One of the most important developments in recent study of Israelite religion has been the discovery of evidence for widespread goddess worship in archaeological contexts dating from the monarchic period, ie. the period covering much of the historical books of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (1000-600 BCE). This evidence, which includes a range of inscriptional and iconographic material, has led to a dramatic paradigm shift in scholarly views about the nature of Israelite religion and catalyzed a critical rereading of the biblical text. Israelite religion has come to be seen as a subset of Canaanite religion more broadly, with many beliefs and practices deriving from this cultural matrix (including belief in a polytheistic pantheon), while the traditions of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (OT/HB) are increasingly thought to reflect a late and ideologically tendentious perspective on Israel’s religious past.
As Latter-day Saints have a particular interest in understanding ancient Israelite belief in a divine feminine because of our own belief in Heavenly Mother, this two-part post aims to briefly 1) summarize the main pieces of archaeological evidence for goddess worship in monarchic Israel; and 2) discuss a few select references or allusions to female divinities in the traditions contained in the OT/HB.
Part 1
Two separate pieces of archaeological evidence have been central to scholarly discussion about Israelite goddess worship. These are a number of inscriptions found in the Negev desert (Kuntillet ‘Ajrud) and Judah (Khirbet el-Qom) that mention Yahweh in association with a female deity referred to as “his asherah” and hundreds of small clay figurines recovered from excavations throughout central and southern Palestine that depict a female holding her breasts.
The first was something like a bombshell to biblical scholars when it became public knowledge in the 1970s and 80s, because the inscriptions explicitly associated Yahweh with a female partner. For long many biblical scholars had assumed that the biblical description of Yahweh as the only god (legitimately) worshiped in Israel was an accurate reflection of Iron Age historical realities and that Israelite religion had been unique and distinguished from Canaanite polytheistic beliefs and practices from pre-monarchical times. But now it seemed that Yahweh had been commonly understood in the monarchic period to have had a wife, not so different from the pantheons of other Canaanite and ancient Near Eastern cultures!
Subsequently over the past three decades the interpretation of the inscriptions has been much debated. Some have argued that the term “asherah” as used in the inscriptions cannot refer to the goddess known by that name in other West Semitic sources, since it appears with an attached pronominal suffix indicating Yahweh’s possession of the “asherah” (i.e. “his asherah”). Because proper names do not normally take suffixes in Hebrew, these scholars argue that “asherah” refers to a cult object of some kind (ie. an object relating to religious ritual). However, the main problem with this theory is that the genre of text/speech in which these inscriptions participate is the genre of blessings, which based on examples from elsewhere in the ancient Near East are always directed toward deities. Thus, “asherah” most likely refers to a deity. The solution to understanding the meaning of the term in this context is that some Ugaritic (West Semitic/Canaanite language related to Hebrew) evidence suggests that the term “asherah” could have a common noun nuance like “divine consort” or “wife” in addition to its proper noun usage. On this reading, the inscriptions would be translated something like, “I bless you to Yahweh and his consort.”
In addition to the inscriptions’ controversial association of Yahweh with a female partner, one inscription is particularly remarkable since it is accompanied by a picture depicting two figures arm in arm that are thought to be an illustration of Yahweh and “his asherah” (seen at the top of the page). These representations are totally alien to modern religious aesthetic sensibilities, as the deities are portrayed with a combination of bovine features and dwarf-god imagery that derives from the popular Egyptian protective deity named Bes. Presumably, this strange symbolism communicated something important about the deities’ natures and was perhaps a way of emphasizing their ontological difference from mortal worshippers.
Pillar Figurines
The second piece of archaeological evidence is the so-called Pillar Figurines. While the figurines have accumulated slowly over the last century and therefore have not attracted the same kind of sudden attention as have the inscriptions, they have had a similar effect in changing scholarly views about the nature of ancient Israelite religion. These figurines have been found literally everywhere in Judah (hundreds in Jerusalem alone!) and predominantly in relation to domestic and household contexts, suggesting that they were used in localized family religious practices of some kind.
