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Updated: May 29, 2025
The words which they translated "hell" have been put back into their Hebrew and Greek equivalents, and appear as Sheol and Hades. Another instance is that of an Old Testament word, Asherah, which was translated always "grove," and was used to describe the object of worship of the early enemies of Israel.
On the next morning, when the people of the village went out to worship their idols, they found them cut in pieces, the altar taken away; in its place an altar of the Lord, and on it the pieces of the Asherah were burning as wood under a sacrifice to the Lord. The people looked at the broken and burning idols; and they said: "Who has done this?"
The southern section of the country, known as the kingdom of Judah, was ruled over by nineteen kings and one queen for a period of about three hundred and seventy-five years. Asa, one of the good kings, was a religious reformer even "his mother he removed from being queen, because she had made an abominable image for an Asherah; and Asa cut down her image and burnt it at the brook Kidron."
This, however, came to be appropriated to Ashtoreth in the days when the older Ashêrah was supplanted by the younger Ashtoreth. We hear of other Canaanitish divinities from the monuments of Egypt. The goddess Edom, the wife of Resheph, has already been referred to. Resheph, too, has been mentioned in an earlier page.
Among those of earlier times may be noted: An old prophet of Bethel, 1 K. 13:11. 400 prophets with a lying spirit, 1 K. 22:6-8. 22-23. 450 prophets of Baal, 1 K. 18:19, 22, 40. 400 prophets of Asherah. 1 K. 18:19. A study of these will show that some are idolatrous prophets and others are perverted worshipers of Jehovah, who did not really prophesy at all.
It was only the unmarried goddess, Ashêrah as she was called by the Canaanites, who had a personality of her own. And since Ashêrah came in time to be superseded by Ashtoreth, who was herself of Babylonian origin, it is probable that the idea of separate individuality connected with Ashêrah. was due to the influence of Babylonian culture.
But it is perhaps on the whole more likely to have been an actual object; in which case we can not but suspect that it stood in the Assyrian system in much the same position as the Asherah in the Phoenician, being closely connected with the worship of the supreme god, and having certainly a symbolic character, though of what exact kind it may not be easy to determine.
When his worship and adoration came in time to be transferred from the stone itself to the divinity it had begun to symbolize, it became an altar on which the libation of oil or wine might be poured out to the gods, and on the seals of Syria and the sculptured slabs of Assyria we accordingly find it transformed into a portable altar, and merged in the cone-like symbol of the goddess Ashêrah.
Among them there was one who had once occupied a very prominent place. This was Ashêrah, the goddess of fertility, whose name is written Asirtu and Asratu in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Ashêrah was symbolized by a stem stripped of its branches, or an upright cone of stone, fixed in the ground, and the symbol and the goddess were at times confounded together.
Ashêrah was the goddess of fertility, and though the fertility of the earth depends upon the Sun, it was easy to conceive of it as an independent principle. The name Baal was merely a title. It was applied to the supreme deity of each city or tribe, by whatever special name he might otherwise be known. There were as many Baals or Baalim as there were states or cults.
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