Asherah
For the small research submarine, see Asherah (submarine).Asherah (from
Hebrew אשר"), generally taken as identical with the
Ugaritic goddess
Athirat (more pedantically but accurately
Airat), was a major northwest
Semitic mother goddess, appearing occasionally also in
Akkadian sources as
Ashratum/
Ashratu and in
Hittite as
Asherdu(s) or
Ashertu(s) or
Aserdu(s) or
Asertu(s).
In the Ugaritic texts (before
1200 BC) Athirat is three times called
art ym,
Airat yammi, 'Athirat of the Sea' or as more fully translated 'She who treads on the sea', the name understood by various translators and commentators to be from the Ugaritic root
ar 'stride' cognate with the Hebrew root
šr of the same meaning. The sacred sea (lake) upon which Asherah trod was known as Yam Kinneret and is now called
Lake Galilee.
In those texts, Athirat is the consort of the god
El and there is one reference to the
70 sons of Athirat, presumably the same as the
70 sons of El. She is not clearly distinguished from
Ashtart (better known in English as Astarte), although Ashtart is clearly linked to the
Mesopotamian Goddess
Ishtar. She is also called
Elat (the feminine form of El) and
Qodesh 'Holiness'.
Among the Hittites this goddess appears as Asherdu(s) or Asertu(s), the consort of Elkunirsa and mother of either 77 or 88 sons.
In Egypt, beginning in the 18th dynasty, a Semitic goddess named
Qudshu ('Holiness') begins to appear prominently, equated with the native Egyptian goddess
Hathor. Some think this is Athirat/Ashratu under her Ugaritic name Qodesh. This Qudshu seems not to be either Ashtart or Anat as both those goddesses appear under their own names and with quite different iconography and appear in at least one pictorial representation along with Qudshu.
But in
Persian,
Hellenistic and
Roman periods there was a strong tendency towards syncretism of goddesses and Athirat/Ashrtum then seems to have disappeared, at least as a prominent goddess under a recognizable name.
Biblical references have been taken to indicate that a goddess Asherah was worshipped in
Israel and
Judah, as the Queen of Heaven whose worship
Jeremiah so vehemently opposed:
"Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.":::"
Jeremiah 7:17"18
"... to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem ...":::"Jeremiah 44:17
The Hebrews baked small cakes for her festival.
But the word
asherah also refers to a standing pole of some kind, pluralized as a masculine noun when it has that meaning. Among the Hebrews' Phoenician neighbors, tall standing stone pillars signified the numinous presence of a deity, and the
asherahs may have been a rustic reflection of these. Or
asherah may mean a living tree or grove of trees and therefore in some contexts mean a shrine. These uses have confused Biblical translators. Many older translations render Asherah as 'grove'. There is still disagreement among scholars as to the extent to which Asherah (or various goddesses classed as Asherahs) was/were worshipped in Israel and Judah and whether such a goddess or class of goddesses is necessarily identical to the goddess Athirat/Ashratu.
Most of the forty references to Asherah in the Hebrew Bible derive from sources edited by the
Deuteronomist. In her study
Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament (1997, p. 141), Tilde Binger noted that there is warrant for seeing an Asherah as, variously,
"a wooden-aniconic-stela or column of some kind; a living tree; or a more regular statue." For Asherah often a wooden-made rudely carved statue planted on the ground of the house was her symbol, and sometimes a clay statue without legs and stood in the same way. Her
idols were found also in
forests, carved on living
trees, or in the form of poles beside altars that were placed at the side of some roads.
When the young reformer
Hezekiah came to the throne of Judah (possibly some time around the 7th century BC)
"He removed the high places, and broke the pillars (massebahs
), and cut down the Asherah." (2 Kings 18.4). In the
Authorized Version of the
Bible, the name
Asherah is always mistranslated
"grove". That error caused a theory that
"the Hebrews cut down all the sacred groves, whereupon the land soon stopped flowing with milk and honey" (see
deforestation).
At Kuntillet Arjud (in Hebrew Horvat Teman) in the Sinai Desert in the 1975 excavation, a pottery ostraca was inscribed "Berakhti et'khem l'YHVH Shomron ul'Asherato." (=I have blessed you by YHVH of Samaria and His Asherah.)
This would appear to show northern Israelite influence but others have suggested that "Shomron" should be read "shomrenu", our Guardian.
Scholars have argued that this was a sacred site but others suggest it was a resting place, of a religious nature, for travellers following trade routes through the Sinai of the 8th century BC There may also be another reference YHVH and His Asherah in an inscription on the building wall.
An additional references to YHVH and His Asherah, has been found at Khirbet el-Qom, near Hebron, where an inscription reads
"Blessed be Uriyahu by Yahweh and by his asherah; from his enemies he saved him!" (Berlinerblau).