As with the inscriptions, there has been some scholarly resistance to recognizing these small statuettes as evidence for goddess worship. Some have suggested that because they lack explicit divine attributes (such as a divine headdress) that they are better taken as mortal females used in magical practices invoking a deity for healing or fertility. But this argument is problematic, since a variety of ancient iconographic evidence suggests that deities could be portrayed without explicit divine symbols and the partial nudity and stance of the figurines are hardly appropriate for mortal women. These figurines are consistently shown in the stance of holding/offering their breasts, a posture that strongly suggests that they represent a benevolent and matronly divine figure who nourishes.
To what divinity do these figurines correspond? Well, we lack any explicit inscriptional evidence that would identify this smiling and buxom female; no figurine has been discovered with an inscribed label. The OT/HB even seems to fail to mention the existence of these omnipresent clay female figurines (but compare the use of the word teraphim in Gen 31:34). However, I think the most plausible interpretation is that they represent the goddess Asherah, whom the biblical authors acknowledge to have been the most important female deity worshiped in ancient Israel (e.g. 2 Kgs 21:7; 23:4-7). Based on what we know about Asherah from comparative evidence, she seems to have been a motherly and domestic figure, a powerful goddess and wife of the high god. In addition, the Bible shows Asherah’s cult to have been particularly prominent in Jerusalem, precisely where so many of the figurines have been found.
From the available evidence, we would have to conclude that the worship of Asherah was widespread in ancient Israel, so widespread that it would not be presumptuous to say that her veneration was culturally normative, ie. it would have been difficult for anyone to imagine the divine world without her or even to get by in daily life without her assistance. Strange at it may seem, Asherah was crucial to the religious beliefs and practices of the world that eventually became famous for producing the monotheistic literature contained in the Bible. Finally, we should also note that Asherah may not have been the only goddess recognized in monarchic Israel. The picture of Yahweh’s “asherah” discussed above portrays a female divinity that substantially differs from the image of the full-breasted and motherly figure depicted by the figurines, implying that there may have been a younger asherah and an older Asherah simultaneously worshiped in the pantheon.
Part 2 about evidence for goddess worship in the OT/HB will be posted next Thursday.
Ryan Thomas
I'm from Hurricane, Utah, where I currently live with my wife Brenda and two boys. I studied the Bible and ancient Near East at Harvard Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One of my favorite things to do is hike with my family in beautiful southern Utah!
All posts by Ryan Thomas
Very interesting. That would be great if we are discovering more ‘feminine’ significance in history.
Thanks Rachel. I agree with you, especially since in this instance the goddess we are speaking about goes to the taproots of Western religious history.
Wonderful! Thanks for sharing. Can’t wait for the follow up.
Thanks Melody. Glad to share.
Ryan,
I first came across Asherah when I read Kevin Barney’s Dialogue article “How to Worship Mother in Heaven Without Getting Excomunicated” and Dan Peterson’s Maxwell article “Nephi and His Asherah”.
I like what you have presented here as it gives further archeological evidence of a Mother Goddess that Barney and Peterson didn’t mention.
As I see it, Mormons are not polytheists or monotheists. Mormons are monolatrous (preferential worship of one God from the pantheon). With that view in mind, how did the ancient Israelites worship Asherah? Were the ancient Israelites in fact polytheists? How do we know that Asherah worship was not in fact an apostate cult?
What have devout traditional orthodox Christians done with the above information? Specifically, I am thinking of Evangelical Christians, Protestants, and Catholics.
In the traditional Abrahamic religions, God is seen as “an unimbodied mind”. He is sexless, so the idea of a female and male god is a tautology.
In your next post, will you be looking at the Biblical passages that may refer to Heavenly Mother (ie Wisdom, etc)?
In your next post will you be discussing how the idea of a Divine Feminine was removed from scripture? If so, how do we come to terms with Judah’s reformers and their views of Asherah worship?
