Groves

What older English Bibles call "groves" is rendered in UPDV as Asherah, Asherim, or Asheroth — the wooden cultic poles or stylized trees that stood for the Canaanite goddess Asherah. The word never names a stand of natural timber in this register; it names a manufactured object. It is "made" (1Ki 14:15; 2Ki 17:16; 2Ki 21:3), "set up" (2Ki 17:10), "planted" (Deut 16:21), "served" (Judges 3:7; 2 Chr 24:18), and just as deliberately "cut down" (Judges 6:25; 2Ki 18:4; 2 Chr 14:3), "broken in pieces" (2 Chr 34:4), "burned" (2Ki 23:6; Deut 12:3), and "plucked up" (Mic 5:14). The Asherim are the constant material companions of the high places, the pillars, the Baalim, and the host of heaven, and the cult that grew up around them is the running indictment behind nearly every reign-evaluation in Kings and Chronicles.

The Asherah Pole as a Manufactured Object

The Asherah is fabricated, not found. Maacah, Asa's mother, "had made a horrible image for an Asherah" (1Ki 15:13). Israel "made themselves molten images, even two calves, and made an Asherah" (2Ki 17:16). Manasseh "set the graven image of Asherah, that he had made, in the house" of Yahweh (2Ki 21:7). And in Josiah's day women still "wove hangings for the Asherah" inside the temple precincts (2Ki 23:7). The object is dressed, decorated, and tended — an image discipline, not a piece of landscape.

Because it is manufactured, it is also plantable. Deuteronomy frames the prohibition that way: "You will not plant for yourself any kind of Asherah pole beside the altar of Yahweh your God, which you will make for yourself" (Deut 16:21). The same verb that puts an orchard tree in the ground puts the Asherah pole in the ground; the law takes that grammar and forbids the act. The altar of Yahweh and the Asherah-pole are not to share a ground-line.

The Standing Pairing: High Places, Pillars, Asherim

The Asherim almost never appear alone. They appear in a triad — high place, pillar, Asherah — sited "on every high hill, and under every green tree" (1Ki 14:23; 2Ki 17:10; cf. Jer 17:2: "their altars and their Asherim by the green trees on the high hills"). The geography is fixed: elevated, tree-shaded, repeated across the land. The triad is the standing furniture of the high places, and reform programs reach for all three at once.

The covenant program is therefore demolition-by-list. Israel at Sinai is told, "you⁺ will break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and you⁺ will cut down their Asherim" (Ex 34:13). Deuteronomy repeats the same four-verb sequence at the conquest (Deut 7:5; Deut 12:3 adds "burn their Asherim with fire"). The Asherah-pole, in the law's framing, has no place to stand inside the land.

Worshiped: The Indictment Pattern

When Israel falls away, the verbs run the other direction. "The sons of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh, and forgot Yahweh their God, and served the Baalim and the Asheroth" (Judges 3:7). Ahijah's word against Jeroboam pegs the coming exile to the same cause: "he will root up Israel out of this good land… because they have made their Asherim, provoking Yahweh to anger" (1Ki 14:15). Athaliah's Judah "forsook the house of Yahweh, the God of their fathers, and served the Asherim and the idols" (2 Chr 24:18). The northern kingdom in 2 Kings 17 is summarized the same way: pillars and Asherim on every high hill, an Asherah in Samaria that even Jehu's reforms did not touch (2Ki 13:6; 2Ki 17:10, 16). Manasseh in Judah pushes the pattern furthest, importing the Asherah-image into the temple itself (2Ki 21:3-7).

The cult around the Asherah is large. Jezebel keeps "four hundred" prophets of the Asherah at her table alongside Baal's four hundred and fifty (1Ki 18:19). The image at Bethel and Samaria persists across reigns. The pole is not a fringe accessory; at its height it carries a salaried priesthood and a queen's patronage.

Cut Down: The Reformer Sequence

Against the indictment Scripture sets a counter-list of reformers who attack the Asherim by name. Gideon goes first, in private and at night: Yahweh tells him to "throw down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the Asherah that is by it," and to use its wood as fuel for the burnt-offering (Judges 6:25-26). The next morning the city wakes to find the Baal-altar broken and "the Asherah was cut down that was by it" (Judges 6:28). The pattern — altar and Asherah falling together — sets the template every later reformer follows.

• Asa "took away the foreign altars, and the high places, and broke down the pillars, and hewed down the Asherim" (2 Chr 14:3); he also deposed his own grandmother for her Asherah-image and "burned it at the brook Kidron" (1Ki 15:13).
• Jehoshaphat "took away the high places and the Asherim out of Judah" (2 Chr 17:6) and is later commended that he "put away the Asheroth out of the land, and have set your heart to seek God" (2 Chr 19:3).
• Hezekiah "removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah" (2Ki 18:4), pairing the pole's destruction with breaking the bronze serpent that had drifted into cult.
• Josiah runs the most thorough purge. He "broke in pieces the pillars, and cut down the Asherim, and filled their places with man's bones" (2Ki 23:14); he "brought out the Asherah from the house of Yahweh… to the brook Kidron, and burned it… and beat it to dust, and cast its dust on the graves of the common people" (2Ki 23:6); the Chronicler adds the wider sweep: "Asherim, and the graven images, and the molten images, he broke in pieces, and made dust of them, and strewed it on the graves [of them] that had sacrificed to them" (2 Chr 34:3-4).

The reformer-verbs are uniform across the list — cut down, break in pieces, burn, beat to dust, pluck up — and they are uniformly applied to the same object.

The Prophets' Final Word

The writing prophets turn the Asherim into a token of the whole apostate cult that must end. Isaiah promises that on the day of Jacob's atonement Israel "makes all the stones of the altar as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder, [so that] the Asherim and the sun-images will rise no more" (Isa 27:9). The same prophet pictures that day's shame in tree-grammar: "they will be ashamed of the oaks which you⁺ have desired, and you⁺ will be confounded for the gardens that you⁺ have chosen" (Isa 1:29) — the cultic-tree imagery of "groves" turned back on the worshipers. Isaiah 17:8 sees a remnant who "will not look to the altars, the work of their hands; neither will they have respect to that which their fingers have made, either the Asherim, or the sun-images." Micah seals it: "I will pluck up your Asherim out of the midst of you; and I will destroy your cities" (Mic 5:14). In the prophets' end-state the Asherah-pole is uprooted with the cities that housed it.

Reading "Groves" in UPDV

A reader meeting the older English word "grove" should expect, in UPDV, to find one of three things instead: Asherah (the singular pole or image), Asherim / Asheroth (the plural), or, where the underlying Hebrew word is genuinely trees, the named species — oak (Isa 1:29), green tree (1Ki 14:23; 2Ki 17:10; Jer 17:2), or the wood of the Asherah-pole itself (Judges 6:26). The synthesis gathered under "Groves" is not, in UPDV, a topic about woodland; it is a topic about a forbidden cult-object whose ground-line, priesthood, and image-shop the covenant law and the reform-history of Israel were built to remove.