Asherah: Shaking Loose the Goddess

Holly Horn

Scholarly constructions of ancient Near Eastern female deities rest upon nineteenth-century theories of cultural evolution infused with gendered stereotypes. Contemporary goddess movement writers incorporate many assumptions of this literature. This paper critiques the constructions of goddesses in traditional biblical scholarship and in contemporary goddess movement literature and examines the literary, inscriptional, and iconographic evidence for the Canaanite/Israelite goddess Asherah.

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