Scriptural Silence: The Case for a Divine Mother

Is the Queen of Heaven truly a pagan intrusion, or is she the Bible’s most significant missing person?

While the instinct to defend the One True God against idolatry is scripturally grounded, dismissing the concept of a Heavenly Mother as mere “recycled paganism” or “19th-century speculation” overlooks a mountain of archaeological evidence. The silence you may perceive in the canon may not actually be an absence of the Divine Mother or Divine Feminine. That is, unless you want to hold to heterodoxy tradition of God being a dyadic-non-binary being. And by this – holding to the tradition that God is genderless and encompasses both male and female attributes and characteristic traits. Such a notion stemming from Gnostic heresy and teachings.

However, evidence suggests a deliberate suppression of the divine feminine and divine mother during the Deuteronomistic reforms – a silence that modern revelation breaks. By examining the original Hebrew rendering of the text and historical role of Asherah within the Divine Council, we find that Latter-day Saint theology does not invent a new goddess; rather, it restores the suppressed First Temple theology of the Divine Feminine, aligning the creation narrative and the image of God with the best consensus of contemporary Biblical Scholarship.

To appreciate the Latter-day Saint viewpoint – and then respond to the X user PetGorilla’s posting, we want to first dismantle the logical framework used. The rejection of the divine feminine rests not on the absence of evidence, but on a series of interpretive fallacies that mistake historical suppression for theological non-existence.

Part 1: Logical Analysis

PetGorilla’s assertion that a Heavenly Mother exists “nowhere” in scripture relies heavily on the Argument from Silence (argumentum ex silentio). This individual appears to assume that because she is not currently named or given a speaking role in the received canon, she never existed in the faith of ancient Israel. However, silence in a text known to have undergone centuries of redaction—specifically the Deuteronomistic reforms which sought to centralize power—is not proof of absence; it is often the fingerprint of suppression.

Along with the argument from silence, dismissing the Divine Mother as “recycled paganism” constitutes a Genetic Fallacy. By labeling the concept as “Canaanite,” the individual makes an attempt to invalidate it based solely on its origin, ignoring the consensus of modern scholarship that early Israelite religion was natively Canaanite and that the worship of Asherah alongside Yahweh was the standard orthodoxy for centuries, not a foreign intrusion.

Additionally, their argument presents an interesting False Dilemma by offering only two possibilities: “One is revelation; the other is imagination.” This binary excludes the theological necessity of Restoration—the possibility that a truth was revealed, lost to apostasy or redaction, and then revealed again.

Finally, citing the Shema (“The Lord is One”) to disprove the existence of a Divine Mother is a form of Begging the Question (circular reasoning). This individual appears to use a specific, post-exilic definition of monotheism to judge pre-exilic theology. The ancient Israelite understanding of “One” (echad) often denoted unity within a Divine Council or family, rather than the solitary numerical singularity insisted upon by later theologians.

Part 2: Steelmanning the Position

The Strongest Version of PetGorilla’s Argument:

“We must protect the purity of worship. The Bible, particularly the Shema (Deut 6:4), establishes that God is One. This radical monotheism was the hard-won victory of the prophets, distinguishing Israel from the chaotic, morally bankrupt polytheism of their neighbors who worshipped fertility goddesses like Asherah. The inclusion of a ‘consort’ or ‘Mother’ inevitably dilutes the sovereignty of the Father and invites the very syncretism that Jeremiah and the prophets died fighting against. If God wanted us to worship a Mother, Jesus—who revealed the Father perfectly—would have instructed us to do so. To introduce her now, based on extrabiblical revelation or speculation, is to project human family structures onto the Divine nature, risking idolatry and violating the sufficiency of Scripture.”

