One of my pet stories: Asherah was the wife of Baal/El, the chief god in the Canaanite pantheon. A very popular goddess, believed to be extremely powerful, she was represented by 'trees' - which were probably poles carved into some particular shape.
As Yahweh's worship grew, he assimilated El's role. All the languages in the region referred to their highest god as El, Al, and similar terms (see Allah, Elohim and more). Asherah got transferred along with El and, for the first several hundred years of Judaism, was Yahweh's wife.
She continued to be very popular. It was normal to worship both at dual temples; she also had woman-led temples that specialised in things like fertility issues. She was a hearth and mother goddess: people would view her as central to the home (unlike Yahweh).
Baal/El and Asherah were very sexy. It's widely believed that their temples hosted public sex rituals and employed 'prostitutes' of both sexes. Unsurprisingly, Yahweh's priests seem to have embraced these practices with some enthusiasm.
King Josiah, late 7th century BC, decreed the priesthood corrupt and Asherah's worship as forbidden idolatry. He ordered all the dual temples and female temples destroyed, all the prostitutes killed and the corrupt priests, all Asherah's trees cut down and every woman who had anything to do with her temples killed. Only the most rigorous, patriarchal fun sponges were to remain as priests, with their simplistic temples.
The bible plays this down, glossing over Asherah as a bad influence and, naturally, celebrating the people's return to the Right Way (a mass-murdering king will do that). There's a contemporary account by someone who visited a town of Judah after the cleansing. He describes the ashes of the tree before the ruined temple, the bodies of women covering the entire space around it. He says they were not to be moved, but allowed to rot into the earth. He says their blood will nourish the soil. This may have been a last sneer at these women worshippers of 'fertility'.
The remains of a dual altar have been found at a single temple site. There were cannabis traces in the burner bowls.