The Restoration of the Biblical Mother Goddess

One of the numerous ways that the opponents of Christ’s Restored Church attack it is over the restored doctrine that God the Father is married, that He has a Divine Wife. As can be seen in this typical example, the assertion is that the Bible doesn’t teach that God is married, so the idea is a false doctrine and the church is false. The only problem with this argument is that there are actually numerous biblical references which testify that Heavenly Mother is real. The restoration of this truth despite the total ignorance of it in Christianity is actually a powerful evidence of the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith.

The first thing to realize is that the Bible is an extremely flawed book. As an angel explained to Nephi, the texts that eventually made up the Bible were intentionally edited by uninspired men who altered and removed “plain and precious truths,” from those texts. Those scribes did this in order to change the religion of the people, twisting and breaking the everlasting covenant as was prophesied in Isaiah 24:5. One of those twisted, broken, and lost plain and precious truths was the Divine Family. To understand how this happened, why it happened and how we have begun to recover these ancient truths in the modern day, we must first understand the so-called Reforms of King Josiah.

The Apostasy of Josiah

According to Dr. Moshe Weinfeld, emeritus Professor of the Bible at the Hebrew University:

As the Bible tells it, in the course of repairing the Temple, which had apparently been considerably neglected, the high priest at this time, one Hilkiah, “found” an important scroll. The biblical text calls it the “Book of the Law” (Sepher ha-Torah) (2 Kings 22:8). In a later retelling of this event, in Chronicles 34:14, it is called the “Book of the Law of the Lord given by the hand of Moses” (Sepher Torat Yahweh b-yad Moshe). Virtually all scholars agree that this book (or, more precisely, this scroll) was a form, probably an early version, of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Pentateuch.

…The name is appropriate because Deuteronomy repeats the law and history contained in the other four Pentateuchal books (sometimes called the Tetrateuch), presented as a long farewell speech by Moses. As we shall see, however, some radical changes are introduced into this second telling. …The Book of Deuteronomy incorporates significant changes in both beliefs and worship as well as in social and moral values.

Deuteronomy’s Theological Revolution

Academics describe the religious school of scribes and believers that promulgated these radical changes to the revealed religion of Moses as the Deuteronomists and their ideas as Deuteronomistic. They even altered the scriptures in order to put their doctrines into the mouth of God and His prophets. Among these radical changes the Deuteronomists instituted was the intentional destruction of all holy places and the centralization of all sacrificial worship in Jerusalem. Before this, Israelites worshipped in numerous places, wherever they lived. No longer. Henceforth, all religious power would be focused on Jerusalem. This placed all political and religious power in the same place, making it easier for the king and high priest to control all of society.

The Deuteronomists transformed the temple from the house of God to being the place of God’s name. This was part of a larger effort “to eliminate the corporeality of the traditional divine imagery,” i.e. to deny God of His physical form and body. The older faith maintained that men could see and even touch God – Jacob wrestled God Himself and was renamed Israel (He who wrestles with God) as a result. The Deuteronomists argued that you could not even hear God’s voice without being destroyed. This is a very convenient belief if you want to ignore all contemporary prophets who challenge you (as the Deuteronomists did in persecuting Jeremiah and Lehi) and explain away the absence of any other prophets. The Ark of the Covenant goes form being the Throne of God in His House, the temple, to merely being a nice repository for the things within it.

One of the main missions of the Deuteronomists was to eliminate the idea of sacrificial atonements. In the older faith, atonement was made by the sacrifice on animals and the shedding of blood. The scapegoat ceremony specifically had the high priest lay hands upon a sacrificial goat and transfer all the sins of the people onto the animal. Then the goat was made an offering to God. Thus, through blood sacrifice would the sins of the people be expiated. The Deuteronomists changed the purpose of sacrifice entirely, making them obligatory ways of expressing gratitude to God for His blessings. The atoning of sins was eliminated altogether. It was the removal of these truths, along with many others, that denuded (and denudes) the Deuteronomistic faith by stripping it of the rituals, beliefs, and doctrines of the Atoning Messiah that are preserved in the Book of Mormon. Indeed, it may very well be that Lehi, who preached against the Deuteronomistic changes and was nearly killed by the Deuteronomistic priests, was led out of Jerusalem when he was in order to preserve the ancient truth that Jehovah Himself would be the Atoning Messiah.