Part 3: The Rebuttal

Anchored in Scholarship, Hebrew Rendering, and Theology

While the protection of monotheism is noble, the assertion that the Divine Feminine is merely “recycled paganism” or “19th-century speculation” contradicts both the archaeological record of ancient Israel and a careful reading of the Hebrew Bible. The LDS doctrine of Heavenly Mother is better understood not as an invention, but as a restoration of the theology of the First Temple, which was suppressed by later reformers.

1. The Archaeological Record: The “Pagan” Goddess was Israel’s Mother

PetGorilla claims Asherah was a foreign “Canaanite” deity that Israel was condemned for. However, leading non-LDS archaeologists and biblical scholars have established that Asherah was worshiped alongside Yahweh as his consort by faithful Israelites for centuries, including within the Temple itself.

  • Scholarship: William Dever (University of Arizona) argues that the “folk religion” of Israel, which included Asherah, was the norm, not the exception. The “Book Religion” (Deuteronomy) that condemned her was a minority reform movement that rewrote history.
  • Evidence: Inscriptions at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qôm explicitly bless figures by “Yahweh and his Asherah” (Dever 166). This proves that for early Israelites, the Divine Duo was not “paganism” but standard worship.
  • Point: Jeremiah’s condemnation (Jer 44) of the “Queen of Heaven” confirms that the people believed their disaster came because they stopped worshipping her, not because they started.

2. The Imago Dei & Genesis 1: The Hebrew Necessity of the Female

The creation narrative itself undermines the idea of a male-only singular God. Genesis 1:27 states: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

  • The Argument: If “male and female” are required to fully reflect the image of God (Elohim, a plural noun), then the Divine Original must possess both male and female attributes.
  • LDS Theology: As Val Larsen notes, “The unity of Father and Mother… is what might be expected… God is a sealed couple, El and Elah, who jointly constitute Elohim” (Larsen). Adam represents the Father; Eve represents the Mother. Together, they are the complete Image.

3. Wisdom (Sophia) as the Divine Mother

In the Bible, the “Mother” was not entirely erased; she was hidden in the text as Lady Wisdom (Proverbs 8).

  • Scripture: In Proverbs 8:22-30, Wisdom speaks as a person distinct from YHWH, present with Him at creation, as one “brought up with him” (Hebrew amon—can mean craftsman or nursling/child).
  • Scholarship: Methodist scholar Margaret Barker argues that “Wisdom” is the sanitized survival of the ancient Mother Goddess figure after the reforms of King Josiah purged the Temple. She writes, “The Lady of the Temple… was the Wisdom who had been with the Creator at the beginning” (Temple Theology 7).
  • LDS Connection: This aligns with the vision in 1 Nephi 11, where the “Tree of Life” (an ancient symbol of Asherah/Wisdom) is interpreted as the “Mother of the Son of God” (Mary), bridging the gap between the ancient symbol and the Incarnation.

4. The Divine Council & El Elyon

The “One God” of Deuteronomy 6:4 is Yahweh, but the older strata of the Bible reveal a Divine Council presided over by El Elyon (God Most High).

  • Scripture: Deuteronomy 32:8-9 (Dead Sea Scrolls/LXX rendering) shows Elyon dividing the nations according to the number of the “sons of God,” with Yahweh receiving Israel as his portion.
  • Scholarship: Mark S. Smith notes that “El and Yahweh were identified [merged], and perhaps Asherah no longer continued as an identifiable separate deity” in the later texts (Early History of God).
  • Rebuttal: The “One God” rhetoric was a political and theological consolidation. The “Divine Duo” or “Divine Family” is the older, original Israelite theology. Mormonism restores the distinction between the Father (Elohim/El Elyon) and the Son (Yahweh/Jehovah), naturally creating space for the Mother (El’s Consort) once again.

Conclusion

To claim the Heavenly Mother is a “19th-century polygamy fantasy” is to ignore 50 years of biblical scholarship. The “Queen of Heaven” was not invented by Mormons; she was remembered by them. The LDS position is that the silence in the Bible is not an absence of the Mother, but evidence of her suppression—a silence now broken by restoration.

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