William Durand-Poor

That the other Canaanite tribes, although they didn't seem to call themselves Canaanites, that's what Egyptian sources certainly call them, that they all more or less share the same pantheon.

Yes, that you're tolerant of each other's deities.

And one of these gods is one that appears a lot in the Old Testament, who is Baal.

Who's he?

He's got thunderbolts and that sort of stuff.

It sounds very, very Jim Morrison.

Riders on the storm, yeah.

Not only do you have this very unfamiliar world of many gods and a goddess, but Asherah, like the female gods of Mesopotamia that we meet in Gilgamesh and so on, is quite sensual.

This is not a sort of chaste and goody-two-shoes goddess.

Some scholars have said that.

This is early sexism trying to pollute this cult.

We're going to take a break now, but after the break, we'll find out how this very unfamiliar world gets edited to the more familiar world that we read about in the current edition of the Old Testament.

Welcome back, Francesca.

So we opened with this very unfamiliar world of many gods and goddesses in worship by the Israelites in a way that, you know, most of our religious educations does not teach us.

Now, how do we move from that world to the world that we get read out to us in church or synagogue or a mosque today?

What is the editing process that means that Yahweh loses his Asherah?

Samaria is kind of modern Nablus, isn't it?

It sounds a bit like either the English Reformation or the Taliban, where you have someone just sort of knocking down gods, destroying things and telling people to worship this.

And this is an incredibly powerful idea that then gets boosted

After the Israelites are defeated, they move to Babylon, their temple is destroyed, and in exile, they rebuild their religion in a very different way.