One in Messiah Congregation ÷ÌÈäÈì
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Part of the Congregation of Israel òÂãÇú
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Shabbat Shalom
All Welcome
We are still in the Feast of Unleavened Bread
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Let’s pray
Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, sins, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory, forever.
Amen
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Today we use the Gregorian calendar from Pope Gregory, from
the 1500’s
Today is April 3rd, 2010
----
God has His own calendar
We are now in the 1st Month of God, ha Aviv / Nisan,
17th day
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I explain the Sabbath each week
This is how simple it is:
Exod. 20
[8] Remember the Sabbath day, to keep
it holy.
[9] Six days shalt
thou labour, and do all thy
work:
[10] But the seventh day is the sabbath of Yehovah
thy God:
in it thou shalt not
do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy
daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger
that is within thy gates:
[11] For in six days Yehovah made
heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day:
wherefore Yehovah blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Lev. 23 [3] Six days shall work be done:
but
the seventh day is the sabbath of
rest, an holy convocation;
ye shall do no
work therein:
it is the sabbath of Yehovah in all your dwellings.
--------
Isa. 58 [13] If thou
turn away thy foot from the sabbath,
from doing thy pleasure on my holy day;
and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of Yehovah, honourable; and shalt honour him,
1 - not doing thine
own ways,
2 - nor finding thine
own pleasure,
3 - nor speaking thine own words:
[14] Then shalt
thou delight thyself in Yehovah; and I will
cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the
heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of Yehovah hath spoken it.
------------------------
Buying and selling is evil on the Sabbath
Neh. 13 [16] There
dwelt men of Tyre also therein, which brought fish,
and all manner of ware, and sold on the sabbath unto the
children of Judah, and in Jerusalem.
[17] Then I contended with the nobles of Judah, and said unto
them, what evil thing is this that ye do, and
profane the sabbath day?
------------------------
We read from law and the prophets every Sabbath
like they did in the Book of Acts
60 times in the Gospels
and letters it uses the word Sabbath!
--------------------
Let's see what Yeshua,
Paul and the Apostles did:
Acts 13 [13]
Now when Paul and his company loosed from Paphos,
they came to Perga in Pamphylia:
and John departing from them returned to Jerusalem. [14] But when
they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch in Pisidia, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and sat down. [15]
And after the reading of the law and the prophets the
rulers of the synagogue sent unto them, saying, Ye
men and brethren, if ye have any word of exhortation for the people, say on.
----
Acts 15 [21] For Moses of old time hath in every city
them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every
Sabbath day.
----
Luke 4 [16] And he, Yeshua came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and,
as his custom (prescribed by God's law) was, he
went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and
stood up for to read. [17] And
there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias.
----
Acts 13: [27] For they that
dwell at Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they knew him not, nor yet the
voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath day, they have fulfilled them in condemning
him.
----
Acts 13 [42] And when the Jews
were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles besought
that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath.
[44] And the next sabbath
day came almost the whole city together
to hear the word of God.
----
First
day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread
Luke. 23 [56] And they
returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested
the sabbath day according to the commandment.
----
"In the future"
Yeshua said in Matt. 24 [20] But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the
Sabbath day:
Isa. 66 - A
Sabbath, even after the new heavens and the new earth are created
[22] For as
the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall
remain before me, saith Yehovah,
so shall your seed and your name remain.
[23] And it
shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to
another, shall all (new body) flesh come to worship before me, saith Yehovah.
[24] And they shall go forth, and look
upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed
against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched;
and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.
-------------
Now make sure you remember:
God's Spring Calendar for 2010
Remember: There are two extra Sabbaths
left, besides the 7th day Sabbath each week
------------
At Yeshua's time:
Tomorrow - The resurrection of Yeshua the Messiah
First Fruits - April 4th, 1st day of the Week (Sunday) - (starts sunset of April
3rd)
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Last day of Unleavened Bread, ha Aviv / Nisan 21th, April 7th, Wednesday, (starts sunset on the
6th) A Sabbath
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2nd Month of God, Ziv
/ Zif, April 16th
(starts sunset April 15th)
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3rd Month of God, Sivan, and May 16th (starts sunset of May 15th)
------------
Feast of Weeks, Pentecost - May 23th, 1st day of the week (Sunday), (starts sunset
May 22th) 8th of Sivan, 50 days from First Fruits - a
Sabbath (This would make it 2 Sabbaths in a row)
------------------------------------
We are told to prove all things
1 Thessalonians, chapter 5:21 Prove
all things; hold fast that which is good.
