Trista Hendren

“The biblical King David was also a sacred shepherd. His sensual and ecstatic songs of earthly love, so untypical of the Bible, derive from the ancient love rites of the shepherd king and the Goddess—her Canaanite names were Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth. The settled people of the Old Testament, like everyone else in the Near East, practiced Goddess worship. The Old Testament is the record of the conquest and massacre of these Neolithic people by the nomadic Hebrews, followers of a Sky God, who then set up their biblical God in the place of the ancient Goddess. The biblical Hebrews were a nomadic pastoral and patriarchal people, tribes of sheepherders and warriors who invaded land belonging to the matriarchal Canaanites. Both Hebrews and Canaanites were Semitic people. The Canaanites lived in agricultural communities and worshiped the orgiastic-ecstatic Moon Mother Astarte. As Old Testament stories relate, the Hebrews sacked, burned, and destroyed village after village belonging to the Canaanites, massacring or enslaving the people—a series of brutal invasions and slaughters described typically by theologians and preachers as “a spiritual victory.” In this way the Hebrews established themselves on the land, along with the worship of their Sky-and-Thunder God Yahweh (Jehovah), calling themselves his “chosen people.” Yahweh’s male prophets and priests, however, despite their political victory over the Canaanites, had to carry on a continuous struggle and fulmination against their own people, who kept “backsliding” into worship of the Great Mother, the Goddess of all their Near Eastern neighbors. For she had originally been the Goddess of the Hebrews themselves. This constant fight against matriarchal religion and custom is the primary theme of the Old Testament. It begins in Genesis, with the takeover of the Goddess’s Garden of Immortality by a male God, and the inversion of all her sacred symbols—tree, serpent, moon-fruit, woman—into icons of evil. Of the two sons of Eve and Adam, Cain was made the “evil brother” because he chose settled agriculture (matriarchal)—the “good brother” Abel was a nomadic pastoralist (patriarchal). The war against the Goddess is carried on by the prophets’ rantings against the “golden calf,” the “brazen serpents,” the “great harlot” and “Whore of Babylon” (the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar), against enchantresses, pythonic diviners, and those who practice witchcraft. It is in the prophets’ war against the Canaanite worship of “stone idols”—the Triple Moon Goddess worshiped as three horned pillars, or menhirs. One of her shrines was on Mount Sinai, which means “Mountain of the Moon.” Moses was commanded by “the Lord” to go forth and destroy these “idols”—who all had breasts. We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great “spiritual invention” of the religious leader Moses. This is not so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the worship of the Goddess. Her universality has been duly noted by everyone who has ever studied the matter. “Monotheism, once thought to have been the invention of Moses or Akhnaton, was worldwide in the prehistoric and early historic world,” i.e., throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. As E. O. James wrote in The Cult of the Mother Goddess, “It seems that Evans was correct when he affirmed that it was a ‘monotheism in which the female form of divinity was supreme.” The original monotheism of the Goddess is perhaps most clearly shown by the fact that, in Elizabeth Gould Davis’s words, “Almighty Yahweh, the god of Moses and the later Hebrews, was originally a goddess.” His name, Iahu ’anat, derives from that of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“All us wounded women make a career of trying to put other people back together.”
― Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water

“In the abandon of that solitude, we could see how tiny we were, how small and defenseless our earth. And from that terrible dignity, we heard the susurrus of a long-ago old woman’s words: This land will rise again!”
― Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water

“There’s something I want to explain. And I want to be clear about it. You can spend your life being a humanist, a pacifist, a thoughtful person who does not even think about hating, or does not even know what it is to hate—that is to say, you can really and truly be a human being who is tolerant and open-minded and humane, judging people by how they behave toward you, and treating them the way you wished to be treated, but when you are being attacked, when bombs are falling around you, planes are hovering over your head, when your life is in danger and you are scared, It is so easy to look up to the sky and feel abject, boiling hatred for the people doing this to you, and curse them out.

When you are fearful for your life, and you are being bombed by a certain group of people, you are not thinking, Oh, but I know that not all Israelis agree with this. There is no time for that. Just as there is no time for them to think that it is not all Lebanese attacking back. And there is no time to think about the Israeli pilot who wishes he weren’t in the plane dropping bombs on everybody. All you can think in these situations is, Fuck everyone. The summer of 2006 was the first time I had ever experienced this real, pure, true hate.”
― Najla Said, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family