Asherah

"But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire."

-Deuteronomy 7:5

A beautiful morning in Corning, part of the pattern that's emerged over the early summer (or, more accurately, the late spring): several lovely days midweek, with rain and cool weather on the weekends. The Finger Lakes Chamber of Commerce must be less-than-thrilled, but P and I sort of enjoy watching the low clouds over the lake and listening to the rain pat the leaves of the woods all around us, while reading a book or taking a nap at the Cliff.

Today's headline that called me up short but had nothing to do with the domestic crisis came from Israel, where the coalition government may blow apart over calls for orthodox Jews to participate in the draft.

https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250611-netanyahu-faces-vote-dissolve-parliament-ultra-orthodox-draft-law

Since its founding, Israel has exempted from military service the ultra-orthodox. The original purpose of this policy was to set aside from the forever wars of its nativity Israel's Judaic scholars tasked with rebuilding what was lost during the Holocaust. But now those numbers have swelled to 13% of the population, receiving a subsidized education while their leadership decries any efforts to mix this select group of men (always men) with the sinful general population through shared military service. It all strikes me as pretty despicable, given that those sinners are the reason these religious zealots have the space to engage in their goofy rituals. They rise and sleep under the very blanket of freedom their armed neighbors provide, to quote A Few Good Men.

And their scholarship, or at least that of their millennia-old tradition, seems a project in distorting the tradition they purport to preserve.

Take Asherah.

A friend of mine posted recently about the female fertility god Asherah, a ubiquitous presence in Near Eastern religion maybe 4,000 years ago.

And yes, she's always as stacked as a Kardashian in the statuary that's survived. Apparently Asherah was associated at some point with sacred groves, to the point that the various translations of her name seems to have dissolved into a word for trees, or maybe columns with her image crafted to look like trees.

But there was a time when she sat next to Yahweh himself, a female ruler variously associated with wisdom or the wild unknown of the sea. The long-ago ancestors of those ultra-orthodox draft dodgers knew exactly who Asherah was, and in fact probably worshipped her.

So what happened?

That's hard to say, but one theory seems to be that as Judaism migrated from polytheistic to henotheistic to its most recent monotheistic understanding of god, there was no place for a mother god sitting coequal with the father. There's also the uncomfortable fact of the Hebrews picking up gods and beliefs from the people they dispossessed, and those who conquered the Hebrews. There's scholarship suggesting the Egyptians' evil creator god, in the form of a donkey, found his way into the recesses of the First Temple. And the occasional incoherence of the Hebrew Bible's references to god owes a lot to the fact that the Hebrews absorbed much of the Canaanite religion they found when they arrived there, more likely as refugees than conquerors, after their time in Egypt. Much of the old scriptural narrative is devoted to prophets urging the destruction of the old idols, of which Asherah was one, even as their monarchs worshipped at those altars. Smashing Asherah and erasing her name from memory was all part of the national project for them. And a wildly successful project it was, given that I'd never heard of Asherah until yesterday, even after spending a couple years in seminary and a couple more in ordained ministry.

So there's syncretism with old, largely vanished religions, mixed in with a dash of xenophobia and racism. But I can't help thinking that, as much as anything, it's the sexism that's baked into everything we do in the western world, or maybe just as people, that led to Asherah's demise. Strong women are a threat, being reminded of what we can't do as men--bring life into the world and sustain it--is a threat. A less organized, nomadic society had less space for hierarchical gender roles. An agrarian society with a ruling class justified by a religious class almost requires it to keep order. And anyone who thought we'd worked our way past all that hasn't been paying attention lately.

But maybe the rise of the Virgin Mary over the last century or so suggests things are changing. There's always been this yawning gap in Trinitarian Theology, a missing leg of the stool that represents nurturing, life, and the sort of strength that pushes an eight pound creature into the world every now and then. Judaism evolved into a neighborhood without an Asherah. Perhaps we'll evolve back.