The majority of scholars hold that Yahweh and Asherah were a consort pair in ancient Israel and Judah , [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] while others disagree. Some have sought a common-noun meaning of her name, especially in Ugaritic appellation rabat athirat yam , only found in the Baal Cycle. But a homophone's meaning to an Ugaritian doesn't equate an etymon, especially if the name is older than the Ugaritic language.
There is no hypothesis for rabat athirat yam without significant issues, and if Asherah were a word from Ugarit it would be pronounced differently. The -ot ending "Asherot" is found three times in the Tanakh , [ 16 ] with -im "Asherim" making up the great majority.
That is, merely terminally alternate spellings like Asherat and Asherah reflect contextual rather than existential variation. Asherah was an important Goddess recognized across Northwest Semitic cultures.
However, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, the term asherah and sometimes asherot, came to be identified with cultic wooden objects, sometimes referred to as asherah poles. In this context, in regard to certain attestations of Asherah, there is controversy about whether the inscriptions referring to Asherah indicate the deity, a cultic object ", [ 23 ] or both de Vaux [ 15 ].
Winter says the goddess and her symbol should not be distinguished. Beside the obvious connections between goddesses who sometimes cannot be distinguished [ citation needed ] , some scholars have found an early link between Asherah and Eve , based upon the coincidence of their common title as "the mother of all living" in Genesis [ 25 ] through the identification with the Hurrian mother goddess , Hebat.
