Babylonian-Inspired Biblical Features and the Yahwistic Exilic History

Abstract

The framing of the Hebrew Bible in the Mesopotamian–Babylonian landscape is evident in two of its central themes. First, Abraham, the forefather of the Hebrews, is presented as a native of Ur in south Mesopotamia, whence he left for Harran and then reached the Promised Land. Second is the exile of the Judahite elites to Babylonia, and the later return of some of them to Jerusalem to build their Second Temple. As the Bible was written, rewritten, and compiled by Babylonian exiles, primarily authored after the Fall of Jerusalem, its compilation by Judean exiles reveals a certain legitimization for existence in Exile, namely, the first revelation of YHWH outside of the Promised Land. This article examines the impact of the Babylonian surroundings on the Exiles’ approach to the representation of YHWH. It surveys the role of the Levantine goddess ’Ašerah, while proposing that alongside ’Ašerah, there may have been a male god named ’Ašer who, in pre-exilic times, was probably part of the Yahwistic religion and who was subsequently eliminated or degraded by the Judean exilic compilers of the Bible as it has reached us.

1. Introductory Note

This essay comprises six Sections. Section 1 deals with the two biblical themes connecting Judah with Babylonia: the birth of Abraham in Ur and the deportation of the Judeans to Babylonia. Then, Section 2 discusses the legendary tale about the birth of Abraham, the first worshiper of YHWH and proposes some affirmative biblical views on the Exile. Section 3 reexamines a few Babylonian-inspired Genesis myths and offers some potential everyday social occurrences, through which such Babylonian myths could have inspired the Judean exiles. Section 4 focuses on the creation myth of man and woman presented in Genesis 1: 26, where the divine is referenced in a plural form, hinting at a pair of divine creators. This leads to Section 5, which deals with the Levantine goddess Ašerah and the enigmatic image of Ašer in relation to the later, mostly post exilic Judean–Babylonian biblical editing and brings us to Section 6, which examines the impact of the Babylonian religio-cultic context on the Judeans, and its possible effect on the exilic compilers of the Bible, who reshaped its ideology, whose primary authorship is attributed to the period after the Fall of Jerusalem, referred to as Deuteronomistic writings (Pakkala 2009, 2017), termed here as Exilic History as, indeed, the main reworking and editing of the biblical texts probably occurred after the Fall of Jerusalem (Pakkala 2010).

2. The Babylonian Diaspora Novella

That the Hebrew Bible, as it reached us, is framed within a Mesopotamian–Babylonian landscape is manifested in its two central themes that open and close its long narrative on ancient Israel. The first presents Abraham, the forefather of the Hebrews, as a native of Ur of the Chaldeans in Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia, whence he departed for his Promised Land in the southern Levant, through a detour in Harran in now days south-east Turkey, fulfilling a divine order of YHWH (Genesis 11: 31; 12: 1; 15: 7). The foreign origin of Abraham, indeed, is revealed in the Promised Land after the death of Sara, in the account describing his efforts to acquire a family tomb in Genesis 23: 2–16. The background of this tale emphasizes his attempts to buy a family tomb from Ephron the Hittite1, the lack of a family resting place (אֲחֻזַּת-קָבֶר) typical of immigrants. As a newcomer (Genesis 23: 4)2 in the Promised Land, where none of his forefathers had lived or been buried, he had to have his own legitimate burial plot for the use of his family and descendants. In order to fulfill his rights to the Land and secure it, he refused to be buried within the burial area of the local ‘Hittites’, which was first offered to him by Ephron, nor could he be given a piece of land at no charge by Ephron. Rather, he had to pay the full price for it (Liverani 2007, pp. 258, 260–62; Collins 2007, p. 208). This purchased plot of land was intended to be a peaceful eternal resting place for him and his descendants, thus transforming his status from a foreign immigrant to a local resident3.

The second theme that occurred in the same south Mesopotamian region concerns the Judahite king and some echelons of his society brought to Babylonia as exiles by Nebuchadnezzar II at the beginning of the 6th century (597–82 BCE).4 In the course of time, these exiles settled in Babylonia as reflected by Jeremiah (29: 4–7), and later, during the regime of the Achaemenid Empire, some of their descendants returned to Judah creating the Province of Yahad/Yehud, as mainly reported by Ezra (Chapter 2) and Nehemiah (Ezra 1–3, 7).5 The two men led some Judean returnees6 back to Judah. Ur, as the birthplace of Abraham, is acknowledged in Nehemiah (9: 7). These two central biblical themes undeniably tightly bind the ancient Hebrews, actually the Judeans, with Babylonia.

