The Bible mentions the goddess Asherah. What did some Israelites and Canaanites Believe about Asherah before she appeared in the Bible?
Asherah appears outside the Bible as Asherata. She first appears in the eighteenth century BC in the culture that Abram and Sarai and their family were a part of. Asherata is mentioned only a few times in those early texts. Of special interest is her appearance in a list of ten deities from tablets with writing from this culture which includes Asherata as the first named female deity. She is therefore of special importance for those who worshipped other gods and goddess (like the family of Abram, as Joshua 24:2 records). Asherata continues to be named here and there. Her name appears as part of the name of Abdi-Ashirta in the mid-fourteenth century BC. Abdi-Ashirta was leader of the kingdom of Amurru (in the northern part of modern Lebanon) at this time. His name means “servant of the goddess Asherata.” She also appears frequently as a goddess in the mythological texts about Baal found in the thirteenth century BC. In the script of Ugarit (a city at the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria) her name is Athiratu. She is the consort of Baal and the “first lady” of the pantheon at Ugarit. Asherata then disappears from attestations until the ninth/eighth century BC. At that point her name occurs four times in a cultic room at what was likely a caravanserai in northeast Sinai. It also occurs three times in a tomb inscription at Khirbet el-Qom in Judah (likely identified with biblical Makkedah of Joshua 10:10-29). In most of these occurrences her name appears alongside that of the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. It occurs in the formula, “I bless you to Yahweh and Asherata.” The writer(s) of these two sets of texts took a position different from the belief of the Old Testament that these is only one God and that his name is Yhwh, often pronounced as Yahweh (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). These texts imply that Yahweh had a consort, Asherata. Probably like the setup at Ugarit centuries earlier, the couple were the two chief deities of the pantheon of Israelite gods and goddesses (various forms of Baal, Astarte, the Sun, the Moon, Molek, and others). As the Bible references to Asherah suggest, some Israelites believed this while others followed the teaching of the Bible and of Yahweh’s prophets. The latter regarded Asherata and all other deities except Yahweh as false.
For further on Asherata and the change in spelling to Asherah, see Richard Hess, “New Evidence for Asherata/Asherah,” Religions Special Issue: The Bible and Ancient Mesopotamia16.4 (2025) 397 https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16040397
