The Goddess Myth

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A passage from Genesis 3:16 calls for a different reading as well: "For your husband you will long, and he will rule you" suggests that (most) women will sexually desire men in spite of the results--acknowledging, perhaps, the discomfort of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, and the fact that men can be real jerks. (The Hebrew word translated here as "rule," mashal, does not mean to rule by domination, but to rule as the sun rules the day and the moon rules the night. From this we can deduce that it refers to a kind of affinity between man and woman.)

While sexism in the Jewish community has kept these interpretations from greatly influencing Jewish education, they do exist in the tradition.

The God of the Hebrew Bible is meant to be a incorporeal (and therefore genderless) Being. Hebrew is a gendered language, however, and the masculine gender, which is the root form, is used in most cases to describe God. There are exceptions: For instance, Moses addresses God as feminine in Numbers 11:15. Also, many Hebrew words can be either masculine or feminine; it is how they are vocalized that determines their gender--and vocalization was determined by men. The "linguistic maleness" of God is exaggerated by translation into nongendered languages such as English. It has been solidified into a physical image of maleness by Christian theology, which has God "impregnating" a woman and "fathering" a son.

In biblical times, the new notion that God was beyond gender had to be radical and potentially very liberating, given the harsh realities of the older Canaanite, Egyptian, and Babylonian religions.

The Canaanite pantheon, for instance, was a product of incest. According to Canaanite epic poetry from the 14th-century B.C.E.[SMALL CAPS], the goddess Asherah had 70 children by her brother, the god El--including a son, Baal, and a daughter, Anat. El also impregnated Baal's daughter. Baal castrated El and then took his mother Asherah sexually. To complete the incestuous circle of this divine dysfunctional family, Baal then had sex with Anat. A symbolic reenactment of the incest between Baal and Asherah formed an essential part of Canaanite fertility rites. The Hebrew Bible found this tradition repugnant and commanded Jews to turn away from such gods and goddesses--a fact that many feminists, rather than applauding, have criticized as patriarchal.

In Egyptian mythology, the universe was created through an act of masturbation by the sun god Atum. When Isis' brother (and husband) Osiris was killed and dismembered, she recovered all his body parts except his penis; the artificial one she proceeded to make for him became a focus of Egyptian worship. At Osiris's bull festival, women carried a genitally explicit replica of him, operated by pulling strings.

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