Framing the historical, long, and complex biblical narrative with two critically significant episodes relating to Babylonia, where the forefather of the Hebrews was said to have been born and where the upper echelons of the Jerusalemite society and its selected trained professionals were taken as exiles, seems to express and convey a specific message. These two meeting points of biblical Israel or, to be more exact Judah with Babylonia—as the bible presents the Judeans’ point of view(s)—however, exhibit two different literary genres. The first, an invented tale about Abraham’s birth at Ur, is a legendary, non-historical account, as already suggested by Wellhausen (1905, pp. 316–17), an unhistorical literary tradition assigned to the exilic period (Van Seters 1975, particularly pp. 309–12; Liverani 2007, pp. xvi–xvii; Finkelstein and Römer 2014, pp. 5, 11, 19–20; Frevel 2023, p. 36). According to Liverani (2007, p. 263), it was during the lifetime of Ezekiel that mention of the names of Abraham and the other patriarchs began to increase. The second account—the deportation of the Judean royal court and its elites to Babylonia and their settling there, well recorded in the Bible (2 Kings 22: 10–12; 24: 12, 14–16; 25: 21; Jeremiah 29: 5–10; 52: 15, 28–30; Liverani 2007, p. 194)—is a historical event verified in extra-biblical contemporary Babylonian records such as, for example, the circa 200 cuneiform tablets assigned to Āl-Yāḫūdu, ‘the town of Judah’, which was probably located in the Borsippa region (Pearce and Wunsch 2014; Wunsch 2022).

It was the fall of the Babylonian Empire and its provinces to the Achaemenid Empire that modified the Babylonian imperial policy that enabled some of the Judean exiles to return to Judah. But, as pointed out by Kuhrt (2007, pp. 118–19, 136–37), the account of the Judean exiles’ return to Judah is a biblical narrative lacking any extra-biblical sources to support it. Hence, this biblical account cannot be considered a secure historical source. Yet, the return of some Judeans to Judah during the hegemony of the Achaemenid regime does not seem to be an entirely made-up story. It matches the general policy of the Achaemenid Empire to grant and renew some past favorable rights to polities under its rule (Amit 2018, p. 132). A good example of this policy is the restoration of the Babylonian religious establishment, in particular the reinstalling of Marduk as the major Babylonian god and its worship by Cyrus (Kuhrt 2007, p. 125; Razmjou 2013, pp. 114–19; Abusch 2020, pp. 102–3). In such a political context, the probable longing of some of the Judean exiles to return to their homeland as expressed, for example, in Psalm 137: 1–6, may have been actually realized as reflected in Psalm 126. However, the account of the return to the Promised Land cannot be considered only as a religious–political move by the exiles, stirred by their beliefs and traditional sentiments. Rather, it can be considered as an initiative of the Achaemenid regime aimed at mobilizing the expectations of some Judean exiles to advance and maintain imperial policy (e.g., Grabbe 2004, p. 355; Lipschits 2006, pp. 39–40). Perhaps the returnees’ movement itself was first instigated and surely encouraged by the imperial rule—as implied by the probable nomination of Nehemiah (5: 14–15, 18) as פֶּחָה Governor of the Achaemenid Province of Yahad/Yehuda and the high status of Ezra in the Persian administration7.

3. The Invention of Abraham’s Birth and the Approval of the Exile

In the form in which it has reached us, the Bible was written, rewritten, compiled, and edited through the lens of the Babylonian exiles, who probably had some earlier pre-exilic traditions and texts to fit their religious ideology, political needs, and aspirations (compare Van der Toorn 2007, pp. 90, 146, 175, 177, 201; Carr 2011, pp. 225–303). The huge literary composition of the biblical texts should be contextualized within the Achaemenid Empire that ruled the Near East for some 200 years from the capture of Babylon in 539 to the conquest of Alexander the Great in 331.

