Asherah

אשרה


Much of what follows can also be found under Asher.

Mother-goddess, and sometimes goddess of the sea, Asherah was El's wife. Like Astarte she is often called Ba'alat, whch means "mistress", but also "wife of Ba'al".

She was sometimes represented as a lioness, and worshipped in sacred groves (Judges 3:7, 6:25, 1 Kings 16:33 and 18:19), and as an idol (2 Kings 21:7, 2 Chronicles 17:6 etc).

Her name connects her with both Sarah (שרה), the wife of Av-Raham, and with Asher (אשר), the son of Ya'akov (Jacob); but not with Osher (Osiris), whose name is spelled with an Ayin (עשר).

However, it is surely more than just coincidence that the land occupied by the Beney Asher (אשר) was precisely the place where Eshet (Isis) went in search of the remains of her brother, who had been killed by his uncle Set and his body, cut in fourteen parts, put out to sea in a boat? Osiris is the Greek form of his name; to the Egyptians he was Osher. Asherah is the Assyrian form of Eshet, but with an additional first-letter Aleph (א), and that Aleph is one of the key distinctions between Yehudit and Aramaic (as commonplace as the "o" that is present in English but absent in American: colour, rigour, valour, etc); so the loss of that Aleph would yield Sarah.

Asherah would also become Asher in the masculine, and the Asherim (or sometimes Asherot or Ashterot) were the sacred trees, effectively totem poles, used in her worship: the Cross, the Obelisk and the World Tree of Christmas are all variations of it. Is it conceivable that Asher is to Asherah as Dan was to Dinah, the inference of either a sister-tribe, or more likely the tribal name of her worshippers? And if so, was the spelling of Osher with an Ayin in Yehudit a deliberate obfuscation, an attempt to separate?

Asher is taken to mean "happy" or "fortunate" (which one should be if one worships Asherah properly!), and is common in the Psalms especially, many of which begin with, or include, a verbal pun on the goddess' name, such as the two verses sung under the title "Ashrey" in synagogue every morning: Psalm 84:5 "Ashrey yoshvey beytecha - happy are they who dwell in the house of Asherah"; and Psalm 144:15 "Ashrey ha-am she-kacha-lo - happy are they when it is so" (the "so" being the intense fertility of the land brought by Asherah). Not that Asherah is present, chas ve chalilah, in the religious Judaic uttering of these lines!

To the Romans, Venus was regarded as the bringer of good fortune. The Roman equivalent of Ba'al was Hercules, Venus' lover, previously Herakles to the Greeks; but in Kena'an (e.g 2 Kings 23:4) he was Asherah's consort.

On innumerable occasions (Judges 3:7 and 10:6, 1 Samuel 7:4 and 12:10 et al) the texts have Ashtoret instead of Asherah, this being the Babylonian Ishtar rather than the Assyrian Astarte, but still clearly the same goddess, who in Egypt, as noted above, was Eshet (Isis) and, also as noted above, to the Romans Venus. In Eleusis she was worshipped as Diana (later as the Virgin Mary), and by the Greeks at different times as Aphrodite or Demeter. To the Celts she was Guinevere the consort of Beli, which translates into Celtic as Ar-Thor or The King (Arthur). Beli is of course Bel or Ba'al, Astarte's consort; to the southern Beney Kena'an Ba'al's consort was Anat, which is another variation on the same fertility goddess, as Yah was to the Ionian Phoenician and the Beney Chet (Hittites).

The Asherim were a Phoenician-Aramaean idol, representing Astarte, or the planet Venus, the companion and consort of Ba'al. Images of Astarte (usually small clay figurines with pregnant bellies and large milking-breasts; icons of fertility) were called Asherot (אשרות) or Ashterot (אשתרות), and are probably included amongst the various household iconoi known as Teraphim. She was worshipped in sacred groves, but also, as we shall see in a moment, in the Temple itself, at certain periods. 


The larger Asherim were sometimes immense pillars of stone, akin to the menhirs of Carnac, more often the trunks of large trees, pollarded and carved, something in the manner of a totem pole (cf Deuteronomy 16:21 and Judges 6:25).

The altar of Ba'al at Shomron (Samaria) in the time of King Achav (Ahab) was an idol of this type (1 Kings 16:32/33), with the Asherah alongside it. A similar pillar at Ophrah, known as "Adonai Shalom" or "Lord of Peace", was erected by Gid'on (Gideon) in Judges 6:24, and from the time of Menasheh until Yoshi-Yahu (Josiah) there was even one erected in Yeru-Shala'im (2 Kings 21:3-7), until Yoshi-Yahu himself tore it down (2 Kings 23).

That tale, that chapter, are essential reading for our understanding of what precisely the paganism so detested by the Biblical Prophets comprised: the Asherah, the Tsi'un, the sodomitic priests etc. What follows is simply my edited reduction, to relay the key parts:

