Samaritans/ Jews?

[patrick457]

Re: the seven gods mentioned –

Two of them were female, so they would be “ba’alat” (mistress, wife) and not “ba’al” (master, husband).

Anammelech was the spouse of Adrammelech. She was associated with a she-quail, and possibly with the moon.

Sukkoth-Benoth (tents of the daughters) is another name for the Babylonian goddess Zir-banit, wife of the Babylonian god Bel-Merodach, aka Marduk. (Babylonian Bel = Phoenician Ba’al) Apparently she was worshipped in Samaria by having sex tents where men hooked up with temple prostitutes (or in this case, tent-al prostitutes). She had a normal temple in Babylon.

I beg to differ in a detail here. We actually don’t know much about Anammelech and Adrammelech.

It’s true that Anammelek is associated by some commentators with the goddess Anat. We know that some 5th century BC Judahites in Elephantine in Egypt worshipped a deity known as Anat-yahu (Anat + Yahu) alongside Yahu ( = Yhwh), thought to be a certain form of Anat who is imagined to be the wife of Yhwh (pairing male gods with female consorts was a common thing back then). So a theory thinks that ‘Anammelek’ is an analogous name to Anat-yahu - Anat-Melek - and that ‘Anammelek’ is actually another local form of Anat. On the other hand, some interpret Anammelek as male; they see Ana- as the masculine form of the name Anat: Anu, and so interpret Anammelek as being either a combination of the (male) gods Anu and Melek (= Athtar, the male version of the goddess Ishtar) or a title: anu-melek ‘Anu is king’, though admittedly this theory is weaker.

(As for Adrammelek, some scholars suggest that the name is a garbled version of Adad-melek ‘(H)adad is king’ or Adad-milki ‘(H)adad is my king’ (?), an obscure Assyro-Babylonian known only from some personal names in records found in Tell Halaf in modern northeastern Syria. But others question whether the reading ‘Adad-milki’ is correct at all and propose an alternate identification: 'dr + mlk ‘the glorious one is king’. Since the root 'dr is absent in Aramaic, it might suggest a Phoenician origin for the god.)

But beyond the fact that the Sepharvites (who worship Anammelek alongside Adrammelek) are accused of child sacrifice (which suggests a connection with Moloch - not too far fetched, since moloch and molech - M-L-K - are essentially (nearly) the same word: ‘king’), we don’t know anything else about these gods (hence the differing opinions above - to the point that some even say that these two deities or their names at least might have been simply invented by the author of 1-2 Kings.

Along Anammelech and Sukkoth-Benoth, I’ll actually add Ashima - another obscure deity - as another (possible) goddess. But to be frank, we cannot positively identify right now whether two of these ‘goddesses’ (Anammelech and Ashima) are really goddesses at all. AFAIK out of these seven gods, only Sukkoth-benoth (Zir-banit, aka Sarpanitu or Banitu) is positively identified by the consensus as being female, but even then, there’s the question of whether ‘Sukkoth-Benoth’ refers to one god(dess) or to two related gods (Sakkut - an astral deity, identified with the planet Saturn - and Banitu/Zir-banit).

 

[YADA]

I forgot to say that the more common spelling for Zir-banit is Sarpanit, just like you hear more about Marduk than Bel-Merodach. She was associated with Venus, the rising Moon, pregnancy, and seeds.

But anyway, the point is that goddesses definitely aren’t husbands, and that Jesus wasn’t going to bring them up when talking to a woman whose personal history didn’t include such things. If he’d been talking to a Samaritan man, maybe he’d have focused on the goddesses instead.

It may even be part of Jesus’ point to the woman that Samaritans didn’t do this stuff anymore and were solid for the Torah, if she wasn’t having all these men anymore, either.

The other point is that “the one who is with you now is not your husband” was literally true, since Jesus wasn’t her husband (and yet she was talking to him, because she was kindhearted and interested in what the heck he was doing talking to her) or the Samaritan people’s Lord (and yet they were trying to follow God).

So He was personally offering her salvation and reconciliation through “living water;” and at the same time He was offering salvation, reconciliation, and espousal to God to the whole Samaritan people.