Demonic · Deliverance tradition · c. 1300 BCE
Asherah
Also called Athirat, Ashratu, the grove (KJV) · also recorded as Ascherah, Ashera (per Wikidata)
Consort of El at Ugarit and mother of the gods, whose cult objects stood in the Jerusalem temple itself for long stretches — and who disappears from English Bibles behind the word 'grove'.
Well sourced
Asherah is the most thoroughly buried major deity in the biblical record. At Ugarit she is *Athirat*, consort of El and mother of seventy gods. In Kings her *asherim* — wooden poles or living trees — stand at high places and repeatedly inside the Jerusalem temple, removed by reforming kings and put back by their successors. The eighth-century inscriptions at Kuntillet Ajrud go further and bless by 'YHWH and his asherah', which is why she is central to any modern argument about how Israelite religion actually worked as against how Kings says it should have.
English translation did the rest. The KJV renders the word as 'grove', so a reader in English encounters landscaping where the Hebrew has a goddess.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Ugaritic *Athirat*, titled 'she who treads on the sea'. The KJV renders the Hebrew *asherah* as 'grove' seventeen times, which turns a named goddess and her cult object into scenery.
Where it was actually worshipped
Not a demon in her own period at all: high places across Israel and Judah, and a carved pole beside the altar that the reforming kings keep cutting down.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) · c. 1400-1200 BCE
- Named there as
- Athirat
- Rank
- Mother of the Gods
- Order
- Deliverance tradition
- Base of operations
- Not a demon in her own period at all: high places across Israel and Judah, and a carved pole beside the altar that the reforming kings keep cutting down.
- Era
- c. 1300 BCE
- Traditions
- Christian, Deliverance & Spiritual Warfare
- Placed in
- The Deliverance Taxonomy
Traits
- Domain
- Motherhood, the sea, the consort of El, the cult pole
- How firm the basis is
- Strong — a real goddess with a real cult, buried by translation
- Textual basis
- Attested at Ugarit and throughout Kings
- Status
- A category in modern deliverance teaching (1970s onward), not a figure of ancient demonology
Stats
Known connections
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Asherah, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- social3
- material1
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
3 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 3 texts that names Asherah, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
3 texts spanning roughly 3,291 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Athirat, Asherah (KJV 'grove'), Asherah
- Rank: given as Lady Athirat of the Sea; Cult object and goddess; Territorial spirit
Consort of El and mother of the gods; her intercession with El is what secures Baal permission to build his palace.
Her image and poles stand in the temple and at the high places, removed by Hezekiah and Josiah and restored by others. Four hundred of her prophets eat at Jezebel's table.
“The prophets of the groves four hundred, which eat at Jezebel's table.”
Named in strategic-level warfare writing as a regional spirit paired with Baal, addressed by name in organised prayer over cities and nations.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Opposes Baal Hadad
Paired with Baal in the biblical polemic and in territorial-spirits writing, though at Ugarit she is El's consort rather than his.
Identified with Astarte
Distinct goddesses at Ugarit, steadily conflated in the biblical text and in everything downstream of it.
Serves El
His consort at Ugarit, and the one whose intercession moves him.
Identified with The Queen of Heaven
Proposed referent; the text does not name her.
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
In the deliverance and territorial-spirits literature she appears as a ruling spirit paired with Baal, associated with idolatry and sexual sin. That pairing is drawn from the biblical polemic against her cult rather than from anything the Ugaritic material says about her, where she is a maternal figure of high standing.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Asherah?
Is Asherah the same as Astarte?
What rank is Asherah?
How else is Asherah spelled?
What is Asherah said to do?
How old is Asherah?
Nearest in the corpus
If Asherah is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Azazel
Chief Watcher · The Watchers
The scapegoat's destination in Leviticus, and the Watcher who taught weapons and cosmetics in 1 Enoch. Translators cannot even agree whether the word is a name, a place or an abstraction.
The Etemmu
The Dead Who Return · Mesopotamian
The Mesopotamian ghost of a person, and a problem of neglect rather than of malice: the etemmu that troubles the living is usually a spirit nobody buried and nobody remembers.
Abaddon
Angel of the Abyss · Infernal Court
A place-name in the Hebrew Bible — 'destruction', a synonym for the grave — that Revelation personifies as the king of the locusts of the pit.
Behemoth
Beast of the Land · Infernal Court
Job's land-beast, paired with Leviathan — presented there as a creature of God, not an enemy of him.
Samael
Prince of Accusers · Chief Princes
Both an archangel and an adversary. Jewish tradition makes him the accusing angel, the angel of death and the guardian prince of Rome; all three are offices he was assigned, not verdicts on his character.
The Ifrit
Class of Jinn · Jinn
A powerful class of jinn — and jinn, crucially, have free will, so an ifrit may be Muslim, hostile, or neither.
The books behind Asherah
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets)
Anonymous; recovered at Ras Shamra · c. 1400-1200 BCE · Ugaritic
Read The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) in full ↗Cover: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Unknown artist · Wikimedia file page
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Territorial Spirits & Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare
C. Peter Wagner and the Third Wave writers · 1989-1996 · English
Read Territorial Spirits & Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.