place of privilege in the world is a result of the work of past feminists who did need to make a big ruckus and needed to be angry to get anyone to listen to them. Yet I also recognize that the fastest way to get shut down and not be listened too is to start from a place of anger, which is where I thought this book was starting from.
I was wrong. It only took reading a few pages to have my opinion change and see that Mollenkott was outlining a problem with language. She says, “The language of Christian preaching, prayer, and hymnody is still laden with exclusive-sounding references to men, man, brothers, son and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And that pronoun for that God is ‘he’.”[vii]
This problem with language is further elaborated on in the book The Hebrew Goddess, by Raphael Patai[viii]. In the introduction of his book, ‘Part 3: The Masculine Godhead’, he discusses the linguistic problems of the Hebrew language where every noun has masculine or feminine gender.
“The two biblical names of God, Yahweh (pronounced out of reverence for its great holiness as ‘Adonai’ and usually translated as ‘The Lord’) and Elohim (or briefly El, translated as ‘God’) are both masculine. When a pronoun is used to refer to God, it is the masculine ‘He’, when a verb describes that He did something or when an adjective qualified Him, they appear in the masculine form (in Hebrew there are male and female forms for verbs and nouns). Thus, every verbal statement about God conveyed the idea that He was masculine. Most people, of course, never stopped to think about this, but every Hebrew-speaking individual from early childhood was imbued with the idea that God was a masculine deity.”[ix]
Prior to this paragraph Patai sets the stage of Judaism’s concept of God as the following:
“Let us proceed to look at the person of the deity as He appeared, first of all, in the Biblical and Talmudic writings, To begin with, let us restate that the legitimate Jewish faith, beginning with the earliest formulations of its belief-system by the great Hebrew prophets, down to its various present day versions... has always been built upon the axiom of One God.
“Since, being pure spirit, he is without body, he possesses no physical attributes and hence no sexual traits. To say God is either male of female is therefore completely impossible from the view point of traditional Judaism. As Maimonides, the greatest medieval Jewish philosopher put it, “God is not a body, nor can bodily attributes be ascribed to him and He has no likeness at all.”[x]
And while we all might like to believe this, both Patai and Maimonides use the gender pronoun He for a genderless deity. We are stuck with our issues of language where we have no gender neutral pronouns to use in English or Hebrew. AS much as we would like to be gender neutral in our God talk, we get stuck in our own humanity of needing images for the transcendent which we then also consciously or unconsciously apply gender attributes too.
Throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures God is referred to as He and yet there are regular references to God behaving like or having qualities that are distinctly, traditionally and stereo-typically associated with females.
Examples[xi]:
Deuteronomy 32:18
18 You deserted the Rock, who fathered you;
you forgot the God who gave you birth.
you forgot the God who gave you birth.
Isaiah 42:14
14 “For a long time I have kept silent,
I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
I cry out, I gasp and pant.
I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
I cry out, I gasp and pant.
Isaiah 49:15
15 “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
Mollentkott comments on the Isaiah 49 passage saying, “Clearly, the comparison of God’s Love with the love of a nursing mother indicates than in the authors eyes, such motherlove is the most constant, most reliable, and most consistent of all forms of human caring.”(Author’s emphasis)[xii]
The Divine Feminine is broken up into chapter’s that give many passages about God performing roles traditionally done by women: weaning, making clothes, making food, providing comfort.
Psalm 131:2
2 But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
Genesis 3:21
21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
Job 10:10-11
10 Did you not pour me out like milk
and curdle me like cheese,
11 clothe me with skin and flesh
and knit me together with bones and sinews?
and curdle me like cheese,
11 clothe me with skin and flesh
and knit me together with bones and sinews?
Isaiah 66:13
13 As a mother comforts her child,
so will I comfort you;
and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”
so will I comfort you;
and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”
Revelation 21:4
4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
1 Peter 2:2-3
2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.
Mollenkott says of 1 Peter, “Since in biblical times allbabies were breast fed babies, this clearly is an image of Christ as suckling newborn Christians.”[xiii] She goes on with Christian scripture references:
John 7:37-38
37 On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”
John 7:38 is an interesting passage when you look at different translations:
King James: 38 He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his bellyshall flow rivers of living water.
Revised Standard: 38 He who believes in me, as[a] the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
Wycliffe Bible: 38 He that believeth in me, as the scripture saith, Rivers of quick water shall flow out of his womb.
