Asherah

Asherah is a Hebrew word that the Old Testament uses both for a goddess worshiped in Israel and Judah alongside Baal and for the wooden cult object, usually rendered “Asherah pole,” that stood at sanctuaries; the plural forms Asherim and Asheroth also appear.

The texts say that the object was to be destroyed: Israel is commanded to cut down the Asherah poles, dash the sacred pillars, and burn the carved images (Deuteronomy 7:5; 12:3). They were set up at high places and under every green tree beside sacred pillars and incense altars (1 Kings 14:23; Isaiah 27:9), made by kings — Ahab “made the Asherah” (1 Kings 16:33), and Manasseh did the same (2 Kings 21:3) — and removed by reforming kings, Hezekiah cutting it down (2 Kings 18:4) and Josiah purging Judah and Jerusalem of the Asherah poles, carved images, and molten images (2 Chronicles 34:3). The command to burn them (Deuteronomy 12:3) indicates a wooden object, and the word is regularly listed with other furnishings of non-Yahwistic worship rather than described in detail.

Elsewhere the word names a deity: Israel “served the Baals and the Asheroth” (Judges 3:7), and the indictment of the northern kingdom pairs “made an Asherah” with serving Baal and worshiping the army of the sky (2 Kings 17:16); 2 Chronicles 19:3 speaks of putting the Asheroth out of the land. Linguistically, the same singular form serves for both the goddess and her image, and the Hebrew text does not consistently mark which is meant, so translators differ. That the name also belongs to a goddess in ancient Near Eastern sources outside the Bible is an established historical and linguistic fact; it informs but does not by itself settle how any given biblical verse should be read.

How traditions read the term differs. Classical Jewish and Christian interpretation has generally treated Asherah as a Canaanite idol and the poles as its emblems, with the condemnation being of idolatry and syncretism; critical scholarship has often reconstructed a goddess cult, possibly a consort of Yahweh, suppressed by the writers of the reform accounts, and reads those accounts as partly idealized. Translations reflect the same divide, from the older “groves” to the modern “Asherah poles,” and readers also differ over whether the plural Asheroth in Judges 3:7 is a proper name for the goddess or simply a plural of the objects.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.