Asherah

Asherah
אֲשֵׁרָה‬
Goddess of motherhood and fertility
Lady of the Sea
Major cult center Middle-East
Formerly Jerusalem
Symbol Asherah pole
Consort El (Ugaritic religion)
Elkunirsa (Hittite religion)
Yahweh (Israelite religion)
Amurru (Amorite religion)
Offspring 70 sons (Ugaritic religion)
77 or 88 sons (Hittite religion)

Asherah (/ˈæʃərə/),[lower-alpha 1] in ancient Semitic religion, is a mother goddess who appears in a number of ancient sources. She appears in Akkadian writings by the name of Ašratu(m), and in Hittite as Aserdu(s) or Asertu(s). Asherah is generally considered identical with the Ugaritic goddess ʼAṯirat.

Signifiance and roles

Asherah is identified as the queen consort of the Sumerian god Anu, and Ugaritic El,[1] the oldest deities of their respective pantheons,[2] as well as Yahweh, the god of Israel and Judah.[3] This role gave her a similarly high rank in the Ugaritic pantheon.[4] Despite her association with Yahweh in extra-biblical sources, Deuteronomy 12 has Yahweh commanding the destruction of her shrines so as to maintain purity of his worship.[5] The name Dione, which like 'Elat means "Goddess", is clearly associated with Asherah in the Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, because the same common epithet ('Elat) of "the Goddess par excellence" was used to describe her at Ugarit.[6] The Book of Jeremiah, written circa 628 BC, possibly refers to Asherah when it uses the title "Queen of Heaven"[lower-alpha 2] in Jeremiah 7:16-18[7] and Jeremiah 44:17-19, 25.[8]

In Ugaritic texts

Sources from before 1200 BC almost always credit Athirat with her full title rabat ʾAṯirat yammi, "Lady Athirat of the Sea" or as more fully translated "she who treads on the sea".[lower-alpha 3] This occurs 12 times in the Baʿal Epic alone.[9] The name is understood by various translators and commentators to be from the Ugaritic root ʾaṯr "stride", cognate with the Hebrew root ʾšr, of the same meaning. There she appears to champion Yam, god of the sea, in his struggle with Ba'al.

Her other main divine epithet was qaniyatu ʾilhm[lower-alpha 4] which may be translated as "the creatrix of the Gods (Elohim)".[9] In those texts, Athirat is the consort of the god El; there is one reference to the 70 sons of Athirat, presumably the same as the 70 sons of El. She is clearly distinguished from ʿAshtart in the Ugaritic documents although in non-Ugaritic sources from later periods the distinction between the two goddesses can be blurred; either as a result of scribal error or through possible syncretism. In any case, the two names begin with different consonants in the Semitic languages; Athirat or Asherah[lower-alpha 5] with an aleph or glottal stop consonant (א) versus ʿAshtart or ʿAshtoreth[lower-alpha 6] with an ʿayin or voiced pharyngeal consonant (ע), indicating the lack of any plausible etymological connection between the names.

She is also called Elat,[lower-alpha 7] "Goddess", the feminine form of El (compare Allat) and Qodesh, "holiness".[lower-alpha 8] Athirat in Akkadian texts appears as Ashratum (or, Antu), the wife of Anu, the God of Heaven. In contrast, ʿAshtart is believed to be linked to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar who is sometimes portrayed as the daughter of Anu while in Ugaritic myth, ʿAshtart is one of the daughters of El, the West Semitic counterpart of Anu.

Among the Hittites this goddess appears as Asherdu(s) or Asertu(s), the consort of Elkunirsa ("El the Creator of Earth") and mother of either 77 or 88 sons. Among the Amarna letters a King of the Amorites is named Abdi-Ashirta, "Servant of Asherah".[10]

In Egyptian sources

Beginning during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, a Semitic goddess named Qudshu ("Holiness") appears prominently. She is equated with the native Egyptian goddess Hathor. Some think this is Athirat/Ashratu under her Ugaritic name. This Qudshu seems not to be either ʿAshtart or ʿAnat 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 the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods in Egypt there was a strong tendency towards syncretism of goddesses and Athirat/Ashratum then seems to have disappeared, at least as a prominent goddess under a recognizable name.

