This closeup of a female figurine now at the Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology is an example of similar ones common to the Kingdom of Judah in the 8th through 6th centuries. (The second image shows more.) Historians debate their meaning — did they represent the Cannanite Goddess Asherat, who was sometimes associated as a consort, but other times an enemy, of the God Yahweh? (Early Judaism was polytheistic with Yahweh as the dominant deity.) Another argument is that these were statues of mortal females, and do not relate to the cult of Asherat at all. In studying early Biblical and West Semitic archaeology, we are constantly humbled by the multiplicity of human stories tantalizingly out of reach.