----
2 Timothy, chapter 2:15 Study to shew
thyself approved unto God ,
a workman that needeth
not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
----
Colossians, chapter 4:6 Let your speech be
always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know
how ye ought to answer every man.
----
Colossians, chapter 3:16: Let the word of Messiah dwell in you
richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms
and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.
----
2 Peter, chapter 3:18 But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of
our Lord and Saviour Yeshua
the Messiah. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.
----
Rom. chapter 12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind, that ye
may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
--------------------------
We will watch our video presentations
http://oneinmessiah.net/theday1.asf
http://oneinmessiah.net/theday2.asf
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I could not leave this out J
Here is some info on
Pagan Easter from some encyclopedias:
The English word Easter
is derived from the names "Eostre" - "Eastre" - "Astarte" or Ashtaroth.
Astarte was introduced into the British Isles by the Druids and is just another
name for Beltis or Ishtar of the Chaldeans and
Babylonians.
The book of Judges
records that "the children of Israel did evil ...in the sight of the LORD,
and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, ...and forsook
the LORD, and served not Him."
Easter is just another
name for Ashteroth "The Queen of Heaven."
Easter was not considered a "Christian" festival until the fourth
century. Early Christians celebrated Passover on the 14th day of the first
month and a study of the dates on which Easter is celebrated will reveal that
the celebration of Easter is not observed in accordance with the prescribed
time for the observance of Passover.
After much debate, the Nicaean council of 325 A.D. decreed that "Easter"
should be celebrated on the first Sunday, after the full moon, on or after the
vernal equinox. Why was so much debate necessary if "Easter" was a
tradition passed down from the Apostles?
The answer is that it
was not an Apostolic institution, but, an invention of
man! They had to make up some rules.
History records that
spring festivals in honor of the pagan fertility goddesses and the events
associated with them were celebrated at the same time as "Easter". In
the year 399 A.D. the Theodosian Code attempted to
remove the pagan connotation from those events and banned their observance.
The pagan festival of
Easter originated as the worship of the sun goddess, the Babylonian Queen of
Heaven who was later worshipped under many names including Ishtar, Cybele, Idaea Mater (the Great Mother), or Astarte for whom the
celebration of Easter is named. Easter is not another name for the Feast of
Passover and is not celebrated at the Biblically prescribed time for Passover.
This pagan festival was supposedly "Christianized" several hundred
years after Christ.
THE PAGAN
WORSHIP OF EASTER
Reading from Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, 1948, Volume 4, page
140, we find that Easter is the Greatest Festival of the Christian Church,
which commemorates the resurrection of Yeshua Christ__which festival was named after the
ancient Anglo Saxon Goddess of Spring!
EASTER. The greatest
festival of the Christian church commemorates the Resurrection of Yeshua Christ. It is a movable feast, that is, it is
not always held on the same date. The church council of Nicea
(a.d. 325) decided that Easter should be celebrated
on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox
(March 21). Easter can come as early as March 22 or as late as April 25.
The name Easter comes
from the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre
or Ostara, in whose honor an annual spring festival
was held. Some of our Easter customs have come from this and other
pre-Christian spring festivals. Others come from the Passover feast of the
Jews, observed in memory of their deliverance from Egypt (see Passover). The
word ‘‘paschal,’’ meaning ‘‘pertaining to Easter,’’ like the French word for
Easter, Pâques, comes through the Latin from
the Hebrew name of the Passover. Passover is not Easter, nor the
translation is wrong.
Unger’s Bible Dictionary,
by Merrill F. Unger, 1957, page 283, goes on to corroborate this fact, saying:
Easter (Gr. pascha, from Heb. pesah), the
Passover, and so translated in every passage excepting ‘‘intending after Easter
to bring him forth to the people’’ (Acts 12:4). In the earlier
English versions Easter had been frequently used as the translation of pascha which is wrong.
