Judean pillar figures or figurines were ubiquitous household items in the Iron Age representing the Canaanite great goddess Asherah.
Judean pillar figures or figurines were ubiquitous household items in the Iron Age representing the Canaanite great goddess Asherah.
Scholarly consensus has categorized the figurines as the Canaanite great goddess Asherah. [2] Dissenting from this view, Erin Darby suggests other possible identifications. [3] They show her with some facial detail, protruding breasts, and completely plain cylindrical bodies below. Surely popular, they were often handmade and sometimes crude, but that led to a diversity of style. It also allowed them currency over a longer period of time, unlike the more sophisticated but then-late Revadim Asherah whose examples were mass-produced in the productive milieu leading up to the Bronze collapse.
Pillar figures are first found in small numbers around Judah in the 10th century BCE, then grew somewhat in geographic distribution and greatly in attestation. A single archaeological site could reveal them in the hundreds like in Jerusalem, or over a thousand like in Kuntillet Ajrud, so museums and universities contain a great number.
The head and cylinder body are usually separate pieces with a pin. They usually have almond-shaped eyes and a slightly twisted "teardrop" curl hairstyle, sometimes with a pinched-nose or bird-headed appearance, sometimes with clues of paint. Megiddo and Lachish had the less common examples from molds; i.e. mass-produced. "The hollow bodied figurines... appear to be typically Philistine." [4]
It's likely they were dressed. Some show hermaphroditic or androgynous character. [5] Five "male" JPFs are mentioned in Kletter.
The first cataloging attempt by Pilz included less than a dozen JPF examples and little analysis. The figures were originally half of a broad classification under two categories of goddess image: JPFs that stand on a pole-like base and plaque figures that lie. (That is, they cannot be "in the round".) Then came the discovery and gradual publication depictions of Revadim Asherah from the 13th century.
The plaque figures in Syria-Palestine are familiar to an earlier-still Egyptian tradition. The supine goddesses, more like portraits to view than dolls to hold, are made in gold by artisans for the wealthiest from Egypt and the early northern Steppes to later Achaemenid primacy. For plaques see Negbi 1976 and Budin 2016.
The first major work was theologian Kletter's in 1995. A Ron Tappy's take on it was rather excoriating, showing that Asherah-related controversy is still able to divide peers in the academy today. [6]
The history of ancient Israel and Judah spans from the early appearance of the Israelites in Canaan's hill country during the late second millenium BCE, to the establishment and subsequent downfall of the two Israelite kingdoms in the mid-first millenium BCE. This history unfolds within the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. The earliest documented mention of "Israel" as a people appears on the Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian inscription dating back to around 1208 BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that ancient Israelite culture evolved from the pre-existing Canaanite civilization. During the Iron Age II period, two Israelite kingdoms emerged in the region: the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.
Yahweh was an ancient Levantine deity, and national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Though no consensus exists regarding the deity's origins, scholars generally contend that Yahweh is associated with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman, and later with Canaan. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age, if not somewhat earlier.
The Israelites were a group of Semitic-speaking tribes in the ancient Near East who, during the Iron Age, inhabited a part of Canaan. They were also an ethnoreligious group.
Qetesh was a goddess who was incorporated into the ancient Egyptian religion in the late Bronze Age. Her name was likely developed by the Egyptians based on the Semitic root Q-D-Š meaning 'holy' or 'blessed,' attested as a title of El and possibly Athirat and a further independent deity in texts from Ugarit.
Asherah is the great goddess in ancient Semitic religion. She also appears in Hittite writings as Ašerdu(s) or Ašertu(s). Her name was Aṯeratum to the Amorites, and Athiratu in Ugarit. Some scholars hold that Yahweh and Asherah were a consort pair in ancient Israel and Judah, although others disagree.
Proto-Canaanite is the name given to the
An Asherah pole is a sacred tree or pole that stood near Canaanite religious locations to honor the goddess Asherah. The relation of the literary references to an asherah and archaeological finds of Judaean pillar-figurines has engendered a literature of debate.
