Asherah

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In the museum case in Jerusalem they stand in rows, hand-high, the clay grayed by three thousand years in the ground: small female figures, a pinched bird-face above, and below it two cupped hands lifting a pair of heavy breasts. The lower body is not modeled at all. It tapers into a smooth column, a turned trunk, so that each woman ends as a little pillar planted in the earth. They were made in the eighth and seventh centuries before the common era, in the hill towns of Judah, in their hundreds — found in houses, under floors, in tombs, in the fill of the city Jerusalem worshipped from. No text names what they are. But the gesture they make, the breast offered and the trunk that roots them, points back along a line that runs the length of the Canaanite world to a goddess the Ugaritic scribes called the mother of the gods, and that the writers of the Hebrew Bible called, with a single doubled word, Asherah.

Athirat, Lady of the Sea

The name surfaces first in the cuneiform tablets of Ugarit, the coastal kingdom dug out of the Syrian mound of Ras Shamra beginning in 1929. There she is Aṯiratu — Athirat — and her standing title, recurring through the mythological texts, is rabat Aṯirat yammi, “Lady Athirat of the Sea.” She is the wife of El, the white-bearded high god who sits enthroned at the source of the two rivers, the father of years; and she is the great mother of the Ugaritic pantheon. The gods are bn aṯrt, “the sons of Athirat,” seventy of them according to one passage of the Baal Cycle — a round, total number, the whole divine family issuing from her. Her other epithets carry the same weight. She is qaniyatu ilima, “creatress of the gods,” the one who brings them into being; she is ilatu, “the goddess,” simply, the feminine of El’s own name, as if she were the female pole of divinity as such.

The picture the tablets give is of a maternal dignitary, not a warrior and not a lover. In the central episode of the Baal Cycle, the storm-god, having defeated Sea and longing for a palace worthy of his kingship, cannot simply build one. Permission rests with El, and El must be approached. It is Athirat who carries the petition. The poem shows her at her domestic work — a spindle in her hand, washing garments by the shore — when Baal and his sister Anat come bearing gifts of silver and gold; and it is Athirat who then goes up to El, who flatters and persuades the old god, and wins from him the word that lets the palace rise. She is the one with standing in the house of El, the intercessor whose access to the patriarch’s ear moves the plot of the cosmos. The role is procreative and political at once: she is the womb the gods come out of and the voice that can bend their father. There is dignity in it, and a touch of comedy too — the tablet lingers on her startled fear when she sees the two younger gods approaching, before she grasps that they come as suppliants, not enemies. She is formidable not by force but by place: the only figure in the divine household with the standing to ask El for something and be answered.

Her reach extended well beyond Ugarit. Centuries earlier, in the Amorite world of Mesopotamia, a goddess Ashratum is named as the consort of the god Amurru; among the Hittites of Anatolia a goddess Ašertu appears as the wife of a god whose name, Elkunirša, is simply the Canaanite phrase El, creator of the earth swallowed whole into Hittite, in a strange tale of the storm-god, the goddess, and an attempted seduction. In the far south, pre-Islamic inscriptions from Arabia know an Athirat as well. The same divine name, the same maternal office, runs across the Semitic-speaking Near East for the better part of two thousand years, the consort of whatever high god a given people set at the head of its sky.

The goddess and the pole

When the name passes into Hebrew it splits. The word ’ăšērâ occurs roughly forty times in the Hebrew Bible, and it does two distinct kinds of work. In a handful of places it plainly names a goddess: prophets eat at her table, an image of her is made, kings set her up or tear her down. But in the great majority of its occurrences the word names not a deity at all but a thing — an object of wood, planted in the ground, that stood at places of worship beside the altar. One could make an asherah and one could cut it down; one could plant it under a green tree and one could burn it to ash. The same noun, in the same book, is a goddess and her furniture.