"Then the king called together all the elders of Yehudah and Yeru-Shala'im. He went up to the temple of YHVH with the people of Yehudah, the inhabitants of Yeru-Shala'im, the priests and the prophets - all the people from the least to the greatest. He read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which had been found in the temple. The king stood by the pillar and renewed the covenant in the presence of YHVH ... The king ordered ... to remove from the temple all the articles made for Ba'al and Asherah and all gods of the constellations. He burned them outside Yeru-Shala'im, in the fields of the Kidron Valley, and took the ashes to Beit-El. He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Yehudah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Yehudah and on those around Yeru-Shala'im - those who burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts. He took the Asherah pole from the temple ... to the Kidron Valley outside Yeru-Shala'im, and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the temple ... and the quarters where women wove for Asherah... brought all the priests from the towns of Yehudah and desecrated the high places, from Gev'a to Be'er Sheva, where the priests had burned incense. He broke down the gateway at the entrance of the Gate of Yehoshu'a, the city governor, which was on the left of the city gate... He desecrated Tophet, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice their son or daughter in the fire to Moloch. He removed from the entrance to the temple the horses that the kings of Yehudah had dedicated to the sun (they were in the courtyard, by the office of an official named Natan-Melech). Yoshi-Yahu then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun. He pulled down the altars which the kings of Yehudah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Achaz, and the altars Menasheh had built in the two courts of the temple. He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley. The king also desecrated the high places that were east of Yeru-Shala'im on the south of the Hill of Corruption - the ones Shelomoh king of Yisra-El had built for Ashtoreth the vile goddess of the Beney Tsiydon, for Chemosh the vile god of Mo-Av, and for Moloch the detestable god of the people of Amon. Yoshi-Yahu smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones. Even the altar at Beit-El, the high place made by Yerav-Am [Jeroboam] ben Nevat, who had caused Yisra-El to sin - even that altar and high place he demolished. He burned the high place and ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole as well... Just as he had done at Beit-El, Yoshi-Yahu removed all the shrines at the high places that the kings of Yisra-El had built in the towns of Shomron, and that had aroused YHVH's anger... slaughtered all the priests of those high places on the altars and burned human bones on them... Furthermore, Yoshi-Yahu got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Yehudah and Yeru-Shala'im."

The Asherim, or sometimes Asherot and sometimes Ashterot or Ashtaroth, appear, among many other examples, in Micah 5:13/14 and Deuteronomy 7:5, and in the plural Asherot in Judges 3:7, and you will see that, in the link I have chosen here to 2 Chronicles 33:3, the Yehudit gives Asherot, some translations give Asherim, but several others "Asherah poles" - an indication of our modern inability to understand the nuances of the esoterics of this ancient "pagan" religion.

Linked to these statues and poles and stones and idols to the goddess were others to her spouse Ba'al, called Asherim (Exodus 34:13; Deuteronomy 7:5 and 12:3; 1 Kings 14:23, 2 Kings 17:10 and 23:14; 2 Chronicles 14:2, Micah 5:12; etc). Judges 6:25 ff describes an Asher as a pillar of wood of great size, either fixed or planted in the ground. As such it resembles a totem-pole, or the May or caduceus pole, as well as the Edenic Tree of Life, the World Tree.

Such statues stood alongside the Asherot at Beit-El and even in the Temple in Yeru-Shala'im, plus elsewhere. They were often paired as an Astarte and a Ba'al pillar (were the Bo'az and Yachin pillars in the Temple then such?). Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah) 27:9 laments them, saying that in the time of the Messiah "they will rise no more"; he also couples them with Chamanin (חמנים) or sun-images, which is what Haman was, rather than the Persian prime minister whose attempted genocide of the Jews was thwarted by Queen Ester (Esther - אסתר) - a name which itself is not unconnected to Ishtar and Astarte. The fact that Yesha-Yahu laments them, but cannot predict their overthrow until the coming of the Messiah, may well indicate how prevalent goddess-worship remained in Yisra-El until very late on, in spite of Yoshi-Yahu's (King Josiah's) attempts to eradicate them, as in 2 Kings 23, above. Ezekiel 8:14 likewise complains about the women worshipping Tammuz (Ishtar's son and the model for Jesus) at the north gate of the Temple in Yeru-Shala'im.

The key difference between Asherim and Ashterot appears to have been that the Ashterot were made with natural stone, where the Asherim were carved in wood, something in the manner of the totem-pole. Whenever they were destroyed - usually on the instructions of fundamentalist prophets of YHVH seeking to replace the ancient "pagan" cults with their new monotheistic religion - the Asherim are described as "cut down and burned", where the Ashterot are always "overthrown".

Interestingly the Vulgate (Latin) edition of the Bible translates Asherot as Luci, from Lucus which means "a sacred grove". The Mishnah calls them "Eylom ne-aved" (אילן ניבד), or "trees to be worshipped", which amounts to an overt admission. The original root - Ashar - means "to be upright" or "straight".

References to Asherah worship among the Beney Yisra-El are too many to list in full; but see: Judges 2:13, 3:7, 6:25 ff and 10:6; 1 Kings 15:13 and 18:19; 2 Kings 17:16, 21:3 ff, 23:6; 2 Chronicles 15:16, 33:3; 1 Samuel 7:4, 12:10; etc.

Given that tribes were known as "sons of" – i.e. the Asherites would have been called the Beney Asher - we should note that the term for the worshippers of Asherah would also have been Beney Asherah; and given that the tribe of Dan was a masculinisation of the original Beney Dinah, his sister who was ravished by the Shechemites...it is logical to suggest that the tribe of Asher was defined precisely by its inclination to worship the goddess as Asherah, rather than under any of her other names; and that they were tribally connected to those other, more famous worshippers of Asherah - the Ashurim or Assyrians. In all probability these people, at an early stage of occupation, held sway over an area considerably larger than that defined by Yehoshu'a. Their geographical location, however, on the north-west coast of Yisra-El, between today's Haifa and Lebanese Tsur (Tyre), is, as noted above, precisely the place where Eshet (Isis) came from Mitsrayim (Egypt) to find the body of her brother-spouse Osher (Osiris), after he had been gored to death by his wicked uncle Set (Shet, Seth), and then dispatched into the Mediterranean sea in a sealed casket.

See also my pages on ASHER, ASHTEROT KARNAYIM and ASTARTE.

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