Considering this major composition was possibly aimed at fitting the needs and objectives of the returnees, one wonders why the detail about Abraham’s birth at Ur of the Chaldeans was included in the narrative compiled during the second half of the first millennium, when Ur was a relatively small town compared with other contemporary Babylonian cities. What was the purpose of such a ‘biographic’ detail and whose interests did it serve? Finkelstein and Römer (2014, pp. 19–20) explain this source insertion about Abraham as a false biographic detail that may have been used as an invitation for ‘those born in “exile” to return to the land’. Nevertheless, since the two Judean–Babylonian meeting points open the long history of the Judeans and close it with the actual Exile to Babylonia (and the return of some of the exiles to Jerusalem), we may propose that the allusion to Ur manifests a reversed explanation. Thus, the beginning and termination of the long biblical epic narrative about the Judeans (also) conveys an ideological approach legitimizing the Exile. In other words, the made-up birth of Abraham at Ur presents a deliberate, invented detail introduced to exonerate those Judeans who did not join the returnees but remained in Babylonia for generations to come. Another personality of utmost importance to Israelite–Judean history is Moses, who was also a non-historical figure (Assmann 1997, p. 2). We may also trace in the story of Moses a Mesopotamian inspiration, although contextualized in a non-Mesopotamian background. The episode in question, considered a Neo-Assyrian narrative legend written under Sargon II in the 8th century, reflected a literary theme relating to the ‘greatness’ of a baby—found deserted in a basket at a river, as told of Moses and Sargon the Great (Frahm 2020, p. 177)8. It seems that the long and complex narrative, as found in the Exilic History, assembled prominent fictitious figures as a literary tool to make its ‘biographic’ tales more credible and attractive to its audience by introducing its leaders as real human beings, expanding their biographies, characters, family relations, and seemingly miraculous infancy. Such invented details rendered these stories as more trustworthy and reliable tales about model human protagonists with whom readers or listeners could identify.

At the end of Genesis chapter 11 (verse 31), we are told that Terah’s family left its hometown Ur and moved to Harran on their way to Canaan. The beginning of the next chapter, no. 12, opens with the declaration of YHWH to Abraham announcing that he will grant him the Promised Land. This episode presents the first revelation of YHWH and marks a significant detail as it occurred outside of the Promised Land, at Harran. It suggests that YHWH was not confined to the Promised Land: his believers could reach him anywhere. In that sense, the tight connection of Abraham’s descendants with the Promised Land is somewhat weakened. The locus of YHWH’s revelation outside of the Promised Land points to a prediction-like promise that being in exile does not entail YHWH’s leaving or abandonment of his believers. A similar ideological approach is reflected in the prayer of King Solomon. On the conclusion of the construction of the Jerusalem Temple, Solomon clearly states that YHWH will hear and receive prayers from Judeans who would find themselves in a foreign land (1 Kings 8: 44–50; Hoffman 2018, pp. 388–89). Thus, the birth of Abraham at Ur was aimed to accommodate the phenomenon of a Judean Diaspora and, thus, could only have been written during the Exile, after the fall of Jerusalem9.

Indeed, a repeated positive and accepted biblical theme of an Israelite–Judahite Exile is found elsewhere in the Bible, in particular in Exodus with regard, for example, to the 400 years when they were settled in Egypt. At least part of this long exile was considered a prosperous period for which the Israelites longed, as reflected in their yearning for the food they ate while in Egypt (Numbers 11: 4–5). Such an affirmative attitude towards an Israelite Exile is proposed by Thomas Römer (2021), who called the story about Joseph in Egypt “a Diaspora Novella”.

This is not to imply, however, that legitimizing the phenomenon of a Judean exile was a dominant theme of the biblical message. We have to acknowledge that alongside the more acceptable, formal ideology governing the biblical agenda concerning the relationships among the Judeans, the Promised Land, and the reality of their long history of exile, there is an ongoing self-contradictory biblical ideology beginning with the made-up tradition of Abraham as a Babylonian native. This ideology legitimizes the Judean Diaspora, which, indeed, is realized through the history of the Judeans and, even more so, throughout their later historical phases, when they became Jews.

