I started Tikva Frymer-Kensky's In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. I have two items:
1. I will use a passage from page 80 as a fulcrum for discussing certain points in today's reading:
"We do not know all the reasons for this decline [in the prominence of women and of goddesses]. It would be tempting to attribute it to new ideas brought in by new people with the mass immigration of the West Semites into Mesopotamia at the start of the second millennium. However, this cannot be the true origin. The city of Mari on the Euphrates in Syria around 1800 B.C.E. was a site inhabited to a great extent by West Semites. In the documents from this site, women (again, royal women) played a role in religion and politics that was not less than that played by Sumerian women of the Ur III period (2111-1950 B.C.E.). The cause for the change in women's position is not ethnically based. The dramatic decline of women's visibility does not take place until well into the Old Babylonian period (circa 1600 B.C.E.), and may be [a] function of the change from city-states to larger nation-states and the changes in the social and economic system that this entailed."
Before the time "well into the Old Babylonian period", there were Sumerian city-states with patron gods or goddesses, and the kings of those city-states would pretend to cohabit (as if they were gods) with the warlike sex goddess Inanna in order to bring fertility to the land. The portrayal of the goddesses tended to reaffirm the social expectation that women were to be passive, and Inanna's independence (while feared and respected) was "a fearsome admonition of the dangers of the unencumbered woman" (page 29). But there was also a recognition that women were wise. At some point, the goddesses declined, and nation-states began to overshadow city-states, bringing an emphasis on stability rather than fertility. For Frymer-Kensky, the Epic of Gilgamesh was significant in this change, for Gilgamesh was not depicted as a god (as were kings of city-states), but primarily as a man struggling with his own mortality (even though he was technically half-divine). As Frymer-Kensky states, "During the Old Babylonian period, the sacred marriage disappeared, and with it, all the ideas of divinity-in-kingship" (page 77). Frymer-Kensky argues that the decline in the prominence of women (who did some political things at one point) probably coincided with the decline of the goddess, but she disagrees with the view that West Semitic migrants brought that change, for West Semites in second millennium Mari accorded to women political and religious roles.
2. On pages 87-88, Frymer-Kensky discusses the worship of only one god in the ancient Near East (while there was still an acknowledgement that other gods existed):
"Within polytheism, crisis situations might impel people temporarily to focus all their energies on one deity. Such a situation prevails in the Atrahasis Epic. As the plague is decimating humanity, Ea declares, 'Do not worship your God, do not reverence your goddess. Build a temple to the god Namtar and bring offerings to him, and so induce him to lift the plague.' Later, when the drought afflicts humanity, Ea suggests a similar stratagem of worshiping only Adad, God of the rains. In the Atrahasis Epic the intelligent man worships only the one god who has the power to control the situation in which the worshiper finds himself. Worshiping only that god induces him to use his power to the benefit of the worshiper. In Atrahasis, the suggestion of exclusive worship of one deity is a temporary response to an emergency situation; in the Bible, it is a permanent demand."
So, in Atrahasis (an ancient Near Eastern flood story), people were encouraged to worship only the god who was causing the disaster, in order for the disaster to end. But there were still other gods. The Bible, however, makes the worship of only one god a command that is permanent.