In their crusade to destroy the physical existence of God and reduce Him merely to a spiritual fire and scary voice, one of the plain and precious truths that was destroyed by the Deuteronomists is that God is married – that our Heavenly Father has a Heavenly Wife who is our Heavenly Mother.

The Heavenly Wife

In contrast to the monotheistic god of the Apostasy of Josiah, the religion revealed to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses had at its head a Divine Council. Dr. Michael S. Heiser explains the Divine Council this way (pg. 292):

The term divine council is used by Hebrew and Semitics scholars to refer to the heavenly host, the pantheon of divine beings who administer the affairs of the cosmos. All ancient Mediterranean cultures had some conception of a divine council. The divine council of Israelite religion, known primarily through the Psalms, was distinct in important ways.

^{Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings, Hebrew Bible, pg. 292}

Of the Divine Council, and the drive by later Israelite “reformers” to eliminate their polytheist past in order to transform the Israelite religion into a strictly monotheistic one, the editors of the Jewish Study Bible wrote:

As a broader model for understanding such issues, it would be helpful to view the religion of Israel reflected by Deuteronomy in the preexilic period as in many ways a “Near Eastern” religion. This applies preeminently to the original theology of the text, which, like all religions of its time and place, viewed its god as presiding over a “divine council” of lesser deities (5.7 n.; 6.4 n.). From this perspective, texts like the Shema called for exclusive loyalty to God, without thereby denying the existence of other deities, just as Near Eastern treaties required that a vassal swear allegiance to a single political monarch (6.4-g n.). But once radical monotheism became the Jewish norm in the Second Temple period, under the influence of exilic prophecy, the original “Israelite” view gradually became “foreign” and unintelligible. The Shema could only be understood as affirming the later “truth” of Jewish monotheism. This authentically Israelite religious language seems to have become so alien that the Hebrew text was “corrected” in several cases to bring it into conformity with later Jewish theology

^{The Transformation of Deuteronomy in the Second Temple Period, The Jewish Study Bible, pgs. 342-343}

This council was led by El, the Head God of the Gods, and Yahweh as the eldest or first son of El was head of the bene Elohim, the Sons of God. This relationship can be seen in the work of Dr. Mark S. Smith who has argued that Yahweh was originally subordinate to El in the Divine Council and that Yahweh was the head of the Sons of God:

The author of Psalm 82 deposes the older theology, as Israel’s deity is called to assume a new role as judge of all the world. Yet at the same time, Psalm 82, like Deut 32:8-9, preserves the outlines of the older theology it is rejecting. From the perspective of this older theology, Yahweh did not belong to the top tier of the pantheon. Instead, in early Israel the god of Israel apparently belonged to the second tier of the pantheon; he was not the presider god, but one of his sons.

^{The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, pg. 49}

You can also see Dr. Smith speaking in more detail about the pre-Josiah Israelite religion’ regarding’s worship of El (God), the Divine Council of the gods, and the divine sons of God starting at the 45:00 minute mark in this video. Going farther though, El and Yahweh were not just part of the Divine Council, they were part of the Divine Family. El is God the Father of the sons of God, including Yahweh/Jehovah. But that isn’t all and it isn’t metaphorical. El is a father because He has a wife with whom He has fathered children and Yahweh is a son because He has a Divine Mother. Kevin L. Barney explains:

[A]t first the Hebrews worshipped a small pantheon consisting of the high god El, his consort (scholar-speak for “wife”) Asherah, their sons Yahweh and Baal, and the other (less important and often unnamed) sons of the Gods. …this early pluralistic understanding of God also developed over time in the movement toward monotheism. Baal was a very similar deity to Yahweh and therefore was excluded from the pantheon very early to make way for Yahweh’s claims. El was more complementary to Yahweh in his characteristics, so he and Yahweh were simply merged into each other (resulting in the compound name Yahweh Elohim, rendered “the LORD God” in the King James Version). The other sons of the Gods became angels—still divine beings, but a lower class of being than the dominant Yahweh.

