Israel - the home of monotheism.
Here, for thousands of years, people have worshipped just one god...
Or so the Bible says.
But there's something about this ancient world that the Bible is not telling us.
Jerusalem - the epicentre of the world's most widespread monotheistic faiths.
The Bible states time and again that the forefathers of Jews and Christians believed in one God.
But I believe that hidden in its pages is a secret.
A very different story, which fundamentally challenges the Bible's claims.
My name is Francesca Stavrakopoulou, I'm a Biblical scholar.
In this programme, I'll be looking at the Bible not as Holy Scripture but as ancient literature.
Literature with a religious agenda which distorts the past.
I'll also be looking at archaeological finds,
which show that the ancestors of Judaism and Christianity believed in many gods.
And even that God had a wife.
It's a radical revision which rocks the foundation of monotheism to its core
and challenges what the religious past means for faith today.
We're going to do three classes.
The first is my most politically incorrect class.
But, as I always say, reality is sometimes politically incorrect...
For Jews, monotheism is the ancient foundation on which their faith and morality is built.
And they trace this belief system to Moses and other legendary ancestral figures,
including Jacob, Isaac and Abraham.
What Abraham brought into the world was a concept called monotheism.
In this Jerusalem Yeshiva, a Jewish school, Rabbi Ken Spiro reminds his students of their heritage.
We said Abraham is unique for two reasons.
A) He's a free thinking super genius who's able to think outside the box
and come to the realisation there's one god.
But like I said in the first class, imagine being the only person in the world to believe in an idea
that no-one else could comprehend or accept.
Few of us would have the hutzpah, the nerve to whisper it to our best friends.
The nature of the God of Judaism - who's the God of all humanity -
is an infinite being, outside time and space,
no parts, wasn't born, doesn't die. Doesn't need anything.
Has this always been the nature of the Jewish God?
Absolutely. The very unique concept which Judaism brought in was this one god that is the only god,
that there is nothing besides that god.
In Judaism we say that the most essential statement of theology in Judaism is called the Shema.
Here is the lord our god, the lord is one.
It doesn't mean he is one versus many, it means he is one, meaning the only.
What was it about polytheism that was so problematic?
I mean, in essence it's a lie.
You just look at the morality of the ancient world, which is polytheistic, and you see
the radical contrast between the Jewish idea on one hand
and what came out of the pagan world on the other, and it's very clear.
But it's not only the Jewish faith which up holds monotheism as a core belief.
The Jewish Bible is virtually the same as the Christian Old Testament.
And for this reason monotheism is at the heart of Christianity too.
Walter Moberly is a Christian theologian
who believes that monotheism isn't just an ancient belief.
As the first of the Ten Commandments,
it is a moral imperative as relevant today as ever.
The false gods would be
money, sex and power. And treating those
as gods, as ultimates,
is, I think, an enduring problem.
The belief in one God is also the first pillar of Islam.
In Jerusalem I met up with Mushin Yusef, a leading Islamic scholar.
He explained to me the Islamic view of God.
God is the greatest.
God is everything.
It is the only thing in the universe.
In Islam there is one God, there is nothing beside their God and that's it.
And believing in two in Islam is the worst thing that you can think about.
You definitely would go to hell,
so you have to believe only in one and not in two.
This view of God as a universal, all-powerful creator
unites Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
But though they all appear to trace this monotheistic heritage back to Abraham,
Islamic monotheism has developed quite differently.
Its roots lie in the Qur'an and its founding traditions,
wholly separate from the Bible.
Abraham that we have in Islam is definitely different from Abraham,
which is mentioned in Judaism or Christianity.
Abraham in Islam, he was the first Muslim.
And...according to Islam he believed only in one God.
And supposedly there is no difference in the belief of Abraham
and in the belief of Mohammed or the other Muslims.
As a scholar of the Hebrew Bible - or Old Testament -
it's the early history of the Jewish and Christian God that interests me.
A history the Bible claims to preserve in its pages.
According to the Bible, the roots of monotheism can be traced back
3,500 years to the legendary Abraham and a pact he made with God.
"Worship me and me alone and I will give the land of Canaan to your descendants."
So the Bible's claim is that Abraham arrived in Canaan
and founded an entirely new belief system.
