Endnote 3 – Santa and His Asherah

See my forthcoming study Sex and the Single Godhead. Asherah was also called ’Elah, “the Goddess,” corresponding to ’El, “the God.” Indeed, as ’Elah is to ’El, so Asherah is to Asher, a common title for the God of Israel utterly unknown to scholars. The problem is that ‘asher is generally misunderstood as the relative pronoun “who, that, which.” Once this simple error is corrected, we find the divine name Asher on virtually every page of the Hebrew Bible. Thus, God’s words to Moses in Exodus 3:14, “‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh,” mistranslated in the King James Version as “I am that I am,” must really be rendered “I am Asher, I am.” Similarly, the opening of the Decalogue is not “I am the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt,” but “I, the Lord your God, Asher, brought you out…” Doubtless other examples lurk behind seemingly innocuous “who/what/which’s.” Another source of confusion is the term ‘ashrey, which is generally misinterpreted to mean “how happy!” but which in fact is the majestic dual of ‘Asher. For example, Psalm 84:5 should be translated, not “Happy are those who dwell in your house; they will ever praise you,” but “/Ashrey, those who dwell in your house will ever praise you.” /Asher/Ashrey is ultimately related to Egyptian Osiris and Mesopotamian Asshur (see William F. Albright, “The Evolution of the West-Semitic Divinity ‘An-‘Anat-‘Attä,” American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 41 [1925], p. 99).