Paleo-Hebrew inscription honoring Goddess Asherah:
“Uriyahu the prince wrote it: Blessed be Uriyahu, by Yahweh and his Asherah, for from his enemies he has saved him by his Asherah, and by his Asherah.”
7th century B.C.E.
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
“In 1968, I discovered an inscription in a cemetery west of Hebron, in the hill country, at the site of Khirbet el-Qôm, a Hebrew inscription of the 8th century B.C.E. It gives the name of the deceased, and it says “blessed may he be by Yahweh"—that’s good biblical Hebrew—but it says “by Yahweh and his Asherah.” …In popular religion they were a pair... Asherah was widely venerated in ancient Israel.
Is there other evidence linking Asherah to Yahweh?
In the 1970s, Israeli archeologists digging in Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai found a little desert fort of the same period, and lo and behold, we have “Yahweh and Asherah” all over the place in the Hebrew inscriptions.
Are there any images of Asherah?
For a hundred years now we have known of little terracotta female figurines. They show a nude female … They are found in tombs, they are found in households, they are found everywhere. There are thousands of them. They date all the way from the 10th century to the early 6th century. They have long been connected with one Goddess… We found molds for making Asherah figurines, mass-producing them, in village shrines. So probably almost everybody had one of these figurines…
There aren’t such representations of Yahweh, are there?
No.”
- Archaeologist William Dever, interviewed by PBS NOVA
* (Interesting, too, that aniconism seems to have developed around the same period that Asherah was edited out of Judaism.)