In Mollenkott’s book she uses a translation that writes the line as: “From his breast shall flow fountains of living water.” [xiv]
It is not clear what translation she is using, yet from looking at all these different translations there is again a distinctly feminine tone to these words; especially in the Wycliffe and Mollenkott translations which are outright female: Breast and Womb. Later she quotes St. John Chrysostom’s Baptismal Instructions: “Have you seen with what food he nurtures us all?... Just as a woman nurtures her offspring with her own blood and milk, so also Christ continuously nurtures with His own blood those whom He has begotten”[xv]
I could go on and on with many more individual references, but as that’s already been done in her book there is no need. Her point is clear however, that throughout the bible, both the Hebrew and Christian scripture there is a long tradition of applying femininity to a masculine God.
While that is interesting and enlightening for those seeking a relationship with the divine and struggle with the male dominated language in common usage, I found myself asking – why?
Why, did the writers of all these scriptures create feminine images for their male God? And why also, did the editors later on in time leave these images in the scriptures? Especially during the times of great patriarchy when women were so heavily oppressed by men?
Here began the second part of my research. I began to look at why feminine metaphors have remained both important, yet paradoxically repressed in scripture and to seek answers to my many questions.
Mollenkott suggests on page eleven of her book: “It is quite possible that one reason so few men attend church regularly is that they are unconsciously repelled by being called towards intimacy with an exclusively masculine God.” [xvi]
The male God of the Hebrew scripture was harsh and judgemental. He hardened hearts, sent plagues and floods and denied paradise to his first children. Could this also be the reason why the male writers, editors and redactors for the Hebrew and Christians scriptures created these feminine references? They simply longed for a more approachable feminine God?
Enter, Asherah
Asherah was a Canaanite Mother Goddess. She was present in Canaan before the Hebrew’s enter the promised land and throughout the bible she and her places of worship are commented on time after time. She is blamed for not just leading the Hebrew people astray from worshiping the one true God, she blamed for the Temple’s downfall and the deportation of the Hebrew people to Babylon in 587BCE.
She is interchangeable with Astarte and Anath fertility Goddess’ from Tyre and Sidon; also sometimes with Ishtar the Assryro-Babylonian Mother Goddess and Hathor the Egyptian Sky Goddess.[xvii]
Asherah is mother and nurturer; she brings fertility to the land; animals and people; she is a comforter. She is caring and approachable. She is all the things Yahweh is not.
There are references to the Hebrew people worshipping Asherah beginning with their entry Canaan until the exile; a period of more than 600 years. These references are always as admonishments to the Hebrew’s to stop worshiping her, to remove her image or pole from the high places and even the Temple.
Asherah Poles, “are generally described as being in the shape of a pole or stylized tree. Like a pole or tree, they can be said to be planted, stood up, or erected. Conversely, when destroyed, these cult symbols can be described as being cut down, hewn down, or uprooted; they can also be said to be burned, overturned, or broken. Both the Greek and Latin translations of the Bible, moreover, render the words asherah and asherim as ‘grove’ or ‘wood’.”[xviii]
Even before entrance into Canaan, God is commanding the Hebrew people to worship only one God.
Exodus 34:13-14[xix] Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles. Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.
A jealous God, with a stiff necked people, who for some reason do not listen to this warning, take on the worship of Asherah and continue to worship her despite all the work the prophets and priests do to suppress her.
We’ve looked at one reference during the Mosaic period (1300–1200BCE) – there are others, for example Deuteronomy 7: 5, 12:3, 16:21:
7:5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.
12:3 3 Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.
16:21 21 Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole beside the altar you build to the Lord your God.
There are similar pronouncements in the time of Judges (ca. 1200-1050/1000BCE).
Judges 6: 25-26 25 That same night the Lord said to him, “Take the second bull from your father’s herd, the one seven years old. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. 26 Then build a proper kind of altar to the Lord your God on the top of this height. Using the wood of the Asherah pole that you cut down, offer the second bull as a burnt offering.”
In this story the phrase Asherah Pole gets used another 4 times, indicating that the writer wants to be extremely clear as to just what wood is going to be used for this new alter – wooden poles previously held sacred to goddess worship.
During the monarchal period of Saul, David and Solomon and continuing after secession of the Northern Kingdom from the South and into the Divided Monarchy period worship of Asherah continues.
In the northern Kingdom of Israel:
During the Reign of Jeboram (931 – 913BCE): 1 Kings 14:15 15 And the Lord will strike Israel, so that it will be like a reed swaying in the water. He will uproot Israel from this good land that he gave to their ancestors and scatter them beyond the Euphrates River, because they aroused the Lord’s anger by making Asherah poles.
King Ahab’s reign (874- 853BCE) 1 Kings 16:33 33 Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to arouse the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than did all the kings of Israel before him.