All good questions. Thanks for commenting, Michael.
“As I see it, Mormons are not polytheists or monotheists. Mormons are monolatrous (preferential worship of one God from the pantheon).”
This is definitely a complex issue that we could debate about forever. A big part of the problem is the terms themselves and that they mean somewhat different things to different people. As I see it, if we take polytheism simply as the recognition and worship of more than one deity in the same divine pantheon, then Mormonism’s theism qualifies as a polytheism of sorts, certainly a conceptual polytheism ( since we think of God having a wife and son), and a functional polytheism as well because not only God the Father is worshiped but also Jesus (prayer may not be typically directed to Jesus, but he is an object of worship in Mormon belief nonetheless).
An interesting issue related to this is that we often use the word worship to describe our relationship to God the Father and Jesus, but not generally for the Holy Ghost, though again, worship of the Holy Ghost is at least implicit in our theological placement of it in the godhead.
“With that view in mind, how did the ancient Israelites worship Asherah?”
In a broad sense they worshiped her in much the same way that they worshiped El or Yahweh. In the pre-exilic world deities were commonly worshiped by means of material icons that were seen to be the manifestations of their divine essence, icons that were housed in temples understood to be their household residences (the basic word for temple in Hebrew is bet, “house”). Fragments of this theology and ritual system are present in the biblical text, but we are dependent to a great extent on comparative material to reconstruct it.
I would assume that prayer was directed to Asherah in ancient Israel, just as were other forms of worship, including offerings, sacrifices, veneration in the temple, and hymn singing. There were probably even rituals and practices unique to Asherah’s cult (an example is found in Jer 7:18, where it is said that the people made cakes for the Queen of heaven). I should say, however, that the culture was very patriarchal, so that the primary position in the pantheon and in official religious practice was given to male deities.
“Were the ancient Israelites in fact polytheists?”
Yes, they were. By the simple definition of polytheism I offered above, they were polytheists for at least the whole of the pre-exilic period (I will discuss this topic more in the second part of the post).
Keep in mind, however, this is not polytheism in the sense that an Israelite would typically or spontaneously worship many different deities, including deities outside of his own familiar pantheon. The pantheon of ancient Israel was probably fairly small and it had a high degree of conceptual unity because it was conceptualized in familial terms; the godhead was imagined primarily as a family: father, mother, and children. Mark Smith has written a lot about this aspect of West Semitic pantheons in his book on the Origins of Monotheism.
“How do we know that Asherah worship was not in fact an apostate cult?”
We know this from a variety of pieces of evidence, from the remarkable congruence in perspective offered by biblical, inscriptional, iconographic, and artifactual evidence. There is no possible way for me to summarize or discuss all this evidence here, but even the little that I have discussed in the post so far is significant. The female “Asherah” figurines, for example, have been found among all social groups in ancient Israel, including royal officers, the wealthy, the common people, and even priests of the temple! They were not imported from another country, but were locally made. Their style is uniquely Judean. They have been found in so many people’s houses, that the unanimous consensus of scholarship is that they were integral to mainstream Israelite religious practice.
The biblical view of Asherah found in Deuteronomistic literature (such as the books of Kings) is prejudicial and misrepresentative. The authors of these books try to portray her as foreign (for reasons that I will discuss in my next post), but ultimately their depiction of Asherah implies that she was an indigenous Israelite deity. She did not come to be seen as apostate until much later, likely during the post-exilic period.
“What have devout traditional orthodox Christians done with the above information? Specifically, I am thinking of Evangelical Christians, Protestants, and Catholics.”
Very good question. It’s hard to say because until relatively recently scholars have had quite diverse views about evidence for Asherah worship in ancient Israel, which has allowed many religious people to take the evidence with a grain of salt. The summary that I give above is actually uniquely my own, based on personal research and synthesis of the data, though the majority of mainstream scholarship is clearly moving in the same direction.
