Did God have a wife?
A provocative series is airing on PBS: “Bible’s Buried Secrets.” The most subversive segment, “Did God have a wife?” (video) captured the most attention from me. I wondered whether it would spill intoxicating information I have garnered over years of doing feminist research. “Did God have a wife?” did not seem feminist to me during most of the hour, although its female scholar, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, reaches for provocation. Her main point is that common perceptions about the Bible and God as taught by the Judaeo/Christian tradition are upended by archaeological finds. They show that Hebrew ancestors of the Jews did not practice monotheism. Jews also did not invent monotheism, but that point was less clear in the documentary. For hundreds of thousands of years, what is called God was a woman. She had many different names, but She was not rivaled by males. They were her consorts, not her superiors. The Great Mother gave life, and what we would call...