What the wooden asherah actually was remains partly a matter of inference, because the people who wrote about it wanted it gone and did not pause to describe it. The verbs attached to it are the clue. It is planted, made, set up, stood up; it is cut down, hewn, uprooted, burned, ground to powder. A living tree could be planted and uprooted; a carved wooden pole could be made, stood up, and burned. The likeliest reconstruction is that the asherah was a stylized sacred tree — sometimes perhaps a living tree tended at a shrine, sometimes a worked pole or post standing for one — set up next to the altar as the goddess’s emblem and, by a common ancient logic, as a localization of her presence. The doubling is not careless. In a world where a deity could be present in the object that signified her, the line between the goddess and the wooden tree that named her was never sharp; to plant the asherah was to plant the goddess, and to burn it was to drive her out. The Greek translators of the Septuagint, working when the object itself had long vanished, rendered the word as alsos, “grove,” and the King James Bible after them wrote “grove” wherever the Hebrew says asherah, so that for centuries English readers met the goddess only as a stand of trees.

Behind the pole stands a coherent iconography of the goddess herself, recoverable from the art if not from the hostile texts. Asherah is the deity of fertility and motherhood, and her signs are the things that bear and nourish. She is associated with the tree of life — the date palm above all, its frond a stand-in for her — and with the lion, the great cat she rides or stands upon as mistress of the wild. She is shown with heavy breasts, the source of the milk that feeds gods and herds and fields alike; flanking animals, often a pair of ibexes or caprids rearing to browse, feed from the sacred tree that is her body. The tenth-century cult stand from Ta’anach, in the Galilee, gathers the whole grammar onto one terracotta object: a tier with a sacred tree flanked by ibexes and guarded by lions, and a lower tier with a nude goddess holding the ears of two lions at her sides. The tree and the lioness are two ways of drawing the same power.

The Ta’anach cult stand, tenth century BCE, Israel Museum, Jerusalem — its tree-and-lion and goddess-and-lion tiers are widely read as imagery of Asherah. Photo by Wikimedia user פעמי-עליון, CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is worth marking off, here, the goddesses Asherah is not. The Canaanite world set several great female powers side by side, and the modern habit of merging them flattens distinctions the ancient texts kept sharp. Anat is the war-fury, the sister of Baal who wades thigh-deep in blood and hangs severed hands from her belt. Astarte — Ashtart, the West Semitic counterpart of Mesopotamian Ishtar — is the goddess of love and the evening star, the figure the Greeks would later read as Aphrodite. Asherah is neither warrior nor lover. She is the matriarch, older than both, the consort of the highest god and the mother from whom the others descend. In the Hebrew Bible the names do blur — the reformers were not interested in fine theology — but the Ugaritic record draws three different goddesses, and Asherah is the one who holds the maternal office.

Yahweh and his Asherah

The deepest question Asherah raises is not about Canaan but about Israel, and it turns on a fact the biblical writers half-concealed and half-confessed: that the asherah did not stand only at foreign shrines but inside the worship of Yahweh himself. The book of Kings is candid about it. An asherah stood in the Temple at Jerusalem; one king set up a carved image of Asherah in the house of the LORD, where it remained for the better part of a century. The reforming kings are graded, in the Deuteronomistic accounting, partly by what they did to it. Hezekiah is praised for cutting down the asherim; Josiah, in the most violent of the purges, is said to have brought the asherah out of the Temple, burned it in the Kidron valley, beaten it to dust, and scattered the dust on the graves of the common people. A cult that took a king’s army to uproot was not a foreign import lightly entertained. It was something native, persistent, and close to the center.

Then there is the epigraphy. In the 1970s, excavation at Kuntillet Ajrud — a remote way-station in the northeastern Sinai, dated to around 800 BCE — produced two large storage jars covered with drawings and inscriptions in early Hebrew. Among the blessings scratched and painted on them are formulas that read: “I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah,” and “by Yahweh of Teman and his asherah.” A tomb inscription from Khirbet el-Qom, in the Judean hills, dated to roughly 750 BCE, carries a closely related blessing, invoking Yahweh and his asherah for a man named Uriyahu. The words are not in doubt. Their meaning is the most argued sentence in the study of Israelite religion.