In Israel and Judah

Image on pithos sherd found at Kuntillet Ajrud below the inscription "Yahweh and his Asherah"

Between the 10th century BC and the beginning of their exile in 586 BC, polytheism was normal throughout Israel;[11] it was only after the exile that worship of Yahweh alone became established, and possibly only as late as the time of the Maccabees (2nd century BC) that monotheism became universal among the Jews.[12][13] Some biblical scholars believe that Asherah at one time was worshipped as the consort of Yahweh, the national God of Israel.[12][14][15] There are references to the worship of numerous gods throughout Kings: Solomon builds temples to many gods and Josiah is reported as cutting down the statues of Asherah in the temple Solomon built for Yahweh (2 Kings 23:14). Josiah's grandfather Manasseh had erected one such statue (2 Kings 21:7[16]).

Further evidence includes, for example, an 8th-century combination of iconography and inscriptions discovered at Kuntillet Ajrud in the northern Sinai desert[17] where a storage jar shows three anthropomorphic figures and several inscriptions.[18][19] The inscriptions found refer not only to Yahweh but to El and Baal, and two include the phrases "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" and "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah."[20] The references to Samaria (capital of the kingdom of Israel) and Teman (in Edom) suggest that Yahweh had a temple in Samaria, while raising questions about the relationship between Yahweh and Kaus, the national god of Edom.[21] The "Asherah" is most likely a cultic object, although the relationship of this object (a stylised tree perhaps) to Yahweh and to the goddess Asherah, consort of El, is unclear.[22] It has been suggested that the Israelites might have considered Asherah as a consort of Baal due to the anti-Asherah ideology which was influenced by the Deuteronomistic History at the later period of Monarchy.[23] In another inscription called "Yahweh and his Asherah", there appears a cow feeding its calf.[24] If Asherah is to be associated with Hathor/Qudshu, it can then be assumed that it is the cow that is being referred to as Asherah.

William Dever's book Did God Have a Wife? adduces further archaeological evidence—for instance, the many female figurines unearthed in ancient Israel, (known as Pillar-Base Figurines)—as supporting the view that in Israelite folk religion of the monarchal period, Asherah functioned as a goddess and consort of Yahweh and was worshiped as the Queen of Heaven, for whose festival the Hebrews baked small cakes.

The word Asherah is translated in Greek as alsos, grove, or alse, groves, or occasionally by dendra, trees; Vulgate in Latin provided lucus or nemus, a grove or a wood (thus KJV Bible uses grove or groves with the consequent loss of Asherah's name and knowledge of her existence to English language readers of the Bible over some 400 years).[25] The association of Asherah with trees in the Hebrew Bible is very strong. For example, she is found under trees (1K 14:23; 2K 17:10) and is made of wood by human beings (1K 14:15, 2K 16:3-4). Trees described as being an asherah or part of an asherah include grapevines, pomegranates, walnuts, myrtles, and willows (Danby:1933:90,176).

Some scholars have found an early link between Asherah and Eve, based upon the coincidence of their common title as "the mother of all living" in Genesis 3:20[26] through the identification with the Hurrian mother goddess Hebat.[27][28] Asherah was also given the title Chawat from which the name Hawwah in Aramaic and the biblical name Eve are derived.[29]

Asherah poles, which were sacred trees or poles, are mentioned many times in the Hebrew Bible. The Asherah pole was prohibited by the Deuteronomic Code which commanded "You shall not plant any tree as an Asherah beside the altar of the Lord your God".[30]

In Arabia

A stele, now located at the Louvre, discovered by Charles Huber in 1883 in the ancient oasis of Tema,[lower-alpha 9] northwestern Arabia, and believed to date to the time of Nabonidus's retirement there in 549 BC, bears an inscription in Aramaic which mentions Ṣalm of Maḥram, 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 (transliterated as ṯ), 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 Hebrew/Canaanite Asherah.[31]