Evangelicals and other conservatives have not surprisingly tended to dismiss the kinds of reconstructions seen above that see Asherah as part of the normative culture of ancient Israel. This is totally understandable, since to accept it would severely undermine their understanding of the biblical text as divinely initiated and historically authentic.
There are some Christians doing creative theological work that attempts to account for archaeological evidence for Asherah, however. I’m only vaguely familiar with it, since most of my work is in the historical realm. Whatever the case, I believe that in the coming decades all religions that stem from the Old Testament and that are not completely fundamentalist will have to reckon with this material and its profound implications for theology. And fortunately, Mormons are well situated to take advantage of this opportunity.
“In the traditional Abrahamic religions, God is seen as “an unimbodied mind”. He is sexless, so the idea of a female and male god is a tautology.”
I disagree. While this sexless notion may have been held to by theologians and intellectuals or even asserted in sacred literature or scripture, for the most part God in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity has been conceptualized and rhetorically called to mind as male. It has been mostly impossible for the vast majority of people throughout history to imagine and speak about the divine in non-personal terms.
“In your next post, will you be looking at the Biblical passages that may refer to Heavenly Mother (ie Wisdom, etc)?”
Yes.
“In your next post will you be discussing how the idea of a Divine Feminine was removed from scripture?”
Yes. I will actually be arguing that she is still there in some biblical traditions.
“If so, how do we come to terms with Judah’s reformers and their views of Asherah worship?”
This is a difficult question that I will try and come back to after the second part of the post. For now, all that I would say is that theologically Mormons are not bound to accept the Deuteronomist presentation of Asherah as authoritative doctrine (“We believe… as far as it is translated correctly”). The Bible is really an anthology of all kinds of literature, some of which I find to be inspiring and some of which I believe is deeply problematic and has had profoundly negative consequences on subsequent religious and historical developments. One of these developments has been the construction of deity as an unembodied, transcendent, singular bachelor male. God=male.
Very, very interesting. Michael, thanks for pointing us to the other two articles which are opening up whole new vistas for me as I read about groves and trees in the scriptures. It would be easy to proof text the heck out of this theory, including arguing that Joseph was drawn to the sacred feminine in a sacred grove of trees.
Hagoth: Thanks for the comment. I’m glad you find the other articles interesting too.
Now about trees. I should say that the KJV can give the wrong impression, suggesting that the worship of Asherah was equivalent to worshiping in groves of trees. However, this was not the case. While it is true that Asherah could at times be symbolized by a life giving tree, the Hebrew word lying behind the KJV “groves”, asherim, probably referred to the cult symbols of the goddess (which themselves were probably not in the shape of a tree, but were anthropomorphic).
So while Asherah was associated with trees at times, it is important not to read too much into the KJV translation.
Interesting article, but I’m not sure how the evidence of a goddess figure in archeology supports the idea that ancient Israelites legitimately worshiped a mother goddess, or that this is evidence of her actual existence. The OT is full of instances where the Israelites strayed from the one true god in following Caananite religious practices and they were rebuked for this. Heck, they ALL worshipped a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain, that Aaron made for them…is that evidence that we should too? (You may have guessed I’m not mormon, but saw this posting from a friend and wanted to comment.)
Thanks Amy for the question. In my view, the evidence that ancient Israelites worshiped Asherah is very convincing. Not only is there a substantial amount of archaeological evidence, there is even positive biblical evidence. Take a look at part II of my post. http://rationalfaiths.com/biblical-allusions-to-asherah/
To give an analogy for the figurines, if 1000 years from now an archaeologist happened to be excavating houses that had once belonged to Mormons in the 20th century and consistently found pictures of large beautiful temples in prominent places on their walls, let’s say 8 out of every 10 homes, would it be reasonable to assume that these structures held an important place in the hearts and minds of the people who had once lived there?
Archaeology gives us data that we can use to infer what cultural realities were likely to have occurred in earlier times. We can wish that the evidence wasn’t there or try to interpret it in alternative ways, but sometimes the evidence is very compelling.
