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more, Asherah carried a second epithet in the Bronze Age, ‘dat batni,’ also ‘the one of the serpent? The Sumerians knew her as Ninth or Ninhursag. Her symbol is a serpent coiling about a tree or staff~ the caduceus.”

“Who worshipped Asherah? A lot of people, I gather.”

“Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium B.C. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms of Hezekiah and, later, Josiah.”

“I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they

worship Asherah?”

“Monolatrists. They did not deny the existence of other gods.

But they were only supposed to worship Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh.”

“I don’t remember anything about God having a wife in the

Bible.”

“The Bible didn’t exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices. The stories about the Exodus hadn’t been formalized into scripture yet. And the later parts of the Bible had not yet happened.”

“Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?”

“The deuteronomic school-defined, by convention, as the

people who wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.”

“And what kind of people were they?”

“Nationalists. Monarchists. Centralists. The forerunners of the Pharisees. At this time, the Assyrian king Sargon II had recently conquered Samana-northern Israel-forcing a migration of Hebrews southward into Jerusalem. Jerusalem expanded greatly and the Hebrews began to conquer territory to the west, east, and south. It was a time of intense national. ism and patriotic fervor. The deuteronomic school embodied those attitudes in scripture by rewriting and reorganizing the old tales.”

“Rewriting them how?”

“Moses and others believed that the River Jordan was the

border of Israel, but the deuteronomists believed that Israel included Trans jordan, which justified aggression to the east. There

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