King Jehoahaz (814 BC – 798BCE) 2 Kings 13:6 6 But they did not turn away from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, which he had caused Israel to commit; they continued in them. Also, the Asherah pole remained standing in Samaria.
King Hoshea (732–721BCE) 2 Kings 17:10 10 They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree.
2 Kings 17:16 16 They forsook all the commands of the Lord their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves, and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal.
As well as in Judah, the Southern Kingdom:
King Solomon is admonished in 1 Kings for following the Goddess. (970- 931BCE) 1 kings 11: 4 – 6 4 As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been. 5 He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. 6 So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done.
The name of the Goddess given in this passage is Ashoreth, which is the same as Asherah, with a localized spelling.
Patai comments on this passage in The Hebrew Goddess he questions the ‘old age comment’ among other issues:
“The two extenuating circumstances are offered as excuses of Solomon’s acts: he did what he did because his wives, to whom ‘he cleaved in love’, turned his heart; and all this happened when Solomon was old. Historical considerations, however, invalidate these excuses.
Firstly we know that political marriages between a ruler and foreign princesses were an accepted means of strengthening alliances or friendly relations between states. Secondly, the introduction of a foreign princess into a royal household inevitably meant the admission of her gods as well. Thirdly, which such marriages may have taken place any time during the reign of a king; the most ambitious of Solomon’s political marriages... were entered into at the beginning of his reign.”[xx]
Patai’s point is that these marriages and introduction of the goddess would have occurred during the early days of his reign around the same time he began his building projects including the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Further Passages in 1 and 2 Kings show’s that worship of Asherah continues after Solomon in Judah as well:
Rehoboam, son Solomon (931 – 913BCE) 1 Kings 14:23 23 They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree.
King Asa, David’s son (911 – 830BCE) 1 Kings 15: 13 – 14 13 He even deposed his grandmother Maakah from her position as queen mother, because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of Asherah. Asa cut it down and burned it in the Kidron Valley. 14 Although he did not remove the high places, Asa’s heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life.
King Hezekiah (715 - 686BCE) 2 Kings 18: 4 4 He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it.
Manassah King of Judah (687 – 642BCE) 2 Kings 21: 3 -5 3 He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he also erected altars to Baal and made an Asherah pole, as Ahab king of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them. 4 He built altars in the temple of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, “In Jerusalem I will put my Name.” 5 In the two courts of the temple of the Lord, he built altars to all the starry hosts.
2 Kings 21:7 7 He took the carved Asherah pole he had made and put it in the temple, of which the Lord had said to David and to his son Solomon, “In this temple and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my Name forever.
King Josiah (620BCE) 2 Kings 23: 6 6 He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people.
2 Kings 23:14 14 Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones.
What we see in 1 and 2 Kings is a span of time from 930 – 620BCE, over 300 years where every time one King removed the Asherah Poles and destroyed the high places of worship the Hebrew people and sometimes even the Hebrew Kings bring her (and her pole) back again and again.
What is missing, sadly, are details of the rituals performed. While many female clay figures have been discovered in archeological sites in Israel, it is not known if they belonged to the Hebrew’s or other people who they lived among. There is no written evidence to tell us about ritual, ceremony or belief as any that may have existed at one time have been lost, fallen apart or destroyed.[xxi]
Many of these same stories of the reigns of Kings are also in 1 and 2 Chronicles. I did not feel the need for duplication was necessary so have not included them. However knowing that Chronicles has parallel passages does matter.
The reason it is important to know this is because while 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles tell parallel histories of the Hebrew people they were written at completely different times.
Parts of 1 and 2 Kings were likely written down during, or shortly after the events of which they speak, but the collection of the histories and their editing did not occur until the reforming days of Hezekiah and Josiah in the 7th Century BCE. They were further revised post- exile ca. 538BCE.[xxii]
1 and 2 Chronicles however, were written during sometime in the Persian Period 539 – 332BCE, with many scholars estimating somewhere in the 4th Century BCE as the most likely time. This means Chronicles was likely written more than 100 years after 1 and 2 Kings.
This matters because the writers of Chronicles could have very easily edited out the references to Asherah worship as could the editors of Kings. Yet they left them in. One can argue, of course they are there to show future Hebrews the errors of their ancestors ways.
However, I would suggest another reason. I surmise the mentions remain because of the spiritual need of the Hebrews to have a feminine deity as part of their worship. I am not the only one to think this.