4. The Adoption of Babylonian Mythic Motifs in Genesis

The above characterization of the Judeans in Babylonia is reflected in how certain biblical themes are inspired by Babylonian–Mesopotamian mythological elements, briefly illustrated here via a few well-known cases from Genesis that present mythological features. For example, the first creation act of the divine, the making of light, was realized only through speech by the divine uttering (Gen 1: 2 וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר). The latter verse recalls Marduk’s (re)creation of a star only by his words (Enūma Eliš IV: 22–27, Lambert 2013, pp. 19–26); the separation of the vast primordial waters to create the sky and the seas (Gen 1: 6–9) adopts the Babylonian creation tale relating that out of Tiamat’s corpse, sky and land were made, representing a male and female pair (Enūma Eliš IV: 135–140, Lambert 2013, pp. 94–95, 169, see below).

A well-known account in this regard is, of course, the creation of man and woman out of earth/clay (Gen 2: 7)10 that follows Mesopotamian sources (Atra-ḫasīs I: 208–230, Lambert and Millard 1969, pp. 58–59; Enūma Eliš VI: 31–34, Lambert 2013, pp. 112–13). A significant modification of the Mesopotamian myth in the biblical version, however, is the absence of the blood of the murdered god Wȇ-ila in the clay from which man was made (e.g., Wasserman and Bloch 2025, p. 6). The reasoning underlying the very creation of man and woman presents yet another distinction between the biblical and the Mesopotamian sources. While the intention of the Babylonian creation myth of man was to impose the burden of labor on him (formerly, the duty of the lesser gods); in the adapted biblical version the reason for the creation of man and woman is to procreate and to rule the animal world (Gen 1: 28). Notwithstanding, in other contexts, the Bible does share the idea of the yoke of work put on man with the Mesopotamian sources and acknowledges its tough imposition on human males as punishment after Adam ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (Gen 3: 19. Cf. Gen 2: 5). It conveys that throughout his life, man was destined to work very hard for his nutrition (Gen 3: 19), a theme repeated in Job 5: 7 and hinted at in Psalm 104. The task of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to guard The Tree of Life, though (Genesis 2: 15 ַיַּנִּחֵהוּ בְגַן-עֵדֶן, לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ), may have alluded to the duty of hard work put on man; it functioned as a literary prediction signaling the eternal harsh task of men to maintain their existence in the world created for them by God. Similarly, the account of the Flood in Genesis (chapters 6–9) is the closest to the Mesopotamian Flood version found in Atra-ḫasīs: it commences in Tablet II with the divine preparation and continues in Tablet III, where the Flood hits humans and animals (Lambert and Millard 1969; Wasserman 2020), and Gilgamesh Tablet XI (Day 2013, pp. 74–88). Probably, as suggested by Day (2013, pp. 84–85), the Flood account entered the biblical collection during the Exile. The main difference in the biblical account is the very reason given for imposing the flood on human beings, that is, due to their evilness, violence, and corruption (Genesis 6: 5–6, 13. Day 2013), while in the Babylonian account, the flood was unleashed on humanity as a result of the vast proliferation of humans, since in the beginning, their life span was endless. Consequently, the noise they created reached a level that did not let Enlil sleep, causing him to destroy them by the flood; the human noise that disturbed Enlil also bothered the gods when they heard it (Wasserman 2020, pp. 50, 97, 133–34, 125, 154–55).

To these comparisons we may add two kinds of labeling or naming features found in both the Mesopotamian and biblical literature. First, God names light and darkness ‘day’ and ‘night’ (Genesis 1: 5); he names the land, sky, and seas (Genesis 1: 8, 10); and the human being(s) he created Adam11 (Genesis 5: 2). Secondly, Adam replicates the divine act of naming: he names all the types of animals (Genesis 2: 19–20) and names woman אִשָּׁה (Genesis 2: 23). Naming, indeed, carried “immense importance” in Assyro-Babylonian culture, as advocated by Baker regarding the interplay between inscribed words and pictorial imagery on wall reliefs in Ashurnasirpal II’s Nimrud palace (Baker 2024, pp. 122–23, 129)12. Another aspect of the significance of naming is the renaming attested to in the Mesopotamian records and biblical accounts discussed by Wasserman and Bloch (2025, p. 6), as in the changing of the name, Mami to Nintu, also titled Bēlet-kala-ilī, ‘Lady of all the gods’, that fits her role as a mother goddess; the Genesis’ examples of renaming concern Abraham, Sara, and Jacob and may reflect another cuneiform tradition, applied here to human beings. Most of the borrowed Babylonian features revealed in the biblical text, though, were modified or shortened to fit the norms, ideology, and aims of the post-exilic Judean biblical redactors of the Exilic History, presenting a process that characterizes almost any cultural borrowing (Eerkens and Lipo 2007).