The understanding of Asherah changed over time in response to these developments. At first She was the wife of El, the mother and procreator of the Gods. As El was merged into Yahweh (around the tenth century B.C.E.), Asherah came to be viewed as the consort, not of El, but of Yahweh. …Eventually, the functions of Asherah were also absorbed into Yahweh’s; then, in an effort to put a stop to any independent worship of Her, reformers linked Her polemically to (the now thoroughly discredited) Baal, despite the fact that such a linkage does not seem to have had any historical basis. This reform movement against the worship of Asherah took place from the eighth to the sixth centuries B.C.E.; and by the time of the conclusion of the Babylonian Exile, the worship of Asherah as such had been stamped out.

The Evidence

The historical literature on this subject is vast, but two non-LDS biblical and ancient Hebrew scholars stand out in both their specializations and their discoveries. First, we will look at the work of Dr. Margaret Barker as she is an expert in the text of the Bible and its transmission through history. Secondly, we will look at the archeological work done by Dr. William Denver, one of the foremost experts on the subject of what the physical evidence tells us about what the ancient Israelites actually believed and how they lived.

The Biblical Text

Dr. Margaret Barker is a retired Methodist preacher and biblical scholar who read theology at the University of Cambridge, was awarded her Doctorate in Divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was formerly President of The Society for Old Testament Study. Her work has been focused extensively on the text of the Bible itself, both the history of its transmission that can be found within it and how it compares to the texts as old as those within it but which were not included in the Bible itself. For example, she has done work comparing the Isaiah texts in the Old Testament to those found at Qumran which is the oldest complete text of Isaiah. In the address below, titled Restoring Solomon’s Temple, Dr. Barker explores the textual evidences for Heavenly Mother within the text of the Bible itself in their oldest forms, the role of God’s wife in ancient temple worship (including the Divine Family), and the changes that Josiah and his conspirators made in the religion and temple worship of ancient Israel.

Now, that video is too long for me to completely detail here, but I want to provide some points that I thought interesting and encourage you to listen to the whole thing:

1. Around the 5 minute mark, Dr. Barker points out that King Josiah made all these reforms to the temple and religion of Israel and then Babylon invades and destroys the kingdom, conquering the city and subjugating the people. This is not what happens to righteous followers of God. This is what happens to apostates who have abandoned God and no longer qualify for His protection.
2. Around the 11 minute mark, Dr. Barker points out that the early Christians rejected the temple worship of the Second Temple Era, which was base don Josiah’s “reforms,” and saw themselves as restoring the ancient temple worship of Solomon’s Temple, which was based on the teachings of Abraham and Melchizedek.
3. Around the 16 minute mark, Dr. Barker begins explaining how in Solomon’s Temple, which were the ancient forms of worship going back to Abraham, the Israelites had recognized Asherah, the Mother of the Lord, and had symbols of her in the temple itself. This was changed by Josiah and his conspirators.
4. Around the 19 minute mark, Dr. Barker discusses how Josiah (and his later disciples) removed the angel-priests of the temple, eliminated the recognition of the Divine Mother, and altered the texts of the scriptures to justify these changes. One of these changes was to eliminate references to the sons of God in the text of the scriptures because to admit God has literal children means He also has a wife to be their mother.
5. Around the 30 minute mark, Dr. Barker explains that lineal descent from Abraham was irrelevant, but that the covenant of the First Temple which came from Abraham was known by the Apostle Paul, which is why he was so willing to abandon the Law of Moses after defending it for so long. Christianity is the restored religion of Abraham, not the false doctrines of Josiah.
6. Around the 43 minute mark, after exploring numerous texts, Dr. Barker explains that the Menorah of the ancient temple had not just been a large candelabra. The ancient Menorah had been decorated as a Tree of Life whose flames were glowing fruit at the end of its branches. It an asherah tree which symbolized the Divine Mother, and that this symbol had been changed to eliminate that symbolism in the Second Josiah-based Temple.
7. Dr. Barker then compares this changed symbol to the symbolism of Revelation, where Jesus promised to restore the Tree of Life to His followers along with its light and fruit. Part of this is the restoration of the garments of light given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
8. At the 1 hour mark, Dr. Barker explains that early Christians came to adore Mary because of her relation to Asherah, the Wife of God. Asherah was the Mother of Jehovah as a spirit and Mary was the Mother of Jesus, Jehovah born as a human. The ancient Solomon’s Temple symbolism of the Divine Mother seating her divine son on the Cherubim Throne of the Ark of the Covenant was restored in Christianity with Mary seating her divine son on the throne of the new Ark, her own womb. Mary, the human God-bearer was in similitude of Asherah, the divine God-bearer.

