They Say He Erased Her Memory

Hecht Museum, Israel

King Josiah, the Deuteronomists, and the Prophets saved our people and our goddess.
 
Thanks in part to them, Asherah was not forgotten. She appears in the Bible, the Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts, not to mention the prayer book. She is a weeping mother of Israel, the Sabbath bride, Torah personified, Mother Zion, “His Shekhina,” and a number of other feminine figures in Jewish tradition. As Shekhinah, she went into exile with us and remained with us. The feminine divine survived in our memories, as did our Land.

In exile, our texts helped us remember our connection to the Land.

In the Land there were bamot, high places where we had worshipped our god. At those high places, we had also erected asherot, pillars symbolizing our goddess, "His Asherah."

Opposition to the worship of Asherah grew, particularly in the monarchy. We were supposed to have no king but god, but eventually a monarchy arose and it needed to centralize power and worship. (Read Judges 19 to learn one story that the monarchy created to justify its existence.) It may have been the monarchy’s scribes who wove various traditions into single text, the first four books of Torah, but it was most certainly King Josiah’s scribes who wrote the fifth book, Deuteronomy, as part of his program of religious and political reforms.

These reforms included banning the high places to centralize worship at the Jerusalem Temple. (The northern kingdom with its temples in Beth El and Dan had been destroyed by Josiah’s time.) Nonetheless there were other Jewish temples, and the bamot with their asherot remained places of worship. The prophet Jeremiah reported that men and children continued to gather wood for fire rituals and women continued to “bake cakes for the Queen of Heaven.”

Although King Josiah had the pillar of Asherah removed from the Jerusalem Temple during his reign, an asherah was repeatedly re-installed in and removed from the First Temple during the reigns of different kings. (The seven-branched lamps in both Temples may have been remnants of her worship.)

After the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple, Jews in the Land (renamed “Palestina” by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba Revolt) began putting to paper the oral traditions that interpreted Torah. The study of Torah and the expansion of the no-longer-only-oral tradition preserved us during 2,000 years of the galut (exile). If our religion had remained tied solely to the Land, we could not have survived for so long as a people.

King Josiah, I believe, can take some credit for our survival. And because his reforms focused on eliminating goddess worship among our people, he (inadvertently) preserved her name and even some of her rituals.

Raphael Patai, William Dever, and other scholars have written about the Hebrew Goddess. Rabbi and Priestess Jill Hammer excavates our texts to learn more about our goddess and our resurect our priestess traditions. But in some cases, we don’t have to dig deeply at all. A song, composed in the Land in the 16th century, contains many images of the Hebrew goddess: she is the Sabbath Bride, the city of Jerusalem, the people of Israel, Mother Zion, god’s spouse, and Queen. Each time I hear a congregation sing L’cha Dodi on Friday night, I see her entering the synagogue, clothed in light.

Many faces of the divine feminine are found in our tradition because she accompanied us in our exile, but Asherah herself remained in the Land, among the bamot. Josiah and the Deuteronomists gave us monotheism and a textual tradition that helped us survive exile. But we’re home now and I long to meet Asherah in her Land.