These have all raised great speculation. At Kuntillet there are accompanying drawings (not a later Hebrew custom) and more fundamentalist scholars argue that the oasis was a center of the religious cross-fertilization called
syncretism.
A stele, now at the
Louvre, discovered in the ancient oasis of Tema (the modern transcription is
Tayma) in southwestern Arabia by Charles Huber in
1883, and believed to date to the time of
Nabonidus's retirement there in 549 BC, bears an inscription in
Aramaic which mentions alm of Maram and Shingala and Ashira as the gods of Tema. This Ashira might be Athirat/Asherah. Since Aramaic has no way to indicate Arabic
th, corresponding to the Ugaritic
th (more pedantically written as
), if this is the same deity, it is not clear whether the name would be an Arabian reflex of the Ugaritic
Athirat or a later borrowing of the supposed Hebrew/Canaanite
Asherah.
In the ancient
lunar calendar that became the
Islamic calendar, the
Day of Ashurah, transliterated also as
Aashurah,
Ashura or
Aashoorah, falls on the 10th day of Muharram. On that day, in the year of the Hejira 61 (AD 680),
Husayn bin Ali, the grandson of Muhammad was killed by
Umayyad forces at the Battle of
Karbala (now in Iraq). Still called by its ancient name, the
Day of Ashurah, it has been observed ever since as a day of mourning by
Shī`ites.
The name
`Ashurah is interpreted as meaning
"ten" in Arabic. (The normal Arabic word for
ten is
`asharah cognate to the
Hebrew root `śr =
"ten", the differing forms of
s being the normal correspondence found in cognate roots between Arabic and Hebrew.)
Some try to connect the Arabic
:Ashurah instead to the goddess
Athirath/
Asherah through the Ashira of
Tema. But
:Ashurah with initial letter :ain (ﻉ) is difficult to equate with
'Asherah; with beginning 'alef (here indicated by an apostrophe but normally omitted initially in popular transliterations from Semitic languages).
The connection is controversial. It is as though in English one were to say that the word
juice refers to the god
Zeus. The sound difference is very distinctive to Arabic ears. Yet
cognate Semitic roots display this switching between ain and alif, and some Arabian accents pronounced, and indeed still do, pronounce `ain as a
glottal stop (like the tribe of
Tamim whose name is given to this way of pronunciation).
In the
science fiction book
Snow Crash, by
Neal Stephenson, Asherah is portrayed as a
meta-virus brought to earth naturally or by alien broadcast. The
Sumerian figure
Enki is a proto-hacker or as Stephenson puts it "a
neurolinguistic hacker" who uses his ability to manipulate people through language to introducing sentience to mankind and save them from the restrictive dogma of Asherah. Modern day
glossolalia is attributed to a resurgence of the
"cult of Asherah" and the meta-virus in humanity.
The worship of 'Asherah of the Sea' plays a large part in the plot of
Jacqueline Carey's novel
Kushiel's Chosen, placed in a fantasy version of Venice.
In the video game, Fire Emblem 'Path of Radiance', Ashera is a goddess, worshipped by the entire world. Armor blessed by the goddess can only be penetrated by weapons that are also blessed.
*
Asherah pole*El in Ugarit
El (god)*
Elohim (God [plural], the pantheon of gods or divine beings in general)
*
The Hebrew Goddess*William G. Dever:
Did God Have A Wife? Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2005)
*Judith M.Hadley:
The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judaism (U of Cambridge 2000)
*Jenny Kien:
Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism (Universal 2000)
*Asphodel P. Long:
In a Chariot Drawn by Lions (Crossing Press 1993).
*Raphael Patai:
The Hebrew Goddess (Wayne State University Press 1990 and earlier editions)
*
Asherah**
Asphodel P. Long, "The Goddess in Judaism - An Historical Perspective"**
"Asherah, the Tree of Life and the Menorah"**
Jewish Encyclopedia: Asherah**
University of Birmingham: Deryn Guest: Asherah**
El (god) in Ugarit.
**
Lilinah biti-Anat, Qadash Kinahnu Deity Temple "Room One, Major Canaanite Deities"*
Kuntillet inscriptions**
Jacques Berlinerblau, "Official religion and popular religion in pre-Exilic ancient Israel" (Commentary on Yahweh's Asherah.)
**
ANE: Kuntillet bibliography**
Jeffrey H. Tigay, "A Second Temple Parallel to the Blessings from Kuntillet Ajrud" (University of Pennsylvania) (This equates Asherah with
an asherah.)
*
Israelite Religion**
David Steinberg, "Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the Religion of Israel"