On one reading, his asherah means the goddess: Asherah was worshipped in early Israel as the consort of Yahweh, his divine wife, paired with him in blessing as Athirat had been paired with El at Ugarit, and the later insistence on Yahweh alone was a reform that wrote her out. This is the case Raphael Patai pressed in The Hebrew Goddess and William Dever in Did God Have a Wife? — that beneath the monotheism of the finished Bible lies an older Israel in which the high god had a partner, attested in the figurines, the cult stands, and now the inscriptions. On the other reading, his asherah means the cult-object: Yahweh’s sacred pole or tree, the wooden emblem standing in his sanctuary, a mediating thing through which his blessing was channeled, not a separate deity. The strongest grammatical argument cuts toward the object. Classical Hebrew does not attach a possessive suffix to a proper name — one does not say “his Yahweh” or “her Baal” — and so “his asherah,” with its blunt possessive, looks like a common noun, a piece of cult furniture, not a person. Against that, related Semitic languages did sometimes suffix divine names, and the pairing of a god with his goddess-consort is exactly the structure the Ugaritic texts display; a personified Asherah, the partner who comes with the god, would also fit the formula.

The honest position is that the inscriptions do not by themselves decide it, and that the two readings are not as far apart as the debate makes them sound — a cult-pole named for a goddess is, after all, the goddess’s pole, and the line between an emblem and its presence was one the ancient world drew lightly. What the evidence establishes beyond argument is that in eighth-century Israel and Judah, in the everyday religion of way-stations and tombs and household shelves, Yahweh and an asherah belonged together in the language of blessing. Whether that asherah was a living goddess or her wooden sign was already, perhaps, a question the worshippers themselves did not need to settle.

Judean pillar figurines, eighth to sixth centuries BCE, Israel Museum, Jerusalem — mass-produced household figures whose offered breasts and pillar-bodies are often read as a domestic form of the goddess. Photo by Chamberi, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The reform and the recovery

The campaign against the asherah is one of the few sustained narratives the Bible tells about its own religious past, and it runs for centuries. The asherim appear from the period of the judges onward, planted on the high hills and under every green tree; the law codes order them cut down; the historians measure king after king by whether the poles still stood. The contest reaches its set-piece on Mount Carmel, where the prophet Elijah faces the prophets of Baal — and, the text adds, four hundred prophets of Asherah who eat at Queen Jezebel’s table. The reform crests under Josiah, with the asherah dragged from the Temple and burned, and it is sealed by the catastrophe of 586 BCE, when Jerusalem falls, the Temple burns, and the exile in Babylon forges, out of defeat, the uncompromising monotheism that would define what came after. After the exile the goddess is gone from the worship of Israel. The pillar figurines stop being made. The word asherah survives only as a thing to be condemned, and then only as a “grove” in translation.

She did not vanish from everywhere at once. The maternal office she had held passed, by long and contested lines, into other figures — some have heard an echo of her in the personified Wisdom of Proverbs, who was beside the Creator at the founding of the world, and a fainter one in the later Jewish mystical figure of the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence imagined in feminine terms. These are resemblances traced through the history of an idea, not a proven descent; the goddess herself was not carried forward under her own name. What carried forward was the polemic that buried her, and through it, paradoxically, her memory.

The recovery began with the spade. Ugarit gave back Athirat in 1929, the dignified Lady of the Sea whose existence the Bible had reduced to a heap of burned poles; the figurines came up by the hundred from Judahite soil; Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom put her name beside Yahweh’s in ink. Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess in 1967 forced the figure into general view and into controversy, and Dever’s archaeological case carried the argument into wide public debate, where the phrase “the Hebrew goddess” still provokes — among scholars over how much the evidence will bear, among believers and skeptics over what a consort of Yahweh would mean for the monotheism that displaced her. The reformers cut down the tree beside the altar and scattered its ashes on the graves; and three thousand years later it is the ashes, sifted and read, that have given the goddess back her shape.

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