The Goddess of Groves
A few months ago, a friend wrote about a dream she had — a very ancient-seeming dream. She was in a traditional garb of some sort, eyes veiled, in line with three other people. All of whom were attending to a Great Tree. The rest of the dream explored the importance of the tree to these ancient people she found herself among. Upon waking, she was struck with one word: “Akkadia”.
After reading about this dream, I provided the following commentary: “You should Google ‘Asherah’. The Queen of Heaven, the Goddess of Groves. Her Akkadian name was ‘Ašratu’.”
That dream (and my own response to it) stuck with me for awhile, as did Asherah. And then I realized, I needed to explore further, if only for my own sense of understanding. For, you see, she has shown up in my own religious research. Not once, not twice. Many, many, many times.
The Hebrew Bible mentions gods and goddess with surprising abandon, never in a positive light. It is — by their narration — God’s story, after all. Deities from other lands were usually called by name so that ancient Israelite readers/listeners knew whom to avoid. For if there was one thing Yawheh hated more than pre-Flood civilizations, it was his chosen people worshiping other gods.
However, Asherah shows up quite a bit in the Old Testament; forty-or-so times by my last count. Not quite as often as Baal (or Baals, plural), but still . . . a lot. Weirder still, she’s shown as being worshiped alongside Yahweh. That was very perplexing. So, who was she?
Digging up information on her (outside of the Bible) wasn’t that hard. Finding information that was internally consistent, even from an ancient perspective, proved more difficult. As far as I could tell, Asherah was considered a mother goddess to many cosmologies among the ancient religions of the world; the Akkaddians, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and — yes — even the ancient Israelites when they crossed the River Jordan.
In Ugaritic and other regional traditions, she was seen as the consort (or wife) to the god, El. That name should sound familiar; it’s one of the names Yahweh goes by — El, or El Elyon (“God Most High”). He’s referred to that title often in the Book of Genesis. Example:
“And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; now he was a priest of God Most High. He blessed him and said,
“Blessed be Abram of God Most High,
Possessor of heaven and earth[…]” Genesis 14:18–19
Over the course of centuries, and upon the return of Hebrews to Canaanite lands, El Elyon and Yahweh (the Hebrew patron God) were somehow conflated. Odder still? In the Canaanite pantheon, El and Yahweh were seen as two separate deities. Their consort? Asherah.
Reasons are unknown, but Asherah somehow made her way into Israelite religious practices, particularly among the poor, and more importantly — among women. The Canaanites viewed her as both a goddess of fertility, motherhood, and wisdom. Her symbol — mentioned countless times in the Old Testament — was the Asherah pole.
It’s difficult to say exactly what an Asherah pole was. Some sources claim it was equivalent to a totem; the stock of a tree carved in her likeness. Other sources insinuated that the poles were actual trees that bore a feminine, anthropomorphic shape. And, as such, whole forests could be seen as her sacred space. Whatever the case, the Hebrew Bible documents several instances where God — and by extension the Levite priesthood — were having none of it.
There are countless passages about Asherah poles being uprooted, taken down, or destroyed. The first one that stuck out to me was the account of King Hezekiah.
“He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it.” 2 Kings 18:4
No matter how many times a righteous king, or the priesthood, removed the offending goddess worship, by the next generation she returned. This spiritual tug-o’-war went on for centuries. The practice of Asherah worship didn’t seem to vanish in the narrative until well after the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah may have even been referring to her when he mentioned the worship of the “Queen of Heaven”.
“The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes to offer to the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to arouse my anger.” Jeremiah 7:18
The question I kept coming back to was . . . why? What was it the ancient Israelites saw in Asherah? And did some secret form of her worship turn up in the New Testament?
Full disclosure: I’d wanted to write about Asherah for several months, but I didn’t have much more to go on other than the basic information available about her. That and some of the research — and even the Bible itself — was confused about who she was. Oftentimes, in the Old Testament, she was conflated with other goddesses, most often with Astarte (aka. Ashtoreth); the other name(s) for the Sumerian goddess, Inanna. Compounded with that, the Internet was already dotted with hot takes on “God’s lost wife”.
Most of these narratives conveyed a stance that Asherah was somehow written out of Hebrew and Christian canon. That the whole affair seemed like a divine divorce, and the Israelites were the divorce settlement. Different versions of the Christian Bible even supported this stance. Asherah’s name was sometimes switched to “groves”. Or omitted entirely.
Then I had a breakthrough, and it came by way of a podcast. (As is often the case, anymore.) An episode of the Earth Ancients podcast featured a couple of authors — Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. They were promoting their book, When God Had a Wife: The Fall and Rise of the Sacred Feminine in the Judeo-Christian Tradition.
Once the episode got past all the talk of ancient aliens, crystalline technologies, Akashic records, and pre-Flood civilizations, they tackled something I’d both heard of before, but knew very little about. I remember hearing about the “Sacred Feminine” a long time ago. The culprit? The DaVinci Code; the book, not the movie.
Author Dan Brown’s self-insert character — Robert Langdon — spoke at length about the Sacred Feminine. New Age-y circles talked about it all the time. It also went by another moniker, the Divine Feminine. Picknett and Prince drew a direct line between goddess worship in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and onward to the modern grasp of the Divine Feminine. But they mentioned another “goddess” I hadn’t heard about.
Sophia.
A bit of an aside: a half a year ago, I had a conversation with another friend about the Divine Feminine. She asked what it meant to me, or rather, what I considered it. To which I responded, “I have no idea.” I mulled the thought around in my cobwebby brain for a spell, and then came back with, “When I think of the Divine Feminine, I think of Wisdom.” Capital W.
In the first two sentences of Genesis, the first thing mentioned is the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. Later on in the Old Testament — in Proverbs 8 — that part of the story is retold . . . by the Spirit herself:
“I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence;
I possess knowledge and discretion.” Proverbs 8:12“The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old;
I was formed long ages ago,
at the very beginning, when the world came to be.” Proverbs 8:22–23
The Hebrew word for wisdom is “Chokmâh”. The Greek word?
Sophia.
So, “she” may not be mentioned directly in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, but she shows up enough by “wisdom” alone. The Gnostic sects of Christianity (circa 200–400 C.E.) took this literally, fashioning Sophia as her own quasi-deity — a female emanation of God. The very representation of the Divine spark found in all human beings, which was the equivalent to the “breath of God” that gave life.
It wasn’t that the early Israelites were trying to grasp onto a female god; rather, the female aspect of God. Every patron deity in every ancient cosmology — from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age — had a pair-mate; a feminine to the masculine. Yahweh’s representation as a lone deity was the exception, not the rule. No matter how many times the “Divine Feminine” was snuffed out, she always managed to find her way back in. Or more succinctly put, she was always there. If Biblical authors were trying to erase Asherah (or whoever represented the Divine Feminine aspect), they did a poor job of it.
There’s a philosophical expression from 1883 that goes thus: “If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?” It’s the earliest version of the more common: “If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound” . . . question.
My answer to both, based upon what I’ve read, the conversations I’ve had, the dreams I’ve heard about, would be, “Yes, and the sound is carried on the wind — the very Divine breath — and it would be very wise to listen to her.”
