A Story about Forced Gender Reassignment
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El Elyon and the Father of YHWH
In 1928 a Syrian farmer’s plow struck stone at a coastal site called Ras Shamra. French archaeologists arrived the following year and uncovered the ruins of Ugarit, a Bronze Age city destroyed around 1180 BCE. Its palace library contained clay tablets in a previously unknown alphabetic cuneiform. By 1930 the script was decoded. Inside the tablets sat a complete Canaanite religion, written down centuries before the earliest plausible date for Genesis, and the Hebrew Bible had been arguing with it ever since.1
At the head of the Ugaritic pantheon sat El. His full title was El Elyon, El Most High. Among his epithets were Father of Years, Creator of Created Things, and Bull El. He held court at the source of the two rivers, amidst the springs of the two deeps, with his consort and their seventy divine sons. The seventy were the council that governed the seventy nations of the earth.1,2
One of those seventy sons was a younger storm god, Hadad-Baal. Another, according to a textual variant in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 preserved at Qumran and supported by the Septuagint, was YHWH. The standard Masoretic text reads that Elyon divided humanity “according to the number of the sons of Israel.” The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the older reading: “according to the number of the sons of God,” meaning the sons of El. Each son received a nation as inheritance. YHWH received Jacob.3
This is the consensus reading of the Deuteronomy variant among modern Hebrew Bible scholars. The implication is direct: the earliest stratum of Israelite religion places YHWH not as the supreme deity but as one allotted son of the high god El, given Israel as his portion. Over centuries the two were merged. El became one of YHWH’s titles, and the family structure was painted over. The underpaint shows through. Genesis 14 still has Melchizedek blessing Abram in the name of El Elyon, and Abram accepts the blessing without correction. The text was not edited cleanly.
Were the Canaanites Patriarchal?
Short answer: yes, in form. Longer answer: their religious imagination held more women than their courts did.
Bronze Age Canaanite society was patrilineal and patriarchal in the legal sense. Property and political authority passed through the male line. The divine world above this society, however, was densely populated with female deities who held independent cult followings and operated as agents in the texts.
El’s consort was Athirat, the Hebrew Asherah. Her Ugaritic titles include “Lady Asherah of the Sea” and “Creatress of the Gods.” She was the mother of the seventy. In the Baal Cycle, the central narrative of Ugaritic literature, she intercedes with El on behalf of her son Baal, and El grants her petition. Her cult had its own temple and its own priesthood.4,5
Alongside Asherah stood other female powers. Anat, the warrior goddess, slaughters Baal’s enemies and is described wading through blood up to her thighs. Astarte, related to the Mesopotamian Ishtar and the later Greek Aphrodite, held the domains of love, sexuality, and war. Shapash, the sun, was female. The Canaanite cosmos was a court of male and female agents, with the female deities often more active than their husbands.1
This is the religious matrix from which early Israel emerged. The archaeology suggests the Israelite tribes were Canaanites themselves, settling the highlands in the late Bronze Age collapse, carrying their inherited pantheon with them. What changed was a slow, contested, often violent process by which one of those gods, YHWH, was elevated to exclusivity, and the others, including all the female ones, were demoted, demonized, or erased.1,6
YHWH and His Asherah
The question of whether Asherah was worshipped as YHWH’s wife is no longer open. The evidence is inscriptional.
In the 1970s, archaeologists excavating a desert way station at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud in the northeastern Sinai found Hebrew inscriptions on pottery and plaster, dating to roughly the 8th century BCE. Several read variations of a blessing formula: “I bless you by YHWH of Samaria and his Asherah.” Another: “I bless you by YHWH of Teman and his Asherah.” A similar inscription was recovered from a tomb at Khirbet el-Qom in the Judean foothills, dated to the late 8th century BCE: “Blessed be Uriyahu by YHWH; and from his enemies, by his Asherah, He has saved him.”6,7
Scholars disagree about whether “his Asherah” refers to the goddess herself or to a cultic object representing her, the wooden pole that 2 Kings 23 describes Josiah dragging out of the Temple. The grammatical question matters less than the cultic one. Whichever it was, ordinary Israelites in the centuries before the exile invoked YHWH alongside Asherah in their household blessings as a matter of course. She was domestic religion, possibly Temple religion, and the scribes who edited the later Bible spent generations trying to scrub her out.4,8
2 Kings 23 records the climax of that scrubbing. Around 622 BCE, King Josiah of Judah carried out a violent religious reform after the alleged “discovery” of a scroll of the Law in the Temple. The scroll, as most modern scholars read it, was the Deuteronomic core text, possibly newly composed. Josiah’s officers removed the Asherah from the Temple, burned it in the Kidron Valley, ground it to dust, and scattered the dust on graves. They tore down the booths of the cult prostitutes attached to the Temple, where the text notes women wove garments for Asherah. The priests of the high places were executed. Josiah’s men abolished the local sanctuaries and centralized all sacrifice in Jerusalem.
