The next few installments of this blog are going to address similar topics. They are, in fact, pieces of a much larger topic. However, because each of them is significant in and of themselves, I thought it would be more digestible in segments...I'm interested in your thoughts.
I did not start out wanting to be a religious scholar. Nothing in my youth pointed to the fact that I was interested in dogma or religion per se. What I was interested in was the dynamics of religion, most especially that of their culture, the societal structure and power structures and how that affected their followers. From a very young age (6), I have vivid memories of attending church and hearing lessons and purposely discarding concepts that I thought were stupid, or that did not seem right. Like author and religious scholar Sue Monk Kidd, I attended a Baptist denomination and I heard many of the same messages:
"God is a man...it says in the Bible God the Father, so he must be a man"
"Jesus was a man"
"Eve committed the first sin"
"The ONLY way to salvation is through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your savior"
"If you change denominations, many churches require that you be re-baptized, as if one is not enough"
"A personal relationship with God did not mean you didn't need an intermediary"
I still have huge issues with many of these points and did so even as a small child, but lets examine each the first of these issues:
God is a Man
Even in my early religious upbringing the point was clear...God was a Man. The scriptures (The Bible and Torah) referred to him in terms of Lord, Father, Master, etc these were very gender specific concepts, even for a young child, but no one missed the point. Women were not God, nor like God (or were they?), maybe they were not evil or the embodiment of evil, but they were definitely different than men and as a result other than God. After all, God was a man, Jesus was a man, so just by being male you had to be closer to God than a woman? Right? Well, I did not think so. Though it would not be until years later that this very point would become such a central point of my study and work, but when I finally found the insight I was looking for, the reaction both personally and academically was profound.
In Beyond God The Father, author and Feminist Theology scholar Mary Daly wrote, "If God is Male, then Male is God," (Beacon, 1973). What she was saying is that by equating gender language to God, most specifically that of masculine identity, the other gender is removed from God or is defined as "other." It set the stage for what was deemed powerful, good and the ideal, in short - male. It defined the power paradigms and seemed to justify the marginalization of anything that that did not embody the masculine ideal. Think about that for just a moment. That was certainly the message I had received from a myriad of pulpits and Sunday school classes over the years. It was mirrored not only in Christianity, but in Judaism and Islam as well.
This has been a defining premise of my studies. The concept of a God, of which humankind was fashioned in the image of could only be conveyed in the embodiment of masculine form and language. But lets start at the beginning...The Book of Genesis, it does note get much more "beginning" than that.
The JPS Hebrew-English TANAKH, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1999. Pg. 2,
States:
Genesis 1:26-27
And God said "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish
of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth and all creeping things that creep on
the earth. 26 And God created *(hu)man in his image, in the image of God He created him;
male and female he created them."27
*(hu) is my addition because the Hebrew word used is quite acceptably translated as human, even thought he TANAKH chooses to use the word man.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible - Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 2001, Pg. 14,
States:
26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let
them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle,
and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the
earth." 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male
and female he created them.
I've read these passages dozens of times in my life and had never really given them much thought, it certainly never occurred to me to actually question the legitimacy of the translation or even the word choice. Yet that is exactly that I am doing now...in fact what I am asking you as the reader to do. What do you notice about these two excerpts?
Let's break it down:
In the Torah translation (and incidentally it is also true in the original Hebrew), God said:
"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Anyone pick on the interesting fact that the monotheistic God of the Ancient Israelites...the foundation of monotheism in the Western world is a plural? And yet there can really be no dispute of the language chosen, the pronouns that God uses when describing God, is us and our.
While that is certainly interesting, there is more to consider. I have long contended that if humankind was fashioned in the image of God, that it would be impossible for God to solely be male. After all, how did woman get created in the image of God if there was not a feminine reflection upon which to base her. Both the Hebrew and Christian scripture support this concept with the statement "and female he created them."
It all comes down to language, gender language. Hebrew, like many of the world's languages does not have neutral category or gender-less category. By the advent of the written word, the world's power paradigms had largely been defined and masculine had won out over feminine in many cultures. Yet despite this explanation, or even the modern religious answer of "God has no gender" the literary and cultural inference exists and is damaging.
Many religious communities, both within Judaism and Christianity, are working diligently to re-work scripture to gender balanced language. It will likely take countless generations for a significant consciousness shift to occur, but it is happening.
If you want to find out why I think this matters, check back in the next day or so.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible - Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 2001, Pg. 14,
States:
26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let
them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle,
and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the
earth." 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male
and female he created them.
I've read these passages dozens of times in my life and had never really given them much thought, it certainly never occurred to me to actually question the legitimacy of the translation or even the word choice. Yet that is exactly that I am doing now...in fact what I am asking you as the reader to do. What do you notice about these two excerpts?
Let's break it down:
In the Torah translation (and incidentally it is also true in the original Hebrew), God said:
"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Anyone pick on the interesting fact that the monotheistic God of the Ancient Israelites...the foundation of monotheism in the Western world is a plural? And yet there can really be no dispute of the language chosen, the pronouns that God uses when describing God, is us and our.
While that is certainly interesting, there is more to consider. I have long contended that if humankind was fashioned in the image of God, that it would be impossible for God to solely be male. After all, how did woman get created in the image of God if there was not a feminine reflection upon which to base her. Both the Hebrew and Christian scripture support this concept with the statement "and female he created them."
It all comes down to language, gender language. Hebrew, like many of the world's languages does not have neutral category or gender-less category. By the advent of the written word, the world's power paradigms had largely been defined and masculine had won out over feminine in many cultures. Yet despite this explanation, or even the modern religious answer of "God has no gender" the literary and cultural inference exists and is damaging.
Many religious communities, both within Judaism and Christianity, are working diligently to re-work scripture to gender balanced language. It will likely take countless generations for a significant consciousness shift to occur, but it is happening.
If you want to find out why I think this matters, check back in the next day or so.
Moreover, the word translated "God" is merely a generic term, and a PLURAL one at that, meaning "overlords/rulers." For, as the late Sumerian linguist and Jewish scholar Zecharia Sitchin detailed exhaustively in his eight books (at least three of which dealt with suppressed ancient history in the Middle East), the Genesis account is not about the Creator of the universe making humankind but, rather, a mere summary (and an overly short, misleading one at that) of an extensive Sumerian account left recorded on stelae some 3,000 years beforehand.
ReplyDeleteThe Sumerians documented the creation of homo sapiens by the Anunnaki -- ET colonizers who "came from the skies" and whose medical officers (also geneticists) mixed Anunnaki DNA with the DNA of homo erectus females in a laboratory setting. They then had Anunnaki women carry the hybrid embryos to term ... after several unsuccessful tries, they succeeded in creating the first human. And why did they do this? Because they needed slave workers for their gold mines and their agricultural enterprises.
One of the names used for God and it is used fairly often is Elohim. This word points directly at the God El a Mesopotamian valley God who is well documented as was a God of Fire/Sky/Volcano. The plural form used (in Hebrew) for discussion of this name is believed by some religious scholars to be representative of a divine couple...i.e. God/Goddess. Regarding your summation of ET, my discussions will center on a more terrestrial perspective of religion, rather than celestial.
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