The word Easter is of
Saxon origin, Eastra, the goddess of spring, in
whose honor sacrifices were offered about Passover time each year. By the
8th century Anglo-Saxons had adopted the name to designate the celebration of
Christ’s resurrection.
It is a fully documented
historical fact that the day which was chosen by the Christian Church to
celebrate this resurrection, was a day which had been celebrated by pagans from
antiquity! Yes, the only difference between these two celebrations,
is the fact that its name was changed to veneer it with Christian
Respectability!
It is simply no secret
that EASTER originated with the WORSHIP OF A PAGAN GODDESS! This
fact is presented almost every time one researches the word Easter.
Compton’s Encyclopedia,
1956, Volume 4, says this about Easter:
‘‘Many Easter customs
come from the Old World...colored eggs and rabbits have come from pagan
antiquity as symbols of new life...our name ‘Easter’ comes from ‘Eostre’, an ancient Anglo Saxon goddess, originally of the
dawn. In pagan times an annual spring festival was held in her honor. Some
Easter customs have come from this and other pre-christian
spring festivals.’’
Reading about this
Pre-Christian spring festival from Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Reference
Encyclopedia, 1962, Volume 8, page 2940, we learn:
Although Easter is a
Christian festival, it embodies traditions of an ancient time antedating the
rise of Christianity. The origin of its name is lost in the dim past; some
scholars believe it probably is derived from Eastre,
Anglo-Saxon name of a Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility, to whom was
dedicated Eastre monath,
corresponding to April. Her festival was celebrated on the day of the vernal
equinox, and traditions associated with the festival survive in the familiar
Easter bunny, symbol of the fertile rabbit, and in the equally familiar colored
Easter eggs originally painted with gay hues to represent the sunlight of
spring.
Such festivals, and the
myths and legends which explain their origin, abounded in ancient religions.
The Greek myth of the return of the earth-goddess Demeter from the underworld
to the light of day, symbolizing the resurrection of life in the spring
after the long hibernation of winter, had its counterpart, among many others,
in the Latin legend of Ceres and Persephone. The Phrygians believed that their
all-powerful deity went to sleep at the time of the winter solstice, and
they performed ceremonies at the spring equinox to awaken him with music
and dancing. The universality of such festivals and myths among ancient peoples
has led some scholars to interpret the resurrection of Christ as a mystical and
exalted variant of fertility myths.
The Dictionary of
Mythology, Folklore, and Symbols, Part 1, page 487 tells us more about this
Spring Festival:
‘‘It incorporates some
of the ancient Spring Equinox ceremonies of sun worship in which there
were phallic rites and spring fires, and in which the deity or offering to the
deity was eaten...The festival is symbolized by an ascension Lily...a chick
breaking its shell, the colors white and green, the egg, spring flowers, and
the Rabbit. The name is related to Astarte, Ashtoreth, Eostre
and Ishtar, goddess who visited and rose from the underworld. Easter yields
‘Enduring Eos’... ‘Enduring Dawn’.’’
Part of this spring
festival centered around Phallic Rites. Collier’s
Encyclopedia, 1980, Volume 9, page 622, tells us of the Babylonian Ishtar Festival
Phallic Rites:
The Ishtar Festivals
were symbolical of Ishtar as the goddess of love or generation. As the daughter
of Sin, the moon god, she was the Mother Goddess who presided over child
birth; and women, in her honor, sacrificed their virginity on the feast day or became
temple prostitutes, their earnings being a source of revenue for the temple
priests and servants.
We learn about these
Temple Prostitutes from The Interpreter’s Dictionary of The Bible, Volume 3,
pages 933-934:
a. The roll of the
sacred prostitute in the fertility cult. The prostitute who was an official of
the cult in ancient Palestine and nearby lands of biblical times exercised an
important function. This religion was predicated upon the belief that the
processes of nature were controlled by the relations between gods and
goddesses. Projecting their understanding of their own sexual activities,
the worshipers of these deities, through the use of imitative magic, engaged in
sexual intercourse with devotees of the shrine, in the belief that this would
encourage the gods and goddesses to do likewise. Only by sexual relations among
the deities could man’s desire for increase in herds and fields, as well as in
his own family, be realized.