The Arabic root ʼṯr is similar in meaning to the Hebrew indicating "to tread" used as a basis to explain the name of Ashira as "lady of the sea", specially that the Arabic root ymm also means "sea".[32] It has also been recently suggested that the goddess name Athirat might be derived from the passive participle form, referring to "one followed by (the gods)", that is, "pro-genitress or originatress", corresponding with Asherah's image as 'the mother of the gods' in Ugaritic literature.[33]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Hebrew: אֲשֵׁרָה‬ 'Ášērāh; Ugaritic: 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚 'Aṯirat
  2. ↑ Hebrew: מְלֶכֶת הַשָּׁמַיִם‬
  3. ↑ Ugaritic 𐎗𐎁𐎚 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚 𐎊𐎎, rbt ʾaṯrt ym
  4. ↑ Ugaritic 𐎖𐎐𐎊𐎚 𐎛𐎍𐎎, qnyt ʾlm
  5. ↑ Ugaritic: 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚, ʾaṯrt
  6. ↑ Ugaritic 𐎓𐎘𐎚𐎗𐎚, ʿṯtrt
  7. ↑ Ugaritic 𐎛𐎍𐎚, ilt
  8. ↑ Ugaritic 𐎖𐎄𐎌, qdš
  9. ↑ Modern Tayma – Arabic: تيماء‎

References

  1. ↑ "Asherah" in The New Encyclopædia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 15th edn., 1992, Vol. 1, pp. 623-4.
  2. ↑ Oxford Companion to World Mythology, p.32
  3. ↑ Niehr, Herbert (1995). "The Rise of YHWH in the Judahite and Israelite Religion". The Triumph of the Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA: Eerdmans. pp. 54, 57. ISBN 0-8028-4161-9.
  4. ↑ Binger 1997, p. 74
  5. ↑ Deuteronomy 12: 3-4
  6. ↑ Olyan, Saul M. (1988), Asherah and the cult of Yahweh in Israel, Scholars Press, p. 79, ISBN 9781555402549
  7. ↑ ". . . pray thou not for this people . . . 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 to other gods, that they may provoke me to anger." (King James Version)
  8. ↑ Rainer, Albertz (2010), "Personal piety", in Stavrakopoulou, Francesca; Barton, John, Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (reprint ed.), Continuum International Publishing Group, pp. 135–146(at 143), ISBN 9780567032164
  9. 1 2 Gibson, J. C. L.; Driver, G. R. (1978), Canaanite Myths and Legends, T. & T. Clark, ISBN 9780567023513
  10. ↑ Noted by Raphael Patai, "The Goddess Asherah", Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24.1/2 (1965: 37–52), p. 39.
  11. ↑ Finkelstein, Israel, and Silberman, Neil Asher, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Simon & Schuster, 2002, pp. 241–42.
  12. 1 2 "BBC Two - Bible's Buried Secrets, Did God Have a Wife?". BBC. 21 December 2011. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  13. ↑ Quote from the BBC documentary: "Between the 10th century and the beginning of their exile in 586 there was polytheism as normal religion all throughout Israel; only afterwards things begin to change and very slowly they begin to change. I would say it [the sentence "Jews were monotheists" - n.n.] is only correct for the last centuries, maybe only from the period of the Maccabees, that means the second century BC, so in the time of Jesus of Nazareth it is true, but for the time before it, it is not true."
  14. ↑ Wesler, Kit W. (2012). An Archaeology of Religion. University Press of America. p. 193. ISBN 978-0761858454. Retrieved 3 September 2014.
  15. ↑ Mills, Watson, ed. (31 Dec 1999). Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (Reprint ed.). Mercer University Press. p. 494. ISBN 978-0865543737.
  16. ↑ "Genesis Chapter 1 (NKJV)". Blue Letter Bible.
  17. ↑ Ze'ev Meshel, Kuntillet 'Ajrud: An Israelite Religious Center in Northern Sinai, Expedition 20 (Summer 1978), pp. 50–55
  18. ↑ Dever 2005
  19. ↑ Hadley 2000, pp. 122–136
  20. ↑ Bonanno, Anthony (1986). Archaeology and Fertility Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean: Papers Presented at the First International Conference on Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean, University of Malta, 2–5 September 1985. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 238. ISBN 9789060322888. Retrieved 10 March 2014.
  21. ↑ Keel, Othmar; Uehlinger, Christoph (1998). Gods, Goddesses, And Images of God. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 228. ISBN 9780567085917. Retrieved 10 March 2014.
  22. ↑ Keel, Othmar; Uehlinger, Christoph (1998). Gods, Goddesses, And Images of God. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 232–233. ISBN 9780567085917. Retrieved 10 March 2014.
  23. ↑ Sung Jin Park, "The Cultic Identity of Asherah in Deuteronomistic Ideology of Israel," Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 123/4 (2011): 553–564.
  24. ↑ Dever 2005, p. 163.
  25. ↑ "Asherah". www.asphodel-long.com. Retrieved 2016-02-14.
  26. ↑ Jenny Kein, (2000)"Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism" (Universal Publishers; 1 edition (January 15, 2000)
  27. ↑ Bach, Alice Women in the Hebrew Bible Routledge; 1 edition (3 Nov 1998) ISBN 978-0-415-91561-8 p.171
  28. ↑ Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, Princeton University Press, 1992 p.270.
  29. ↑ Dever 2005.
  30. ↑ Deut 16:21
  31. ↑ Baruch Margalit, "The Meaning and Significance of Asherah," Vetus Testamentum 40 (July 1990): 264–97.
  32. ↑ Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris, Ancient Goddesses: Myths and Evidence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 79.
  33. ↑ Sung Jin Park, "Short Notes on the Etymology of Asherah", Ugarit Forschungen 42 (2010): 527–534.

