Asherah, Wisdom and the Tree of Life

Sooner or later a Latter-day Saint who loves the doctrine of a Mother in Heaven meets the argument. A book, a podcast or a friend lays it out. Nephi’s tree of life is Asherah, the ancient Mother goddess of Israel. Lady Wisdom in Proverbs is Her. Ancient scribes cut Her out of the Bible, and the clues are still there for anyone who knows where to look. Some go further: the Holy Spirit Himself, they say, was once known as the Mother.

It is an appealing picture. Much of it is built on real things — real verses, real inscriptions dug out of the ground, real early Christian texts. And it answers a real longing. We know so little about Her. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the scriptures had been talking about Her all along?

So what is solid here, and what is not? The answer turns on one distinction. A symbol can deepen a truth God has already revealed. It cannot reveal a new one. Hold on to that, and the ancient material becomes a rich place to ponder instead of a quarry for a new theology.

We do not need Asherah to know we have a Mother in Heaven. That doctrine rests on revelation to living prophets, and it is taught on Heavenly Mother and the pages linked from it. This page is about something else: the ancient echoes people bring to the doctrine. Treat them as windows, not as walls. Everything below is ornament on a house that already stands. It isn’t new doctrine. It is understanding what we ALREADY know, and what is ALREADY in the scriptures.

The book of Proverbs speaks of Wisdom as a woman. She cries in the streets. She builds a house. She was with God before the earth was made. And she is a tree of life:

In Proverbs 8 she speaks for herself: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old… Then I was by him, as one brought up with him.” The Book of Mormon uses the same figure. King Limhi, marveling at the interpreters Ammon described, grieves over a people who “will not seek wisdom, neither do they desire that she should rule over them” (Mosiah 8:20).

Is Lady Wisdom our Mother in Heaven? It is a lovely thought, and nothing forbids a reader to ponder it. But notice what the rest of scripture does with Wisdom. Paul calls Christ “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). Jesus speaks of wisdom as “her” and in the same breath applies it to Himself and John: “wisdom is justified of her children” (Matthew 11:19). Many early Christian writers read Proverbs 8 as a picture of the Son. But is it ONLY the Son?

Hebrew poetry personifies freely. Folly is a woman in the same chapters (Proverbs 9:13). A “she” in a poem is not, by itself, a name. Lady Wisdom shows that the ancients could imagine divine wisdom as a woman at God’s side, and that is worth something. It does not explicitly tell us who She is, but through inference it can help us consider who She is.

The strongest case starts in 1 Nephi 11. Nephi asks to see the tree his father saw. He sees it, “precious above all” (1 Nephi 11:8–9), and asks what it means. Then, instead of an answer, he is shown a city, and a virgin, “exceedingly fair and white” — the mother of the Son of God, carrying a child in her arms. Only after that does the angel ask him the question back:

Why show Nephi a mother and her child in answer to a question about a tree? Latter-day Saint scholar Daniel C. Peterson noticed that in Lehi’s world a sacred tree had long been the symbol of a divine mother, the goddess Asherah. “Clearly,” he wrote, “the answer to his question about the meaning of the tree lies in the virgin mother with her child. It seems, in fact, that the virgin is the tree in some sense” (“Nephi and His Asherah,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9/2, 2000). It is a careful, faithful reading, and it has helped many readers see the chapter with new eyes.

Look closely at what the text itself settles, though. The mother Nephi sees is Mary, a mortal woman. The meaning he is given is “the love of God.” Four verses later the waters are “a representation of the love of God” as well (1 Nephi 11:25). Alma plants another tree in the heart of anyone who nourishes the word (Alma 32:41), and John sees it beside the river, its leaves “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2). So although the symbol of a tree is clearly used for many different things, should we limit it in our own minds to just one or two?

Can the tree represent Her? YES. The angel did not name Her, and the mother Nephi saw was Mary. But the Son has two mothers: Mary, who bore His body, and a Mother in Heaven, for He is the Firstborn of the Father’s spirit children (D&C 93:21). When a tree of life was used to represent the mother of the Son of God, it could point to both — the earthly mother as the type, the heavenly Mother as what the type points to. Should that say something to us? YES. Images are applied, and symbols can be, and are, meaningful.