A belief system in which people worshipped just one god.
In the Bible, God's pact with Abraham was honoured by his heirs - Isaac and Jacob.
Joseph then took this belief into Egypt.
Moses brought it out of Egypt.
And then Joshua led the descendents of Abraham, the Israelites,
into a war to conquer Canaan
and wipe out its indigenous polytheism,
establishing monotheism for a further 1,000 years.
Well, that's the story the Bible tells us. But I disagree.
When submitted to rigorous analysis, the biblical texts reveal quite another story.
I think the evidence now shows that the people of the Bible believed in many gods.
And the scribes who composed the Bible did their best to conceal this.
But not altogether successfully.
A close reading of the Bible reveals that its people found it hard to stick to monotheism.
There was a competitor to the solitary God of Israel.
Another god, whose name appears in the Bible over 130 times.
The god Baal.
The Bible presents him as a Canaanite god, and the most dangerous of foreign gods.
The Book of Kings vividly portrays this competition between Baal and the God of Israel.
Prophets gather on Mount Carmel in northern Israel.
The solitary God of the Bible is represented by his faithful prophet Elijah.
But fighting against him are 450 prophets of Baal.
They face off, taking turns to summon their god to set alight a sacrificial offering.
The prophets of Baal process ritually around the altar,
calling out to their god, but there's no response.
They begin cutting themselves, slashing themselves deeper and deeper until the blood flows,
but there's still no response.
It's the God of the Bible who lights the sacrifice and wins the battle.
The Bible presents Baal worshippers
as ranting, frantic, entranced deviants whose practices are no more than impotent superstitions.
But in my view, this crude caricature of Baal worship
is a warning to the people not to lapse from faith in one god.
It's a sign that the Biblical writers believed the people were straying.
Such warnings against Baal worship are found again and again in the Bible.
So what was the appeal of the god Baal?
The answer is revealed by archaeological discoveries.
I'm on my way to a site which, in terms of our understanding of the Bible,
I think is the important archaeological discovery ever.
More important than Qumran, the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I'm in Syria, on my way to the ancient city of Ugarit.
Standing on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea,
Ugarit was in its prime between 1500 and 1200 BC.
Ugarit was a Canaanite city.
Until its discovery in 1929, our only guide
to Canaanite religion was the Bible.
But now scholars can piece together a detailed and more objective picture of their gods.
As we're filming, an odd-shaped stone is seen sticking out of the ground.
It could be a significant find.
We seem to have...at the moment it looks like three figures.
It's not clear what they might be,
but there seems to be a figure right at the bottom there on the left
who's in a very striding position.
It could be a god, but it could be a king,
or an elite figure of some sort.
The dig supervisor believes this could be a remnant of Canaanite worship.
Together, we suspect the figure on the left could be the god Baal.
So this could be Baal? Yes.
So he's got the conical head gear.
He's in a smiting position.
Oh, look there's Baal.
Other examples of Baal unearthed at Ugarit are now on display
in museums across Syria and France.
THUNDER RUMBLES
This is a fantastic representation of him.
It shows him in typical Baal mode.
He's a strong warrior god, a young thrusting virile deity.
He's often got his hand raised up as if to strike down his enemies.
He's a warrior god, but he's also a storm god.
So his weapons are the thunderbolts in his hand
and the clouds he rides, the thunder clouds, terrifying his enemies.
It's his ability to bring fertile rains that would have made this Canaanite god so attractive
to the ancient Israelites who were dependent on rainfall for their agriculture.
Baal's appeal explains why time and time again the Bible rails against Baal worship.
The biblical texts themselves admit that the people repeatedly fail to be loyal to their god.
The monotheism of the Bible wasn't such a solid foundation after all.
But I think this foundation is weaker still.
The Bible covers up a much more inconvenient truth...
about God himself.
The Bible claims that the deity at the heart of its monotheism
is unique and distinct, quite separate from Canaanite religion.
But amongst the discoveries found at Ugarit is a Canaanite god
whose status, character and name challenge this claim.
A god who's even more powerful than Baal.
The God El.
The texts often describe him as an ancient deity,
the father of the gods with a long, grey beard.