The Babylonian inspiration reflected in the biblical texts of the Exilic History attests to the connections of the Judeans with their Babylonian surroundings. Most of the Babylonian cuneiform tablets that mention Judeans deal with economic and commercial activities (Waerzeggers 2014), which at first glance, do not seem to contribute to the issue of the Babylonian inspiration on biblical cultural assets like mythic features. However, such recorded commercial documents not only demonstrate social contacts between Judeans and Babylonians; their very existence probably could have familiarized the Judeans with Babylonian cultural assets. These included cultic-religious features reflected, for example, in the use of the names of Babylonian divinities in personal names. The latter are evinced in the names of people involved in these transactions or in social events such as marriage ceremonies, in which some of the attendees have Yahwistic names: for example, in the list of witnesses in the marriage contract of ^fNanaya-kānat from Āl-Yāḫūdu (Abraham 2005–2006, pp. 206, 208, and 211–16; Compare Liverani 2007, p. 217). The commercial activities of the Sippar Judean family of Ariḫ in the second half of the sixth century, with the officials of the Sippar Ebabbar temple of Shamash (Bloch 2014, p. 131), exemplify a social context where Babylonian cultic-religious features such as divine names and myths could have become familiar to the Judeans engaged in these business activities (Waerzeggers 2014, p. 141). Such Babylonian facets were adopted into the Bible by the exilic writing and reediting, most of which occurred in Babylonia after the fall of the kingdom of Judah (Pakkala 2017).

5. Creation as Envisioned in Genesis 1: 26

The following section focuses on the biblical creation of man and woman, in particular on Gen 1: 26, where the text indicates that their creation was made by more than one divine figure since it uses a plural future tense, proposing a divine scheme to be performed by more than one deity, Elohim: נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ. Unfortunately—at least for the modern interpreters—except for Elohim, the identity of the other deities or deity that participated in the creation of the male and female humans is not mentioned, and their name or names are not reported. However, since the created humans were shaped like their divine creators and had the same image(s), they can be considered a replica of their divine creators (below), though not a complete one. Man and woman differed from their divine creators in the latter’s immortality; while the former, after eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, had a limited life span (Genesis 2: 17, 3:3, 19). However, as said, they resembled their divine creators in form and image, and thus, we may propose that, alongside Elohim, there was a female divinity, a goddess, paralleling Eve, the female partner of man (Genesis 1: 27).13 The use of plural concerning the divine creators in Gen 1: 26 suggests the participation of a female deity reminiscent of the Mesopotamian birth goddess Nintu, ‘formerly’ named Mami, who ‘practically’ made the first seven human males and seven human females by molding them out of clay (Atra-ḫasīs II: 246–48. Wasserman and Bloch 2025, p. 6). The major role of the female goddess Nintu in the creation may further support the suggestion above that the divinity joining Elohim in Gen 1: 26 must have been a female.

On the basis that Adam and Eve duplicate the two divine creators in form and image, the role of the female divine partner is rather obvious. It entails that the partner of Elohim in verse 26 was perceived as his consort, since it recalls the created couple of Adam and Eve, whom we have called a replica of the divine. It stands to reason, then, that the ‘original’ divine creators’ couple in Genesis 1: 26 represent a male and a female figure, since both couples—the divine and the human—mirror each other. It presents a Babylonian mythologem of a polytheistic belief-system that was left as an unnoticed vestige contrasting with the many more biblical verses which mention only one divine male creator, Elohim. The latter, indeed, fit the ‘formal’ biblical monotheistic ideology, most probably mainly developed after the fall of Jerusalem by the Babylonian exiles, as is demonstrated within the Exilic History14.