The Physical Evidence

Dr. William G. Dever was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona, was Director of the Harvard Semitic Museum-Hebrew Union College Excavations at Gezer from 1966 to 1971, has since been the director of numerous excavations in Palestine and the larger Mediterranean area, and Professor of Judaic Studies & Near Eastern Studies at the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona (now emeritus.) His expertise with the archeological record of Israelite and Jewish culture, history, and religion is extensive and firsthand. He, in fact, pioneered many of the discoveries and insights now common in historical studies of ancient Israel that are now take for granted as facts by contemporary academics. In other words, he made the discoveries and had the insights that laid the foundation for what we now know about the ancient Israelites that are now taken for granted decades before those insights were understood by other academics.

Through his numerous archaeological – including statues, inscriptions, altars, and temple sites, among many others – Dr. Denver has irrefutably demonstrated that the ancient Israelites worshipped an ancient Mother Goddess, the Wife of God known as Asherah, the “Mother of the Gods.” (pg. 226) This video has him going into a multitude of examples from a large variety of artifacts to prove this fact again and again and again.

This summary, based on this original list from another authoress, is a good summation of the video. Because I have borrowed it from another source, it is not tied as directly to times in the video above. But all the points in this list are made in the video based off of hard physical evidence as shown in the video and roughly in the order as presented in the video.

1. God, El, was always part of a council of gods. He is the Head God of the gods.
2. El was the oldest divinity on the council.  Yahweh/Jehovah and Ba’al were El’s sons.  There were also female gods in the council or pantheon. It worth remembering that what Ba’al means is entire contextual. The word itself means owner or master and applies in different ways depending on how it is used. Who or what Ba’al was differed greatly among different cultures. The Ba’al of the Israelites and the Ba’al worshipped in Phoenicia may or may not have been the same conceptual being.
3. Asherah was El’s consort and partner in the Creation. Asherah was God’s wife.  She is symbolized by a tree (often with female form on the top half) or a pole seen as a simplified or symbolic tree. Often her symbols were just called by her name. Hence an Asherah may refer to the pole use to signify her or it may refer to the Wife of God herself.
4. Israelite religion was a subset of Canaanite religion. It underwent massive changes over its history. One of those was the elimination of El from worship as “reformers” worked to combine El and Yahweh into the same being.
5. One of the results of these multiple “reformations” throughout Israelite history was that while El and Asherah had been worshipped as a divine Husband and Wife, later on she was seen as the divine wife of Yahweh/Jehovah.
6. Asherah was widely worshiped in ancient Israel and Canaan, alongside El and later Yahweh. We find temple worship sites dedicated to El and Asherah or, later, Yahweh and Asherah wherever a large population of Israelites lived. Apostasy warped and corrupted her identity long before apostasy completely eliminated her altogether.
7. There are a large collection of Asherah symbols and statues in a multitude of Israelite homes and burial sites all across what is today called the Levant. Her artifacts are ubiquitous in sites from ancient Canaan and Israel.
8. Asherah being God’s Wife and the Heavenly Mother of the gods was a mainstream religious belief of the religion revealed by God to the Israelites until she was eliminated by reformers starting before the Babylonian Captivity (when Lehi left Jerusalem) and continuing afterwards. These “reformers” are the aforementioned Deuteronomists.

