Asherah

In the Ugaritic texts, the Late Bronze Age tablets from Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast that are our best direct source for Canaanite religion, the goddess appears as Athirat, the consort of the high god El and the mother of the gods (the seventy sons of Athirat), a dignified matriarch of the divine family. She bears the title usually read Lady Athirat of the Sea (the meaning of the word rendered sea is disputed). Her role in the great Baal Cycle is that of an intercessor: it is Athirat whom Baal and his sister Anat must win over so that she will persuade El to permit Baal a palace fitting to his kingship. This Canaanite mother-goddess is the direct background to the biblical Asherah.

Archaeologists have proposed that a stylised tree-of-life motif, found repeatedly on painted pottery, seals and ornate cult stands from Israelite and Judahite sites such as Taanach and Lachish, may represent Asherah in a non-figural, symbolic form parallel to the wooden cult pole the Hebrew Bible associates with her name; a tenth-century terracotta cult stand from Taanach, carved with alternating registers of a nude goddess flanked by lions and a stylised tree flanked by ibexes, is among the most frequently cited pieces of evidence in this debate, though, as with the inscriptional evidence, archaeologists disagree over how directly the imagery should be read as depicting the goddess herself rather than a more general fertility symbol.

In the Hebrew Bible the name Asherah is used both for a goddess and for a wooden pole or stylized tree that stood at places of worship and that reforming kings are said to have cut down, so that the object and the deity are hard to separate in the texts. The question became far sharper with the discovery at Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai of inscriptions from about 800 BCE that bless by Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah and Yahweh of Teman and his asherah. Whether his asherah here means a consort goddess worshipped alongside Yahweh in some circles of early Israelite religion, or merely a cult object, is one of the sharpest and most consequential disputes in the study of Israelite religion, bearing directly on how monotheism emerged, and it remains unsettled. The evidence is genuinely ambiguous, and scholars of good faith read it both ways.

A second Judahite inscription, from a tomb at Khirbet el-Qom and also dated to around the eighth century BCE, similarly invokes a blessing by Yahweh and his asherah, reinforcing the Kuntillet Ajrud evidence that this formula was not an isolated fluke. The Hebrew Bible itself preserves a striking admission of just how embedded such objects could become even at the centre of official worship: 2 Kings 23 describes King Josiah, during his sweeping religious reforms of the late seventh century BCE, personally removing an asherah object from the Jerusalem temple itself and having it burned, direct textual evidence that a cult object bearing this name had stood, for some period, inside the very sanctuary later tradition remembered as dedicated to Yahweh alone.