The Canaanite religion was the group of ancient Semitic religions practiced by the Canaanites living in the ancient Levant from at least the early Bronze Age to the first centuries CE. Canaanite religion was polytheistic and, in some cases, monolatristic.
A baetyl, literally "house of God" is a sacred stone that was venerated and thought to house a God or deity. The most famous example is the Omphalos stored in the Temple of Apollo at the Greek town of Delphi.
The Zayit Stone is a 38-pound (17 kg) limestone boulder dating to the 10th century BCE, discovered on 15 July 2005 at Tel Zayit (Zeitah) in the Guvrin Valley, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) southwest of Jerusalem. The boulder measures 37.5 by 27 by 15.7 centimetres and was embedded in the stone wall of a building. It is the earliest known example of the complete Phoenician or Old Hebrew script as it had developed after the Bronze Age collapse out of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet.
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, a book by Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine published in January 2001 by Simon & Schuster using its Free Press imprint and reprinted in June 2002 using its Touchstone imprint, discusses the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible.
William Gwinn Dever is an American archaeologist, scholar, historian, semiticist, and theologian. He is an active scholar of the Old Testament, and historian, specialized in the history of the Ancient Near East and the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah in biblical times. He was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1975 to 2002. He is a Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.
Two Minoan snake goddess figurines were excavated in 1903 in the Minoan palace at Knossos in the Greek island of Crete. The decades-long excavation programme led by the English archaeologist Arthur Evans greatly expanded knowledge and awareness of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization, but Evans has subsequently been criticised for overstatements and excessively speculative ideas, both in terms of his "restoration" of specific objects, including the most famous of these figures, and the ideas about the Minoans he drew from the archaeology. The figures are now on display at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum (AMH).
Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel is a book by Syro-Palestinian archaeologist William G. Dever, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Did God Have a Wife? was intended as a popular work making available to the general public the evidence long known to Biblical archaeologists regarding ancient Israelite religion: namely that the Israelite God of antiquity, Yahweh, had a consort, that her name was Asherah, and that she was part of the Canaanite pantheon.
The origins of Judaism lie in Bronze Age polytheistic Canaanite religion. Judaism also syncretized elements of other Semitic religions such as Babylonian religion, which is reflected in the early prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible.
Khirbet el-Qom is an archaeological site in the village of al-Kum, West Bank, in the territory of the biblical Kingdom of Judah, between Lachish and Hebron, 14 km (8.7 mi) to the west of the latter.
A ceremonial pole is a stake or post utilised or venerated as part of a ceremony or religious ritual. Ceremonial poles may symbolize a variety of concepts in different ceremonies and rituals practiced by a variety of cultures around the world.
Yahwism, as it is called by modern scholars, was the religion of ancient Israel and Judah. An ancient Semitic religion of the Iron Age, Yahwism was essentially polytheistic and had a pantheon, with various gods and goddesses being worshipped by the Israelites. At the head of this pantheon was Yahweh—held in an especially high regard as the two Israelite kingdoms' national god—and his consort Asherah. Following this duo were second-tier gods and goddesses, such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, each of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees.
The Euphrates Syrian Pillar Figurines (EU_SPF's) are anthropomorphic clay figurines dating from the late Iron Age period and produced in the Middle Euphrates region. These figurines are part of a greater coroplastic production mainly composed of handmade horse-rider figurines, i.e. the Euphrates Handmade Syrian Horses and Riders (EU_HSHR's).
The Revadim Asherah is a significant artifact representing a third genre of Asherah figurines. Like the inscriptions found at Khirbet el-Qom and Kuntillet Ajrud, it's one of the most pivotal discoveries in the field from the latter half of the 20th century. These findings reoriented scholarship to the fact of Asherah's prominence in Canaanite and Hebrew religion.
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