In Palestine the gods
Baal and Asherah were especially prominent These competed with Yahweh the God of Israel and, in some
cases, may have produced hybrid Yahweh-Baal cults. Attached to the shrines of
these cults were priests as well as prostitutes, both male and female. Their
chief service was sexual in nature__the
offering of their bodies for ritual purposes.
Sexual relations for
ritual purposes was the ceremony for the Fertility
Cults. The Interpreter’s Dictionary, Volume 2, page 265 says:
FERTILITY
CULTS. The oldest common
feature of the religions of the ancient Near East was the worship of a great
mother-goddess, the personification of fertility. Associated with her, usually
as a consort, was a young god who died and came to life again, like the
vegetation which quickly withers but blooms again. The manner of the young
god’s demise was variously conceived in the myths: he was slain by another god,
by wild animals, by reapers, by self-emasculation, by burning, by drowning. In
some variations of the theme, he simply absconded. His absence produced
infertility of the earth, of man, and of beast. His consort mourned and
searched for him. His return brought renewed fertility and rejoicing.
In Mesopotamia the
divine couple appear as Ishtar and Tammuz, in
Egypt as Isis and Osiris. Later in Asia Minor, the Magna Mater is Cybele
and her young lover is Attis. In Syria in the
second millennium b.c., as
seen in the Ugaritic myths, the dying and rising god
is Baal-Hadad, who is slain by Mot (Death) and
mourned and avenged by his sister/consort, the violent virgin Anath. In the Ugaritic myths
there is some confusion in the roles of the goddesses. The great
mother-goddess Asherah, the wife of the senescent
chief god El, seems on the way to becoming the consort of the rising young
god Baal, with whom we find her associated in the O.T. Ashtarte
also appears in the Ugaritic myths, but she has a
minor and undistinguished role.
The O.T. furnishes
abundant evidence as to the character of the religion of the land into which
the Israelites came. Fertility rites were practiced
at the numerous shrines which dotted the land, as well as at the major
sanctuaries. The Israelites absorbed the Canaanite ways and learned to identify
their god with Baal, whose rains brought fertility to the land. A
characteristic feature of the fertility cult was sacral sexual intercourse by
priests and priestesses and other specially consecrated persons, sacred
prostitutes of both sexes, intended to emulate and stimulate the deities who
bestowed fertility. The agricultural cult stressed the sacrifice or common
meal in which the gods, priests, and people partook. Wine was consumed in great
quantity in thanksgiving to Baal for the fertility of the vineyards. The wine
also helped induce ecstatic frenzy, which was climaxed by self-laceration,
and sometimes even by self-emasculation. Child-sacrifice was also a feature of
the rites. It was not simply a cult of wine, women, and song, but a matter
of life and death in which the dearest things of life, and life itself, were
offered to ensure the ongoing of life.
Reading on page 103 of The
Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop,
1959, we find that Easter and Ishtar are the same:
Then look at Easter.
What means the term Easter itself? It bears its Chaldean origin on its
very forehead. Easter is nothing else than ‘‘Astarte’’, one of the
titles of Beltis, ‘‘The Queen of Heaven’’ whose name,
as ‘‘pronounced’’ by the people of Nineveh, was evidently identical with
that now in common use in this country. That ‘name’, as found by Layard on
the Assyrian monuments, is ‘‘Ishtar’’.
The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop
tells us of the doctrines of Semiramis:
‘‘She (Semiramis) taught that he (Nimrod the Babe) was a
god-child; that he was Nimrod, their leader reborn; that she and her
child were divine. This story was widely known in ancient Babylon and
developed into a well established worship__The
Worship of The Mother and Child!
Numerous monuments of
Babylon show the Goddess Mother Semiramis with her
child Tammuz in her arms.’’
ISHTAR (pronounced EASTER)
of Assyria was worshiped in Pagan Antiquity during her spring festival! Collier’s
Encyclopedia, 1980, Volume 15, page 748, gives us this information:
Ishtar,
goddess of love and war, the most important goddess of the Sumero-Akkadian pantheon. Her name in Sumerian is
Inanna (lady of heaven). She was sister of the sun
god Shamash and daughter of the moon god Sin. Ishtar was equated with the
planet Venus. Her symbol was a star inscribed in a circle. As goddess of
war, she was often represented sitting upon a lion. As goddess of
physical love, she was patron of the temple prostitutes. She was also
considered the merciful mother who intercedes with the gods on behalf of
her worshipers. Throughout Mesopotamian history she was worshiped under various
names in many cities; one of the chief centers of her cult was Uruk.
