Great Asherah, the Tree of Life
Jehovah (‘Ja-Ho-Va-Heh’) was married to the still more ancient deity, Asherah, who was present on ancient Hebrew altars in the form of the Asherah Pole, or Tree of Life. Her name is attested to in a number of ancient Near Eastern sources including the Khirbet el-Qom and Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions, where the phrase “YHVH (Yahovah or Jahovah) and his Asherah” can be seen.1 The Bible mentions her at least forty times, for, repeatedly, “The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD; they forgot the LORD their God and served the Baals and the Asherahs.” Baal was actually identical with Yahweh/Ja Ho Va He/Jahovah, which is to say ‘God.’ The name “Ba’al” is an honorific that simply means “Lord,” “husband,’ or “steward.”2
This four-tiered cult stand found at Tanaach is thought to represent Yahweh and Asherah, with each deity being depicted on alternating tiers. On tier two, which is dedicated to Asherah, is the image of a living tree, now thought to be how the Asherah was sometimes represented, in addition to the Goddess manifesting as an entire sacred grove, orchard or forest. Joanna E. Taylor speculates that menorah design was based on the Asherah poles on ancient Jewish altars in her paper, “The Asherah, the Menorah and the Sacred Tree.”
Asherim were the cultic representations of the goddess Asherah found in association with mass ebôt at Canaanite high places. They are usually thought to have been wooden objects. However, new evidence may indicate that asherim were in fact living trees, cut and pruned into a particular cultic form. They were therefore both natural and artificial, both planted and made. If asherim were living trees they would have been fitting symbols for a goddess who personified the life principle. The shape of the Temple menorah, which appeared like a cut and pruned almond tree, may have been based on the form of an asherah, perhaps one associated in particular with Bethel.3
Due in part to the thousands of ancient mass-produced goddess figurines found at Israelite sites, we can trace the veneration of Asherah over a period extending from the conquest of Canaan in the second millennium before Christ to the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. This should not be surprising as the Great Goddess depicted as an all-nurturing, ever-fertile Tree of Life was an ubiquitous figure throughout Mesopotamia and North Africa.
That Asherah’s veneration as the Tree of Life was popular, prevalent and recurring is attested by the fact that so many injunctions are made throughout the purity and pollution articles of Mosaic Law and the Old Testament against the religious observation of her rites and customs. In Deuteronomy 16:21 we find, “Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole beside the altar you build to the LORD your God,” and in 2 Kings 23:4, we read how, “The king [of Judah] ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the LORD all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts.”
‘Purity’ pedants like Jeremiah, Isaiah and others had their hands full in terms of prising people away from the rites and observances that had made their agrarian lives meaningful since the dawn of lunar-measured time. As Yahweh complains to his servant in Jeremiah 7:17–18: “Do you not see what they are doing 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 dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods in order to spite Me.”
Resistance to change was rife, as we see in Jeremiah 44:16, where the recalcitrant women avow: “As for the message that you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD, we are not going to listen to you! But rather we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths, by burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, just as we ourselves, our forefathers, our kings and our princes did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food and were well off and saw no misfortune.” That life was popularly deemed better in the old days of peace-loving, war- eschewing, feminine-revering worship of the celestial goddess is made clear in no uncertain terms and passionate avowals: “But since we stopped burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have met our end by the sword and by famine.”
That pretty much everyone felt this way, and not just the women, is made clear in passages like the one where the women Jeremiah is castigating challenge his gendered focus upon them: “And,” said the women, “When we burned incense to the Queen of Heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, did not our husbands know that we were making cakes impressed with her image and pouring out drink offerings to her?”
The “cakes impressed with her image” from Jeremiah 44 would have had the sign of the Asherah Tree of Life pressed into them, the equal-armed cross signifying the horizontal plane of physical life in this, the Middle World of ordinary perception, with the Lower World of Earth, past time, and the Ancestors below, and the abstract celestial realm of future life, possibilities and projections in the Upper World of the celestial gods and goddesses, astral powers and stars above the transept. In short, they were pretty much the ancient equivalent of ‘Hot Cross Buns…’
Of course the Paschal customs and observances of Judaeo-Christian cultures (which include Islam) resemble their early origins, only now disconnected from their actual, sustainable meanings, with “God” retaining only his salutation of “Lord.” No longer given his honorific of “husband” or “steward,” but perceived as an often raging thunder and lightning god, he is relegated to a solo role, more resembling a domineering narcissist than a domestic, agrarian partner. The new, transformed, monolithic god demands complete obedience and obeisance, is jealous and vengeful, and has a terrible temper.
The Book of Hosea addresses the Baal worshiping Israelites in the voice of Yahweh admonishing a straying spouse: “I will put an end to all her rejoicing, her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths and all her solemn festivals. And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, whereof she hath said, these are my rewards that my lovers have given me: and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. I mean to make her pay for all the days when she burnt incense to the Baals and decked herself with rings and necklaces to court her lovers, forgetting me. It is Yahweh who is speaking.” (Hosea 2:11–14)
Asherah, who has been demonized along with all her other cognates, is a celestial Goddess coeval with Mesopotamian stellar deities, Ashtar, Ishtar, Esther, Ashtoreth, Astarte and others. Like many Tree of Life goddesses (original Great Mothers), she is often identified with the planet Venus, and is ubiquitous in World reverence patterns.
Notes
1 Nir Hassan, “A Strange Drawing Found in Sinai Could Undermine Our Entire Idea of Judaism: Is that a 3,000-year-old picture of god, his penis and his wife depicted by early Jews at Kuntillet Ajrud?,” in Haaretz Journal, April 4, 2018.
2 The accounts in the Book of Jeremiah of the Old Testament are the most vociferous in advocating complete allegiance to Yahweh, often speaking in the divine voice, as the deity Himself. Mitchell, H. G.. “The Theology of Jeremiah”. Journal of Biblical Literature 20.1 (1901): 56–76. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3268993
3 Joanna E. Taylor, “The Asherah, the Menorah and the Sacred Tree,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 20 (1995): pp. 29–54.
Additional Reading
- Dever, William G. Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Religion in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005.
- Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. New York: MacMillan, 1992.
- Keel, Othmar. Goddesses and Trees, New Moon and Yahweh: Ancient Near Eastern Art and the Hebrew Bible. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.
