I read a pretty broad range of things, so I don’t remember where I saw the link to the story, but the headline caught my eye.  Why the BBC’s new face of religion believes God had a wife.  It is sort of a morbid curiosity type of thing, but I had to see what in the world could have possibly given anyone this idea.  You can read the article if you want, but it is typically skewed as only a major media religion piece can be.  The upshot is that some piece of pottery that was found from the 8th Century BC has a statement about “Yahweh and his Asherah.”

The inscription is a petition for a blessing. Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from ‘Yahweh and his Asherah’. Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife.

Never mind the endless condemnations of Asherah in the OT and the repeated mentions of God’s exact thoughts regarding worshiping any other God beside Him.  Never mind the frequent statements regarding the fact that the Israelites repeatedly violated God’s commands and did mix the worship of Asherah and other gods with their supposed worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Any sane person who actually knew anything about the Bible could immediately conclude that this piece of pottery was an example of apostasy as it was described in the Bible.  It takes a truly cracked person to make the leap and claim that this piece of pottery is a normative statement about the actual character of God.

I got a call a few weeks ago from one of my youth asking questions about the Apocalypse after watching a History channel show about it.  I patiently answered his questions and concluded him with a reminder to be wary of religion programs on channels like the History channel.  For every good show they manage to put together, there are at least ten that aren’t worth the digital media they are stored on.  Just a few more crackpots on the loose.