ABSTRACT
It has been suggested that Ma'acah's worship of Asherah was an alien element introduced by her into the Judean cult.21 The primary piece of evidence supporting this claim is Ma'acah's presumed foreign ancestry: elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the personal name ma'aka does appear as the name of a non-Israelite (Ma'acah, the daughter of King Talmai of Geshur and mother ofAbsalom; 2 Sam 3:3 and 1 Chr 3:2); this Ma'acah of Geshur, moreover, is apparently the grandmother of the Ma'acah ofl IZgs 15:13, who is identified in 1 Kgs 15:2 and 2 Chr 11:20-22 as the daughter of Absalom. Ma'acah's foreign heritage, however, need not predicate the conclusion that the Asherah cult Ma'acah promoted was foreign; nor does the fact that IZing Asa regarded Ma'acah's worship as heterodox necessarily imply such. In fact, certain biblical and archaeological evidence suggests that Asa's opinion was not normative in Judah. A case can instead be made that Asherah worship was customary among the populace. S.M. Olyan has even argued that the worship ofAsherah may have been part of the state cult; Asherah may have been worshiped, that is, along with Yahweh in official Judahite religion.22 Note in this regard that Ma'acah's image devoted to Asherah stood in all likelihood in Yahweh's Temple in Jerusaleln; the Jerusalem Temple is at least the logical place for a member of the royal family to erect a cult statue, first, for reasons of proximity, as Temple and palace stood side by side in Jerusalem, and, second, because the Temple essentially functioned as the private chapel for the monarch.
