Learn more
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
OK
Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel Kindle Edition
Did God Have a Wife? shines new light on the presence and influence of women's cults in early Israel and their implications for our understanding of Israel's 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 Israel's 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEerdmans
- Publication dateJuly 23, 2008
- File size8335 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Review
Susan Ackerman
"In Did God Have a Wife? Bill Dever presents a multidimensional portrait of ancient Israelite religion with his characteristic eloquence and panache. Most significantly, through his detailed examination of archaeological materials, Dever reveals crucial facets of what he calls 'folk religion,' or the religion of one of ancient Israel's most neglected communities, the everyday people."
Ronald Hendel
"Dever has done it again. The dean of biblical archaeology presents a wide-ranging and lively treatment of folk religion in ancient Israel, including the possibility of a prominent role for the goddess Asherah. Dever's synthesis of the archaeological evidence is masterful. This is a must-read for students of the Bible."
J. Edward Wright
"Did God Have a Wife? is the book that Bill Dever has been preparing to write for decades. In fact, he is probably the only person prepared and bold enough to attempt it. . . Dever finds that the only way to uncover the rich diversity of the religious impulse in ancient Israel is for archaeology to work in conversation with texts and iconography. . . Professionals will know much of the data but will nonetheless be impressed with Dever's synthesis of evidence from diverse sources. Lay readers will appreciate Dever's clear reconstruction and, at the same time, will be challenged by his conclusions. It is fitting that a book focusing on folk religion is written in a style that makes the information readily available to modern audiences."
Mark S. Smith
"A lucid treatment of a most provocative aspect of the Bible, namely, the question of a goddess in ancient Israel who might have been thought of as Yahweh's consort. Dever is one of the leading biblical archaeologists in the world, and he tackles one of the Bible's burning issues in this book. Fresh, clear, accessible, and recommended to anyone interested in the religion of ancient Israel."
Ziony Zevit
"Once again William Dever has written a page-turner for thoughtful individuals interested in the Bible. This time, however, he explores what most biblicists ignore — the folk religion of ancient Israel, the religion as lived and practiced. . . Although written for the general public, this is one book that scholars cannot afford to miss. . . Writing in a personal style sprinkled with anecdotes, Dever has produced a rare work — a book that may be read and appreciated by all who take the Bible, archaeology, and history seriously. Packed with information, crackling with brilliant observations."
Review of Biblical Literature
"I would like to recommend Dever's book to all ordinary people — but especially to theologians — who are interested in the ‘real religion' of ancient Israel."
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
"Anything by the fiesty Dever is a must-read. He is state-of-the-art in the field of archaeology and religion, and he invariably enlightens and challenges."
Archiv Orentální
"Highly persuasive in its portrayal, [Did God Have a Wife?] can become a welcome guide for all who are not afraid to adopt a somewhat alternate view of the ancient Israelite world."
From the Back Cover
"Did God Have a Wife?" shines new light on the presence and influence of women's cults in early Israel and their implications for our understanding of Israel's 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 Israel's 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.
About the Author
William G. Dever is professor emeritus of Near Easternarchaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizonain Tucson. He has served as director of the Nelson GlueckSchool of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem, as director ofthe W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research inJerusalem, and as a visiting professor at universitiesaround the world. He has spent thirty years conductingarchaeological excavations in the Near East, resulting in alarge body of award-winning fieldwork.
Product details
- ASIN : B001EHEC0M
- Publisher : Eerdmans (July 23, 2008)
- Publication date : July 23, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 8335 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 361 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #600,688 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #96 in Religious Antiquities & Archaeology
- #339 in History of Israel & Palestine
- #601 in Religious Studies - History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book informative and well-documented. They describe it as an enjoyable, well-written read that anyone can enjoy. Readers praise the author's clear and concise writing style. The book provides a thorough review of previous scholarship, which is welcome.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book informative and well-documented. It provides an excellent resource for archaelogical evidence that the Goddess was alive in early Judaism. The book is a good text for beginning archaeology courses, especially biblical archaeology. It has a good amount of references to biblical scholarship and an enlightening description of pre-religion establishments. Readers appreciate the author's frequent citations of other scholars' work and areas of agreement.