6. ’Ašerah and ’Ašer

The above supposition that the human-shaped creator god in Genesis 1: 26 had a human-shaped female partner brings to mind Levantine ’Ašerah, who in some biblical references seems to represent a prominent goddess perceived as human-shaped, as most prevailing in the ancient Near East. Such descriptions extend to the second millennium goddess referenced as ’Atherat, the name of a major goddess, the consort of El, the head of the Ugaritic pantheon (Hadley 2000, pp. 38–43, 49)15. These are echoed in first millennium biblical records as they have reached us, presented as a divine image or, as a cultic object, whose materialistic representations are still debated in modern scholarship.16

In the Exilic History, however, the personified ’Ašerah almost disappeared, mainly occurring as a forbidden ’ašerah cultic object: a kind of tree or wooden pole, thus identified by its associations with the verbs krt and śrp meaning cut off and burnt, respectively (Wyatt 1999, pp. 101–2).17 The biblical veto on the ̕ašerah cultic tree, mainly assigned to the post-exilic times or just before the fall of Jerusalem in the beginning of the 6th century, clearly epitomized in the prohibition to plant an ’ašerha in Deuteronomy 16: 21 (compare Judges 6: 25–26, 28, 30), and mentions it in plural, alongside ’Ašerim and Ba‘alim (Judges 3: 7; 2 Chronical 19: 3, and 33: 3). The use of the plural form in these biblical attestations is a derogative tool that aims to deprive the very ‘legitimacy’ of ’Ašerah (below). Indeed, as mentioned, ’Atherat/’Ašherah is a single prominent goddess, evinced in second millennium Ugarit, which continued as a single, well-known worshiped goddess in the biblical records (e.g., 1 Kings 15:13; 16: 33; 18: 19; 2 Kings 13: 6). The modification of her name to a plural form must have been an insertion of the Exilic History compilers aimed to lower and despise her ‘as one of many.’ The divine name of ’Ašerah probably had been perceived as a human-like goddess that could have been represented by her cult emblem, recalling in particular, a characteristic Babylonian attitude demonstrated in written and visual records (below). The biblical mention of ’ašerah as a tree, indeed, does not preclude her from being perceived as an anthropomorphic divinity; 1 Kings 16: 33, describing ’Ašerah made (וַיַּעַשׂ) by Aḥab, seems to allude to her personified image. Additionally, her worship alongside Ba‘al at the Mount Carmel prophets’ gathering in 1 Kings 18:19 suggests that she represents a human-like figure.

The Mount Carmel gathering seems, then, to have been heavily modified by the Exilic History compilers who often differentiated and distinguished between Ba‘al and YHWH, for creating a narrative focusing on the superiority of YHWH and his chosen prophet Elijah (below). The use of standing עָמְדָה, concerning the image installed by Jeroboam in Samaria (2 Kings 13: 6), suggests that it referred to an anthropomorphic statue of the goddess ’Ašerah. The condemnation of Israel and Judah in 2 Kings 17: 16 for making an ’Ašerah may also associate her with the worship of Ba‘al. Another instance that we can reconstruct of a human-shaped ’Ašerah in 2 Kings 21: 7, is the mention of Manasseh installing her image. This conclusion is supported by the choice of words selected here, namely אֶת-פֶּסֶל הָאֲשֵׁרָה אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וַיָּשֶׂם. Also, the items made לַבַּעַל וְלָאֲשֵׁרָה (2 Kings 23: 4) in the account of Josiah’s assumed reform (Pakkala 2010, 2017, pp. 271–72 with earlier bibliography) suggests that they could have been personified images, since her human-like depictions seem to appear when she is paired with or contextualized alongside the Lord Ba‘al, who was signified as an anthropomorphic male god. Calling ’Ašerah מִפְלֶצֶת, לָאֲשֵׁרָה18, entailing a terrifying, possibly shocking image during the reign of Asa (1 Kings 15: 13, repeated in 2 Chronical 15: 1), may have also alluded to a human-like divinity—as implied by the extremely negative description of her image, which fits the antagonist Exilic History. As to Baʻal: his ‘name’ is considered an epithet, meaning a ‘Lord’ (Weippert 1997, p. 20)19, a god associated with ’Ašerah during the Omrides’ rule in the 9th century, when YHWH was already the Israelite kingdom’s dynastic god (Pakkala 2017, pp. 268–69). The earliest extra-biblical mention of YHWH, in late 9th century Mešha Inscription20, supports the possibility that in this period, Ba‘al and YHWH could have stood for one and the same god, who paired with ’Ašerah (compare 2 Kings 23: 4, below). Indeed, that YHWH in the first half of the 8th century could have been identified with Baʻal is implied in the plaster Hebrew inscription 4.2 from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (written in Phoenician script), which mentions YHWH, Ba‘al, and El. El probably stands for YHWH, while Ba‘al is his epithet (Aḥituv et al. 2012, pp. 110–14, 133).