Patai asks, “How are we to explain the extraordinary hold Asherah exercised over the people of Israel? We can only make an informed guess to the effect that she answered the psychological need for a mother-goddess which was keenly felt by the people and its leader’s alike throughout the centuries following the conquest of Canaan. ... Was the goddess perhaps regarded as complementary to, rather than competitive with, Yahweh, and her worship therefore tolerated?” [xxiii]
While Patai is reflecting on the people within the events of the histories, I am also including the later editors and redactors of the histories as well. While these writers might like us to believe that they are showing us ‘the naughty ways of those who lived long ago, see how much we’ve learned?’ I believe that they too felt a need for the feminine within their worship and for this reason left these passages in. They still believed in Her.
It is during post exilic times that the concept we today understand as monotheism takes hold among the Hebrew people. I further surmise that rather than kick Asherah out completely the Yahwist writers blended her into their God giving us Hokmah, Sophia: God’s Wisdom.
Welcome, Sophia
On the roof of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo painted God reaching out to Adam. It is one of the most famous of the roofs scenes. God is not alone however; he is surrounded by other figures. Who are they?
The Creation of Adam[xxiv] |
The most fascinating figure is the woman who has God’s protective arm around her. According to some, she is Eve, waiting for her ‘turn’ to be created.[xxv] She could also be Sophia many others argue.
Marcia Hall, in “Who’s who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam”[xxvi]cites Proverbs 8:27 to support her theory that the woman is Divine Wisdom, Sophia and not Eve in contradiction to Leo Steinberg who suggests Michelangelo used Genesis 1 &2 for his sources.
Both arguments have merit, yet looking at the images the woman next to God and Eve as she is depicted in ‘The Creation of Eve’ also painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel, it certainly looks like two different women. Their hair is different colour, they facial features are different. Their body types are not the same.
 The Women in the Creation of Adam[xxvii] |  Creation of Eve[xxviii] |
Yet, when one compares the images painted by Michelangelo of the woman in ‘The Creation of Adam’ and ‘The Ancestors of Christ’ on another part of the Sistine Chapel there is a striking resemblance between this woman and the Divine Mother of Christ. Did Michelangelo want us to connect Divine Wisdom with the Divine Mother?
Woman in the Creation of Adam |  Divine Mother of Christ[i] |
I’ve jumped a number of centuries here and it’s time to return to post exilic times when the Hebrew people were coping with a very difficult period. The Exile was traumatic to the Hebrew people physically, politically, socially and spiritually.
It is the spiritual trauma on which I will focus. The exile caused the Hebrew people to question everything they knew or thought they knew about their relationship with God. They were God’s chosen people. Yet how could God have allowed such a thing to befall his chosen ones? They were far from home and the temple destroyed. God’s home was destroyed. How would they find God now? How would God find them?
Ezekiel, the great prophet of the exile had a vision and discovered that God was indeed with his people in Babylon. Though the temple is gone, God had not forsaken his children[xxx].
After the return from exile in 538BCE the Hebrew’s need to recover from the trauma done to them. While much of the biblical stories focus on the rebuilding of the temple as part of the healing, a great overhaul of the sacred texts also began.
Much of what we now call the Hebrew Bible took its shape during this period. A time when prophets and Rabbi’s were attempting to figure out what they did wrong for God to punish them so.
Haggai prophesies of the need for a new temple[xxxi]. Ezra[xxxii]and Nehemiah[xxxiii]lead massive reformation efforts. Ezra and Nehemiah both comment on the foreign wives of the Hebrew men as one of the biggest issues holding Israel back from being reconciled with God. They’ve had enough of the foreign influences of these women and though they do not state it out right; if these foreign women brought their Gods and Goddess’ with then, as seen with Solomon, they’ve had enough of the goddess’ influence as well.
It was during the time that Proverbs was compiled and edited[xxxiv]. While some of the material is pre-exilic the book was completed post exile. Proverbs was written to help young men learn the ‘right path’ and how to live a good life.[xxxv]
It is also the book where Sophia, God’s Wisdom is fully formed. Sophia is sometimes referred to as Lady or Dame Wisdom, Woman Wisdom, she is Hokmah in Hebrew. She is the one most frequently used female image of God; she appears in Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, Job and as mentioned Proverbs[xxxvi].
She is a woman who speaks God word and asks all those who hear her to listen. She is contrasted by ‘the foolish woman’ and the ‘strange woman’ who is not to be trusted as she will lead good men astray.
At a time when ethnic purity is of great concern it is easy to suggest that these two contrasting women represent a good Hebrew woman and the untrustworthy foreign woman. Proverbs is encouraging men to look within their own community for the right type of wife and mother for their children.
However, perhaps there is more to it than that. As previously discussed the Hebrew people over the centuries engaged in worship of the Goddess Asherah. Regardless of the many times her Pole and High Places were destroyed the people brought her back time and again.