A Side Note on Worshipping The Mother Goddess

Connected to Point 6 above – and this is my thought, not Dr. Denver’s – the fact that ancient people worshipped Asherah was likely as wrong as the Deuteronomists eliminating her. The focus of faith in this mortal experience is almost exclusively Yahweh/Jesus Christ and our emulation, veneration, worship, and relationship to Him. Even though we pray to the Father, all acts or worship are done in the name of, by the power of, and under the direction of the Son, Jesus Christ. All blessings come only in and through the Son. When we are baptized we are spiritually reborn and are adopted into the family of Jesus (Mosiah 5:7) with Jesus becoming our Father and we becoming His children. (see Subheading 3.) In contrast, we know very little about our Father In heaven. In fact, we know as much (or as little) about Heavenly Father as we do Heavenly Mother, which is next to nothing. This specifically because our salvation and exaltation comes through Christ alone. Therefore it is that and He learn most about.

Even with what little knowledge we have of Heavenly Mother, there are Saints wanting to pray to her, encourage worship of her, and use her to push their destructive social agendas. In doing so, they take their eyes off of Christ, damning themselves and leading astray all those foolish enough to listen to these ignorant preachers. The Israelites couldn’t handle the truth in the past and ended up worshipping Heavenly Mother. Today, many likewise want to or are doing the same. What little knowledge they have is too much for them to act upon with wisdom or faith. Their profound arrogance leads them to demand more, be given inspired and revealed direction from the Lord through His servants, and then refuse to follow the Prophets and Apostles of God because they, and really He, didn’t say what you wanted to hear. They are modern Deuteronomists trying to rewrite the God-revealed religion so that it will be in the likeness of the world, so that it will accommodate and promoted their specific social and political beliefs. That’s why we don’t have more modern revelations on Heavenly Mother – the fools among us are already apostatizing with what little knowledge they have already. They can neither have nor do they deserve more.

Evidence of The Restoration

So then, the ancient Israelites worshipped a Divine family consisting of El, the Head God of the gods, Asherah, HIs Wife and Mother of the gods, and Yahweh/Jehovah, the son of El and Asherah and head of the Sons of God. Creation was not carried out as a single divine being ordering all things into being from nothing nor was existence maintained by the Singular Will. Rather, in the religion revealed to Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, the gods formed creation in council, decisions about how creation would function were made in council and carried out by the members of the council. The ancient Israelites knew that not only was El, God, a physical being, but that He was married to a Divine Mother often called Asherah, and that Jehovah was His Son. This means that Asherah was, quite literally, Heavenly Mother.

This religion was intentionally attacked and destroyed by King Josiah and his priests. Academics typically call this group the Deuteronomists after the book of Deuteronomy. This is because the Deuteronomists claim to have randomly discovered the book of Deuteronomy in the temple. Most likely the book was either invented by them or, more likely, was a preexisting text which they massively altered to justify their actions. They also intentionally altered other religious texts that would one day be included in the Bible in order to accomplish the same goals. This robbed the faith of much of the divine truths given by God about the coming of the Messiah. Prophets such as Jeremiah and Lehi were called to reveal this apostasy and restore these truths to the people. Consequently, these prophets were viciously persecuted by the priestly class for attacking the lies that justified their power.

The end product of this process is what is today in the Holy Bible, a text which has been corrupted by the actions of apostates multiple times over the course of thousands of years with the purpose of obliterating the true religion of God and substituting a false monotheistic religion in its place. This new apostate religion worshipped a god that cannot be seen, heard, or understood, which has no emotions, no wife, and is father (or son in Christianity) only in the loosest and most metaphorical of senses. Modern day Judaism and Christianity, based as they are on these altered and corrupted texts, then are nothing more than the products and promoters of apostasy. Neither is the revealed religion of God. If they were then they would know the truth of God, His Wife, and Jehovah the Son of God and His Wife.

Regarding Christianity, it is tantalizing that so many of the Deuteronomistic changes mirror what would later happen in Christianity as it formulated the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds which proclaimed the worship of a singular monotheistic god without body, parts, or passions (meaning no emotions or feelings whatsoever) who is both unseen and unseeable. Seeing how apostasy in the far ancient history mirrored the path of apostasy after Christ and His Apostles makes it clear that all of it is the work of Satan corrupting the true and revealed religion of God in the same ways each time. That this corruption ends up worshipping a god like Satan himself – a being of eternal spirit with no body, no parts, no children, no wife, and who cannot feel love – is not accidental. Satan desperately wants to be the savior and wants men to worship him as the savior. (Moses 1:19) Neither Christianity nor Judaism worship God. None of them worship El or Asherah or Yahweh/Jehovah. They worship Satan in all but name.

