If you take a look at this book:
you will discover that the judeo religion that spawned Judaism originally worshiped a goddess named Asherah, and that she was essentially on equal footing with Jehovah.
The deuteronomist takeover of that religion included removing her, and the implements that represented her, from the temple and from daily worship. In 600 BC King Josiah even cut down the tree that was within the holy of holies inside the temple, and burned it in front of the Temple as a symbolic gesture of her removal.
Because Barker is a scholar of the Old testament, she was able to discover that much of the misogyny present in the Bible is from edits made by the Dueteronomists and their inheritors, the Pharisees. All of the Old testament rules about women and their menses, etc., and even Paul's sexist prescriptions, have been ignorantly inherited by modern day Christians from that deuteronomist tradition.
She also theorizes that this is why some books, including the book of Enoch which is to be found in the Ethiopian bible, were excluded from the Jewish Canon. Enoch criticized the church men and monarchy that betrayed and abandoned Asherah.
This is also why the Essenes split off from the main Jewish tradition, and when their scriptures were found by archaeologists (the Dead Sea scrolls) they contained remnants of the scriptures that were edited out by the deuteronomists.
Barker's larger point is that most modern misogyny and patriarchal rule stems directly from Asherah's removal from the temple in 600 BC, as the male hierarchy of Judaism became a corporate model for every religious institution that followed.
Asherah was known as "the goddess who walked the sea." When I was reading Barker's book I realized that there is a possibility that when Jesus (who criticized and rebuked the patriarchy of his time until he was executed) walked on the Sea of Galilee he was sending a message to his disciples about Her, and not just performing a miracle for its own sake.
I'm not saying that anybody needs to believe in jesus. But symbolically speaking, for him to walk on the water within the context of what Barker's book puts forth, without saying a word he was essentially legitimizing Her place within their religious cosmology.