Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [62]
The Old Testament contains at least forty passages in which the Yahweh prophets denounce the temple groves of Ashtoreth (Ishtar) with their sacred prostitution; and it is obvious that the Israelites celebrated her ritual almost universally until the middle of the seventh century.39
The much-vilified biblical character Jezebel was in reality a refined priestess of Baal and Astoreth, the Goddess, while her main nemesis, Elijah, a Yahweh zealot, as evidenced by his name, was a crude, dirty and hairy wildman. Except in the eyes of the Yahwists, Jezebel was considered Hebrew royalty, and her worship of the Great Goddess was consistent with what had existed prior to the Yahwist invasion. In fact, in the Old Testament the Yahwist priests are depicted as virtually foaming at the mouth in describing "their" people as worshipping Baal and Astoreth, but many of "their" people at this time were virgin girls who had been the only ones spared as the Yahwist thugs captured town after town, slaughtering the inhabitants, stealing their property and raping their young (Num. 31:17-18, et al.). These surviving girls continued their ancient tradition of worship, including that of the Goddess and assorted Baals, much to the constant frustration and outrage of the sexist, patriarchal and virgin-enslaving Yahwists.
In order to establish their supremacy, the creed and duty of the Yahwists were as follows:
You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess served their gods, upon the high mountains and upon the hills and under every green tree; you shall tear down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and burn their Asherim with fire; you shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy their name out of that place. (Deut. 12:2-3)
Part of the Hebrews' ancient worship included the establishment of "high places" where they set up altars and other religious accoutrements, including the "Asherim," or singular Asherah, "the stylized multibranched tree symbolizing the Great Goddess of Canaan."40 The Asherim were erected by Hebrews such as the patriarch Abraham in Beer-Sheba, yet later Yahwist fanatics destroyed them.41 These Asherim in sacred groves served as "astronomical instruments," reflecting the connection between trees and the stars, which possessed the names of trees.42
These sacred high places were specially constructed all over the Levant as sites of sacrifice, both animal and human, by nonSemites and Semites alike, the latter of whom were, in fact, the last people to maintain human sacrifice, into Hadrian's time, when it was banned.43 These sacrifices on high places, however, served not only for the propitiation of the Gods but also to provide food, and this was the major reason the monopolizing Yahwists went after the high places: So that they could control the Hebrews down to the food they ate, giving the priests tremendous power. Obviously, it is more than unreasonable to insist that, in order to eat, the people of a nation must all go to a centralized place, where they are compelled to pay a priest to sacrifice their food animals; thus, the people relentlessly rebuilt the high places and ignored the centralizing priests. When the threats and destruction of the high places failed to end the polytheism, however, the Yahwists repeatedly butchered "their own" people (Num. 25, Ezek. 9), demonstrating that the repressive, despotic monotheism is no more "moral" than other religious or secular ideologies and governing systems. In the face of such unbearable oppression as having their food controlled, the people not only rebelled against the imposed Jealous/Zealous God, YHWH, they turned to other gods to get rid of him.
In fact, according to the biblical story it was this oppression that split the kingdom in two after Solomon's death, at which time the northern kingdom