As we come to understand these facts, it becomes a powerful testimony of the Book of Mormon because the symbolism of the ancient Divine Family that existed before Josiah’s apostasy, including and especially the symbolism of the Divine Mother is in the Book of Mormon. When paralleled with the remnant evidences for the Divine Mother, wife of God and Mother of Yahweh, that can still be found in the texts that make up the Bible, the presence of the teachings and symbolism of the Divine Mother as found in the Book of Mormon (see also the 47:00 mark) becomes positive historical evidence for the authentic origins of the book as a pre-Exile religious text with roots in the ancient religion of Israel before it was corrupted by Josiah.

The preservation of these divine truths may even be one of the purposes that Lehi and his family are commanded to leave Jerusalem when they did, during the Deuteronomist Revolution and just before the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon. There is even evidence that the family conflicts between Lehi and Nephi on one side and Laman and Lemuel on the other hand may have been based on the fact that Lehi and Nephi adhered to the ancient religion, which recognized Asherah and the Divine Council, while Laman and Lemuel were Deuteronomists. The Prophet Lehi preserved the ancient, true religion as delivered by God to His people while those left behind were apostates doomed to destruction for abandoning God and, in the words of Isaiah, twisting and breaking the everlasting covenant.

The restoration of this truth, the reality of the Divine Family, through the Prophet Joseph Smith, over a century before any academic would realize it and as preached by prophets and apostles since, is a restoration of plain and precious truths to us by God. No one else in all the world knew these things. They mocked us for believing them. Now the world knows we were right about them from the start. But they conveniently ignore it because of the implications for what that means about Joseph’s divine call. His restoration of El as the Head God of the gods, of a Mother in Heaven to whom He was married, of Yahweh/Jehovah as their eldest son and head of all the sons of God, and the Divine Council of the gods planning and carrying out the Creation (as seen Chapters 3-5 in Book of Abraham) were not based on decades of archeological research and mastery of Hebrew, Aramaic, and ancient Greek as well as a deep scholarly knowledge of ancillary scriptural texts like Second Enoch or the Book of Jubilees.

Instead, Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God restoring by revelation ancient truths that had been lost for thousands of years and wouldn’t be rediscovered for over a century more by the academics, linguists, and scholars of the world. Further, the Prophet didn’t just restore a form of these truths, he restored the purest and most ancient versions of these truths. The Prophet restored these truths in their fullest and purest forms long before anyone else would even have a sniff of them and while everyone else thought him insane for teaching them. Even now the ignorant atheistic and apostate masses mock him for being an ignorant conman when history, as demonstrated here, has only shown the Prophet Joseph Smith to be correct again and again and again about things which no one in his time knew and which very few even now understand. History has vindicated the Prophet once more and always will.

We can accept these facts and truths or reject them. I hope that you will. As a convert, I know that I had to change a great deal of what I already thought to be true because so much of what I thought I knew was wrong. Christianity is full of so much corruption at every level that when you begin to find the truth you have to jettison almost everything you thought you knew because it is completely wrong. But that is the great blessing of having modern Prophets and Apostles. There is so much that you, I, and everyone else gets wrong that we need to know. God has given us the means to discover those truths and increase our knowledge of and relationship to Him in ways we could not even understand before but, thanks the the Prophets and Apostles today, we can have now.

One of those great truths is the knowledge of our Heavenly Father, our Heavenly Mother, our Elder Brother and Savior Yahweh/Jesus Christ, and ourselves as Their holy children, the divine sons and daughters of God with potential to become like Them in every way. The truth that we are the Children of Heavenly Parents changes everything about who we are, our relationships to one another, the purpose of life, and our eternal destiny.

Thank God for these truths restored through His modern Prophets and Apostles!