Storage-jar inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud (Sinai, c. 800 BCE, excavated 1975-76) read 'I bless you by YHWH of Samaria/Teman and his Asherah'; a tomb inscription at Khirbet el-Qom carries the same pairing. In Ugaritic myth Athirat is the consort of El. The Hebrew Bible polemicizes against the asherah, the cultic tree or pole, forty times (e.g., 2 Kings 23:4-7, Josiah tearing her vessels out of the Temple), which documents both the goddess and the campaign against her. The reading of 'his Asherah' is genuinely contested, consort or cult object, and the card keeps that fight visible.
The popular version states it flatly: God had a wife and the editors divorced them. The scholarly version is narrower: a segment of Israelite religion paired YHWH with Asherah, and the Deuteronomistic writers waged documented war on her cult. Both agree on the campaign; only the marriage certificate is disputed.
Asherah's emblem was the living tree or stylized pole, the vertical axis of the shrine. Her removal from Jerusalem's Temple in 2 Kings 23 is the Bible's own record of an image war fought at the center of worship, and every later purity campaign, iconoclasm included, reruns the Ajrud problem: the god and the goddess share the altar until the reformers arrive.
If the queen of heaven was edited out, what else did the editors take with her?