Astarte

Astarte (Phoenician Ashtart, biblical Ashtoreth) is the Levantine goddess of love, war and fertility, the western counterpart of Mesopotamian Ishtar and, like her, associated with the evening star, the planet Venus. Though a relatively minor figure in the Ugaritic texts, she became a major deity of Phoenician religion, with important temples at Sidon, Tyre and Byblos, and she travelled with Phoenician traders and colonists across the Mediterranean; in the Punic west she is closely tied to, or succeeded by, the great Carthaginian goddess Tanit. Her identification with the Greek Aphrodite was ancient: Herodotus in the fifth century BCE calls the temple of Aphrodite Ourania at Ascalon the oldest of that goddess's sanctuaries and says the Cypriot one was founded from it, and Greeks also at times equated Astarte with Hera and with Selene, a looseness that itself shows how freely such cross-cultural equations were made.

Astarte enters the Hebrew Bible under her Hebrew name Ashtoreth as a specifically named foreign cult that Israelite kings are recorded both adopting and later destroying. The first Book of Kings reports that Solomon, in his old age and under the influence of his many foreign wives, built a high place for Ashtoreth, described there as the goddess of the Sidonians, on a hill near Jerusalem, an act the biblical text presents as a serious religious failure that helped justify the kingdom's later division.

Centuries afterward, the reforming king Josiah, in the account given in the second Book of Kings, is credited with systematically tearing down the religious infrastructure of what the text treats as generations of accumulated idolatry, including the specific defiling and destruction of the high place Solomon had built for Ashtoreth, alongside similar sites dedicated to other foreign gods, as part of a broader campaign to centralize worship exclusively on Yahweh at the Jerusalem temple. These two episodes, separated by roughly three centuries in the biblical narrative's own internal chronology, bracket Astarte's presence in Judahite religious life as the biblical authors chose to record it, an initially tolerated or even royally sponsored foreign cult at the start, and a specifically targeted object of religious purification at the end, and they provide some of the clearest textual evidence that worship of Astarte under her Levantine name was not merely a foreign curiosity to ancient Israelites but an actual, sometimes officially sanctioned practice within Jerusalem itself that later religious reformers considered serious enough to require deliberate physical demolition generations later.