Yahweh Needed a Wife

[If I speak, thus, with multitudes of certainty, know it is the influence of the movie “Noah.” Forgive me.]

So, out of the Vast Incomprehensibility Yahweh appeared, and He created light and He saw that it was good. Then water, land, and mountains He created, followed by creatures of many kinds. On the sixth day of this Mighty Work He created humankind, first a man. Then out of man’s lowliest spare rib, a woman, for man’s companionship.

On the seventh day, He rested. A little too soon.

Yahweh should have created a wife for Himself, someone to teach the kids manners and how to live in relationships and manage anger and greed. By Himself, He was just a Ten Commandments sort of guy.

Perhaps He thought Eve was only there to clean up apple cores.

His social management plan was an “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” and “dominion over the earth.” And when we, His unmothered creations, were bad, i.e. we didn’t praise Him enough, we were smited (smote?) with divine retribution: fire and brimstone (bye, bye, Sodom and Gomorrah), plagues, famines, locusts, slavery, and 40 days and 40 nights of water.

And when, after the flood all the new people were working well together and building a really high tower, He looked down, got worried they were getting too close, and waved His hands or something to change their one language into many and started the whole “you’re different than I am” thing. This is a man who needed a woman.

He routinely abandoned his children to silence for hundreds of years and then would come back and ask them to sacrifice their first born to Him. Alternatively, He would cover them in boils or have them swallowed by a whale to test their allegiance. How petulant is this?

The movie “Noah,” viewed in NYC’s largest IMAX theater (water, water everywhere!), showed an Old Testament god sorely lacking humor. His way or no way, the irony being that the humans, excepting Noah and family, mimicked Him, the truest form of flattery. Vengeful. Wanting tribute and complete obedience. Willing to murder.

With a wife, Yahweh might have had teenagers and learned that you love despite being ridiculed. You give a little, you take away the car keys, you gives curfews, but you don’t wipe out. You would have thought He could have had an ounce of humanity in Him.

But then haven’t we always made God in our own image? Confession time. Yes, it is.

Didn’t we start the whole hate and anger business, the favored status and bigotry calamity (“chosen people” and all that)? Isn’t Yahweh in any religion our largest projection?

Ever notice how humor is never projected onto the Old Testament God as a quality? Onto the Goddess, yes. One of my favorite mystics always asked, “Isn’t the Goddess a hoot?” All the synchronicity stuff, and the wry results of getting what you want.

Goddesses are, by and large, credited with being nimble, smart, subtle, and compassionate. But we took our worse qualities and projected them to create an Old Testament-like God and then we use “His” decrees and actions as excuses for us to behave badly in the world. Being judgmental for starters. Followed by being rigid, inflexible, and lacking nuance.

We absolutely needed the Son of God. I personally believe there was an amazing human being (or two, or a man and woman) who lived a couple thousand years ago, and I believe He/They shook up the status quo and probably got themselves murdered for it. (Talk about the father killing the upstart son!)

We need the Son of God because we need a focus of worship for our good qualities. (Yes, you can read that sentence twice if you wish.).

We also need the embracing mother of the Son of God. She has had a softening influence, even as her status is still not equal to that of the men.

We need the New Testament of forgiveness and tending the poor, and turning the other cheek, because those qualities are in us too. And if I had to guess, I would say this “savior” had at least one mighty mystical experience that transformed his daily mundanity into enlightenment beyond the physical, time and space, and that made everything clear and manageable, even death. And he saw It was love. Vengeance had no place in it.

I believe He, and others including Buddha & Co., grasped that Yahweh of the Old Testament was a straw man made out of humans’ craving to know where we come from, where we are going, and what we are to do in-between – an Uber being that transformed our fears into all-mighty power, our insecurities into commandments, and our confusion into management skills. No matter how bad they are, we like to think someone is in charge.

Even now we make movies based on myths, and “Noah” does nothing if not deal in myths, complete with lava-covered angels fighting, as huge Transformers, the evil people trying to get on the ark before the deluge. Murder and mayhem.

We make such movies because we are afraid of what’s happening in our world and we want to picture ourselves as God’s favored children, the ones who will survive.

How strange that we want lives of beauty and joy but still worship at the alters of war, violence, and fear. Because Yahweh needed a wife, Noah needed an ark, and we need to be very careful about our actions. Are we acting in line with our inner Old Testament God or our core being of New Testament love? Are we vengeance or truth and light?

4 thoughts on “Yahweh Needed a Wife

  1. Are we acting in line with our inner Old Testament God or our core being of New Testament love? Are we vengeance or truth and light?

    Patricia, why is it either or? Or, have I missed something? Perhaps it’s my years of being privileged to live in people’s souls and therefore grey areas which are far more anxiety producing than “Either/Or’s”…for where is it written that the soul is pure? If we go eons prior to Judeo-Christian or other monolithic visions of God, such as the very active Greeks, who straddled human and God hopping around in most capricious fashions, often symbolized by being half human and some other more primordial creature such as a minotaur, or, what about other current religions such as Hinduism et. et.al, where they give the spectrum of human emotions far more credence than vengeance and light? They (as I) accept that human beings are far more complex than good or evil. Most of us are both. And if we think we are, for example bathed in light, we often surround ourselves, have friends or have or have had significant others who represent the other half.
    Perhaps it’s my “shrink” platform wanting to shout to the world, “you’ve got it all wrong gang”. Evil exists in most of us. If we look at the issue geopolitically, all politics truly are personal and for those countries that represent “good” perhaps towards the Scandinavian to Costa Rica, we have the horrors of the mid-east and genocide in Africa, and most every place we look.

    I agree women tend to carry nurturing genes and therefore as the place and power of women increases, which I believe it will, hopefully we will will change for the better. If not, we do run the trisk of destroying ourselves.

    But, to get back to Eve and the Old and New Testament. Eve carries only part of the whole. And the Testaments taken together, are the evolution of human spirit in it’s entirety. Could the New Testament really have been written without the old?

    I’m sure you know the original definition of psychotherapist. Psyche comes from the Greek, loosely translated as soul. The therapist was teacher or Rabbi, priest, minister, etc. Thus the task of the therapist was to be the healer of the soul. (As if the soul could ever be made whole).

    I don’t think I will choose to drown in Noah. (In fact having had the opportunity, I chose Grand Budapest Hotel instead). I do think we all have choices. And if we sent warring generals’ mothers to the peace tables instead of those trained in destruction, maybe we would get some place. Though I love your writing, and I value this piece. I see the choice as more complex than I read as your wish.
    Though I know (joy) and pain, deeply and personally, and I wish choices might be more starkly black or white. I live far more in a world of “and” than “either, or.”

    I do like your raising the question of why world destruction films, which have a rising tide of Indies, that at least to me, appear to be trying to counterbalance them. I wonder what you would respond, if it were a conversation and not a one-way Blog?

    PS. Buddhism and its varietals appeal to me the most.

    • Dear Dorree, I appreciate your response and bringing in the complexities of being human. I especially adore the reference to the Olympian gods and goddesses and their frolicking. I had thought of that while writing but my references already felt stretched for the purposes of a blog.

      I agree that all humans carry potentials for good, bad, beautiful and ugly. Therefore, as I said in the last paragraph we need to be aware and thoughtful in our choices of actions, from our Old Testament side of a “tooth for a tooth,” or from an inner core of love. The catch is still being able to access our love and generosity, but that another conversation.

      Thank you, and sorry for the delay in responding.

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