Asherah (Ugaritic Athirat; Akkadian Ashratu; Hittite Ashertu)

Outside the temple stood a tree that was not quite a tree: a tall wooden pole, its grain worn smooth by generations of hands, planted in the packed earth beside the altar where the smoke of burnt fat and barley still hung in the air. People left bread at its base. Women who wanted children touched it and whispered to it. To the ones who tended it, this carved trunk was not a picture of the goddess. It was the goddess, or near enough, drawn down into wood and standing among them.

Long before scribes in Jerusalem tried to scrub her out, she was one of the oldest powers in the Near East. The clay tablets of Ugarit, a Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast, call her Athirat, wife of El, the grey-bearded father of the gods. They name her the Lady who treads the sea and the creatress of the gods. The deities of the pantheon were her children, seventy of them, and the texts can gather them under a single phrase as her pride of lions. She was the matriarch at the head of the divine household, and little of consequence happened in it without passing through her first.

Her name traveled and changed shape. To the Akkadian-speaking scribes of Mesopotamia she was Ashratu. The Hittites of Anatolia knew a goddess Ashertu, wife of their own weather god. In Egypt she may stand behind Qudshu, the holy one, a naked goddess shown full-faced on the back of a lion with lotus blooms in one hand and serpents in the other. Across all these borrowings the core held steady: a mother, a maker, a consort of the highest god, bound up with lions and with growing things.

What she looked like depended on who was carving. The handmade clay figurines pulled by the hundreds from Israelite houses show a woman with heavy breasts cupped in her own hands and a lower body that narrows into a smooth pillar, like the trunk of that temple pole. On a storage jar from Kuntillet Ajrud a stylized tree rises between two browsing ibexes, a lion crouched beneath, the whole design standing in for her. The tree and the woman keep collapsing into each other. That doubling is the clearest thing about her appearance. She is the nursing body and the living trunk at once, fertility given two shapes and asked to choose neither.

The surviving myths give her something to do besides preside. In the long Ugaritic poem of Baal’s rise, the young storm god has beaten back the sea and wants a palace fit for a king, but he needs El’s blessing, and El does not give it easily. The warrior goddess Anat tries threats and gets nowhere. So Baal turns to Athirat and brings gifts. She takes up his cause with her husband, flatters the old god, presses the case until he relents and orders a house built for Baal. The same poems show her grieving elsewhere when her sea-loving son Yam is killed, so her loyalties were never simple. A goddess who could be petitioned, who knew how to move the patriarch at the center of the family, was worth more to a supplicant than one who arrived with a raised blade.

Then there is the part that still unsettles people. In the hill country of Israel and Judah, Asherah did not stay safely foreign. Inscriptions scratched at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom, dating to around the eighth century before the common era, bless their readers by Yahweh and his Asherah. Whatever the writers meant exactly, whether the goddess herself or the wooden pole that carried her name, the pairing sits plainly on the plaster and the stone. For a long stretch of Israelite religion she stood beside the national god, and ordinary households kept her image on a shelf. She was, for many of her worshippers, the wife of God.

Her strength was also the thing that doomed her in the written record. A goddess of fertility, motherhood, and the household needs no grand temple to work. She lives in the pole by the door, the figurine in the back room, the tree on the hill. That made her impossible to contain and, to the reformers, impossible to tolerate. The books of Kings remember rulers who tried. Hezekiah pulled down the high places. Josiah had the asherah dragged out of the Jerusalem temple itself, burned in the Kidron valley, its ashes ground to powder and scattered over graves. The Hebrew verbs tell the story without meaning to: an asherah could be made, set up, cut down, and burned. You do not burn a goddess. You burn the wood she stands in.

What the axes could reach was only the timber. The goddess behind it had been worshipped from the Syrian coast to the Sinai for the better part of two thousand years, named in Akkadian and Ugaritic and Hebrew, carved as a tree, a lion, and a woman holding her own body up as an offering. The scribes who wrote her out were thorough, and for a long time they seemed to have won. Then a spade turned up a storage jar in the desert with her name written next to God’s, and the oldest mother in the pantheon was standing in the room again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Asherah?

Asherah is the great mother goddess of Canaanite religion, known at the city of Ugarit as Athirat. She was the consort of El, the chief god, and the mother of the seventy deities who made up the pantheon. Texts call her the creatress of the gods and the Lady who treads the sea.

Was Asherah the wife of Yahweh?

Many ancient Israelites appear to have worshipped Asherah alongside Yahweh. Inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom, dating to roughly the eighth century BCE, invoke blessings “by Yahweh and his Asherah.” Scholars still debate whether the phrase refers to the goddess herself or to the wooden cult pole that bore her name, but the close pairing of the two is clear in the evidence.

What is an Asherah pole?

An Asherah pole was a wooden cult object, either a sacred tree or a carved standing pole, that represented the goddess at altars and high places. The Hebrew Bible describes such poles being made, set up, cut down, and burned, which indicates they were constructed objects rather than living trees. The pole served as the physical focus for worshipping Asherah.

What was Asherah the goddess of?

Asherah was a goddess of fertility, motherhood, and creation. As the consort of El she was the matriarch of the divine family and the mother of its gods, and she was associated with lions and with sacred trees as symbols of life and abundance. Worshippers turned to her for childbearing and household protection.

Why was Asherah’s worship destroyed?

Biblical writers condemned the worship of Asherah, and reforming kings of Judah moved to stamp it out. Hezekiah is said to have torn down the high places, and Josiah had the Asherah removed from the Jerusalem temple, burned in the Kidron valley, and its ashes scattered over graves. These reforms aimed to centralize worship on Yahweh alone and remove rival cults.

Related Entries

El, Baal, Anat, Dagon, Hadad, Ishtar, Inanna, Tiamat