What that passage describes, in the writers’ own terms, is the destruction of a goddess cult that had been institutionally housed inside the Jerusalem Temple, with its own priestesses and weavers, for centuries.
The Queen of Heaven
A generation after Josiah, the prophet Jeremiah is shouting at a population that refuses to let the goddess go.
In Jeremiah 7 and Jeremiah 44, the prophet condemns Judean families for baking cakes for the “Queen of Heaven,” pouring out drink offerings to her, and burning incense in her honor. The Queen of Heaven is not named directly; scholars debate whether the title refers to Asherah, Astarte, Ishtar, or a syncretic figure absorbing all three.9 The point of Jeremiah’s outrage is that ordinary women are still doing this, in defiance of the official cult, generations after the supposed reforms.
The response of the people in Jeremiah 44 is the most striking passage on goddess worship in the entire Hebrew Bible. The exiled Judeans in Egypt tell the prophet, in effect, that they used to have prosperity when they served the Queen of Heaven, that things went badly when they stopped, and that they intend to resume. They are not theologians. They are survivors of national catastrophe noticing that prosperity correlated with the goddess and disaster correlated with her removal. The text records their argument and condemns it, but it does not refute it.
Jeremiah’s condemnation, viewed from the goddess’s side, is evidence that her worship persisted at the household level for centuries after the elites had tried to eradicate it. The women baking cakes for the Queen of Heaven were doing what their grandmothers had done. The prophets were the innovators.
What Survived: Wisdom, Hokmah, Sophia
Asherah was driven from the official cult, but something feminine survived in the canonical text by being abstracted into a personification.
In Proverbs 8, Wisdom speaks in the first person, claiming to have been present with God before creation, the first of His works, beside Him as a master craftsman when He set the foundations of the earth, rejoicing before Him daily. She is grammatically feminine, called Hokmah in Hebrew and Sophia in the Septuagint Greek. The text presents her as a divine female consort and co-creator.
The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek in the late Hellenistic period and preserved in the deuterocanonical books, takes this further. Sophia is called “a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty,” and the language used to describe her overlaps almost exactly with the language Christian theology would later use for the Holy Spirit. Sirach 24 has her speaking again in first person, describing how she sought a dwelling among men and was given Israel as her tent.10
This is a recognizable pattern. The goddess has been dismantled in her overt form, then reassembled inside the official theology as a feminine attribute of the male God: His Wisdom, His indwelling, His glory. She no longer has her own temple. The temple is His now, and she lives inside it.
That move, the absorption of the goddess into the male God as His feminine aspect, becomes the template for everything that follows.
The Shekhinah Proper
The word Shekhinah is post-biblical. It does not appear in the Hebrew Bible itself. It comes from the rabbinic period, derived from the Hebrew root sh-k-n, meaning to dwell, the same root that gives the word mishkan, the Tabernacle in the wilderness.
In the Targumim, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible used in synagogue, the rabbis introduced the Shekhinah as a way of speaking about the indwelling presence of God without saying God Himself had taken up physical residence in a place. Where the Hebrew text said “YHWH dwelt in the Tabernacle,” the Aramaic Targum would say “the Shekhinah of YHWH dwelt.” It was originally a circumlocution, a buffer against anthropomorphism.
But the buffer took on its own character. In the Talmud and the Midrash the Shekhinah acquires her own actions: going into exile with Israel when the Temple is destroyed, weeping at the Western Wall, withdrawing from the bed of a couple who argue, resting on the heads of those who study Torah at night. The rabbis describe her as the bride of YHWH, the maternal aspect of God, the presence that suffers exile alongside her people.10,11
By the medieval period this had become explicit theology. The Bahir, a 12th century Kabbalistic text, and especially the Zohar, the central work of Kabbalah composed in late 13th century Spain and attributed to Moses de Leon, develop the full system. The ten sefirot, the emanations of the divine, are organized in a structure where the masculine principles of Tiferet and Yesod flow downward into the feminine principle of Malkhut, the Kingdom, which is the Shekhinah.10,11
In this system the exile of Israel is also the exile of the Shekhinah from her divine husband. The reunion of Israel with God is described as the sexual reunion of the Shekhinah with Tiferet, mediated by the righteous human couple whose Sabbath-night lovemaking is understood as a participation in the divine union. The Friday night welcoming of the Sabbath, still sung in synagogues, includes the hymn Lekha Dodi, “Come, my Beloved,” addressed to the Sabbath Queen, who is the Shekhinah.
What we are looking at, in the Shekhinah, is the divine female who was driven out of the Temple by Josiah in 622 BCE making her way back into the official theology twenty centuries later, by a different door, as the bride of God Himself. She enters not as Asherah, the independent goddess with her own priesthood, but as the indwelling, exiled, weeping feminine half of a divinity that had been declared single.
The official monotheism held. The female pressure broke through anyway.
The New Testament: Ruach, Pneuma, Spiritus
In Hebrew the word for Spirit is ruach. It is grammatically feminine. The Spirit of God who hovers over the waters at the opening of Genesis is doing so in the feminine; the Hebrew participle agrees. The verb used, merachefet, is the same verb used elsewhere for a mother bird hovering over her young. The opening image of the Bible is a feminine divine presence brooding over creation.
