Thursday, February 14, 2008

A Woman's Religion





Is it possible that women have escaped mention in the Torah because they could have had a religion seperate from the men? I wonder if women did, in the time the Bible was written, have a religion of oral traditions passed down from mother to daughter that remained apart from the God of fathers and men. Usually in the Bible, as God is listing his references, he calls himself the God of Jacob or Isaac or Abraham and every once in a while will mention a matriarch like Rebecca. I wonder if this is at possible because the god we now know as God, YHWH, was perhaps a god of men. At a time when women's work and men's work was very seperate, it seems that it could be possible that there could have been seperate gods for the very different functions needed by each gender. Maybe women worshipped a goddess of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth or menstruation. I would also assume that men were more likely to write down their myths because they were the ones with access to an education, while I would assume practically all women were illiterate.

I know that it is true that the Judaism were understand as eventually written down as the Torah evolved slowly from a polytheistic religion indigenous to the area surrounding Isreal. I just wonder if perhaps this polytheism or at least the worship of a female deity could have lasted longer among female populations since their work was so often seperate from men's.

If this is true, I wonder how impossible it would be to add some of these traditions back into Judaism...in the time of early Christianity, all those who did attempt to add the feminine priniciple back into the idea of a divine failed...

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