Was Easter Named After Ishtar?

¶ Was Easter Named After Ishtar?

Short answer. No. The English word comes from Old English Eastre, which Bede, writing about 725, explains as the name of the spring month in which the pagan English had honoured a goddess called Eostre. Nearly every other language does not use the word at all: the feast is Pascha, from Hebrew Pesach, Passover, because the first Christians were Jews who met the resurrection during Passover week and kept the anniversary on that calendar. Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess, belongs to a different language family, was not pronounced “Easter”, and had lions and an eight-pointed star for symbols, not eggs or hares. The meme that says otherwise is a 2013 image with an 1853 pamphlet behind it.

Tier note: the Pascha and Passover derivation, Bede's text and its date, and the fact that a sound-alike is not a derivation are bedrock. That there was a real goddess Eostre is strong but not certain: Bede is the only witness, and some scholars think he inferred her from the month name. That the eggs and hares are early-modern German customs is documented; the first hare is dated to the year.

¶ The claim

The version in circulation is an image the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science posted on Facebook in March 2013, which travelled far beyond it. It says that Easter was originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex, that her name was pronounced “Easter”, that her symbols were the egg and the rabbit, and that Constantine relabelled the festival as Christian. Four claims, each with a date or a fact attached, each checkable.

It is worth being clear about why this page exists. This library spends most of its time arguing that older layers lie under the church's story. That makes it the last place that should let a false borrowing claim stand, because a bad “pagan origins” story costs every good one its credibility. The rule is the same one used on the word paradise: a borrowing needs a route, not a resemblance.

¶ Where the word actually comes from

The only ancient witness is Bede, a Northumbrian monk, in The Reckoning of Time, written about 725. In the chapter on the English months he writes that Eosturmonath, now translated “Paschal month”, “was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month”, and that the English now name the Paschal season “by the time-honoured name of the old observance”. That is the whole record: a month name, a goddess named once, and the observation that a Christian feast inherited an older word for the season it fell in.

The name itself is Germanic and transparent. Old English Eastre sits beside east and the words for dawn, and its cousins include Greek Eos, Latin Aurora and Vedic Ushas, all dawn goddesses from the same Indo-European root. German Ostern comes from the same source, which is why English and German are almost alone in Europe in using it. A dawn-and-spring name for the month around the equinox is exactly what one would expect.

How much of a goddess stands behind the name is a fair question, and the honest answer is: thin. Jacob Grimm reconstructed a continental Ostara in 1835 from Bede and the German word, and nothing else attests her, which led some scholars to suspect Bede invented the goddess to explain the month. Philip Shaw's 2011 study makes the goddess more plausible by pointing to more than 150 Roman-era votive inscriptions from the Rhineland, about 150 to 250 CE, to the matronae Austriahenae, mother goddesses with a related-looking name, though what that name means is not settled. Either way, the month is certain and the goddess, if she existed, was Germanic. Nothing here points east of the Rhine, let alone to Mesopotamia.

¶ What almost everyone else calls it

Step outside English and the meme collapses on its first word. The feast is Pascha in Greek and Latin, Pasqua in Italian, Pascua in Spanish, Paques in French, Pasen in Dutch, pask in Swedish, Paskha in Russian. Greek Pascha is the Aramaic form of Hebrew Pesach, Passover. English keeps the trace in its own adjective: the Paschal candle, the Paschal lamb.

That is not a coincidence of vocabulary; it is the feast's identity. Paul, writing in the 50s, says “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). In the second century the churches of Asia Minor kept the feast on the fourteenth of Nisan, the Passover date itself, whatever day of the week it fell, and the bishop of Rome tried to excommunicate them for it around 190; Eusebius records the quarrel. The Council of Nicaea in 325 ruled on the calculation so that all churches kept the same Sunday. Every one of those arguments is about a Passover date. The feast was named, dated and fought over as the Christian Passover for four centuries before an English monk wrote down a month name.

¶ Ishtar, for the record

Ishtar is the Akkadian name of the goddess the Sumerians called Inanna: goddess of love, of war and of the planet Venus, at home in Uruk and Nineveh. Her name is Semitic and is pronounced roughly as it is spelled, ish-tar; it has no relation to a Germanic word for dawn, and no route by which it could have reached seventh-century Northumbria. Her symbols in Mesopotamian art are the eight-pointed star, the lion she stands on, and the reed-bundle standard. There are no eggs and no hares.

The idea has a traceable ancestor. Alexander Hislop, a Scottish Free Church minister, published The Two Babylons as a pamphlet in 1853 and a book in 1858, arguing that Roman Catholicism was Babylonian paganism in disguise and that “Easter” was nothing but Astarte, another form of Ishtar. Hislop's method was to treat any two similar-sounding names in any two languages as the same word, and his book is the source of most of the “pagan origins” claims that still circulate about Christmas, Easter and the papacy. Ralph Woodrow, whose Babylon Mystery Religion (1966) had spread Hislop to a new generation, later checked the sources himself and withdrew his book, publishing The Babylon Connection? (1997) to say why. The 2013 meme is Hislop without the footnotes.