Astarte of Phoenicia was
the offshoot of Ishtar of Assyria. To the Hebrews, this abomination was known
as Ashtoreth__Ashtoroth. From Collier’s
Encyclopedia, Volume 3, page 13, we read:
ASHTAROTH [Æ(terath] the plural of the Hebrew ‘Ashto-reth,
the Phoenician-Canaanite goddess Astarte, deity of fertility, reproduction,
and war . The use of the plural form probably indicates a general
designation for the collective female deities of the Canaanites, just as the
plural Baalim refer to the male deities.
Watson’s Biblical and
Archaeological Dictionary, 1833, tells us more about this mother goddess, Ashtaroth:
ASHTAROTH, or ASTARTE, a
goddess of the Zidonians. The word Ashtaroth properly signifies flocks of sheep, or goats; and
sometimes the grove, or woods, because she was goddess of
woods, and groves were her temples. In groves consecrated to her, such
lasciviousness was committed as rendered her worship infamous. She was also
called the queen of heaven; and sometimes her worship is said to be that of
‘‘the host of heaven.’’ She was certainly represented in the same manner as
Isis, with cow’s horns on her head, to denote the increase and decrease of
the moon. Cicero calls her the fourth Venus of the Syrians. She is almost
always joined with Baal, and is called a god, the scriptures having no
particular word to express a goddess.
It is believed that the
moon was adored in this idol. Her temples generally accompanied those of the
sun; and while bloody sacrifices or human victims were offered to Baal, bread,
liquors, and perfumes were presented to Astarte. For her, tables were prepared
upon the flat terrace-roofs of houses, near gates, in porches, and at
crossways, on the first day of every month; and this was called by the Greeks,
Hecate’s supper. Solomon, seduced by his foreign wives, introduced the worship
of Ashtaroth into Israel; but Jezebel, daughter of
the king of Tyre, and wife to Ahab, principally
established her worship. She caused altars to be erected to this idol in every
part of Israel; and at one time four hundred priests attended the worship of Ashtaroth, I Kings xviii. 7.
The Interpreter’s
Dictionary, Volume 3, page 975, tells us of Ishtar’s role as The Queen of
Heaven:
Ishtar,
the goddess of love and fertility, who was identified with the Venus Star and is
actually entitled ‘‘Mistress of Heaven’’ in the Amarna
tablets.
The difficulty is that the Venus Star was regarded in Palestine as a male deity
(see DAY STAR), though the cult of the goddess Ishtar may have been introduced
from Mesopotamia under Manasseh. It is possible that Astarte, or ASHTORETH, the
Canaanite fertility-goddess, whose cult was well established in Palestine, had
preserved more traces of her astral character as the female counterpart of Athtar than the evidence of the O.T. or the Ras Shamra texts indicates. The
title ‘‘Queen of Heaven’’ is applied in an Egyptian inscription from the
Nineteenth Dynasty at Beth-shan to ‘‘Antit,’’ the Canaanite fertility-goddess Anat, who is termed ‘‘Queen of Heaven and Mistress of
the Gods.’’ This is the most active goddess in the Ras
Shamra Texts, but in Palestine her functions seem to
have been taken over largely by Ashtoreth.
We find this information
about Ashtoreth from The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 1979,
Volume 1, pages 319-320:
ASHTORETH ash’te-reth
[Heb. ‘astoret. pl. ‘astarôt;
Gk. Astarte].
A goddess of Canaan and Phoenicia whose name and cult were derived from
Babylonia, where Ishtar represented the evening and morning stars and was
accordingly androgynous in origin. Under Semitic influence, however, she became
solely female, although retaining a trace of her original character by standing
on equal footing with the male divinities. From Babylonia the worship of
the goddess was carried to the Semites of the West, and in most instances the
feminine suffix was attached to her name; where this was not the case the deity
was regarded as a male. On the Moabite Stone, for example, ‘Ashtar
is identified with Chemosh, and in the inscriptions of southern Arabia ‘Athtar is a god. On the other hand, in the name Atargatis (2 Macc. 12:26), ‘Atar,
without the feminine suffix, is identified with the goddess ‘Athah or ‘Athi (Gk. Gatis). The cult of the Greek Aphrodite in Cyprus was
borrowed from that of Ashtoreth; that the Greek name also is a modification
of Ashtoreth is doubtful. It is maintained, however, that the vowels of Heb. ‘astoret were borrowed from boset
(‘‘shame’’) in order to indicate the abhorrence the Hebrew scribes felt toward paganism
and idolatry.
