Another reader asked me for information on the Tree of Life. I gave her a general answer and then wrote the following for her blog.
Asherah (or the Lady in the Tree of Life)
Picture a wide river plain with a flat horizon in Upper Mesopotamia. Find a free standing tree and draw a circle around it. Mark north with a pole on the circumference of that circle, by night, with the help of the circumpolar stars. Mark south with another pole on the other side of the circumference. Observe the rising and setting sun over the year, standing by the trunk of the tree. Mark the northernmost point of the rising sun in summer with one more pole on the circumference, and the northernmost point of the setting sun with a further pole. Do the same with the southernmost points of the setting sun in summer and winter. If you did so a couple of millennia ago, you had an astronomical observatory allowing to predict the solstices, and, what may come as a surprise, the six poles formed an exact hexagon, the distances between the poles being the same as the radius of the circle (measured from the center of the tree trunk). Now imagine that observatory in an abstract model, bringing the central Tree of Life and the six poles into one plane, reducing them to vertical strokes, and you get the candelaber of seven arms. If you add six more poles, in between the six already standing poles, you get a calendar monument of an ancient lunisolar kind, each pole representing a month of 30 days, the dozen poles a basic year of 360 days. Add 3 days for midsummer and 2 days, occasionally 3 days for midwinter and you get a regular year of 365 days and an occasional leap year of 366 days. 63 periods of 30 days, counted continously, are 1890 days, or 270 weeks of 7 days, and correspond to 64 lunations or synodic months, mistake less than one minute per lunation, or half a day in a lifetime. The mysterious Asherah sanctuary would have been such a calendar sanctuary, most often a dozen poles around a Tree of Life and an altar of four horns in the center (evidence for this can be found in tablets or pendants of the Chalcolithic Beersheba culture, from Megiddo in the north and Beersheba in the south to Tell Ghasul in the east). Lady Asherah inhabited the Tree of Life, as the Egyptian goddess Nut inhabited a sycamore (- Nut swallowed the setting sun in the evening and gave birth to the sun child in the morning), while the heavenly Lord was worshipped at the altar of the four horns, indicative of the cardinal directions (such an altar had been found at Megiddo).