The Book of Isaiah

Chapter 1 V.1 Part 3.3 Asherah 1

(If you are simply reading this one post, you will not get it all. Your understanding will be impaired as to the big picture. The individual studies may give you some understanding in the context of that individual section, but the overall scope of this will not be understood unless you follow through the entire study. Bear in mind…I’m still digging under the reference of Isaiah 1:1 at this time, and what is following is the result of that search, but fair warning…it’s a vast amount of information and is quite complex.)

When I began looking up Ashtoreh or Asherah I found some very interesting things. I am giving you snipets of what I found, but it’s a lot. I am focusing on certain aspects of this non-biblical history so you can see where these things tie together to what the bible is referring to. I am not presenting this because I believe in it, but so that the dots can be connected to the history, and we can see what was really happening and being represented then and now. Hopefully, I can show you the links to the past, as well as to the present throughout the course of this study.

Isis is a goddess in Egyptian mythology. She is the wife and sister of Osiris and mother of Horus, and was worshipped as the archetypal wife and mother.

Her name literally means “(female) of throne”, that is, “Queen of the throne”, which was portrayed by the emblem worn on her head, that of a throne. However, the hieroglyph of her name originally meant “(female) of flesh”, i.e. mortal, and she may simply have represented deified, historical queens.

Queen Isis was married to her brother Osiris who was ruler of the throne. They were the children of Nut and Geb, and had an additional sister named Nephthys and brother Set. Isis was supposed to marry Set, not Osiris. When a jealous Set slew the beloved Osiris and dropped his body into the Nile, Isis did not simply mourn her lost love, but moved all forces of nature and rescued the body of her husband from where it had come to rest in Byblos.

Some versions of this tale claim that when Isis heard of this she took a boat made of papyrus – a plant abhorred by crocodiles— and sailing about she gathered together the fragments of Osiris’s body, wheresoever she found one, and buried it and built a tomb over it.

Isis, with her sister Nephthys were preparing for the ceremonial burial of Osiris when his murderer Set stole the body and hacked it into fourteen pieces. Some versions claim Typhon also known as Set was out hunting by the light of the moon, and he found the chest, and recognizing the body, tore it into fourteen pieces, which he scattered up and down throughout the land.

At length she traced it to Byblos, where it had been carried by the sea, and she found that the waves had gently laid it among the branches of a tamarisk tree, which had grown to a magnificent size, and had enclosed the chest within its trunk. 

With the god Anubis, Isis bound him together to make him whole, save for his phallus. In one version of the myth Isis formed a new phallus and attached it to her deceased husband’s body. For this and her unfathomable skills of re-creation, she is called Isis, ‘great of magic.’

She made magic wings for herself and became a desert kite, circling the sky, wailing and lamenting over the deceased Osiris. The wings and the wind they created wafted the breath of life into the dead Osiris. The devoted wife mounted her husband and with their union, conceived a son, Horus. Fearful that the jealous Set would seek out and injure her son, she bid her husband farewell.

They believe that Osiris descended into the underworld and by some means obtained a new life, where he reigned over the Netherworld as god and king. Isis went out into the wilderness, gave birth to Horus and hid him in the papyrus marshes, guarding him from Set and the natural forces and dangers, such as snakes and predators, until he came of age.

Ever after, kings were the incarnation of Horus and the kings sought the protection of the goddess. The ancient regents saw the goddess with a throne upon her head and reached out to the divine essence of royalty. As wife of Osiris associated with kingship and the deceased kings of Egypt, and as mother of Horus, the falcon god, always associated with the living Pharaoh, Isis with her powers of love and magic became the epitome of the rights of kings.

Pictures of Isis and Horus are always of a woman holding a baby with a circle of light around both their heads. The light represents the sun god, or powers of the sun.

The followers of Osiris believed in a material heaven, but the heaven they believed in was associated with water, because they believe that Osiris died and became the god of the dead or the underworld, and he rises through the “waters of heaven” into a boat on the Nile. This is why he became the god of the waters in their belief system.

The result of this tale is the the following symbols for Osiris:

One of his symbols is the djed pillar, a tree-trunk – the tet.

It was considered to represent his spine and indicated stability; the stability of eternal life.  Note that this is a phallus-like symbol is indicative of the god of this world and the worship of sex by the media.