In Babylonia and
Assyria Ishtar was the goddess of love and war. An old Babylonian legend
relates how the descent of Ishtar into Hades in search of her dead husband
Tammuz was followed by the cessation of marriage and birth in both earth and
heaven; and the temples of the goddess at Nineveh and Arbela, around which
the two cities afterward grew, were dedicated to her as the goddess of war. As
such she appeared to one of Ashurbanipal’s seers and encouraged the Assyrian
king to march against Elam. The other goddesses of Babylonia, who were little
more than reflections of a god, tended to merge into Ishtar, who thus became a
type of the female divinity, a personification of the productive principle in
nature, and more especially the mother and creatress
of mankind.
In Babylonia Ishtar was
identified with Venus. Like Venus, Ishtar was the goddess of erotic love and
fertility. Her chief seat of worship was Uruk (Erech), where prostitution was practiced in her name and
she was served with immoral rites by bands of men and women. In Assyria,
where the warlike side of the goddess was predominant, no such rites seem to
have been practiced, and instead prophetesses to whom she delivered oracles
were attached to her temples.
From various Egyptian
sources it appears that Astarte or Ashtoreth was highly regarded in the Late
Bronze Age.
Reading on pages 412-413
of Unger’s Bible Dictionary, we find this information about Ashtoreth-Astarte:
Ash'toreth (ash’to-reth),
Astarte, a Canaanite goddess. In south Arabic the name is found as ‘Athtar (apparently from ‘athara,
to be fertile, to irrigate), a god identified with the planet Venus. The name
is cognate with Babylonian Ishtar, the goddess of sensual love, maternity and
fertility. Licentious worship was conducted in honor of her. As Asherah and Anat of Ras Shamra she was the patroness
of war as well as sex and is sometimes identified with these goddesses. The Amarna Letters present Ashtoreth as Ashtartu.
In the Ras Shamra Tablets
are found both the masculine form ‘Athtar and the
feminine ‘Athtart. Ashtoreth worship was early
entrenched at Sidon (I Kings 11:5, 33; II Kings 23:13). Her polluting cult even
presented a danger to early Israel (Judg. 2:13; 10:6). Solomon succumbed to her
voluptuous worship (I Kings 11:5; II Kings 23:13). The peculiar vocalization Ashtoreth
instead of the more primitive Ashtaroth is evidently
a deliberate alteration by the Hebrews to express their abhorrence for her cult
by giving her the vowels of their word for ‘‘shame’’ (bosheth).
M. F. U.
The Interpreter’s
Dictionary, Volume 1, page 252 says:
The antipathy
toward the Asherah on the part of the Hebrew leaders
was due to the fact that the goddess and the cult object of the same name
were associated with the fertility religion of a foreign people and as such
involved a mythology and a cultus which were
obnoxious to the champions of Yahweh.
Unger’s Bible
Dictionary, page 412, gives us this information about Asherah:
Asherah (a-she’ra),
plural, Asherim, a pagan goddess, who is found in the
Ras Shamra epic religious
texts discovered at Ugarit in North Syria (1929-1937), as Asherat,
‘‘Lady of the Sea’’ and consort of El. She was the chief goddess of Tyre in the 15th century b.c. with the appellation Qudshu,
‘‘holiness.’’ In the Old Testament Asherah
appears as a goddess by the side of Baal, whose consort she evidently came to
be, at least among the Canaanites of the South. However, most Biblical
references to the name point clearly to some cult object of wood, which might
be worshiped or cut down and burned, and which was certainly the goddess’
image (I Kings 15:13; II Kings 21:7). Her prophets are mentioned (I Kings l8:19) and the vessels used in her service referred to (II
Kings 23:4). Her cult object, whatever it was, was utterly detestable to
faithful worshipers of Yahweh (I Kings 15:13) and was set up on the high places
beside the ‘‘altars of incense’’ and the stone pillars (masseboth).
