Let me put it this way .... why aren't kids told that god had/has a wife in Sunday school? If this dame was the 'life partner' of god, you'd think she would rate at least a mention - no matter how little is actually written about her. Why isn't she ever mentioned in churches? There's no merit to saying 'not much was said about her, so she doesn't matter', because some stuff which matters very much to Christians is mentioned as little or less. It reeks, to me, of deliberate dismissal. As for John, I've read all that (no goog on phone ... too data hungry ), but not sure why it would upset a fundie?
Well crank, back in the day when I ‘taught’ in a Sunday school I was faced with a bunch of 7 year olds. I should hope they enjoyed my gripping Bible stories, but I made sure to leave enough time for just playing and having fun. Should these kids later on have chosen “religion” as a class in highschool (yes, German state schools actually offer classes in religion) they would have been taught about how the ancient Israelites were once polytheists and how they got to become monotheists. The theory that the Goddess Ashera and the God Jawhe may have been married in the early Israelite pantheon makes for an interesting side note for teenagers sweating over ancient Israelite history, but it doesn’t really make all that stuff about the Canaanites, Midianites, Hittites etc. less dry. You probably never were exposed to Old Testament Studies in school, but I’m sure deep down you are clever enough to have gathered by now, why this Ashera thing is really not as exciting as you are trying to sell it, at least not to anybody who has a halfway profound education in religion. And I say that as a Feminist. Of course you may still like to think of God as an old bearded fellow sitting on a cloud, but I certainly made sure that the 7 year old kids in my 20th century Sunday School classes did not. Point being that your favourite sort of fundie-Christians like to call the Bible the Word of God, when indeed the Bible itself makes no such claims but clearly tells you that the Word of God was Jesus - not a book but a person.