Notice where the vision goes. It is the mother who first draws Nephi’s eye: “a virgin, most beautiful and fair above all other virgins” (1 Nephi 11:15). Then he sees her again, “bearing a child in her arms” (11:20), and the angel turns everything toward the child: “Behold the Lamb of God.” She draws the eye. He is the focus. He is the fruit.

What is the fruit of the tree? Elizabeth told Mary, “blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (Luke 1:42). Nephi calls the fruit “the greatest of all the gifts of God” (1 Nephi 15:36), the very words the Lord uses for eternal life (D&C 14:7). And John tells us where that life is: “this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life” (1 John 5:11–12). The fruit of the tree is the Son — Her descendant, Her fruit. Whoever partakes of Him is made happy, as Lehi was, filled “with exceedingly great joy” (1 Nephi 8:10–12). Whoever eats of Him will “hunger not, neither… thirst” (Alma 32:42; John 6:35). He heals the soul — “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5) — and in the Millennium the trees beside the temple river will bear fruit “for meat” and leaves “for medicine” (Ezekiel 47:12).

And why would the love of God be pictured as a mother at all? Because the Father’s love was never a solitary love. “They twain shall be one flesh” (Matthew 19:5–6). I consider that She is the heart, might, soul and LOVE of the Father, as a wife should be. A tree that represents the love of God, and bears the Son as its fruit, is a fitting image of Her. The angel did not say it in so many words, and I do not claim he did. But the image is there for anyone with eyes to see it. None of this is new — but perhaps some of us haven’t seen it.

Asherah is no invention of modern writers. The King James Bible usually translates her name as “grove,” and she appears dozens of times — sometimes as a carved wooden pole set up beside an altar, sometimes as a goddess with her own prophets (1 Kings 18:19). Archaeology has added more. At Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, a desert way station from around 800 BC, travelers wrote blessings on storage jars. One is commonly translated “I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and by his asherah.” Scholars still argue whether “his asherah” means a goddess or a sacred object. Either way, some Israelites linked the Lord with her.

So far the argument stands on solid ground. Here is where it slips. EVERY biblical prophet who mentions Asherah condemns the worship offered to her. King Asa removed Maachah “from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove” (1 Kings 15:13). Josiah carried the grove out of the temple and burned it (2 Kings 23:6). And Jeremiah, Lehi’s contemporary, spoke for the Lord about the women who baked cakes for a goddess:

How do the theories handle that? One popular approach, drawn largely from the British scholar Margaret Barker, says these condemnations were written by a party of scribes and priests who purged an older worship of the Mother from Israel, and that Lehi fled from those very men. The prophets who condemned Asherah, on this view, were the corrupters.

But isn’t it more likely that these women had gone beyond the mark, and were doing what was not acceptable before God, even if the symbol of a Goddess pointed to something true? The prophets condemned the worship. They did not condemn the truth a symbol may once have pointed to.

A Latter-day Saint should be slow to accept that the focus on a Mother in Heaven was the real issue. The brass plates Lehi carried out of Jerusalem “did contain the five books of Moses” (1 Nephi 5:11). Nephi quotes Moses’ promise of a prophet like unto him as words the Lord will surely fulfill (1 Nephi 22:20–21), and the risen Savior applies that promise to Himself: “Behold, I am he of whom Moses spake” (3 Nephi 20:23). Lehi did not run from Moses. He ran from people who rejected the prophets — and Jeremiah was one of those prophets.

What, then, do the inscriptions teach? Something true and sobering. Ancient Israel did sense that God was not alone, and it turned that sense into images, offerings and prayers that God had not given. Israel reached for Her without revelation, and the prophets called it idolatry. That is not a reason to doubt Her. It is the clearest reason in all of scripture to receive Her only in the way God reveals Her.

Much of the case rests on the gender of Hebrew words. The word for spirit, ruach, is usually feminine. So is the word for wisdom. One divine title, Shaddai, sounds like the word for breast. Malachi’s “Sun of righteousness” rises “with healing in his wings,” and since “sun” can be feminine in Hebrew, some translate it “her wings” (Malachi 4:2).

Does a grammatical gender make a person? No. German makes a young girl neuter and French makes a beard feminine, and nobody draws theology from either. Even Jerome, who knew Hebrew well, noted that the word for spirit is feminine in Hebrew, masculine in Latin and neuter in Greek, “for in the deity there is no gender” (Commentary on Isaiah, on 40:9).