Indeed, the stone pillars seem to have represented the male god Baal (cf. Judg.
6:28), while the cult object of Ashera, probably a
tree or pole, constituted a symbol of this goddess (See W. L. Reed’s The Asherah in the Old Testament, Texas Christian University
Press).
But Asherah
was only one manifestation of a chief goddess of Western Asia, regarded now
as the wife, now as the sister of the principal Canaanite god El. Other
names of this deity were Ashtoreth (Astarte) and Anath.
Frequently represented as a nude woman bestride a lion with a lily in one hand
and a serpent in the other, and styled Qudshu
‘‘the Holiness,’’ that is, ‘‘the Holy One’’ in a perverted moral sense, she was
a divine courtesan. In the same sense the male prostitutes consecrated to the
cult of the Qudshu and prostituting themselves to her
honor were styled qedishim, ‘‘sodomites’’ (Deut.
23:18; 1 Kings 14:24; 15:12; 22:46). Characteristically Canaanite the lily
symbolizes grace and sex appeal and the serpent fecundity (W. F. Albright, Archaeology
and the Religion of Israel, Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1942, pages 68-94).
At Byblos (Biblical Gebal) on the Mediterranean,
north of Sidon, a center dedicated to this goddess has been excavated. She and
her colleagues specialized in sex and war and her shrines were temples of
legalized vice. Her degraded cult offered a perpetual danger of pollution to
Israel and must have sunk to sordid depths as lust and murder were glamorized
in Canaanite religion.
On page 413 of Unger’s
Bible Dictionary, we have found that Astarte is the Greek name for
the Hebrew Ashtoreth. From Collier’s Encyclopedia, Volume 3, page 97, we
find that Astarte-Ashtaroth is merely the Semitic Ishtar__which we have already learned is
pronounced Easter:
ASTARTE
[aesta’rti], the Phoenician goddess of fertility and
erotic love.
The Greek name, ‘‘Astarte’’ was derived from Semitic, ‘‘Ishtar,’’
‘‘Ashtoreth.’’ Astarte was regarded in Classical antiquity as a moon
goddess, perhaps in confusion with some other Semitic deity. In accordance with
the literary traditions of the Greco-Romans, Astarte was identified with Selene
and Artemis, and more often with Aphrodite. Among the Canaanites, Astarte, like
her peer Anath, performed a major function as goddess
of fertility.
Egyptian iconography,
however, portrayed Astarte in her role as a warlike goddess massacring mankind,
young and old. She is represented on plaques (dated 1700-1100 b.c.) as naked, in striking contrast to the modestly garbed
Egyptian goddesses. Edward J. Jurji
In Ephesus from primitive
times, this MOTHER GODDESS had been called DIANA, who was
worshiped as the Goddess of Virginity and Motherhood. She was said to represent
the generative powers of nature, and so was pictured with many breasts. A tower
shaped crown, symbolizing the Tower of Babylon, adorned her head:
Reading from Bible
Manners And Customs, by James M. Freeman, 1972, page
451, we learn these facts about the Mother of all things:
‘‘The circle round her
head denotes the nimbus (sin circle) of her glory, the griffins inside of which
express its brilliancy. In her breasts are the twelve signs of the zodiac,
of which those seen in front are the ram, bull, twins, crab, and lion; they are
divided by the hours. Her necklace is composed of acorns, the primeval food of
man. Lions are on her arms to denote her power, and her hands are
stretched out to show that she is ready to receive all who come to her. Her
body is covered with various breasts and monsters, as sirens, sphinxes, and
griffins, to show that she is the source of nature, the mother of all things.
Her head, hands, and feet are of bronze while the rest of the statue is of
alabaster to denote the ever-varying light and shade of the moon’s figure...
Like Rhea, she was crowned with turrets, to denote her dominion over
terrestrial objects.’’
The English word Easter
is derived from the names "Eostre" - "Eastre" - "Astarte" or Ashtaroth.
Astarte was introduced into the British Isles by the Druids and is just another
name for Beltis or Ishtar of the Chaldeans and
Babylonians.
This
should be enough for you to decide
Shabbat
Shalom