Asherah the Name of a Syrian Goddess.
Asherah was also the name of a Syrian goddess. In the El-Amarna tablets of the fifteenth century B.C. her name appears with the determinative for deity as a part of the name Arad-Ashirta (or 'Ebed-Asherah). It also appears in a Sumerian hymn published by Reisner ("Sumerisch-Babylonische Hymnen," p. 92), on a hematite cylinder ("Zeit. f. Assyr." vi. 161), and in an astronomical text of the Arsacide period (ib. vi. 241). She appears to have been the consort of the god Amurru, a Baal of the Lebanon region (compare Jensen, "Zeit. f. Assyr." xi. 302-305). Arad-Ashirta in the El-Amarna tablets represents not only a sheik, but a clan, and is possibly the one which afterward became the tribe of Asher. Possibly a trace of this goddess is to be found in an inscription from Citium in Cyprus, which dedicates an object to "My lady mother Ashera" (compare Schröder, "Z. D. M. G." xxxv. 424). Many scholars, however, interpret the passage otherwise (compare Moore, l.c.). Hommel has recently announced ("Expository Times," xi. 190) that he has discovered in a Minæan inscription a goddess Athirat. phonetically equivalent to Asherah. This would indicate that Asherah was a name for an old Semitic goddess long before the fifteenth century B.C.; but for the present this must be regarded merely in the light of a possibility. The relation of this goddess to the pole called Asherah in the Bible is a difficult problem. The name in the Bible is masculine; the plural "Asherim" occurring sixteen times, and the plural "Asherot" but three times. The latter is clearly an error. Asherah must be a nomen unitatis. G. Hoffmann has shown ("Ueber Einige Phönizische Inschriften," pp. 26 et seq.) that these posts originally marked the limits of the sacred precincts, and that in the Ma'sub inscription it is the equivalent of "sacred enclosure." Moore finds in this fact the explanation of the use of the word in Assyrian (ashirtu, ashrâti; eshirtu, eshrâti), in the sense of sanctuary. Hommel fancies that he sees in the original form of the ideogram for Ishtar (compare Thureau-Dangin, "L'Ecriture Cunéforme," No. 294), a post on which hangs the skin of an animal.
Quite apart, however, from Hommel's somewhat imaginary conjecture, the Assyrian and Phenician use of the word in the sense of "sanctuary," taken in connection with the Arabian and Syrian use of it as the name of a goddess, indicates that the posts were used at the sanctuaries of the primitive Semitic mother-goddess, and that in course of time their name attached itself in certain quarters to the goddess herself, and has survived in South Arabia and Syria. When, therefore, the late editors of the Old Testament books made of the Asherah a fetish or cultus god, history was but repeating itself (see Ashtoreth; Worship, Idol; Maẓẓebah; Phenicia).
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