And the Malachi verse has a Latter-day Saint answer of its own. When the risen Christ gave Malachi’s words to the Nephites, the Book of Mormon reads “the Son of Righteousness” with “healing in his wings” (3 Nephi 25:2). The Lord applied the verse to Himself.

Here the ancient record really is striking, and it deserves an honest hearing. Some early Christians did speak of the Holy Spirit as a mother. A lost gospel used by Jewish Christians, quoted by Origen in the third century, has Jesus say: “Even now did my mother the Holy Spirit take me by one of mine hairs, and carried me away unto the great mountain Thabor.” A century later the Syriac writer Aphrahat could still speak of a man who “loves and reveres God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother.”

Why did they talk that way? Partly grammar — the Syriac word for spirit is feminine, as the Hebrew is. Partly imagery. The Odes of Solomon, an early Syriac hymnbook, sings that “The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him” (Ode 19). No one takes that as a description of anatomy. When a metaphor is that fluid, it is poetry, not a doctrine of who is who in heaven.

The restored scriptures settle the rest. The Holy Ghost is “a personage of Spirit” (D&C 130:22), a member of the Godhead distinct from our heavenly parents. To make Him our Mother, a revelation has to be explained away to fit an ancient metaphor. That is the wrong way round. The question is answered more fully in Questions About Who She Is and The Role of the Holy Ghost.

None of this means the ancient material is worthless. Some of it is precious, as long as it is used for what it is.

Take the “Hymn of the Pearl,” an early Christian poem preserved in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. A prince leaves “my kingdom, in my father’s house,” is sent down to a far country on a mission, forgets who he is, and is called home by a letter: “From thy father, the king of kings, and thy mother, the mistress of the East, and from thy brother, our second (in authority).” Latter-day Saints reading it for the first time hear “O My Father” in it at once. John W. Welch and James V. Garrison wrote about exactly that (“The ‘Hymn of the Pearl’: An Ancient Counterpart to ‘O My Father,’” BYU Studies 36:1).

What is such a poem good for? It shows that people far from Nauvoo, long ago, sensed a home above, a Father and a Mother, and an elder Brother who helps the child return. It is a witness that the longing is old and deep. It is not scripture, and it does not tell us anything about Her that the prophets have not.

The Lord has already told us how. In 1833, while Joseph Smith was working through the Bible, he asked whether he should translate the Apocrypha — the very kind of book where many of these echoes are found. The answer fits everything on this page:

True things and false things, side by side, and the Spirit to tell them apart. That is exactly the situation with Asherah, Lady Wisdom and the early Christian texts. So read them. Let a tree of life, a woman named Wisdom and a prince’s letter from his Father and Mother turn your heart toward home. Then ask what the Spirit actually confirms. It will confirm what the prophets teach. It will not hand you a private theology to set beside theirs.

Why does it matter so much? Because ancient Israel took the other road. The people of Judah told Jeremiah to his face that their troubles began when they STOPPED burning incense to the queen of heaven (Jeremiah 44:17–18). They were sincere. They were also wrong, and they lost the temple, the land and the prophet with it.

We are better placed than they were. We do not have to guess whether She exists; we have been TOLD. The echoes are a gift for pondering, nothing more and nothing less. Enjoy the window. Live in the house.

See also: Heavenly Mother · A Daughter’s Question · Questions About Who She Is · Questions from Her Daughters

Sources: Daniel C. Peterson, “Nephi and His Asherah,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9/2 (2000); Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptions, discussed in Mark S. Smith, “God Male and Female in the Old Testament: Yahweh and His ‘Asherah’,” Theological Studies 48 (1987); Origen, Commentary on John 2.12, quoting the Gospel according to the Hebrews, trans. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (1924); Aphrahat, Demonstration 18.10, and Jerome on Isaiah 40:9, as translated in Sebastian Brock, “The Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature” (1990); Odes of Solomon 19, trans. James H. Charlesworth; Acts of Thomas 108–113 (“Hymn of the Pearl”), trans. William Wright, in A. F. J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas (1962); John W. Welch and James V. Garrison, “The ‘Hymn of the Pearl’: An Ancient Counterpart to ‘O My Father,’” BYU Studies 36:1.