In the Septuagint, the Hebrew was translated into Greek, and ruach became pneuma. Pneuma is grammatically neuter.
In the Vulgate, the Greek became Latin, and pneuma became spiritus. Spiritus is grammatically masculine. By the time the Western Church had its operative scriptural language, the original feminine Spirit of God had been silently re-gendered twice, first to neuter, then to male.
The gender shift was a theological choice as much as a linguistic one. The early Syriac-speaking Christian communities, who used a language closer to the Hebrew and Aramaic, retained the feminine Spirit. In the Odes of Solomon and the writings of the Syriac Fathers, the Holy Spirit is consistently feminine, called the Mother. The Acts of Thomas calls her “the compassionate Mother.” The Gospel of the Hebrews, an early Jewish-Christian gospel quoted by Origen and Jerome, has Jesus refer to “my Mother, the Holy Spirit.”12
That tradition was crushed. By the fourth and fifth centuries, the Latin and Greek Churches had standardized the masculine Spirit, and the feminine usage survived only in a few scattered Eastern texts and in the Gnostic literature that the proto-orthodox would soon declare heretical. The Nag Hammadi corpus, discovered in 1945, preserved Christian texts in which the divine feminine was central: Sophia, the Mother, the Bridal Chamber.13,14 These were the texts the Council of Nicaea’s heirs spent the next three centuries burning.
By the medieval West, the Trinity was three men.
Mary as Incubator
What was left for the feminine in Latin Christianity was Mary.
Mary’s theological function in the canonical Gospels is narrow. She conceives and bears Jesus, then speaks rarely throughout the texts. The Magnificat is her one substantial speech, a song of social reversal that the Church has tended to read past. After the Resurrection she appears in Acts and disappears from the narrative.
Mary is not divine. The official theology is precise on this point: she is a creature in Catholic dogma, fundamentally separate from the Godhead. Her role is to be the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the vessel through which the second person of the male Trinity took on flesh.
The function is incubation. The text gives her a uterus and a yes; it does not give her divinity. The actual divine actor in the Annunciation is the male Holy Spirit, who overshadows her. The valuable cargo is male.
This is the official Roman Catholic dogmatic position from the Council of Ephesus in 431 forward. Mary is honored as Theotokos because of what she carried.15
What complicates the picture is that ordinary Christians, century after century, have refused to leave it there. The Marian cult in Catholic and Orthodox practice has consistently treated Mary as something much more than her dogmatic definition allows. She has been called Queen of Heaven, the same title Jeremiah was condemning. Catholic and Orthodox art has depicted her on thrones identical to those of Isis with Horus on her lap. Around her have accumulated apparitions, miracles, sanctuaries, and intercessory traffic that, in any other religion, would be the cult of a goddess.16
The same pattern as the Shekhinah. The official theology declares the divine male and singular. The female pressure breaks through anyway, finding whichever crack the official structure left available. In the rabbinic tradition the crack was the indwelling presence. In Catholic practice it was the mother of the male God.
The divine female returns in both traditions, disguised as something other than herself.
What Was Lost
The arc runs like this. The earliest religion of the region was a divine family with a father, a mother, and seventy sons. One of the sons was promoted by his followers to exclusivity. His promotion required the elimination of his siblings and the demotion of his mother. The official cult of the male God spent eight centuries trying to drive the goddess out, and never fully succeeded. She returned in personifications: Wisdom, Spirit, Shekhinah. The translations into Greek and Latin re-gendered her toward neuter and male, and the institutional Christianity of the West built a Trinity of three masculine persons. The feminine, having been excised from the Godhead, returned through the side door as Mary, who was permitted to incubate the male God without being divine in her own right.
What was lost was a religious imagination in which the divine had a mother. Asherah, named, with her own temple and her own priesthood, who could be asked for things directly. That religion was driven underground in stages and has surfaced repeatedly under various disguises ever since.
The Shekhinah is the most explicit return. The rabbis wrote her into the cracks of a monotheism that officially had no room for her, and she walked back in as the bride of God. By accident or otherwise, she is Asherah’s revenge.
Bibliography
1. Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. Second edition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
2. Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
3. Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
4. Olyan, Saul M. Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel. SBL Monograph Series 34. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.
5. Day, John. Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 265. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.
6. Dever, William G. Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.
7. Meshel, Ze’ev. Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Ḥorvat Teman): An Iron Age II Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2012.
8. Hadley, Judith M. The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
9. Ackerman, Susan. Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah. Harvard Semitic Monographs 46. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992.
10. Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Third enlarged edition. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.
11. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1941.
12. Brock, Sebastian P. The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition. Syrian Churches Series 9. Kottayam, India, 1979. Third edition, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008.
13. Robinson, James M., editor. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Third revised edition. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988.
14. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.
15. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
16. Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Knopf, 1976.
License
“The Shekhinah: A History of the Banished Bride” © 2026 by Kevin Cann is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/