Peace, my friends:
Ryan Hi, You must read Nahum Ch. 1 v 11, and understand that out of Nineveh came out the wicked counselor, who has established evil against YevHah [the Elohiym of Israel], who has neither form nor figure, who has commanded us to never depart from the Torah :"This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success" warning us to never turn away from the Torah, to the left or the right. Nineveh was known as the seat of Ishtar, and Ishtar is Venus, Asherah, Isis, Mary [mother of god], Fatimah [Malat], Madonna, etc., and this is the evil that came out to Nineveh to contend with YevHah, our true Elohiym, who alone stands in praise and worship. Notice that this goddess is the foundation of Christianity as it derives from the Catholic church hence all of Christianity, as is now being proven with the ecumenism of the churches, again, notice that this is Venus the 5 point star in the heart of the Moslem crest moon, again establishing that this goddess lies at the heart of Islam. Now, Judaism is a Torah-less religion, for where there is a Talmud, then there is no Torah, for we are commanded to turn neither right nor left, hence if you read the History of the congregation of Israel, they did not keep the holy law, even for one day, hence Rabbinic Judaism is a religion of blind guides, moreover Judaism turned first to Baal-in [the error of Shittin] and then to Asherah, who was established as the god of Israel by Jedidah, who changed his name to Solomon because of these error's, and when you study further, you will discover that the Torah was never read in Israel through the time of the Judges to the time of the kings, until Josiah, and then the Babylon captivity, where Israel wholly became Babylon and her priests engineered the Qabalah, which is in fact the mystery religion of Babylon, whereas, it is Asherah, who lies at the heart of the evil of this mystery of iniquity, and this is the corruption that has been spread by Israel to all the world, by which Islam and Christianity were created, and as all can see, all the messianic nuances are queuing behind the image of jesus that was created by Catechism, in defiance of the Torah and furtherance of this Babylonia Idolatry, while Islam is just senseless violence in the nature of the dragon, hence the earth beast of the end times, is lamb like [Christianity], but speaks like the dragon [Islam].
Asherah is none other than Ishtar [Queen of night and the Jealousy], she was in life the mother and then consort of Nimrod, [Represented as Moloch, Baal and Amon, the god of Babylon and of builders, the abomination and the god of Akkadian kings], with whom Ishtar bore a son, and to conceal the abomination, proclaimed that she had an immaculate conception, hence the son of Ishtar i.e. Tammuz, became known as the son of god [for whom the churches cry every December, for he is Mithra, the sun god, the sol-invicticus, which is the jesus of the Catechist Trinitarian traditions, however, collectively, these three constitute the Babylonia trinity; whereas you must disregard the variations, they follow the Babylonia dispersal, when language and geography separated the races, and every race took the gods of Babylonia to the land they possessed, and adapted them to the character of those lands, inevitably changing names and appearances of the idols; moreover, the dragon is a known liar who creates these variations to confuse the simpletons and get them to turn from the Torah and disregard holy law, which is what the devil always does, knowing that no man shall prosper who has no Torah.
When you insinuate, that YevHah, kept consorts, you bring Him into derogation, and the strata of the false gods and the fallen angels, and this is the essence of the unforgivable blasphemy, hence we are warned that YevHah is a jealous Elohiym and a consuming fire, who said the names of these abominations must not be found mentioned amongst us.
Remember the day of Judgment, which is now bearing down upon humanity as we all approach the day of the LORD, when He shall come to punish the world, because of this evil counsel of Nineveh.
And Yehoshuah [Mashiach] bless you all.
Amen.
Jo
Letters[#]tothesevenchurches.net
I love reading a post that can make people think. Also, many thanks for allowing me to comment!
It’s great that you are getting thoughts from this article as well as from our discussion made at this place.
Hi Ryan Thomas. I'm flattered that you like my illustration. However, it would have been nice if you would have asked before using it. You could have at least put the source of where you found that copyrighted illustration, or even credited it. http://matrifocus.com/LAM04/spotlight.htm