Sunday Service: God Had A Wife

The story of Asherah, consort to YHWH

God was not always God. The idea that the Jewish people came to know God, whose name is YHWH, and who they call Adonai (lord) because it is forbidden to say the holy name, and worshipped Him as He is today is simply not true. What we understand as the Abrahamic* God evolved over time, and in His original form God was much closer to the kinds of pantheon gods we know from Greece and Rome. And there’s evidence in the Bible itself for this.

*Sometimes people say “Judeo-Christian,” but this is a bad term that is meaningless and makes the Jews secondary in nature. The more accurate term is Abrahamic, which describes the faith that draw their lineage back to old Abraham in the Hebrew Bible. That’s Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

First a little history: the ancient Israelites were almost certainly a subset of the Canaanites, and the Canaanites had their own pantheon of gods, as most peoples back then did. At the top was a god named El, and he had a wife named Asherah, and they had a son who was a storm god, named YHWH. Or maybe Baal; there’s some confusion over the fact that there was another storm and fertility god named Baal, and it seems as if that name became a bad guy name in the Hebrew Bible because there may have been competition between the two storm gods.

So God has a dad and a mom. And that is still in the Bible you have on your shelf, believe it or not. From Deuteronomy 32: 8-9:

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,
when he divided up humankind,
he set the boundaries of the peoples,
according to the number of the heavenly assembly.
For the LORD's allotment is his people,
Jacob is his special possession.

El, the Most High, put YHWH in charge of the Israelites. Other gods got other nations. Apologists will huff and puff to explain this away, but the reading is fairly plain. And even if they make the argument that the Most High and the LORD are the same person, the verses tell us there are other gods in the heavenly assembly who got dominion over other peoples.

At any rate, over time YHWH and El got conflated. That means that over time YHWH ended up with his own mother as his consort. Asherah is the wife of God.

Like El and YHWH, Asherah was a god to the ancient Semitic peoples, and her worship was widespread in the Near East. You find variations on her across cultures, all the way back to Neolithic times. One of her most common symbols was a tree, and it’s possible that Asherah and the tree were indistinguishable, pointing perhaps to earliest animistic beliefs in the region.

So who was she anyway? Weirdly, it’s not exactly certain. Asherah was widely recognized in her day, and was considered the consort of no less than seven gods (including El and YHWH). Because of this widespread reach she has a zillion different symbols representing her, so many in fact that they become meaningless. She was the consort of the head god in all of these subsects (many of which, to be fair, were versions of each other), and she was often seen as the mother goddess, and she was sometimes called “the mother of all living.” One of the many things associated with her were date palms, which gave nourishment year round. She may have been a sun god and a fertility god, and she was often depicted with exaggerated sexual characteristics, including big old boobs. Her association with trees seems to tie into this idea of life giving.

You won’t see this in the Bible on your shelf, but Asherah is named 40 times in the Hebrew scriptures. Modern translations turn her name into “grove” or a variation, likely removing difficult theological issues. When she is mentioned it’s negative, and it’s jealousy of her worship that makes YHWH destroy the Temple in 568 BCE and send the Israelites into bondage in Babylon. Further, it seems that her worship was connected with temple prostitutes, and the Israelites looked down on this activity (although the temple prostitutes were considered priestesses by many). Jezebel shows up in Israel worshipping Baal and Asherah, and it’s a big problem; this seems like a story intended to disconnect YHWH from the larger Semitic/Canaanite pantheon. Jewish concepts of monotheism followed shortly after*.

*It’s worth noting that while you may have been told that Jews created monotheism, it existed before they came to it. For one, Zoroastrianism paved the way, and the ancient Vedic religion of India was monist. That one is complicated, because the belief is that there is one God, Brahman, but that there are many gods below Him, each being an aspect of His divinity. Not that different, perhaps, from Catholic sainthood.

There are still potential fragments of Asherah in the lore of YHWH. There’s an intriguing concept of Divine Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible, and it’s female. The Book of Baruch (a deuterocanonical book of the Hebrew Bible) tells us that YHWH found her before He created the world, and that he gave her to Israel. In the Wisdom of Solomon (also deuterocanonical, but very influential. We’ll talk about what the deuterocanon is some day, it’s too much to get into here. Suffice it to say that a big part of Wisdom of Solomon was read aloud at a memorial on the day of the execution of the great hero John Brown!) we are told in Wisdom 7:25-27:

For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty: therefore can no defiled thing fall into her. For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness. And being but one, she can do all things: and remaining in herself, she maketh all things new: and in all ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of God, and prophets.

It seems like the feminine Divine Wisdom is heavily influenced by the Hellenistic concept of Sophia but also likely speaking to a memory of Asherah’s role in the pantheon. To make matters more interesting, the Divine Wisdom is also the same thing as the Holy Spirit in Christianity. The concept of Divine Wisdom is also applied to Jesus Christ, despite the original term being feminine.

Could Asherah make a comeback? We live in an era where the Divine Goddess figure is quite popular, and a way to tie that into traditional Abrahamic religion might be enticing to some who are New Age-y without quite leaving behind their faith. It is interesting how forgotten she is by the masses; she went from God’s mom to God’s wife to being folded into the concept of God Himself and largely disappearing. You could argue that it was patriarchal society that did this, but I do think it has something more to do with the evolution of monotheism tied into the rise of the concept of nations - each nation had a god, and they were always jockeying for position, but only the Israelites could claim their God was the only god*. With this goal all the other gods of the Semitic/Canaanite pantheon needed to recede and go away. (It’s also really important to understand that Judaism as we know it today didn’t really come into being until the Second Temple Period, which was between 516 BCE and 70 CE. Almost everything in the Hebrew Bible was foundation and prologue to this form of Judaism)

*Which, again, they didn’t always do. Look at the First Commandment, as seen in Exodus 20:2-3:

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Makes it kinda clear there are other gods, but they are all number two or lower compared to Adonai.

But cultural memory is long, and Asherah still pokes her head up here and there, especially if you know what you’re looking for. I think it’s not just important to take a look at the evolution of God and His pals, but it’s also interesting. When you understand where this stuff came from, how it morphed and changed over time, you not only begin to understand how we got where we are today but also gain the knowledge that maybe in a few hundred years all of our thoughts about these religions will be woefully out of date as they continue to be renegotiated and rethought by their adherents. No religion, no matter how ancient, stands still forever.