This figurine portrays him in his role as the head of the pantheon.
He sits enthroned and enrobed, his hand raised in a gesture of blessing.
He's a very benevolent god. His role is to hold the cosmos in order.
The other gods praise his wisdom and his mercy and his justice.
They ask his permission to carry out various activities.
He's also the father of the gods.
It's El who sits at the very apex of the cosmos.
The discovery of this chief Canaanite god uncovers a religious reality disguised in the Bible.
For El is also the God of the ancient Israelites.
El is God.
And the evidence is there for anyone to see.
I've left Syria and I'm back in Israel
in what the Bible claims was the heartland of Israelite monotheism.
In the Bible, God reveals his personal name.
His proper name is Yahweh,
but even today this is a name so sacred that observant Jews won't say it out loud.
Instead they refer to Hashem, which means the name, or Adonai, which means Lord.
The divine name Yahweh is unique to ancient Israelite religion.
But the reality is that he wasn't always known as Yahweh.
God used to be known by another name...
..a name still embedded in this part of the world today.
A name that contradicts the biblical claim that its God of monotheism is unique and distinct.
Across the green line from Israel in the West Bank stands an Israeli settlement.
Jewish settlers have occupied this Palestinian land because they believe
it's close to the setting of a pivotal moment in the Bible.
It's the place where one of their legendary patriarchs, Jacob,
the grandson of Abraham, falls asleep and has a vision.
He dreams of a stairway adorned with angels
ascending to heaven.
God stands next to Jacob and pledges to give him and all his descendants the land on which he's lying.
Upon waking, the Bible says Jacob names this place after the God he's encountered there.
He calls it Bethel, which means the house of the God El.
Jacob is clear. Later on he even calls his God El, the God of Israel.
The Bible itself reveals that its God has the same name as the chief Canaanite God.
The name El occurs elsewhere in the Bible, but it tends to be hidden in English translations.
For example, in the Book of Numbers,
the writer celebrates the tradition about God leading his people
from slavery in Egypt and into the promised land,
and in this verse it says, "God, who brings them up out of Egypt."
But if we turn to the original Hebrew,
the same line...
actually it says, "El, who brings the people out of Egypt."
So according to this poem, El is the God of the exodus.
It's El who liberates the people and brings them to the promised land.
So is El of the Israelites the same as El of the Canaanites?
El can be used simply as a generic term for God.
Much like we used the word God today.
There are lots of examples of that in the Bible.
But there are also lots of cases where it's being used as an actual name.
Here in the book of Exodus, God's talking to Moses, and he says, "I am Yahweh.
"I revealed myself to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob
"as El of the Wilderness,
"but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known."
This text is really clear.
It's asserting that Yahweh, the God of the Bible, the God of the Israelites, used to be known as El.
The word El is even found in the name of one of the peoples and nations of this land.
Most of us have a lot of confusion about monotheism. What is monotheism? We think of monotheism as...one god.
A hallmark of monotheism is the claim that God is unique,
but in fact, I think he was a Canaanite god.
I realise that this challenges those for whom the Bible is a book about the one and only true God.
So I suggested to Rabbi Ken Spiro that what his faith professes
is not what the biblical texts actually show.
Do you think Israelite religion was always separate from Canaanite religion?
Absolutely. Obviously Abraham himself emerges out of
the Canaanite Middle Eastern religions of the ancient Near East,
but theologically speaking, radically different from the beginning.
There's constant warnings throughout the Bible to avoid all those Canaanite gods.
When I read the Hebrew Bible closely, it would appear that God is sometimes called El.
We know El is a Canaanite god. What do you make of that?
It's interesting. The Jewish God has many different names.
God himself says to Abraham several times, "I'm giving you a new name.
"My names are not who I am, they just deal with different attributes of how I interact with you."
We shouldn't confuse the similarity in the use of the name El being like a force
with the very radical difference between that Jewish concept,
which may share a similar-sounding name, but is very different from the Canaanite god.
So how do we understand that reference to Jacob worshipping a God
who appears to be called El, the God of Israel?
Depends how you approach the text. If you want to look at it
as a way of seeing that the ancient Hebrews were polytheistic, you could read it that way.