"...the otherwise inevitable unspoken "Yeah, but..." He frequently cites the work of other scholars and his areas of agreement and disagreement with..." Read more
"...Finkelstein & Silberman’s position on Biblical history is SPOT ON and is supported by more than archaeology...." Read more
"Devers provides some great evidence and persuasive arguments, although he wavers a bit (maybe a lot) on a few issues, including whether or not to..." Read more
"...The subject is an important one to anyone interested in the study of the Religion of the Hebrews in the Hebrew Bible especially the role of women in..." Read more
Customers find the book readable and enjoyable, though written at a higher level than their regular reading. They find it informative, inspiring, and entertaining.
"...This is a book that is accessible and it is a pleasure to read...." Read more
"...This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about the truth of human heritage." Read more
"...of great scholarship, ibut at the same time itcan be read and enjoyed by anyone...." Read more
"Intriguing book....read it twice because I enjoyed it so much. Dever is an honest writer - I believe - doesn't seem to have a dogma to protect...." Read more
Customers find the book's writing style readable and clear. They appreciate the author's honest approach and use of concise language to convey his points.
"...This single paragraph is a good example of Dever's writing style and his approach to the problem...." Read more
"...This is a work of great scholarship, ibut at the same time itcan be read and enjoyed by anyone...." Read more
"I had a bit of fun reading this but it's not well organized, not smart enough to serve as a reference book...." Read more
"...Dever is an honest writer - I believe - doesn't seem to have a dogma to protect...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's scholarship. They find it readable and thorough, offering a review of previous work.
"...He offers a fairly thorough review of previous scholarship, which is welcome, but without the use of footnotes...." Read more
"...This is a work of great scholarship, ibut at the same time itcan be read and enjoyed by anyone...." Read more
"...of religion, I can testify that Dever's book is not only reliable scholarship but readable as well. Fascinating stuff!" Read more
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2009I will preface my review by admitting that I love William G. Dever. He doesn't kid around but approaches the question with tenacity. He relentlessly exposes the absurd positions of both extremes (generally the Biblical minimalists and the "believers") and does not let either ideology or religion get in the way of his search for the truth. He comes across as a gruff, irascible sort who has no patience for fools, and his approach is refreshing. He is unafraid to point to his own pioneering work on the subject and why not? He has earned it.
in "Did God Have a Wife?" Dever examines what he calls "folk religion" in ancient Israel. This is to be differentiated from "book religion" - the official position of the Bible, which is that of a literate and patriarchal elite. What Dever is looking for here is the religion of the hearth and home, the religion of women, but also men, of the simple piety of the common folk who made up over 90% of the population of ancient Israel. It is not, as he says at the outset (p. IX) in his Introduction, "about the extraordinary few who wrote and edited the Hebrew Bible." An appeal to the book itself will clarify matters here:
Some reviewers have suggested that my "Book religion" (following van der Toorn; below), which I have set up as a counterfoil to the more pervasive "folk religion," is late in the Monarchy, emerging only with the 7th-6th century B.. Deuteronomistic reform movements. Thus they argue that for the earlier period in the Monarchy, not to mention the "Period of the Judges" (12th-11th cents. B.C.), I can reconstruct nothing but "folk religion." This overlooks, however, he consensus of mainstream biblical scholars that behind the admittedly late written tradition there is a long oral tradition. The major theological motifs of canonical Scripture, although I have downplayed their popular appeal, did not appear suddenly overnight. These themes (see Chapter VII) had a long tradition among the literati who later wrote and edited the Hebrew Bible; so "Book religion" merely represents their final crystallization (p. xv).
This single paragraph is a good example of Dever's writing style and his approach to the problem. He uses very clear and concise language to get his point across. He very frequently points to other parts of the book (below, Chapter VII, etc) so that you know where a particular point will be picked up and continued. This eliminates for the reader the otherwise inevitable unspoken "Yeah, but..." He frequently cites the work of other scholars and his areas of agreement and disagreement with their assertions and in fact, much of the book is a discussion about the views of various schools of thought on any particular point. He offers a fairly thorough review of previous scholarship, which is welcome, but without the use of footnotes. I love footnotes, but I cannot deny that Dever does an excellent job of working without them (and a section at the end of the book called "Basic Sources" fills some 15 pages with a carefully assembled list of the works Dever examines in the text, all divided by topic: "Folk Religion," "Asherah as Goddess," "Archaeological Handbooks," etc).