Without Asherah, God was a heavy handed, violent and angry man. Asherah with her nurturing and mothering qualities would have created a balance to the domineering Yahweh.
The reformers of the post exilic times believed that it was foreign influence that created all of Israel’s strife and tragedy, yet they also knew that their people wanted and needed a mothering wisdom to have faith in.
It would make sense then, if they wanted the people to turn from Asherah to God that they might take the best qualities of Asherah – her wisdom, her mothering, her love for her people and suggest that all of those things are in fact aspects of the one true God and not a separate Goddess from a foreign land.
It would also make sense then, to take the undesirable qualities and transfer then to a separate being; those qualities of the foolish woman that will lead men astray, not from their wives, but astray from God.
The Woman’s Bible Commentary supports this argument, “The figure of Woman Wisdom may be a survival of goddess worship within the monotheistic structure of Israelite theology, since the wisdom traditions of Mesopotamia and Egypt were sanctioned by tutelary goddesses.”[xxxvii]
Elsewhere it says, “Scholars speculate the Israelite figure of Woman Wisdom may reflect in the international wisdoms association with tutelary goddesses: Sumerian Nisaba, Egyptian Ma’at, or perhaps a Canaanite fertility goddess [Asherah] developed from the Sumerian Inanna or Semitic Ishtar.”[xxxviii]
I’ve already shown that Ishtar and Asherah are one and the same, while Inanna is also a variant of the fertility goddess.[xxxix]
Proverbs 3 is a long list of how those who embrace Woman Wisdom will be gifted with many treasures: peace and prosperity, understanding worth more than silver, fruitful crops, barns overflowing and vats brimming with new wine. She brings fertility to the land and her people as Asherah had done.
In 3:18 she is described as “a tree of life to those who take hold of her; those who hold her fast will be blessed.” Perhaps a reference to Genesis or perhaps a reference to the Asherah Poles of old.
It is in Proverbs 8 that Sophia really shines. It begins with a call:
Does not wisdom call out?
Does not understanding raise her voice?
2 At the highest point along the way,
where the paths meet, she takes her stand;
3 beside the gate leading into the city,
at the entrance, she cries aloud:
4 “To you, O people, I call out;
I raise my voice to all mankind.
She commands a public audience; she cries out the like prophets, given the societal restrictions on women at this time, this alone is a challenge to the norm. Yet this is not an issue because she calls men to the wisdom of God.
While it might be reaching, I find that the line about her standing on the ‘highest point along the way’ reminiscent of ‘the high places’ that were Asherah and Baal’s places of worship.
In lines 15 – 17 she makes it clear she is connected to political power:
15 By me kings reign
and rulers issue decrees that are just;
16 by me princes govern,
and nobles—all who rule on earth.
17 I love those who love me,
and those who seek me find me.
“These verses may also carry the nuance of Mesopotamian goddess traditions where sexual union with the goddess of fertility confers on the king his right to rule. In the Israelite tradition, one is reminded of 1 Kings 3, where Solomon, who was not the son expected to succeed David, is given the gift of wisdom by God in order to legitimate his reign”,[xl] suggests the Woman’s Bible Commentary. Solomon’s connection to Asherah has also been previously noted.
In lines 22 – 31 the power of Sophia is shown in beautiful imagery. She is there at Creation. She was with God from the very beginning delighting day after day, rejoicing always in his presence:
22“The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old;
23 I was formed long ages ago,
at the very beginning, when the world came to be.
24 When there were no watery depths, I was given birth,
when there were no springs overflowing with water;
25 before the mountains were settled in place,
before the hills, I was given birth,
26 before he made the world or its fields
or any of the dust of the earth.
27 I was there when he set the heavens in place,
when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
28 when he established the clouds above
and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
29 when he gave the sea its boundary
so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
30 Then I was constantly at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence,
31 rejoicing in his whole world
and delighting in mankind.
With this turn of phrase Sophia suddenly predates Asherah. She has existed since time began and has always been here. While I have not found supporting evidence to this theory (yet), I wonder if perhaps the writers of Proverbs did this so they could then absolve their ancestors of Asherah worship claiming that they were confused. ‘All along it was Woman Wisdom, Sophia that the Hebrew’s were worshipping, but she became mixed up with the Canaanite Asherah’ they could say.
This is also the passage that justifies the argument that is it indeed Sophia nestled in the arm of God on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Personally, given the imagery of this passage, most importantly, “I was constantly at his side”, as well as the images on the Chapel itself makes this the more plausible argument.
