When God Was a Woman

This book is very thought provoking and insightful. It's a good read for anyone interested in expanding their perspective on the origins of religion.

I just finished "When God was a Woman" today. I generally have a hard time with non-fiction and it can take me months to get through one book. I read this book from cover to cover in less than a week. It does bog down in a few places, but the theories being discussed are pretty mind boggling. I support the author's decision to pack in as much evidence as she does.

This book makes the following claims (supported by archaeological evidence):
*the bible was not created in a vacuum: it was written by men as a response to the world they found themselves living in at the time.
*the subjugation of women in the bible had a definite purpose: to lessen the political and economic power women had 3000ish years ago.
*the story of Adam and Eve was specifically contrived to attack the existing Goddess religion. The serpent, the tree of knowledge, the fig leaf clothing, and the successful tempting of Eve were all aimed at commonly recognized aspects of that earlier religion.

Writing today and referring to the Web, or the GOP or Oprah may not be understood even 500 years from now, let alone 3000. The biggest plus of "When God was a Woman" (in my opinion) is that the author places the bible in context of the historical period in which it was written.

Understand, I am not particularly religious. But I know I live in a society that is based on Judeo-Christian morality. I live in one nation under God. I would swear on a bible in a court of law. I have a religious president. And women are not yet considered equal to men.

No, I don't want to go back to a Goddess religion. Humans had at least 7000 years of it, with at least some documented subjugation of men (killing of the king/queen's consort when he loses his potency, or his reverence to Her.) And now we have had at least 3000 years of God the Father religion that claims women must be controlled by men. Isn't it time we advanced?

Stones reliance upon disproved theories and twisted evidence as well as less than stellar, biased, references is a great disappointment as I am truly interested in discovering what few matriarchal societies exist and or existed throughout human history.

Stone does a disservice to her cause by manipulating truth to fit her agenda.

The loser is the uninformed reader who may actually believe there is truth top be found here.

Although she does seem to have a tendency to go off on a tangent, for me, this book confirms what I've known and felt for years - underrepresented in most organized religions and totally out-of-place in Christianity, period. After reading this book, I think I'm ready to 'come out' and tell family and friends what I've known for several years - I'm Pagan as the day is long and secure in my beliefs and religion!

A better title of this book would read: "Before the Bible, God was a Woman." While I have a slight problem with this authors title of her work matching up her actual subject matter, never have I read anything so well describing the problems I have always had with the Judeo-Christian Bible.

While there were undisputed Indo-European invasions into southern lands for thousands of years, their influence on the conquered peoples' religions is not as easy to determine. Indeed, how can we really know how thought changed between 6000-4000 years ago in the ancient Middle and Near East? Marilyn Stone certainly has her very plausible theories about the consequences of these invasions. While this part of the book is enlightening it isn't as blistering a critique as later in the book. At least the Goddess, and women in general, retained some status and legal rights in cultures around Israeli occupied Canaan.

Once Ms Stone sets her sights on the biblical account of creation and of the subjugation of Canaan, she doesn't hold back. The amount of barbarous acts that the Bible documents against the native Canaanites is amazing. Read Joshua and Kings I and II if you don't believe Ms Stone. Why did this genocide take place? For the simple reason that the native people didn't believe in the "real" God. I felt no man-bashing, as some other reviewers read in her book. I only took away religious extremism at its worst, and women and the Goddess were the victims of this "young upstart" religion of only about 3000 years old called Judaism. This isn't Ms Stone making these numbers up, many biblical scholars believe the Pentateuch was only written between 1200 to 1000 BC.

The absolutely most interesting part of Ms Stones work was the deconstruction of the Genesis creation story. She cites not only how each and every event was carefully constructed to denounce the Goddess religion, and make its practitioners sin against God by every major rite of the old religion, but to also condemn women for all of history afterward to be men's "helpers."

If you ever wondered what bothered you about Patriarchial religion, this book captures the epitome of monotheisms' dark side.