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Home > Magazines > BAR > March/April 1979

Did Yahweh Have a Consort?

The new religious inscriptions from the Sinai

By Zeʼev Meshel

The book of Kings describes a time during the 9th–7th centuries B.C. when the land was divided into two kingdoms—Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Phoenicia and Israel were linked by commerce and royal marriages and Hebrew monotheism struggled to resist the attraction of pagan gods. The prophets Elijah, Elisha, Amos and Isaiah inveighed against transgressions. At Kuntillet Ajrud, a remote desert way-station in the wilderness of northern Sinai, we found evidence of the multiplicity of religious practices which provoked the prophets’ fury. 027 In three short seasons of excavation in 1975 and 1976 we uncovered […]

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Footnotes

1.

A wadi is a very dry river bed which flows only one or two days each winter when it rains. Then the water flows with furious and dangerous intensity.

2.

Numbers in parentheses refer to the plan above.

3.

The w which precedes the final word and two other words in the full transcription of the inscription is the particle which is translated “and.”

4.

An abecedary is an alphabet.

5.

The Samaria Ostraca are a collection of inscribed sherds found in excavations at Samaria, capital of the northern kingdom. The ostraca were commercial documents from about 800 B.C.