I'll offer the Table of Contents as part of my review because it is one of the things I look at immediately when pulling a book like this off the shelf:
I. Defining and Contextualizing Religion
II. The History of the History: In Search of Ancient Israel's Religions
III. Sources and Methods for the Study of Ancient Israel's Religions
IV. The Hebrew Bible: Religious Reality or Theological Ideal?
V. Archaeological Evidence for Folk Religions in Ancient Israel
VI. The Goddess Asherah and Her Cult
VII. Asherah, Women's Cults, and "Official Yahwism"
VIII. From Polytheism to Monotheism
IX. What Does the Goddess Do to Help?
There is also, at the end, an index of Scriptural references.
On the whole, Dever's writing style is engaging and easy to follow. Some nonfiction, particularly stuff written by experts in their fields,suffers from unreadability. We have all seen quoted passages in languages we can't hope to translate ourselves and with no translation offered. You won't find that here. But Dever accomplishes this without "dumbing down" his writing. This is a book that is accessible and it is a pleasure to read. I brought it with me everyday to read in the car while waiting for my son to get out of kindergarten classes.
If I have any complaint at all about the book it is with how the illustrations are presented. I would have liked them to be labeled (figure 1, figure 2, etc) and referenced in the text. I like to flip from the discussion to the image without searching for an illustration of the object being discussed. But this is a minor complaint and really did not lessen my enjoyment of the book.
I titled my review "A Brilliant Corrective" and I mean a corrective to extreme points of view on both sides, the minimalists and the "believers," the one group basically erasing even the possibility of knowledge of the past, and the other limiting it to the viewpoint of the few who wrote the Hebrew Bible. I think Dever has done his job well. Those at both extremes will likely be displeased but then nothing but complete surrender to their point of view will ever please them and Dever is not the man to deny the facts to make anybody happy, and this is what I admire about him the most. Even if you end up disagreeing with him, he pulls no punches. History is not always the way we would like it to be, but it does us no good to live in denial of the facts on (or in) the ground. I'll take the facts, warts and all, over pious history "as it should have been" rather than was.
Highly recommended, as are all Dever's books.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2019I deliberately waited nearly a decade to read this book. I was doing my own forensic review of linguistic evidence into the historicity of the Old Testament and didn’t want my findings biased by archaeological publications. When I read this book I was gasping (and nodding) every other page. Finkelstein & Silberman’s position on Biblical history is SPOT ON and is supported by more than archaeology. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about the truth of human heritage.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2015Devers provides some great evidence and persuasive arguments, although he wavers a bit (maybe a lot) on a few issues, including whether or not to directly admit the idea that there was a Great Goddess, known by different names, who preceded the idea of an 'all-father" god, since fatherhood was learned, not natural. I would have also liked to see him tackle the Book of Ruth, wherein the post-exile writers tried to justify (and prove to the women) why they should change cultural habits--from having the man "cleave" unto his wife in her home, which she probably owned, passed down from her mother (a tradition from when the Hebrews lived in tents, which the women created), to having women follow the men to their homes, given the newer and growing idea of paternity as superior to maternity (also the main reason for all those patriarchal begets in Genesis--the writers had to hammer the idea of patriarchy into their readers/listeners).
Such a transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is clear in many of the choices these elitist male-oriented writers attempted (and were successful in many ways) to impose on a previously maternal based culture. We always know who the mother is, knowledge which also gives birth to the idea of "immaculate" births, but learning to tell when you've become a father is difficult--hence an emphasis on removing the woman from her home and excluding access to her. Contrary to male-oriented beliefs, male lions are not Thinking of creating progeny when they kill the babies of the females who they want to pretend to control; they just remember who they had sex with, and kill the offspring of the females they have not yet had intercourse with, so there is no reason to assume human males were any different (many men still refuse to believe they are fathers today).
Dever also errs in showing some of his own pervasive biases--assuming only women cooked and assuming no Israelite woman could read or write (despite archeaology illustrating that priestesses from nearby nations wrote letters and literature; if Ashera was worshipped in the Temple, there should have been Israelite priestesses, too), and he also demonstrates that innate fear many men have when discussing the Great Goddess (whom he insists is merely the Great Mother most of the time) because he refuses to entertain the idea that humanity began our spiritual worship by assuming there must be an all-powerful Goddess creating and directing life, since women--in their "magic"--were the only evident creators in early humanity.