But the traditional Jewish understanding
is that God's making a general statement about the spiritual reality
and he is the only power, there's nothing else beside him.
To me, Rabbi Spiro's response demonstrates how people of faith can sometimes see in the Bible
what they want, even though they recognise the texts are much more ambiguous than they'd like.
In my view, the Bible's claim
that Abraham and the early Israelites worshipped a god distinct from all others is false.
But the Bible makes yet another false claim.
The claim that apart from occasional lapses,
the ancient Israelites were essentially true to one god.
Evidence now casts serious doubt on this claim.
The Israelites worshipped and believed in many gods.
Polytheism wasn't the exception, it was the norm.
Thanks to the finds at Ugarit, we now have a detailed understanding of what polytheism entailed.
As the chief god of the pantheon, El ruled over a divine council,
a form of heavenly parliament.
This collection of gods was responsible for maintaining order in the cosmos,
but the gods were also responsible for what was going on in the human, earthly realm.
There were gods of dawn and dusk, plague and pestilence, fertility and death.
Each god was responsible for his or her patch of earthly and heavenly affairs.
Amongst these gods was of course the weather god Baal.
And I think there's evidence to show that the ancient Israelites also worshipped many gods.
I've come to the very place where the Bible says monotheism was practised.
This is probably where the Temple of Jerusalem once stood,
supposedly the sanctuary where only one god was revered.
And yet if you examine the Biblical texts, you find within them
clear references to more than one god, here in Jerusalem itself.
God, it seems, didn't always act alone.
The Bible itself is telling us that Israel had its own divine council, its own pantheon of gods.
In other words, the religion of the Israelites was polytheistic,
just like that of the Canaanites.
It's not the conventional view
and it weakens further the foundations of monotheism.
But Herbert Niehr, a professor of biblical history,
has researched the real beliefs and practices of the ancient Israelites.
He feels we're blinded to the polytheism in the Bible's pages.
So do you think Israelite religion was polytheistic?
Of course, I do think that
and we have many traces of it conserved in the Old Testament.
Only if you read the Old Testament through the lenses of monotheism,
you should neglect several important texts
and you could come to the conclusion
that Abraham and Moses were monotheistic believers of Yahweh.
But as we now know, it was quite different.
In the Old Testament we have several texts which speak about
a divine council, for example, also in the Psalms and in the Prophets.
So there are divine beings helping Yahweh to fulfil his duties.
For example, if something has to be done on Earth, Yahweh has to send his messenger.
So when we read texts like, "Who is like you, Yahweh, among the gods?"
this is a reference to the divine council, to a polytheism?
Yes, and a very clear reference.
So polytheism was normal in ancient Israel too.
Yes, it was normal like in any other ancient Near Eastern cultures.
It strikes me that Israelite and Canaanite religion were almost one and the same.
I asked Rabbi Ken Spiro if the Jewish faith could acknowledge this.
In reading the Hebrew text, it would seem the god of Israel is one of many gods. Who are those gods?
They are intermediary forces between the physical world and God
that he puts into motion that sort of operate systems in the lower world.
He's talking to his ministers, his council,
but he's supreme and these are not beings that exist alongside him
but underneath him, that are also his creations that serve a purpose too.
Does that mean that God is not alone in the heavens?
So to speak, on a certain level, yes.
In so far as God creates intermediaries that he holds counsel with, whatever that means.
That in itself is a very interesting statement.
Yes, there is such an idea that there are other beings below God subservient to him.
I'm convinced that these other beings are gods.
For me, the evidence undermines the basis on which the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity is built.
We're now discovering that the ancient Israelites had
a great deal more in common with their neighbours and enemies,
and that for almost the entire period in which the biblical story is set,
the ancient Israelites were not monotheistic.
The Bible is an unreliable source.
It is not telling us the truth about these ancient people.
In fact, I want to argue that the Bible is concealing the biggest secret of all,
a secret that shakes the very heart of monotheism -
God had a female counterpart...
a goddess.
A clue to goddess worship in the religion of ancient Israel appears in the Bible itself.
For most readers of the Bible, it's a secret overlooked, hidden in the text.
It's the word "asherah".
The word is found 40 times, and it describes something which must be destroyed.