Wisdom was there at the beginning, so was Christ, “she is pictured in terms of her link to Jesus the Christ, the Logo’s, the Word of God... The Wisdom of Solomon in fact calls Lady Wisdom the designer of everything (8:7), whereas Colossians 1:16 says that Christis the creator of everything.”[xli]
Michelangelo could have known all of these and wanted to show the connection of Wisdom and Jesus to the beginning of time in his works. While there is proof of Michelangelo’s intentions this theory is fascinating.
There is another woman in Proverbs, the foolish woman, or the strange woman in some translations she is the adulterous woman. She the contrast of Woman Wisdom, she is alluring yet dangerous:
Proverbs 5: 1- 4: My son, pay attention to my wisdom,
turn your ear to my words of insight,
2 that you may maintain discretion
and your lips may preserve knowledge.
3 For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
4 but in the end she is bitter as gall,
sharp as a double-edged sword.
Proverbs 7: 4-5 4 Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,”
and to insight, “You are my relative.”
5 They will keep you from the adulterous woman,
from the wayward woman with her seductive words.
The story in Proverbs 7 tells of a young man walking near his home when a woman comes to tempt him. She claims coloured linen’s from Egypt cover her bed, and perfumes of Myrrh, Aloes and Cinnamon scent her room.(Proverbs 7: 16-17). These are foreign items and suggest she is of a foreign nature and will lead this young man down ‘a highway to the grave, leading to the chambers of death’. (7: 26-27)
The imagery of this woman combines several features, that of an adulteress, as we have noted, as well as language typical of the goddess ‘the highway to the grave and chambers of death’ may be referring to the fertility goddess’ power over life and death and power over seasons. Ishtar and Inanna are goddesses associated with the seasonal dying of vegetation. [xlii]
She will lead men away from their true wives and legitimate partners. On one level this is referring to their actual wives, yet it is also referring to the Hebrews marriage to God:
Proverbs 5: 15-23
15 Drink water from your own cistern,
running water from your own well.
16 Should your springs overflow in the streets,
your streams of water in the public squares?
17 Let them be yours alone,
never to be shared with strangers.
18 May your fountain be blessed,
and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
19 A loving doe, a graceful deer—
may her breasts satisfy you always,
may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
20 Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife?
Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman?
running water from your own well.
16 Should your springs overflow in the streets,
your streams of water in the public squares?
17 Let them be yours alone,
never to be shared with strangers.
18 May your fountain be blessed,
and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
19 A loving doe, a graceful deer—
may her breasts satisfy you always,
may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
20 Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife?
Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman?
21 For your ways are in full view of the Lord,
and he examines all your paths.
22 The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them;
the cords of their sins hold them fast.
23 For lack of discipline they will die,
led astray by their own great folly.
and he examines all your paths.
22 The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them;
the cords of their sins hold them fast.
23 For lack of discipline they will die,
led astray by their own great folly.
This isn’t the first time that the relationship between God and his people have been discussed as a marriage. Hosea is called by God to marry the promiscuous Gomer “for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.” (Hosea 1:2) This is a perfect metaphor for pre-exilic times. We have seen how the Hebrew people welcomed Asherah into their worship, turning away from God. Now it is time to remind men of this and change the metaphor to bring men back to God with the feminine figure of Wisdom, Sophia.
She is the right wife, the right mother. She is God.
To this day Jewish people welcome Shabbat with the words, “Come my friend, to meet the bride; let us welcome the presence of the Sabbath.”[xliii]
In is from all of this material that it is evident to me that the writers of the Hebrew scripture were brilliant and thoughtful men who knew well the needs of their people. They were able to influence scripture to fulfill the spiritual need for a feminine divinity, moving her from a separate goddess who was complementary to the One God to becoming an aspect of the One God Himself.
This preserved the monotheism we know today; the monotheism that that allows for reverence of Mary and censure towards Mary Magdalene in Christianities own version of Woman Wisdom and The Foolish Woman. This same monotheism also allowed for the Talmudic scholars to develop the concept of Shekinah.
The scope of this particular paper does not allow for me to delve to deeply into these later developments; however they are noteworthy, the concept of Shekinah especially.
The term Shekinah never appears in the bible. The term comes from the word Shkn meaning ‘to dwell’[xliv] and is used to refer to “the visible and audible manifestation of God’s presence on earth.”[xlv]
This term is feminine in gender and as we’ve already seen despite insistence over time of that God is neither masculine nor feminine we know that humans need more concrete images to focus on. Thus when writers use gender terms we create gender images in our minds.
This term is a very late development in Judaism.
