Wait? Did God Have A Wife?
Appears so…so what happened to her?
Howdy folks
I hope you’re all well. A good few years ago, I came across something that made me go, "Eh what?"
Our Judeo-Christian God had a missus.
Yeah, mad isn’t it? Sure, God’s God, why would God have a wife since He is all things anyway and sure is beyond the whole male/female thing. Did I just assume God’s non-binary gender? Yes, yes I did.
But, yeah, the Big Bossman had a partner. And what does that show us? Well, that the Judeo-Christian idea of God is based on something older and evolved into a monotheistic thing… so, let’s get into it…
The forgotten Queen of Heaven
When I first heard of the wife, I felt like I was the bit-on-the-side. What do you mean He had a wife? Nobody told me.
They never told you about the wife either, did they? All that fire and brimstone, the thundering pronouncements and beardy patriarchs handing down commandments from smoky hilltops, but not even a mouse’s whisper about the woman behind the throne.
Or beside it. Or beneath it, buried in clay and ash and the deakening silence of ancient erasure.
Her name was Asherah.
She was the Queen of Heaven, the mother of gods, the tree of life, the womb of worlds. Yahweh’s consort, if you trust the archaeologists and their dusty shards.
His partner, if you believe the scribes who dared to write “Yahweh and his Asherah” in cuneiform, who must’ve never thought for a moment that she would one day be tossed aside like Tubberware lid with no matching container.
Before monotheism tightened the rules
Back before monotheism went corporate, the divine came in twos.
Sky and earth. Thunder and soil. Inanna and Ishtar in Sumeria, Dyēus Phter and Dheghmon (also called Dʰéǵʰōm Méh₂tēr and Plethwih), if you’re partial to Proto-Indo-European mouthfuls.
God the Father, yes, but also a god the Mother, too. The one who bled harvests, who bore gods, who nursed kingdoms at her breast, and wept when they forgot her.
Asherah was worshipped by the earliest Israelites.
Figurines of her were found in homes, not temples, and sacred poles (more on that below) were raised in her honor, groves planted where her presence might stir the wind. She was the tree and the snake and the lioness.
Archaeologically, sites like Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom have yielded inscriptions invoking “Yahweh and his Asherah,” suggesting not only recognition but reverence.
These aren’t pieces of street art scrawled by heretics; they’re blessings, likely used in household rituals.
Scripture itself confirms her ubiquity, even as it tries to bury her:
“The people of Israel did evil in the eyes of the Lord; they forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Asherahs.” Judges 3:7.
“He set up an Asherah pole, as Ahab king of Israel had done. He also bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them.”2 Kings 21:3
“Manasseh also made an Asherah pole. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger.” 2 Kings 21:7
Even King Solomon, with all his wisdom, wasn’t immune:
“Solomon followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord… On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh… and for Molek… He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods.” 1 Kings 11:5–8.
So yes, she was everywhere.
What were Asherah poles?
Central to her worship were the Asherah poles, wooden symbols, likely carved and ritually erected near altars, high places, or sacred trees.
The Hebrew word often used is asherah, which refers both to the goddess and the object itself, blurring the line between deity and symbol. These poles may have represented the tree of life, a divine connection between heaven and earth, womb and sky. Fertility symbols, yes, but also cosmic axes.
They were placed beside altars to Yahweh in many early shrines, until the Deuteronomists cracked down. Their destruction is repeated like a liturgical obsession:
“Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, and cut down their Asherah poles.” Exodus 34:13
“Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole beside the altar you build to the Lord your God.” Deuteronomy 16:21
Their persistent removal in the text is proof of just how common, and how threatening, they were to the emerging orthodoxy.
The divine feminine never dies
We can pretty much lay most of the play at the door of Josiah, the 16th King of Judah. That pious wee zealot. Seventh century BCE, Jerusalem. A king with a messiah complex and a sledgehammer.
He tore down her altars. Burned her symbols. Declared monotheism the state religion and Yahweh the sole CEO of the cosmos. All other gods were either demons or distractions. It was like a prequel to the Protestant Reformation, twenty-two centuries later.
“He removed from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel.” 2 Kings 23:4
“Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones.” 2 Kings 23:14
She was scrubbed from the story like a scandalously salacious footnote.
But the prophets and chroniclers keep slipping her in, like a ghost turning up at a family feast:
“Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord. They set up for themselves high places, sacred stones, and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree.” 1 Kings 14:22–23
But the thing about goddesses is, they don’t die easily.
Asherah has a thousand names, and she’s been smuggled through history in the hems of other myths. The same archetype is elsewhere called Gaia, Rhea, Danu, Mokosh, Freya, Parvati. The divine feminine, renamed and rebranded like an outlaw queen for different cultural markets.
You could make a solid argument that Catholics tried to baptize her as Mary. The mystics called her Sophia. The Gnostics called her that, too, and spoke her secrets in catacombs and caves.
You can exile the goddess, but she’ll return in dreams, in rituals, in the ache behind your ribs when the sky feels empty.
Older than Yahweh
Even Yahweh wasn’t the first of his kind. He took the throne from El, the old sky father of the Canaanite pantheon.
And El had a wife, too. You guessed it, Asherah. She predates the Hebrews, predates the Torah. She might even predate time, if you believe the myths are older than the stones they’re carved on.
Go back far enough and you hit the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) layer, the ur-language, that ghost tongue from which our gods descend. Indeed, it’s claimed that over 400 languages can be traced back to these people. You’re reading one of them now.
Dʰéǵʰōm Méh₂tēr, as mentioned above, was the earth mother. Also known as Plethwih, and the “broad one.” Her partner was Dyēus Phter, the bright sky, the thunderer. He became Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pitar, an Dagda, Perun, Taranis, and, of course, Yahweh.
They were a pair. Always.
The split that broke the cosmos
And then came the priesthoods. The scribes. The empire-builders.
They split the sky from the soil, crowned the masculine divine, and cast the feminine into shadow.
I reckon the result we’re living in is a cosmos out of balance. A theology of command without compassion, law without nurture, judgment without the womb it sprang from.
So yeah, God had a wife. And when she was taken away from Him, we lost something too.
A way of seeing the world that was cyclical, not hierarchical. Embodied, not abstract. Wild and tender and fierce and real.
Is she coming back? You can still see her in the cracks. And she’s certainly there in the return of earth-based spirituality and in the hunger for the sacred feminine.
But what the future holds, I’ve no idea. One thing is for sure, though: we need to hold nature sacred again because we’ve made a huge mess of things since we stopped seeing it as holy.
I’m Paddy Murphy — a counselor, teacher, and writer with over twenty years of experience helping people face the world without losing their soul. If this piece stirred something in you — if you’re tired of being told to switch off your feelings in order to keep up — I can help you reconnect with what matters. Not as a guru. Not as a brand. Just as someone who believes empathy is still worth fighting for.
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