Some people think an asherah is a wooden stick, or a pole,
because in the Bible it can be planted, cut down, pulverised, crushed, uprooted and burned.
But why is the Bible so unsettled by this apparent object?
What is it about this asherah that's so dangerous?
Archaeology now shows us that asherah wasn't always an object.
The Louvre Museum in Paris holds some of the best treasures found at the Canaanite city of Ugarit.
Its ancient tablets reveal that prominent in the Canaanite pantheon was a powerful goddess,
the wife of the chief god El.
Her name was Asherah.
Asherah's role is as a life-giving goddess.
She was a very respected goddess. She was the mother of all the gods.
She's associated with fertility and the perpetuation of generations.
And as a result, the iconography associated with her
is often very distinctive.
She has a very distinctive hairstyle that we find associated with other
fertility goddesses in the ancient Near East.
She has very heavily emphasised breasts and a very prominent pubic triangle,
emphasising this life-giving quality.
This bodily imaging of Asherah has led some scholars to argue
that this is erotic imagery,
that somehow this imagery is designed to stimulate and titillate.
They've even argued that in cults of Asherah,
cultic prostitution and ritual sex were the order of the day.
But I really don't think there's much evidence for that at all.
This isn't about Asherah being a sexy goddess, this is about Asherah being a life-giving goddess.
What's so striking, though,
is this association of a tree or a branch motif above her pubic triangle.
This motif is often known as the tree of life.
The tree of life was frequently used to represent the goddess.
It symbolised her powers of regeneration, fertility and protection.
In some texts, she's called the Divine Creatrix, in others, she's the Lady Of The Sea.
But her most important role seems to have been to act as an intermediary
between the other gods and her husband El, demonstrating her strong, powerful position.
So is there any evidence to suggest that Asherah was also worshipped in Israelite religion?
Well, not if you take the Bible at face value.
But all across Israel, in almost every excavation of ancient domestic buildings,
archaeologists are unearthing female figurines.
They appear consistently at ancient Israelite sites dating between the 9th and 6th centuries BC,
the period in which much of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament is set.
'I've come to Ramat Rahel near Jerusalem, the site of a 7th century BC palace, to assess the evidence.'
Many of the figurines like this one have moulded heads.
This would seem to indicate that these are in wide production.
'Judith Hadley is a professor of biblical studies.
'She thinks it's possible that the figurines could represent the goddess Asherah.
'But opinion is divided.'
We have no record of exactly what they are.
As you can see with this one, they have very exaggerated breasts
and the arms are coming down, holding the breasts.
People say that they are used for magic
and it's true that with the exaggerated breasts on most of them,
it may be for some type of lactation because, of course,
lactation was very important in the ancient world.
If you couldn't nurse your child, then the child was gone.
So for you, these figurines represent a goddess?
I think they do. I think that's the most logical explanation
because actually it's the goddess who is the one who you would pray to for help with nursing your child
and many scholars say that it's a generic mother goddess,
or mother of fertility.
Now in this period, the goddess who was most worshipped
that we know is the goddess Asherah.
So I think it's very possible that these are representations of the goddess Asherah.
At the very least, what these figurines do tell us
is that there was a strong feminine element in the religious practices of ancient Israel.
And that's a revelation that's completely counter
to the male-centred monotheistic message in the Bible.
But it's difficult to conclude from these figurines alone
that Asherah was worshipped by ancient Israelites.
They lack many of Asherah's signature features - her pubic triangle and the tree of life.
However, in 1968, a relic was discovered
that appeared to link the goddess Asherah
with this part of the ancient world.
It was found in the north, at a site called Taanach.
It dates to about the 10th century BC and is now displayed in the Israel Museum.
This artefact is a cult stand,
a sort of pedestal used to make offerings to the gods,
perhaps by placing a bowl on the top.
It's a real constellation of religious imagery,
but what's particularly significant is this female figure at the bottom.
A naked woman standing full front
with very emphasised breasts and pubic triangle.
She has a very distinctive hairstyle and she's flanked by two lions.
Here, two tiers up, a parallel scene.
But this time the lions flank not a woman,
but what appears to be a sacred tree, being nibbled by two goats.
The female image is widely taken to be representative of a goddess.
