Tell Halif
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Tell Halif
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Though there is much debate about the identity of the pillar figurines (see Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel, for a recent, thorough review of the arguments), the weight of the evidence falls in favor of identifying the pillar figurine as an icon of the goddess `Asherah. While the noun `asherah does apply to a cultic object, a piece of the furniture of a temple, it certainly also applies to an object toward which human activity and devotion were directed, i.e., to something which can or will respond positively to human need. That "something," if it is not already perceived early in the history of the use of the noun as a "something" capable of acting on its own and, therefore, addressed as an independent entity, `asherah was certainly recognized by the time of late Iron II as a deity, as `Asherah. Else why the shrines containing evidence of only the pillar figurine (`Asherah) as the center of ritual attention? That is, whatever events occurred and whatever was attained or desired in the shrine room of Halif, it is clear that there is only one candidate in that room for the representation of an entity toward whom those rituals were aimed and from whom benefactions were received or desired.
Given the archaeological evidence alone, one would necessarily conclude that a localized (even if restricted to the house alone in which it was found) cult, interested in at least certain human needs or desires, focused attention to the source of the satisfaction of those needs or desires. I.e., the "faithful," in some part at least, defined their lives from immediate contact with the features of this shrine, including the pillar figurine. Since all of the other surviving artifacts in the room appear either to serve ordinary/profane functions, such as food-storage or food-preparation and consumption, or possibly to serve in ritual itself, the only remaining artifact to or toward which the ritual must have been directed is the pillar figurine itself (possibly also to the carved stone "pillars"?). People will carry out ritual because that ritual produces, or permits to share in, some reality desired; hence, it seems likely that the entity or power to which the ritual involving food and incense was aimed was one who shared in that reality or was itself that desired reality; here in this shrine room humans found it possible to share or to participate in the divine reality symbolized by the pillar figurine, a reality that apparently differed from the reality of (the orthodox and/or exclusive) Yahwism. And that is why Yahweh was not found or represented in the shrine room at Halif. Some other reality was to be found there.
The attempts to define the meaning and function of the pillar figurine constantly in terms of true Yahwism (e.g., as an hypostatization of the sacred object `asherah, or as a separation and subsequent hypostatization of the feminine from the person of Yahweh, etc.) fail to do justice to what the people in the shrine room imagined themselves achieving or sharing. Since there is no representation of Yahwism that can be eked from the remains in that room (or, for that matter, elsewhere in the house) there is no reason on the face of it to qualify the pillar figurine as some spinoff from the person of Yahweh. Perhaps that evaluation of the Biblical (i.e., orthodox) account is accurate, perhaps (like Christianity's absorbing elements of the "pagan" religions which it encountered) Yahwism did attempt--whether knowingly or incidentally--to absorb elements not otherwise directly associated with the person of Yahweh; but the sources from which these ingredients were presumably absorbed did not become thereby "neutral" and did not cease to exist because portions were absorbed into Yahwism. They continued to provide a system in which the world and human experience was ordered, apart from Yahwism. It is this separate "ordering" of the world and of human experience that is overlooked, indeed eliminated, by the consistent attempts to define the data in terms of the non-, hetero-, and unorthox Yahwism. Always in terms of Yahwism, whereas this data deserves to be interpreted first on its own.
Miller, Patrick D. 2000. The Religion of Ancient Israel. Library of Ancient Israel. D. Knight, Editor. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
