TWO BOOKS ON GODDESS TRADITIONS in ancient Israel and Judaism are reviewed in The Forward:

The Jewish Goddess, Past and Present
NONFICTION
By Jay Michaelson
May 5, 2006

Did God Have a Wife? Archeology And Folk Religion in Ancient Israel
By William G. Dever
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 360 pages, $25.

The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature
By Rami Shapiro
Skylight Paths Publishing, 240 pages, $16.99.

Excerpt:

Recently, however, archaeologists and biblical critics have revealed a far more complicated picture of how biblical Israelites lived their religious lives. As exhaustively summarized in William Dever's "Did God Have a Wife? Archeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel," most scholars now believe that the ancient Israelite world was far less monolithic, and monotheistic, than the Bible suggests. Household shrines, statuettes of male and female figures, and inscriptions and carvings describing "YHVH and His Asherah" all point to a decentralized biblical religion that was practiced largely within family structures, and well beyond the strictures of Jerusalem's orthodox elite. Some scholars believe that this evidence points to an indigenous "goddess worship" that regarded the biblical God as one half of a divine couple. Others say it suggests the influence of non-Israelite religions. And still others, such as Raphael Patai, whose enormously influential 1978 book, "The Hebrew Goddess," arguably inaugurated the popular appropriation of this scholarship, believe that the tradition of the Divine Feminine — a female half of God, or bride of God, or earth-centered, body-centered counterpart to the sky god Yah — endured long after the biblical period ended.