This very distinctive hairstyle is often associated with the goddess Asherah
and so too are the lions whose ears she's holding on to.
It suggests therefore that the sacred tree image just two tiers up
is an interchangeable symbol with the goddess,
that somehow both the tree and the naked woman represent the same goddess - Asherah.
So the goddess Asherah, whom the Canaanites revered, was clearly known in this region.
But was she actually worshipped by the ancient Israelites?
Well, this time the clues in the biblical text are much more revealing.
They say that she was once worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple itself.
The Bible's actually giving us some very significant information.
In one text we're told a king of Jerusalem set a carved image of Asherah in a temple
and in another we're told that women were weaving for Asherah in the temple.
Asherah worship was clearly going on at the very highest levels of society,
at the very heart of Israelite religion, in the Temple of Jerusalem,
the very place where the god of Israel resided.
The Bible itself reveals that the god of Abraham and his sons was not unique,
but he was the deity El, a Canaanite god.
And those Israelites claiming descent from Abraham
worshipped a divine council or assembly of gods.
And included in this pantheon was a goddess, Asherah.
Despite the biblical insistence that the religion of the ancient Israelites was monotheistic,
the reality is that it was polytheistic.
But goddess worship is not in itself the biggest secret of the Bible.
In the Canaanite system, Asherah was the wife of the chief god El.
Did she also hold such an exalted position for the ancient Israelites?
Could she have been Yahweh's other half, the wife of God?
This is Mount Nebo in modern day Jordan.
It overlooks the River Jordan,
and on a clear day you can just about see Jerusalem.
According to the Bible,
this is where Moses and the Israelites
first see the land promised to them by God.
One of the oldest clues to Asherah worship in the Bible
is found in a poem recited by Moses to the Israelite tribes just before he dies.
It hints at the real relationship between the Israelite god and Asherah.
In the poem he talks about Yahweh coming down from Sinai
with what seems to be a divine being on his right-hand side.
Now, we're not really sure what this divine being is.
The problem is in the Hebrew text
and one of the key issues here is this word, eshdat.
Now it's usually translated something like 'his host'.
Most English translations will say something similar.
But actually it doesn't make much sense at all.
Now recently scholars have suggested that actually this could be a reference to the goddess Asherah.
As you can see,
this is the word Asherah.
Here is eshdat.
Now these two words are very similar
and these letters are often confused,
so it's quite possible that originally,
this text contained a reference to the goddess herself.
So if this IS a reference to the goddess Asherah,
it's pretty incredible, because it's saying that she had a close, intimate relationship with God.
Look where she is, at his right-hand side.
If Asherah was God's wife,
it would seriously damage the foundations of monotheism.
Some people would argue that the language is just too ambiguous to say for sure.
A few would flatly reject the possibility.
One of the gods that appears in the Hebrew Bible is Asherah, a goddess.
And a lot of scholars think that she was the consort of the god of Israel.
What do you make of that?
That's a sort of notion that almost all ancient gods had a female consort.
Traditional Jewish understanding is absolutely not.
God being above any physical needs would not even need a consort
and certainly shares the world with no other powers.
So the need of anything else would be antithetical theologically to the whole Jewish world view.
There's no explicit statement in the Biblical text coupling Yahweh and Asherah, God and his wife.
But evidence has been found which does show them together.
The Sinai desert, the wilderness where the Bible says Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.
It was here, just over 30 years ago, that an amazing discovery was made.
For the first time,
we had evidence outside the Bible for the wife of God.
It's an inscription written on a piece of pottery.
In 1975, an Israeli archaeological team began excavating an ancient traveller's resting place.
It dates to the 8th century BC, a period in which Israelite culture was flourishing.
Just days into the dig, they struck gold -
a room filled with shards of pottery, and nearly all were covered in ancient scripts.
Unfortunately, I'm not able to get access to the actual site.
A terrorist group has recently fired on a nearby Israeli tourist resort
and the Egyptian army have declared the site too dangerous for me to visit.
So I've arranged to meet Ze'ev Meshel, the leader of the dig, in a safer location nearby.
We built a camp down below...
He remembers the growing excitement on site
as more and more inscriptions were uncovered,
fragments of correspondence calling out to the diggers from the distant past.