As to ’Ašer, while ’Ašherah/’ašerah appears as a single human-shaped divinity or a cultic object in both singular and (derogative) plural, the masculine form of her name, ’Ašer, only appears in plural form, ’Ašerim/’ašerim21, that is more common than the female plural (Sass 2014, p. 48). These different representations of ’Ašerah and ’Ašer imply that the masculine form was considered a more negative, forbidden entity than the female one in the Exilic History, perhaps because as a male divinity, ’Ašer could have been perceived as a more serious male image competing with YHWH22.

As to the distinctions between the names ’Ašera and ’Ašer, the first appears in both the singular and the plural, while the second only in the plural, an exilic feature (Wyatt 1999, p. 103; see below 1 Kings 14: 15 for another form of the plural, ’Ašerim). This brings us to the name of Jacob’s eighth son (Genesis 30: 13), whose descendants formed the tribe of ’Asher mentioned in the blessings of Moses (Deuteronomy 33: 24). The tight association between ’Ašerah and ’Ašer as divinities is rooted in their shared names, which differ only in their gender construct. Since the female divinity, as said, is identified as a goddess (human-shaped or symbolized as endomorphic), the very fact that both appear side by side in the plural may allow us to propose that ’Ašerim, too, could have originally derived from a singular private name of a god named ’Ašer. If, indeed, we may regard them as a divine pair, the single masculine partner is eliminated by the governing Exilic History (Sass 2014, p. 48), surviving only as a negative, derogative plural.

The notion that there was a male divinity named ’Ašer, who could have been a partner of ’Ašerah was raised by Burney (1920, p.197), who associated ’Ašer, son of Jacob and Leah, and the tribe’s name ’Ašer with a divinity of good fortune. Burney supported this supposition regarding Leah’s ‘interpretation’ of the name in Genesis 30: 13 using, בְּאָשְׁרִי meaning ‘in my good luck’. Martin Noth ([1928] 1966, p. 131) mentioned the latter identification of ’Ašer as a divine name, stressing the prevalent masculine mentions of ’Ašerim/’ašerim and their possible relations to the goddess. But in his conclusions, he emphasized that such a proposition was yet unclear.

The elimination of the singular divine name ’Ašer from the biblical records assigned to the Exilic History does not match, however, with two bullae stamped by inscribed stamp-seals assigned to the 8th–7th century, which reveal the names of their owners, whose patronymics are ’šrḥy and ’šryḥt (Avigad and Sass 1997, nos. 579 and 580). ’Ašer as a personal name, functions here as a theophoric component combined with a verbal one, as is so common in West-Semitic personal names and a most characteristic type of Iron Age II Hebrew names. The theophoric components ’Ašer on these bullae replace the more common Judean theophoric component yhw, or yw, the latter typical of Israelite names. B. Sass opts for ’Ašer here, as it alludes to a shrine, but he does not preclude the possibility that it can also refer to a divinity (Sass 2014, pp. 49, 50–52, 54 with earlier bibliography). Hence, the above noted bullae propose that ’Ašer was known in preexilic Judah as a male divinity. The exclusion of ’Ašer as a singular divine name from biblical records (as said, contrasting the mentions of ’Ašerah), emphasizes the firm Yahwistic agenda of the Exilic History to banish any other divine names in preexilic Judah. Since the former only acknowledged YHWH, other names or YHWH’s epithets were eliminated (Weippert 1997, p. 10) or, only survived in a derogatory manner. The derogatory meaning of plural Ašerot and Ašerim fits the Exilic History approach towards a belief in only one God, as within such a theological framework, presenting divinities in plural form probably conveyed a pejorative attitude. Although ’ašer is mainly found in the Bible as a relative pronoun, it does not preclude that it cannot be comprehended as a personal name and, in our case, as a divine name evinced, for example, in 1 Kings 14: 15 where the two variants of the lexeme are found in one verse יַעַן אֲשֶׁר עָשׂוּ אֶת-אֲשֵׁרֵיהֶם--מַכְעִיסִים אֶת-יְהוָה…; where the divine name is in plural form (compare ESV n.d.: “their ’Ašerim).23

