Author: Johanna Stuckey, PhD
Beltane 2004, Vol 3-3
From the Archives of MatriFocus
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Gold pendant.
Ugarit-Ras Shamra. 1550-1200/1150 BCE.
S. Beaulieu, after Negbi 1976, Plate 53, #1661.

As soon as El saw her,
he opened his mouth and laughed;
… he raised his voice and shouted:
“Why has Lady Asherah-of-the-Sea arrived?
why has the Mother of the Gods come?”
(Coogan 1978:100)

Although texts from the ancient Syrian city Ugarit do not explicitly name Asherah as consort of the supreme male deity, she was arguably his female counterpart, for she was Elat, “Goddess,” to his El, “God” (Hadley 2000:38). Indeed, Asherah and El function as “supreme couple,” and their offspring include “all the other deities in the first generation” (Olmo Lete 1999:47). Like El, Asherah was primarily a figure of authority, but only that authority which a patriarchal culture accords the feminine. Alone of Ugaritic goddesses, Asherah carried a spindle, which marked her as feminine and domestic (Coogan 1978:97; Hadley 2000:39).

Occurring near the top of deity and offering lists, Asherah was certainly the most important goddess at Ugarit (Binger 1997:89). Appropriately for the chief goddess of a sea-trading city, her full name, athirat yam, means “She treads on Sea,” (Coogan 1978:116; Hadley 2000:49-51). In the myths, while not having a central role, Asherah still plays a critical part. She has “sufficient power for El to be willing to take her advice concerning Baal’s successor” (Hadley 2000:39; Coogan 1978:111).

Since one of her epithets was “Creatrix, or Progenetrix, of the Gods” (Coogan 1978:97), and her sons numbered seventy, that is, a great many (Coogan 1978:104), Asherah was probably a “mother goddess.” Certainly, as “creatrix” and “wet nurse” of the gods, Asherah was “somehow related to birth and fertility” (Hadley 2000:43). However, given her authority and her role as power broker, it is unlikely that she was only a fertility goddess.

One of Asherah’s functions seems to have been to act as mediator between the other deities and the supreme El. Though the approach of the aggressive deities Anat and Baal terrifies her at first, Asherah calms down after they bestow sumptuous gifts on her, and, clearly higher in rank than they are, she undertakes to approach El on their behalf (Coogan 1978:98, 99-101 Hadley 2000:39).

Asherah could also be fierce in defence of her prerogatives. In one poem, Kirta, her punishment of a human vow-breaker is both swift and severe (Coogan 1978:67; Hadley 2000:41). It is this poem that mentions her supreme position at two other major cities of the ancient Levant, cities that she seems to have ruled well into the Roman period (Hadley 2000:42). She is “Asherah of Tyre” and “the goddess [elat] of Sidon” (Coogan 1978:63). The poem also uses the word Qudshu, which some translators render as “shrine” (Coogan 1978:63), but others as “Holy One,” probably an epithet of Asherah (Hadley 2000:47). The fact that El promises the king Kirta that Asherah will join Anat in suckling the royal heir suggests that Asherah too was a “divine guarantor of the throne” (Pettey 1990:16).

The chief female deity at Ugarit was also revered in other parts of the Levant, and a good deal of evidence suggests that Asherah may have had an especially close relationship with trees. Such a relationship would not be surprising since, generally in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, goddesses and what scholars call “sacred trees” seem to go together. Excavated in the Late Bronze Age Canaanite city of Lachish (Tubb 1998:79-80), the Lachish Ewer is usually understood as Canaanite and dated to “the late thirteenth century B.C.E.” (Hestrin 1987:212). Its decoration “consists of a row of animals and trees,” above which there is an inscription: “Mattan. An offering to my Lady `Elat” (Hestrin 1987:211,214). A person named Mattan presented the ewer and probably its contents to the temple of the goddess Elat ((Hadley 2000:159).

Decorated potsherd.
Lachish, Israel. 1550-1200/1150 BCE.
S. Beaulieu, after Keel and Uelinger 1998:73, #81

What is really intriguing is that the word for goddess, Elat, is positioned right over one of the stylized trees (Hadley 2000:156; 157, #8). The artist finished the drawings and then did the inscription (Hadley 2000:160), so that the placing of the word was “not by chance” (Hestrin 1987:220). Thus, the word Elat was probably placed so as to designate the tree as the goddess, to indicate that it “represented her presence” (Smith 1990:82).

