Tree Huggers

by Eliezer Segal

The Torah, as is well known, has much respect for trees, especially those that bear fruit. Whenever it extolls the virtues of the land of Israel, the country’s distinctive fruits are placed at the top of its list of assets. The Israelites were forbidden to destroy fruit trees when besieging Canaanite cities.

However, some limits are set to the admiration of fruit trees.

Evidently, there was a serious problem of people worshipping trees as deities. The expressions used in the Torah are rather vague, and do not clearly spell out what is being prohibited or why it is deemed problematic.

Among the rules for the holy Temple, Moses stipulates, “Thou shalt not plant thee an asherah of any trees near unto the altar of the Lord thy God.” If an “asherah” is an idol, it is hard to understand why the prohibition should be restricted to the Temple since idol-worship should not be permitted in any place. 

Several commentators were therefore inclined to accept a metaphoric exposition proposed by sages in the Talmud, that the Torah was equating the appointment of unworthy judges to acourt of competent scholars, with the planting of an asherah next to the Temple altar. 

At any rate, the reference to planting indicates that the forbidden asherah is a tree, or at least some kind of plant.

The next verse states, “Neither shalt thou set thee up any image, which the Lord thy God hateth.” This also supports the view (though in itself it does not prove it) that the asherah was an idol.

Nahmanides observed that the word “asherah” is related to the Hebrew root meaning “straight,” and that the custom of the idolaters was to position an asherah at the entrances to their sanctuaries in order to guide the worshipers’ steps in the right direction.

In the narratives of the Bible’s historical books, we find more specific evidence of the asherah and its nature, though it is still difficult to emerge with a consistent picture. 

In the book of Judges, the Lord commanded Gideon to “tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the asherah pole beside it.” Concerning the Judeans, Jeremiah lamented that “ their children remember their altars and their asherahs by the green trees upon the high hills.” The book of Kings described how the evil monarchs Ahab and Manasseh placed asherahs in the Jerusalem Temple. The objects remained there until the religious reforms instituted by King Josiah after the discovery of the lost text of Deuteronomy when he ordered “to bring forth out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the asherah, and for all the host of heaven: and he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron… And he brought out the asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, unto the brook Kidron, and burned it at the brook Kidron, and stamped it small to powder.”

Based on texts like these, several commentators inferred that it was common in pagan sanctuaries like those devoted to Baal to position asherahs next to the main idol; and this was the reason why the Torah specified that the Israelites must resist the temptation to emulate this practice, to avoid giving the impression that they were sacrificing to the asherah. 

Despite the prophets’ determination to uphold a radical contrast between the religion of Israel and its Canaanite neighbours, the archeological evidence confirms the impression that often the common people were not very scrupulous in maintaining that contrast.

It remains unclear what exactly an asherah was. Was it a deity in its (presumably: her) own right, like the Baal that it so often accompanied? Or was it a physical object that represented the god’s power—a tree, wooden pole or sacred grove? All these options have their scholarly defenders.

You might imagine that, being physical artifacts, idols would be easier to understand than verbal texts that are susceptible to diverse interpretations. Indeed, this would have been true if the archeological relics were explicitly labelled as asherahs.

The disappointing truth, however, is that we possess numerous statues and images of female deities (often fertility goddesses), ceremonial poles, and tree images—but they are not necessarily identified as asherah figures. Scholarship in recent generations has been eager to grasp at any possible evidence for a primordial goddess cult.

One of the few scriptural passages that portrays the asherah unambiguously as a worshipped being is the story of the dramatic confrontation to which the prophet Elijah invited “the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the prophets of the Asherah four hundred,” assigning Asherah a status comparable to that of the male god Baal. 

The Mishnah dealt briefly with the asherah as a tree venerated by idolaters. There is however a halakhic rule that natural formations like mountains and trees cannot be forbidden as objects of heathen worship, prompting the sages to discuss what degree of human involvement with a tree would be necessary to classify it as a prohibited idol. However, there is no suggestion in those talmudic discussions of any mythological identifications of te asherahs with a specific deity.

Maimonides, consistent with his tendency to interpret obscure biblical prohibitions as reactions to the pagan cults that were prevalent in Moses’s generation, cited the work known as “the Nabatean Agriculture,” supposedly an Arabic translation of a document composed by the heathen “Sabians.” Maimonides ridicules one of their myths about a power struggle between two asherah plants. “It is a long story, and you may learn from it the opinions and the ‘wisdom’ of the men of that time. Such were the wise men in those days of darkness of Babel to whom reference is made in Scripture, and such were the beliefs in which they were trained.”

I am not so sure that today we have necessarily made much progress in our attitudes—either to trees or to goddesses.

---

---

My email address is: [email protected]