Really, people became crazy.
It's the only excavation I did
in which I see guys getting addicted
to the excavation.
Everyone wanted so hard to find by his own hands
a piece of inscription.
'And among these pieces, written clearly in Hebrew on a fragment of a large pot, was the name Asherah.'
But it was how her name appears which startled everyone.
For here, Asherah's name was found coupled with the word Yahweh, the name of God.
But before the inscription could be displayed to the world,
it fell victim to the politics of the region.
In 1979, during the Camp David peace talks,
Israel agreed to give the Sinai and all the discoveries back to Egypt.
But both countries have since denied ownership of the artefacts.
And the inscription, which could transform our idea of God, is currently missing.
When was the last time you saw the inscription?
We returned all the finds,
I think, about 20 years ago,
or maybe 15 years ago.
And this was the last time.
Has the original inscription ever been exhibited?
I don't know.
It's distressing to think that perhaps the most important artefact in the history of God has been lost.
But the recent Egyptian revolution has brought a glimmer of hope.
Fresh reports say the missing artefacts from Sinai have been found
and it's very possible that the inscription may soon be available for the world to see.
But until then, all's not lost.
Before it disappeared, the inscription was documented and photographed.
This is a replica of the piece of pottery
that's got everybody so excited.
There are three figures plus an inscription running along the top.
The inscription is the key part.
It's a blessing and the blessing is from Yahweh and his Asherah.
It shows for the first time that people in the 8th century BC
were coupling Yahweh and Asherah, the god of Israel and his wife.
It tells us that the ancient Israelites believed God had a wife.
This isn't just my opinion or even that of a minority.
The majority of Biblical scholars throughout the world
now accept it as compelling evidence that God once had a consort.
But it's a view of God unacceptable to millions of believers today.
On a classic understanding, God, although the biblical language
is consistently He, God transcends gender.
God is not male in the sense that humans are male.
But therefore to give God a consort is very much to anthropomorphise,
to make God too male
in a way that Jews and Christians have wanted to say,
"No, that's actually misunderstanding what God is like."
The traditional view is that the Bible is a book about just one god.
From the time God revealed himself to Abraham through to the founding of Israel,
the Israelites promised to worship one god and one god only.
That's generations and generations of a monotheistic ideal,
an ideal that's corrupted from time to time by idolatrous,
rebellious Israelites, but an ideal nonetheless.
And yet the evidence in the Bible and in archaeology reveals that Abraham's God was not unique.
The Israelites were polytheists and God had a wife.
If we take the Old Testament text at face value,
we are indeed convinced
that there were two different cultures in this land -
the culture of the Canaanites, who already inhabited this land
when Israel came out of Egypt,
and then Israel entered as a new population
with only one god.
But nowadays we know from archaeology, from mythology,
from ritual text and so on,
that Israel is an offspring of Canaanite culture.
So the Israelites are a subset of the Canaanites? Yes, indeed.
And we know that especially on the background of the text from Ugarit,
which show how closely related Israel was to its ancient neighbours.
And so the biblical distinction between Israelite religion and Canaanite religion is a false one.
From a historical point of view, it is false, of course.
In my view, the Biblical basis for an archaic monotheism just doesn't stand up.
And that suggests to me that the Bible cannot be taken at face value.
It's misrepresenting the past.
It's a fictitious account of Israel's religion.
Today, Jews and Christians practise monotheism.
The Bible is read as the story of just one deity, one god.
So what happened?
What made the people of ancient Israel abandon the worship of many gods
and switch to the veneration of just one god?
Something forced a seismic shift in Israelite religion
that led to a systematic purge of polytheism.
Traces of this purge can be detected in polemical stories in the Bible itself,
stories in which Yahweh takes on the other gods in a celestial war.
In a way, the Bible is a battleground for the gods.
The aim is to assert Yahweh, the god of Israel, over all others and even to kill off the competition.
It says so in psalm 82.
Here, Yahweh presides in the Great Council of Gods,
and he criticises the other gods for being unjust.
He says to them, "You're all gods, children of the most high, but you'll die like mere mortals".
The psalm tells how the other gods are defeated.
Only the God of the Bible survives, standing unique and distinct.
