I found out today that YHWH is very likely a lesser god and somewhat reminiscent of the demiurge:


"Yahweh worship also has its roots in an ancient religion of Canaan, the land which God promised to Abraham. Within this polytheistic religion, Yahweh was but one of many deities united under a figure known as El. In the northwestern Semitic language spoken in Canaan, “El” had multiple meanings: It was the word for “god,” the name of a specific god, and the title of a god who stood removed from other, lesser gods.


These lesser gods included Yahweh, Asherah (El’s consort as well as the religion’s chief mother goddess), and Baal, whose worshippers went on to challenge Yahweh’s supremacy in Israel. Yahweh and Baal were merely two of El’s 70 children. According to the mythology, each child of El was given a region to look after. Baal ruled over Canaan while Yahweh, fatefully, was assigned the land of Israel.


Like ancient Near Eastern myths from the same period, the earliest Biblical literature describes Yahweh as possessing particular as opposed to general attributes. He is represented as a storm god who marches into battle alongside stars and planets to defend Israel from enemies. This warrior-like iteration of Yahweh may explain the brutal and volatile behavior he exhibits in the Old Testament, which is a far cry from the omnibenevolent deity we find in Christ."


The trope of an omnibenevolent Christ, was of course debunked and criticized by many.

Today, I stumbled upon The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe. It has a really strong opening with a nice jab at the Eden eviction story:










It makes one wonder how many millions if not billions of women living under Abrahamic religions were diminished based on that story alone (and similar misogynistic myths and beliefs) in the past two millennia (and possibly for a few hundred years more still).

Manfred Hauke wrote a nice intro to mariology (e.g. marianismo, mariolatry) back in 1996. Excerpts (with my emphasis added):


Simone de Beauvoir [...] pointed out the contrast between the ancient goddesses and Mary as early as 1949; whereas the goddesses commanded autonomous power and utilized men for their own purposes, Mary is wholly the servant of God: "'I am the handmaid of the Lord.' For the first time in the history of mankind," writes Beauvoir, "a mother kneels before her son and acknowledges, of her own free will, her inferiority. The supreme victory of masculinity is consummated in Mariolatry: it signifies the rehabilitation of woman through the completeness of her defeat."


Daly now sharpens this critique [Beyond God the Father (1973)] and puts it in a wider systematic context: Mary is "a remnant of the ancient image of the Mother Goddess, enchained and subordinated in Christianity, as the 'Mother of God'." To this attempt to "domesticate" the mother goddess, Daly opposes a striving to bring together the divine and the feminine.


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