Today some friends and I traveled to Tyre and Sidon, two of my favorite places in Lebanon. The first place we went in Sidon was my favorite sight of the day. We visited the ruins of the temple of
Asherah and the altar of Baal.
Asherah and Baal are false gods in the Bible. The Bible tells the story of this place in 1 Kings. Ahab, a king of the Israelites, marries Jezebel, a Sidionian. She influences him to worship Asherah, the goddess of Sidon. Ahab builds an altar to Baal as well.
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| The Ruins of the Temple and Altar |
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| Asherah's Throne |
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| I sat on it. |
Nearby there is a set of stairs leading up the hillside. From afar they looked great but up close they were a little Indian-Jones-esq.
From there it was just a little higher...
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| (Shh. Don't tell anyone I was on crutches 2 weeks ago.) |
And a little more climbing got me this view:
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Sidon
(you can see the Med in the background) |
On the way down I went by the altar of Baal:
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| We climbed it too. |
There used to be 3 stone bull heads on top of the altar of Baal but they were removed a couple of years ago and taken to the national museum. I think this is one of my favorite spots because there is a lot of old history behind it, but it was all new and I had never seen anything like it before.
Asherah was the wife or Yahwey before the return from the Persian exile when they rewrote Jewish history and tradition and dethrowned the wife of god .Excepted fact now .
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not. The idea that Yahweh had a wife is not based on any historical evidence whatsoever. The idea is simply derived by "minimalists" from the fact that there are lots of images of male and female god-figures found by archaeologists in Israel. Well, what do they expect, considering that the Israelites fell away from the worship of Yahweh as often as they did? There are strong reasons for believing that the Israelites were monotheists, unlike the other nations around them, from very early in their history - just as the Bible claims. See Dan Botica's paper on "Weather, Agriculture and Religion" for an assessment of the current scholarly situation: https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/perc.2013.11.issue-1/perc-2013-0005/perc-2013-0005.pdf.
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