¶ Eggs and hares

Eggs came to Easter through Lent. The medieval fasting rules of both East and West forbade eggs along with meat during the forty days, so eggs laid in the last weeks of Lent piled up and were eaten, given and decorated when the fast broke on Easter morning. The red-dyed egg of the Orthodox churches and the medieval English and German coloured eggs are that custom, and they need no goddess to explain them.

The hare is later and more precisely dated. Its first appearance in writing is 1682, in a Latin medical dissertation by Georg Franck von Franckenau at Heidelberg, De ovis paschalibus, which describes a folk belief in Alsace and the Palatinate that a hare laid the Easter eggs, and children hunting for them. German emigrants carried the Osterhase to Pennsylvania, where it became a rabbit. Ishtar's animal was the lion.

¶ What this does and does not mean

It does not mean that no Christian feast ever absorbed an older custom. The English name is itself a small example: a Germanic month name kept for a Jewish-Christian feast, which is exactly what Bede says happened. Such things are real, and the interesting ones have evidence: a mechanism, a date, a route.

It does mean that the burden sits where it always sits. A claim that a festival was borrowed has to show the borrowing, not a rhyme. On the same test the December 25 question comes out as genuinely uncertain, and this library says so at Why Is Christmas on December 25?; the Mithras claim comes out false, at What Was Mithraism, and Did It Influence Christianity?; and the Ishtar claim comes out false on every count. Holding the debunkers to the standard is part of holding the church to it, and the record of where this library has itself failed the test is kept at What We Got Wrong.

¶ Common questions

¶ Is Easter a pagan holiday?

No. The feast is the Christian Passover, named Pascha from the Hebrew Pesach in almost every language, tied to the Passover date from the second century and argued over as such at Nicaea. Only the English and German names are Germanic, and they are the name of a spring month, which Bede says the church kept for the season. A name for a month is not a pagan festival.

¶ Where does the word Easter come from?

From Old English Eastre, the name Bede gives in about 725 for the month in which the pre-Christian English had honoured a goddess, Eostre. The word belongs with east and the Indo-European words for dawn, alongside Greek Eos and Latin Aurora. German Ostern shares the source. It is not related to Ishtar, whose name is Semitic.

¶ Was there really a goddess called Eostre?

Bede is the only source, and he gives one sentence. Jacob Grimm reconstructed a German Ostara from Bede and the word Ostern in 1835; some scholars have suspected Bede inferred a goddess from a month name. Philip Shaw (2011) argues from Roman-era Rhineland inscriptions to the matronae Austriahenae that a goddess with a related name is plausible. The question is open; the month is not.

¶ Why do we have Easter eggs and an Easter bunny?

Eggs were forbidden in Lent, so eggs laid in its last weeks were eaten and decorated when the fast ended at Easter; the custom is medieval and needs no goddess. The hare is first recorded in 1682, in Georg Franck von Franckenau's dissertation De ovis paschalibus, as an Alsatian folk belief that a hare laid the eggs. German emigrants took the Osterhase to Pennsylvania, where it became a rabbit.

¶ What does Ishtar have to do with Easter?

Nothing traceable. Ishtar, the Akkadian Inanna, was a goddess of love, war and the planet Venus; her symbols were the eight-pointed star and the lion, not eggs or hares, and her name has no path into Old English. The link was asserted by Alexander Hislop's anti-Catholic The Two Babylons (1853), whose method equated any similar-sounding names, and it reached the internet as a 2013 meme.

¶ Is Easter connected to Passover?

Directly. Jesus was executed at Passover, Paul calls him “our Passover lamb” (1 Corinthians 5:7), the feast is called Pascha in Greek, Latin and most modern languages, second-century churches kept it on the Passover date of 14 Nisan, and the Council of Nicaea's ruling on its date was a ruling about how to compute a Passover-linked Sunday. Easter is the Christian Passover under an English month name.

¶ Sources

Bede, De temporum ratione 15 (about 725), translated by Faith Wallis, The Reckoning of Time (1999); Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (1835); Philip A. Shaw, Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons (2011); Georg Franck von Franckenau, De ovis paschalibus (Heidelberg, 1682); Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons (1853; 1858); Ralph Woodrow, The Babylon Connection? (1997); 1 Corinthians 5:7; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.23-25 (the Quartodeciman dispute); Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.9, with Constantine's letter on the Easter computation; Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (1992), on Ishtar's iconography; the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. Easter. CC BY 4.0.

The volume behind this page: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21879071

¶ Related

More from the sourced library:

• Why Is Christmas on December 25?
• What Was Mithraism, and Did It Influence Christianity?
• Where Does the Word Paradise Come From?
• Did Constantine Create the Bible?
• What Actually Happened at the Council of Nicaea (325)?
• What We Got Wrong