“By the beginning of the Talmudic period (3rd to 5th Centuries CE), Judaism was characterized by and emphasis on the study of the Law as the essence of religion, as against mere belief expressed in traditional and emotion-laded images. It is characteristic of the development, as well as of the incipient reaction to it, that as against thousands of new religious laws contained in the vast compendium of the Talmud, one finds in it only one single significant addition to the realm of religious faith: loosely sketched, vague aspect of God’s Presence, called Shekinah.” (emphasis mine)[xlvi]
This feminine noun is applied to times in the Hebrew Bible where God’s presence manifests: Exodus 24:16-18, the thick cloud enclosing the devouring flame on Mt. Sinai. In Exodus 33:7-11 Yahweh descends in a cloud to speak with Moses in the Tabernacle. In Exodus 20 the cloud that rested above the tabernacle and the fire that was in the same place at night was named Shekinah. [xlvii]
The biblical references continue in The Divine Feminine, but I am more interested in the fact that such a creation of more femininity applied to God occurred at all. The Divine feminine speaks to this saying,
“It is significant that the Shekinah, like other feminine gender terms concerning Yahweh, focuses on Yahweh’s immanence, the divine nearness to and interaction with humankind. Whereas for the Jews masculine God-language emphasised the abstract, eternal, static transcendent nature of God, feminine terminology had to be found to express God’s every day, humanlike and personally affective attributes.”[xlviii]
This brings us back to the beginning portion of my paper where I showed the feminine language used to describe God as birth mother and nursemaid as well as looking after His children by feeding, clothing and comforting them jobs, traditionally associated with mothers and women.
For me and others who struggle with male dominated language in faith, finding all of this femininity in the scriptures was, if you’ll excuse the pun, a God Send. It has given me a new opportunity to deepen my relationship with God and Goddess. While I do believe that the Creator is genderless, until we find language to speak of the Creator’s aspects that are truly gender neutral as least I now have language and imagery that is gender equal.
Much of this paper is speculative; we cannot know how the Hebrew people worshipped all those centuries ago. Too much editing, redaction and destruction of sacred texts has occurred over time. We can never know what had been lost to fueling fires or what has been covered up with black ink splashed across the page.
Like pieces of sea glass on a beach, we see glints and glimmers of the feminine, the goddess, in scripture. At one time the remains of glass we find polished and soft among the sand were part of a complete vessel, but with the ebb and flow of the ages the vessel has been broken, worn away and smoothed out so that only pieces remain, no one ever knowing what its original shape was.
It is impossible to find all the pieces scattered across the ocean. We cannot fit them back together and see what the vessel once was. Was it a bottle, a drinking glass, a plate? These lines in Scripture are like these pieces. She is there, hidden in the high places, quiet when the prophets speak, loud when her wisdom is sought, present when God dwells among his people. So much has been lost to time that we will never know her complete vessel.
Yet, from the colour of the glass, from indents and shape perhaps we can guess what shape it once was. Just as we can guess at what these lines in scripture mean both to the people who wrote them and to those of us who read them today.
They are tiny treasures of placid green and foggy blue strewn among the common rocks and shells; easy to miss as our eyes pan across the beach, but there all the same, mysterious and beautiful.
End Notes:
[i]From Spirit Workshop, Spring Learning Circle 2014 CCS.
[ii] The Divine Feminine, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, pg. 12
[iii] Spirit of Life, come unto me. Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion. Blow in the wind, rise in the sea; Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice. Roots hold me close; wings set me free; Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me. ~Carol McDade |
[iv] Spirit, spirit of gentleness.
Blow through the wilderness, calling and free.
Spirit, spirit of restlessness. Stir me from placidness.
Wind, wind on the sea.
1. You moved on the waters, You called to the deep,
Then You coaxed up the mountains. From the valley of sleep,
And over the eons You called to each thing,
"A wake from your slumbers and rise on your wings."
Blow through the wilderness, calling and free.
Spirit, spirit of restlessness. Stir me from placidness.
Wind, wind on the sea.
1. You moved on the waters, You called to the deep,
Then You coaxed up the mountains. From the valley of sleep,
And over the eons You called to each thing,
"A wake from your slumbers and rise on your wings."
[v]She Flys On, Refrain:
She comes sailing on the wind,
her wings flashing in the sun;
on a journey just begun,
she flies on.
And in the passage of her flight,
her song rings out through the night,
full of laughter, full of light,
she flies on.
She comes sailing on the wind,
her wings flashing in the sun;
on a journey just begun,
she flies on.
And in the passage of her flight,
her song rings out through the night,
full of laughter, full of light,
she flies on.
[vi]http://www.saintesmaries.com/en/
[vii]The Divine Feminine, pg 2
[viii]The Hebrew Goddess, Raphael Patai
[ix]Ibid, pg 28
[x]Ibid. Pg 28.
