History's Vanquished Goddess

God's Wife: the Goddess Asherah, Wife of Yahweh. Although a disconcerting notion to some, a galaxy of ancient artifacts reveals that goddess worship existed in Ancient Israel and that Asherah was but one of Yahweh's wives. Following a trail of archaeological discoveries, the forgotten story of God's wife, the quintessential Hebrew Mother Goddess Asherah, is slowly reconstructed in this extensive study with over 550 archaeological drawings and 1,183 references. Mentioned over 40 times in the Hebrew Bible, the archaeological evidence identifies Asherah as Yahweh's primary wife and reveals she is the only surviving goddess in Palestine by the end of the 7th-6th centuries BCE. Asherah's stunning history unfolds as the shovels of archaeology resurrect what the pens of history forgot. *A subject pioneered by Raphael Patai's The Hebrew Goddess (1967) and William G. Dever's Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (2005).