However, to which of the Levantine goddesses did Elat refer? In the Hebrew Bible, elah, the grammatically feminine form of el, occurs seventeen times, but is always translated as “oak or “terebinth,” that is, a living tree. Further, “all occurrences of the word can be understood as tree” without damaging the text; however, in some places, the translation equally could be “goddess” (Binger 1997:135). In the Ugaritic texts, although elat can mean “goddess in a rather general way,” it can also be one of Asherah’s titles, “nearly a name” (Pettey 1990:13).

As a result, quite a number of scholars think that the “Elat” of the Lachish Ewer names the Canaanite goddess Asherah (Hadley 2000:159-160; Keel and Uehlinger 1998:72; Pettey 1990:181; Smith 1990:82; Hestrin 1987:220). However, this identification does not prove, conclusively, that the Levantine sacred tree always represented Asherah, though it is clear that a sacred tree could represent any or all of the goddesses.

Decorated potsherd.
Lachish, Israel. 1550-1200/1150 BCE.
S. Beaulieu, after Keel and Uelinger 1998:73, #80.

Another artefact from the Lachish excavations adds to the argument. It is a goblet decorated with “two ibexes facing each other, repeated four times” (Hestrin 1987: 215). They are flanking not by a tree, but by “an inverted triangle strewn with dots” (Keel 1998:34; Part I, #50; Hestrin1987:215, #2; 216, #3). Most scholars interpret the inverted image as a pubic triangle (Keel and Uehlinger 1998:72; Hestrin 1991:55; Hestrin 1987:215). This well-known image, then, they see as replacing of the sacred tree with the vulva symbol making it highly likely “… that the tree indeed symbolizes the fertility goddess …” (Hestrin 1987:215). In response to scholarly doubts, Othmar Keel discusses “recently published evidence” from three different sites in Israel that “may confirm” that the triangles on the Lachish goblet do represent pubic triangles (Keel 1998:34-35; Part I, #51, 52).

Ivory box cover.
Ugarit-Minet el-Beida.
1550-1200/1150 BCE
S. Beaulieu, after Patai 1990, Plate 19.

Thus, it seems that, in the Bronze Age Levant, tree was all but synonymous with goddess. Not only do pendants depict goddesses with trees growing up from their vulvic triangles (see image, top of the page) and seals and other artifacts show trees, complete with browsing animals, next to goddesses, but one of the most beautiful objects from Ugarit presents a goddess as a tree(1). On a fragment of a carved ivory lid of a small box, a goddess takes the position normally held by the sacred tree and feeds goat-like animals that lean forward and upward to take the vegetation out of her hands (Keel 1998: Part I, #43; Patai 1990: Plate19). Despite this exquisite Late Bronze testimony to the identity of goddess and tree, Keel demonstrates that, by that period, the figure of the goddess “is to a large extent replaced by the tree flanked by caprids” (Keel 1998:35). Gradually, throughout the Iron Age, the image of sacred tree with goat-like animals became rare in Israel and Judah (Keel and Uehlinger 1998:399-400), though it continued as an important symbol in surrounding ancient Eastern Mediterranean cultures. The tree symbol, however, may have survived even in Judah in the form of “the seven-branched lampstand of the priestly tradition” (Keel 1998:56).

From its mythic and cultic texts, we saw that Asherah was chief goddess of Ugarit, as well as of the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Undoubtedly, Asherah continued to be an important goddess in the Levant during the first millennium BCE, especially in certain localities. Further, it is possible that she was, for a time, consort of Israel’s god Yahweh [an argument that I will discuss in my next column]. However, it was Asherah’s fate, like that of both Anat and Astarte, slowly, to begin to disappear as a separate entity.

The identity of Carthaginian Tanit has been a focus of scholarly dispute, with cases being made for all three Canaanite great goddesses (Pettey 1990:32). However, there appears now to be general agreement that Asherah probably survived in Tanit, the chief deity of the highly successful Phoenician colony of Carthage in North Africa (Pettey 1990:32). With the Carthaginians, Tanit/Asherah worship spread far from her original Levantine homeland across the Mediterranean into Western Europe. In addition, as we have seen, during the Greco-Roman period, a great goddess Atargatis was worshipped in the Levant, and her name indicates that she was probably a fusion of all three Levantine great goddesses (Pettey 1990:32-33). Spreading from Syria across the Mediterranean, Atargatis’s worship continued well into the third century of our era (Godwin 1981:150-152, 158 #124). Thus, Asherah and her sister goddesses went on living as part of the powerful and much-adored “Syrian Goddess.”

Notes

Bibliography

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