The above two glyptic finds that mentioning ’Ašer as a Judahite divinity can be supported by Psalm 8: 2 יהוָה אֲדֹנֵינוּ מָה-אַדִּיר שִׁמְךָ, בְּכָל-הָאָרֶץאֲשֶׁר תְּנָה הוֹדְךָ עַל-הַשָּׁמָיִם. Ancient and modern translations of this verse, as well as many scholars, who consider the verse ‘problematic’, comprehended אֲשֶׁר here as a relative pronoun and thereby treat this verse as one continued sentence combined by the assumed pronominal ‘which’ that asks YHWH to grant his light on the sky24. However, the verse seems to present a biblical parallelism reflected by the correspondence between ‘land’ in 2a בְּכָל-הָאָרֶץ and ‘sky’ in 2b עַל-הַשָּׁמָיִם; between מָה-אַדִּיר שִׁמְך in 2a and תְּנָה הוֹדְךָ in 2b; and יְהוָה אֲדֹנֵינוּ (YHWH our Lord) in 2a, which parallels 2b אֲשֶׁר that functions here as a divine appellative of the former, YHWH25. Accepting ’Ašer here as a divine name that matches the above-noted bullae mention of ’šrḥy and ’šryḥt, the role of ’Ašer in Psalm 8: 2b, paralleling YHWH in verse 2a, may assign ’Ašer to the pre-exilic Yahwistic religion and does not seem to exhibit difficulties (Smith 1997), unless one regards the ideology of Exilic History as part of the earlier, ‘original’ preexilic religio-cultic reality in Judah.

7. Babylonian Religio-Cultic Context and the Judean Reaction

Perceiving divine figures like ’Ašerah and other (mainly) major divinities as both human-shaped and alternatively, as their non-figural representations was a well-known ancient Near Eastern characteristic prevalent in Mesopotamia since the third millennium (Selz 1997), and, in particular, during the Kassite hegemony in the second half of the second millennium and continuing into the first millennium (Ornan 2005, pp. 41–59). In visual imagery, the representations of major divinities by their inanimate divine emblems, animals, hybrids, and vegetal features became a frequent phenomenon in particular during the 7th to 5th century Babylonia, while their human-form divinities seem to be mostly restricted to sacred compounds and temples, into which only few, mainly cultic personnel, had access (ibid., pp. 109–32, 168–82; Ornan 2009, pp. 132, 136, 143–48).

One may wonder, then, if the prohibition on personified ʼAšerah and her emblematic tree or pole typical of the Exilic History was inspired by the contemporary Babylonian approach toward the divine which, as noted above, was familiar to the Judean exiles. We may conjecture that it was the preponderant use of divine emblems that surrounded the Judean exiles in Babylonia which could have engendered a negative reaction among the Judeans to visual realizations of the divine and his non-anthropomorphic emblems (e.g., Deuteronomy 4, pp. 17–18). The outcome of this is apparent in what seems to be the most important and defining trait of the post-exilic biblical agenda: the formal banning of any form portraying divine images (e.g., Deuteronomy 4: 12, 15–19; Exodus 20: 3–4).

As mentioned, cultural interactions often involve modifications to meet the specific needs and aims of the borrower(s) (Eerkens and Lipo 2007), particularly when the borrower is an outsider. In our case, we may hypothesize that the deported Judean exiled elites aimed, on the one hand, to keep their individuality by reshaping preexilic characteristics of Judah (and Israel)26 while, on the other hand, they modified Babylonian themes and visuals by rejecting the intensified Babylonian use of a multitude of divinities and their emblems in order to demonstrate their particular identity. In other words, the Babylonian cultural and cultic context, which “allowed the deported elites to keep their individuality” (Liverani 2007, p. 195), may have led to the strict prohibition of the visual representation of the Judeans’ divinities and the formation of an ‘ethic religion’. The rise in ethic religions, indeed, matches the advance of the sixth-century wider intellectual modifications typifying the Axial Age (Liverani 2007, pp. 203–13, particularly pp. 204–5). Moreover, the first-millennium elevation of Marduk to a universal supreme god of the Babylonian Empire (Liverani 2007, pp. 205–6; Abusch 2020, p. 102), combined with the contemporary plethora of other divinities worshiped in Babylon, could have resulted in the Exilic History’s elevation of YHWH, not only as a supreme god but as an only god, as expressed, for example, in Deuteronomy 6: 427.