ASHTORETH ăsh’ tə rĕth (Heb. עַשְׁתֹּ֔רֶת, pl. Heb. עַשְׁתָּרֹֽות, cognate to Sumer. Inanna, queen of heaven).

1. The origin of the name and character of the goddess. The spelling and vocalization of the name of this goddess, whose worship was widely practiced throughout the ancient Near E, is badly confused because of the practice of the writers of the OT and the MT to supplant the original vowels with those of another usually derogatory word. To the consonants of the term Ashtoreth, Heb. עשׁתרת, the vowels of the term בֹּ֫שֶׁת, H1425, “shame,” were infixed; thus any magical power or ascription of praise to the pagan deity was forever prohibited from the Biblical text. The name was prob. pronounced somewhat like ’Athtart, which yielded the common Gr. transliteration, ̓Αστάρτι, LXX VS of Judges 2:13, and the common variant, Gr. ̓Αστάρωθ, LXX VS of 1 Samuel 31:10, et al. The Vul. follows this tradition by transliterating the term as Astarthe, as in 1 Kings 11:5, et al. The classical authors follow suit by transliterating Astarte, e.g. Cicero, et al. The worship of mother goddesses in the Near E and elsewhere in the old world is evidenced by the frequency of small fertility figurines excavated from sites as early as the Lower Paleolithic. The earliest written documents from Mesopotamian Sumer. mention the goddess as Inanna, whose shrine and cult-center at Uruk (Akkad.) Erech (Heb., Gen 10:10), Warka (Arab.) stretches back before the protoliterate period of southern Iraq to the fourth millennium b.c. According to various extant Sumer. legends, Inanna was the consort of the shepherd god Dumuzi (Heb., Tammuz, Ezek 8:14) for whom she wept at his seasonal death. In the myth, nanna and Enki: The Transfer of the Arts of Civilization from Eridu to Erech, Inanna schemes successfully to obtain the one hundred MĒ’s, or regulative forms in which the cosmos of man exists, and thus to increase and advance her cult city of Erech and her temple of Eanna. However, an even more revealing set of myths are the nearly identical Sumer. and Akkad. VSS of Inanna/Ištar’s Descent to the Nether World. In this story Inanna or Ištar, whichever cultural manifestation is chosen, goes down into the underworld realm of the goddess of death, the condemned, and the underworld itself. This goddess, Ereshkigal or Irkalla, deprives Ištar of all her ritual garments and imprisons her as an impaled corpse. The Akkad. VS tells vividly the results of this deprivation upon the normal course of human and animal reproduction: “Since Ištar went down to the Land of No Return, Upon the heifer the bull does not leap, The ass does not impregnate the jenny. In the street the youth does not know the maiden” (author’s tr. A Babylonian Anthology [1966], 28). This sexual aspect of the worship of the mother goddess appears to have carried over into every culture of the Near E where her cult was practiced. Another feature of this worship in Sumer. and later Babylon was the annual ritual marriage held in connection with the national akītu festival which was part of the New Year’s celebration. Many ancient sources and primary cuneiform texts affirm that at this rite a temple priestess-prostitute enacted with the king the marriage of Dumuzi and Inanna. The equation of Inanna with Ištar is proven by the interchangeability of the names in the various VSS of the myths and the parallel use of their titles, e.g. Amarna Letter 23, From Tushratta of Mitanni to the Pharaoh Amenophis III (1405-1367 b.c.), wherein the name of the goddess is glossed with a descriptive phrase, “ištar bêlit šamē,” tr. “Ištar, Queen of Heaven,” the precise tr. of Inanna (1. 26). In time, cuneiform lit. utili zed the name Ištar as a general noun for “goddess.” Even the Egyptians mention her name on several stelae of the Middle Kingdom period and thereafter frequently in the papyri of the New Kingdom. In Syria-Pal. she is depicted in art with Egyp. garments and attributes.

2. Ashtoreth among the Canaanites. The people of Israel must have come in contact with the cult of Ashtoreth as it existed among the other Asiatics and W. Semites of Egypt. After the Exodus they were in constant conflict with the worship of the fertility and vegetation deities of the natives of Syria-Pal. The goddess ’Athtart appears frequently in the Ugaritic tablets from Ras Shamra; she is a foremost character in some eleven contexts. She is the companion of Ba’al in several epics and has numerous appellations: ’Athtart of the Field, ’Athtart the Majestic, and others. In a list of offerings to various shrines, a Temple of ’Athtart is listed. In the legend of King Keret she is titled, “‘t t r t š m b’ l”, “’Athtart Name-of Ba’al” (II K. vi 56.); while her charm and appeal are often compared to the goddess Anath, both are goddesses of combat and battle. Anath is more often associated with Ba’al in the Ugaritic texts than ’Athtart, who is much more prominent in later Phoen. times. However the interchange of functions and attributes is a common feature of the development of ancient Near Eastern pantheons. It is clear from the Ras Shamra tablets that the second radical consonant in the name is a שׁ&sub3'; pronounced “th” and simulated in other orthographies as either a sibilant or a dental. The polar attributes of these deities, love and war, are shown in their artistic representations which show at all dates certain characteristics drawn from the prehistoric figures. Although the cult practices and rituals, as well as the depiction of the goddess, were always reminiscent of the earlier and cruder forms, yet her comprehension in the minds of her devotees reached extraordinary heights of poetry and drama, some aspects of which were later sublimated by the Hebrews to the worship of Jehovah.

3. Ashtoreth in the Old Testament. In the OT, as in certain of the Ugaritic legends, a male deity Ashtar seems to be involved who, like Ashtoreth, has astrological significance. The place of this male deity in the Canaanite pantheon is as yet unclear. The name Ashtoreth appears in the sing. only in 1 Kings 11:5, 33; 2 Kings 23:13. Its earliest and most common usage is in the fem. pl. form with the pl. form Ba’alim, as in Judges 2:13. It was common for each local town in a system of archaic religious states to have a “Lord and Lady,” as Lord and Lady of X; such formulas occur frequently, as in the case of the complete mixing of Jehovah and Ba’al in Judges 8:33, where the Israelites were worshiping Ba’al-berith, “Lord of the Covenant,” or the town name of Ba’al-Shalisha, “Lord of Shalisha.” Throughout history the Jews were constantly tempted to worship this pagan goddess and attend her rituals, and it was this forbidden practice which finally led to Israel’s captivity and the seventy years in Babylon. There is no doubt, from the nude statuettes with exaggerated breasts and pudenda and the frequent association of sexual license mentioned by both Biblical and classical authors in connection with Ashtoreth, that her rituals were offensive to the Jews at many points. Her cult was kept alive well into the Christian era and was prob. finally eliminated by the spread of Islam throughout the Near E in the early Middle Ages.

Bibliography A. H. Gardiner, “The Astarte Papyrus,” Studies Presented to F. L. Griffiths (1932), 74-85; K. L. Tallqvist, “Akkadische Götterepitheta,” Studia Orientalia 7 (1938); J. J. Stamm, Die akkadische Namengebung (1939); J. B. Pritchard, Palestinian Figurines in Relation to Certain Goddesses Known Through Literature (1944); A. Moortgat, Tammuz (1949); G. R. Driver, Canaanite Myths and Legends (1956); T. H. Gaster, Thespis (1961); C. F. Pfeiffer, Ras Shamra and the Bible (1962); J. Aistleitner, Wörterbuch der Ugaritischen Sprache (1963); S. N. Kramer, The Sumerians (1963); N. C. Habel, Yahweh versus Baal (1964); C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (1965), # 1941.