[xi]All bible passages in this paper from: www.Biblegateway.comand New International Version unless otherwise noted.
[xii]The Divine Feminine, pg. 20
[xiii]Ibid. Pg. 23
[xiv]Ibid. Pg. 23
[xv]Ibid. Pg 23 – quoting from Jennifer Perone Heimmel, “God is Our Mother”, pg.21
[xvi]Ibdi. Pg 11
[xvii]The Witches’ Goddess, Janet & Stewart Farrar, pg. 195, 226, 232.
[xviii]Jewish Woman’s Achieve, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/asherahasherim-bible
[xix]All Biblical References, New International Version, unless otherwise notes
[xx] The Hebrew Goddess, pg. 40; 1kings 2:46, 3:1
[xxi]Ibid. Section on Archaeological evidence pgs. 58 – 60 and image plates 11- 18 pg. 135 on.
[xxii] Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rdAddition, New Revised Standard Version
[xxiii] The Hebrew Goddess pg. 46
[xxv] Steinberg, Leo (December 1992). "Who's who in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture's Reluctant Self-Revelation". The Art Bulletin 74 (4): 553–554. JSTOR 3045910. Retrieved April 9, 2013.
[xxvi] Title: “Who’s who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam” continued In: Art Bulletin 1993, v. 75, no. 2, June, p.
340-344, ISSN 0004-3079. Summary: Marcia Hall cites Augustine (City of God, 11, 4) and Proverbs 8: 27 in support of her argument that the female figure within the arm of God in the Creation of Adam (Rome, Vatican, Sistine Chapel) represents Divine Wisdom or Sapienta, and not Eve, as proposed by Leo Steinberg (Art Bulletin, 1992, 74 no 4 (Dec) p. 552-566). Steinberg defends his thesis, arguing that Michelangelo’s textural sources were Genesis 1 & 2, which he was concerned to reconcile.
[xxvii]http://www.randolphkin.com/holyspirit/backup.htm#a-1--harv%20stuff The Sistine Chapel, The Art, the History, and the Restoration, Harmony Books, NY, page 143
[xxviii] Same Website, Michelangelo the Painter, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,Publishers, New York, Plate XI
[xxix]Same Website, The Sistine Chapel, The Art, the History, and the Restoration, Harmony Books, NY, page 230
[xxx] Ezekiel 11: 14-20; 17:22–24; 37:1-27.
[xxxi]Haggai Chapter 1
[xxxii]Ezra Chapter 10
[xxxiii]Nehemiah, Chapter 13
[xxxiv]Oxford Annotated Bible, pg 904
[xxxv]Woman’s Bible Commentary, Newson, Ringe (ed.) pg. 155
[xxxvi]The Divine Feminine, pg. 97
[xxxvii]Woman’s Bible Commentary Pg. 154
[xxxviii]Ibid. Pg. 155
[xxxix]The Witches Goddess, pg 229
[xl]Woman’s Bible Commentary, pg. 156
[xli]The Divine Feminine, pg.100
[xlii]Witches’ Goddess, pg. 231
[xliii]http://www.myjewishlearning.com/practices/Ritual/Shabbat_The_Sabbath/In_the_Community/Shabbat_Liturgy/Lekhah_Dodi.shtml
[xliv]The Divine Feminine pg. 37
[xlv]The Hebrew Goddess, pg. 96
[xlvi]Ibid. Pg. 29-30
[xlvii]Ibid. Pg 38
[xlviii]Ibid. Pg. 38
Bibliography
Coogan, Michael D. (editor) The New Oxford Annotated Bible: Third Edition, NRSV. New York, NY. Oxford University Press. 2001.
Farrar, Janet and Stewart. The Witches Goddess: The Feminine Principle of Divinity. Custer, Washington. Phoenix Publishing Inc. 1987
Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey. The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female. New York, NY. The Crossroad Publishing Company. 1989
Newson, Carol A and Ringe, Sharon H. (editors) Woman’s Bible Commentary: Expanded Edition. Louisville, Kentucky. Westminster John Knox Press. 1998
Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess: Third Enlarged Edition.Detroit, Michigan. Wayne State University Press. 1990
Websites: (all accessed May 2, 2014)
Bible Gateway Http://www.Biblegateway.com
My Jewish Learning http://www.myjewishlearning.com/practices/Ritual/Shabbat_The_Sabbath/In_the_Community/Shabbat_Liturgy/Lekhah_Dodi.shtml
Jewish Woman’s Achieve, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/asherahasherim-bible
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