Sources

  • Barker, Margaret (2012), The Mother of the Lord Volume 1: The Lady in the Temple, T & T Clark, ISBN 9780567528155
  • Binger, Tilde (1997), Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament, Continuum International Publishing Group, ISBN 9781850756378
  • Dever, William G. (2005), Did God Have A Wife?: Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, ISBN 9780802828521
  • Hadley, Judith M (2000), The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: The Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess, University of Cambridge Oriental publications, 57, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521662352
  • Kien, Jenny (2000), Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism, Universal Publishers, ISBN 9781581127638
  • Long, Asphodel P. (1993), In a Chariot Drawn by Lions: The Search for the Female in Deity, Crossing Press, ISBN 9780895945754
  • Myer, Allen C. (2000), "Asherah", Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, Amsterdam University Press
  • Park, Sung Jin (2010). "Short Notes on the Etymology of Asherah". Ugarit Forschungen. 42: 527–534.
  • Park, Sung Jin (2011). "The Cultic Identity of Asherah in Deuteronomistic Ideology of Israel". Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. 123 (4): 553–564. doi:10.1515/zaw.2011.036.
  • Patai, Raphael (1990), The Hebrew Goddess, Jewish folklore and anthropology., Wayne State University Press, ISBN 9780814322710
  • Reed, William Laforest (1949), The Asherah in the Old Testament, Texas christian university press, OCLC 491761457
  • Taylor, Joan E (1995), The Asherah, the Menorah and the Sacred Tree, Journal for the study of the Old Testament. no. 66: University of Sheffield, Dept. of Biblical Studies, pp. 29–54, ISSN 0309-0892, OCLC 88542166
  • Wiggins, Steve A (1993), A Reassessment of 'Asherah': A Study according to the Textual Sources of the First Two Millennia B.C.E, Alter Orient und Altes Testament, Bd. 235., Verlag Butzon & Bercker, ISBN 9783788714796

Asherah

Kuntillet inscriptions

Israelite

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