At the end of the psalm, the God of Israel takes over the world.
This shift in the history of Israelite religion can be traced to a traumatic turning point.
The Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem.
In the 6th century BC, the Israelites are disempowered, humiliated and defeated.
They lose their land, their freedom, they lose the Jerusalem Temple and they're exiled to Babylon.
In their darkest hour, their god, it seems, has forsaken them.
This is when monotheism begins to displace polytheism.
Yahweh had been the chief god in Jerusalem.
But he's just been vanquished by rival gods.
It's around this time, from the 6th century BC onwards,
that the Bible as we know it begins to be written down.
Scribes try to make sense of the fall of Jerusalem.
In reflecting on this catastrophe, later writers of the Bible
conclude that this is a punishment from Yahweh for the people worshipping other gods.
They resolved to appease Yahweh by annihilating all the other deities.
The idea is to make Yahweh more omnipotent and fearsome than ever.
He inherits the powers of other gods.
Abraham's god El and the Divine Council get buried in the text.
Even God's own wife is rendered impotent.
Asherah, the goddess once symbolised by the sacred tree of life, is now insultingly portrayed
in Biblical stories as nothing more than a dead piece of wood.
Her powers of fertility are stripped and re-assigned to Yahweh.
Scribes in effect create a new myth of origins, a new religious history of their people.
Old and new stories are spun so as to conceal their polytheistic past.
We have to see the theology behind it.
They wanted to make a division between Israel on the one side
and the Canaanites and all other cultures on the other side.
So it is an attempt of self-definition,
of inventing something new,
and we have the same for example in Greek culture,
where difference is made between the Barbarians on the one side
and the Greeks on the other side.
And in the Hebrew Bible, monotheism is one of those aspects of religion
that's used to distinguish Israelite religion from Canaanite religion.
Between the 10th century and the beginning of the exile in 586,
there was polytheism as normal religion also here in Israel.
Only afterwards, things begin to change
and very slowly they began to change.
I would say it is only correct for the last centuries,
maybe only from the period of the Maccabbeans,
that means the 2nd century BC,
so in the time of Jesus of Nazareth, it is true,
but for the time before, it is not true.
Judaism and Christianity are proud of their ancient monotheistic pedigree.
But in my opinion, the secret buried in the Bible
is that this history has been skilfully manufactured
by the scribes who composed these ancient texts.
The claims that Abraham and his descendants worshipped a unique and distinctive god don't stand up.
The truth about the Bible is that for most of the time,
its people were polytheists and their chief god had a wife.
That undermines the foundations of modern monotheism to its core.
But it also sheds a great deal of light on how we understand faith today.
For the worship of many gods isn't just a thing of the past.
Scratch the surface of modern-day monotheism and you'll find vestiges of polytheism.
Take the god Baal.
He's assimilated and demonised by Christianity.
He lives on today through his title "The Lord of the Flies".
Beelzebub.
Other deities don't completely disappear.
They become the angels of Judaism and Christianity.
But perhaps the most painful loss would have been that of Asherah, the wife of God.
As a result of monotheism, these religions have become very masculine.
But traces of the feminine survive.
Asherah's symbols took on new forms.
The sacred tree of life gradually evolved into the Menorah,
a central feature of modern-day Judaism.
But perhaps the most conspicuous homage is in Christianity itself.
People the world over still pray to the ultimate fertile heavenly female -
Mary, the mother of God.
We have saints, we have the Virgin and so on, so we do not escape such a divine assembly.
It's impossible.
Pure monotheism is nearly impossible.
And the heavens are still very busy today then. Yeah, why not?
The traces of polytheism in monotheism today show how hard it is to suppress it.
But I don't think that's such a bad thing.
Monotheism, when it finally came, brought with it a terrible consequence.
God is exclusively male and so to be male is to be like God.
And this has coloured attitudes towards women for centuries and centuries.
In toppling the goddess from heaven, monotheism disempowered women.
The evidence I've presented rocks the foundation of modern monotheism.
And for some, that may have a severe impact.
But it seems to me that the loss of God's wife had an even greater impact on the history of humanity.
And that's the painful truth of this story.
Next week, I go in search of another secret buried in the Bible -
the real Garden of Eden.
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