You're listening to the ancient tradition. A Wonk Media production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. Here's your host, Dr. Jack Logan. Welcome to the ancient tradition. I'm your host,

Jack Logan. Great to have you listening in today. Today's episode is super long. I thought about

splitting it into two, but since I've been gone for so long with the end

of the semester grading, I thought I'd just leave it, make it kind of a bonus episode. There's a lot in

here, so you may not want to listen to it all in one sitting. You may want to split it up,

but it's of course up to you. If you're a new listener, just want to let you know that the podcast has a companion

website, the ancient tradition.com, where you can find important resources linked to today's

episodes.

Just click on show notes, and you'll find this episode.

With that, let's jump in.

One of the really interesting things that I noticed

when I began studying religious traditions around the world,

and something that was quite honestly surprising

was that the high god, especially the high gods in deep antiquity,

be they Mesopotamian, Egyptian or Canaanite. And even the early

Hebrews didn't reign alone. The high god was married. He reigned over the cosmos as a king with his

spouse, the queen of heaven. And together they reigned over the heavens as a divine royal couple.

It's one of those details that's quite striking considering how many today envision God as a solitary, aloof, invisible, immaterial, transcendent

entity, a notion that we learned in our last episode was largely shaped by Plato's philosophical ideas.

As Dr. Stavra Kapulu writes, quite poignantly on page 415 of her book, God and Anatomy,

that the god that's found in the Hebrew Bible is very, very different from the God envisioned by Plato and many

modern day believers. She writes, quote, the modern God of the West and the ancient God of the

...