When did humans become conscious that males had a role in procreation and were not just reacting to women's magical sexual attractions? Cultural anthropology shows us that, even in tribal cultures, women made the homes, owned the crop fields, and the people believed the main creative divinity was female (and that the male was often either mischievous or tempermental). Even in other patriarchal religions, the male divinities have to overcome and often dismember the female divinity in order to create the earth or to create certain sustaining food sources. Dever ignores all this evidence to continue to support the patriarchy--something he cannot bear to eliminate all together. His fear of upending the patriarchy also means he's incapable of admitting he's a wannabe feminist--someone who believes that both genders are equal, even if sometimes different.
It is foolish for a scholar to dismiss the idea of an original Great Goddess when there is so much evidence around the world that shows the feminine was revered not just for fertility, but also for power. That the Judean exile writers chose to push the masculine divinity to the forefront, moving him from a mere monolatry god to a universal one, was a conscious political choice to allow men to run roughshod over women.
One other important error Dever makes is to imply that any scrutiny of the Judean religion as it is practiced today is anti-semitism. He eagerly points out the continued persecution of women in some Moslem countries (not all Muslims share that sexist view), but he crosses a line he should not have by calling some scholars anti-semitic, simply because they analyze and find wanting all or most Judean religious concepts.
While I applaud Dever for his efforts in trying to set the record straight, even he doesn't do the issue justice.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2005Bill Dever has a way of taking the most complex problems in Scripture studies and making them understandable to any one interested in the subject. This is a work of great scholarship, ibut at the same time itcan be read and enjoyed by anyone. The subject is an important one to anyone interested in the study of the Religion of the Hebrews in the Hebrew Bible especially the role of women in the religious practices. It is in the home and in the exended family that a person learns about God and his personal relationship to us only when that spirituality is achieved can the Book or temple make sense. I highly reccomend this Book.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2017Intriguing book....read it twice because I enjoyed it so much. Dever is an honest writer - I believe - doesn't seem to have a dogma to protect. I very much recommend this book to anyone interested in the foundations of either Judaism or Christianity. Modern research is telling us that the ancient Israelites may not have been monotheistic, believing (possibly) in God having a wife (Asherah) and a Son (Who would later be known as Jesus Christ.) Well worth the time to read and ponder.
Top reviews from other countries
- M Ó RuisReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 11, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks for agreeing with me, William!
Fantastic; the sort of scholarship I kept hoping for and only found at rare intervals. I am only part way in but reckon it will be important for my own views, too; several of which I had worked out for myself painstakingly. - This means that Dever is great because he agrees with me and shows great discernment accordingly. I believe it is a widely used criterion!
- Helium BansheeReviewed in Australia on November 1, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent research
The author does remarkable work on a difficult and controversial topic, using both archeological and textual sources. Far better than most kindle titles.
-
VigilanteReviewed in Spain on August 12, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars Autor incorrecto
Puede no ser importante, pero a fin de evitar al próximo comprador la misma aventura, modifiquen el nombre del autor es William Dever no William DeNver.
Gracias.
- Bauldrick D DogReviewed in Australia on May 8, 2021
4.0 out of 5 stars Great to have some biblical archaeology to shed light on Israelite worship practices
An excellent resource written by an experienced retired archaeologist and anthropologist.
Academic in tone, it needs to be read in small doses. Having said that, it is enormously rewarding to plough through.
- M M MacNairReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2009
4.0 out of 5 stars Strong archaeological and religious study
Excellent book - starts with an over-long and rumbustious taking-to-task of virtually everyone else who has written on this topic. Followed by very solid and sensible take on Israelite folk-religion as juxtaposed with the religion of the Temple elite, reinstating Asherah as the female component of the Old Testament Godhead.
One primary qualm is that Professor Devers does not address the theological work of Margaret Barker, and therefore his closing session on Temple theology is lightweight: if Josiah found a statue of Asherah, etc, in the Temple then the faith of the kings and priests was probably pretty closely aligned to that of the villagers and the Deuteronomists were a distinct and third point of view at odds with both - which is what they said they were.
One person found this helpfulReport