title: Greece national football team

text: As defending European champions, Greece were top seed for the final tournament and were drawn with Sweden, Spain, and Russia in Group D.


title: Greece national football team

text: In the tournament, Greece team lost all three games and scored only one goal. Greece underperformed in the opening match against Sweden and lost 2–0 before losing 1-0 to Russia. Having already been eliminated, Angelos Charisteas opened the scoring for Greece against Spain, but lost 2–1, becoming the first defending champion not to earn a single point in the next European Championship.


title: Greece national football team

text: Despite the scoring prowess of Europe's top 2010 World Cup qualifying goal-scorer Fanis Gekas—who produced 10 goals in as many games—Greece took second place to Switzerland in Group 2 of UEFA qualification, thus advancing to a home-and-away playoff round, where they faced Ukraine. After a scoreless draw at home in the first match, the second leg in Donetsk saw Greece triumph with a 1–0 win, sending the Greece to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. At the 2010 World Cup draw in Cape Town, South Africa on 4 December 2009, Greece found itself grouped with two familiar opponents from its first World Cup appearance in 1994. Argentina and Nigeria were yet again drawn into group stage play alongside Greece, this time into Group B with South Korea replacing Greece's third 1994 opponent, Bulgaria.


title: Greece national football team

text: In its World Cup opener, Greece lost 2–0 to South Korea after a dismal performance characterized by excessive long-ball attacks and a lack of offensive creativity. In the second fixture against Nigeria, Greece won 2–1, coming from behind after conceding an early goal. Dimitris Salpingidis scored Greece's first-ever goal in the World Cup finals in the 44th minute of the first half to tie the match at 1–1. Vasilis Torosidis scored the winning goal in the 71st minute, securing the first points and first victory for Greece in tournament history. In the third match against heavily favoured Argentina, Greece needed a combination of results to advance to the next round. As expected, in what would be his final game as Greece's national team head coach, Otto Rehhagel conjured up a very defensive-minded strategy, leaving Georgios Samaras with nearly all offensive responsibilities as the lone striker. The strategy nearly paid off in the second half with the score still locked at 0–0 when Samaras beat the last Argentine defender on a quick long-ball counter-attack but curled a rushed shot just wide of the far post. Greece held Argentina scoreless until the 77th minute but ultimately lost 2–0, finishing third in Group B.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece moved from 13th to 12th in the FIFA World Rankings following the tournament. Russia, Croatia and France dropped lower than Greece while Uruguay and Chile jumped ahead of


title: Greece national football team

text: Twenty-four hours removed from Greece's World Cup loss to Argentina, Otto Rehhagel stepped away from his post as Greece national team manager. Eight days later a new era in Greece football was ushered in as the Hellenic Football Federation named former AEK Athens and PAOK boss Fernando Santos the new manager. Under Santos the Greece immediately went to work on an unprecedented streak of success, setting a senior-club record by going unbeaten in Santos' first seventeen matches as manager. While Greece's proficiency in stifling opposition attacks seemed to wane toward the end of Rehhagel's tenure, the emergence of Santos seemed to galvanize Greece defending once more. Through seven international friendlies and ten Euro 2012 qualifiers, Greece kept nine clean sheets and conceded just one goal in each of the remaining eight contests. From start to end of their unbeaten run, Santos' national side moved from No. 12 to No. 8 in FIFA's world rankings, equaling the highest mark in history credited by FIFA to Greece. Only one match from their streak featured a team (other than Greece) that appeared at the 2010 World Cup, a 1–0 defeat of Serbia in Belgrade.


title: Greece national football team

text: With its late-game comeback victory over Georgia in October 2011, Greece padded its historic football tournament résumé, most importantly by sealing an automatic berth into UEFA's 2012 European Football Championship tournament. For the second time in team history the national side won its qualifying group for a major football tournament without a single loss incurred, as Greece also went undefeated in 1994 World Cup qualifiers. Adding to its 1980, 2004 and 2008 Euro qualifying campaigns, the Georgia triumph marked the fifth time overall that Greece has won its qualification group for a major tournament. Although their tendency to produce positive results remained steady throughout qualifying, so too did the Greece proclivity to start games slowly and concede early goals. This habit would plague Greece through qualifying and eventually tarnish their Euro 2012 performances.


title: Greece national football team

text: Over two qualifying contests, Greece trailed Georgia on the scoreboard for 130 of 180 minutes and still managed to grab four of six possible points in the standings by way of three late strikes. Goals scored in the dying minutes of games, often coming from defenders, became somewhat of a Greek signature on Group F's table. In fact Greece was able to take and keep a first-half lead just once in ten games, the 3–1 home defeat of Malta which was ranked 50th of 53 teams in Europe. In Malta, a last-second tie-breaking strike from defender Vasilis Torosidis pocketed a crucial extra two points in the standings for Greece, the same number of points it held over Croatia at the end of qualifying. Despite allowing weaker teams in the group to bring the game to them, Greece admirably held powerful Croatia scoreless through two meetings and deservedly won Group F four days after a decisive 2–0 home win versus the second-place Croats. Fanis Gekas, who retired from national team service in 2010 after Fernando Santos' third game as manager, came out of retirement in time to contribute a goal to the result. Gekas was eventually included in Santos's 23-man Euro 2012 roster, leaving out Euro 2004 hero Angelos Charisteas who scored the group-clinching goal in the aforementioned Greece qualifying victory in Georgia.


title: Greece national football team

text: "Shades of 2004" was a commonly perceived theme regarding the buildup to Euro 2012 for Greece and their progression through the tournament. As in 2004 Greece was drawn into the same group as the host nation, Poland on this occasion, and also had the pressure of playing in the tournament's opening match. Two familiar foes from its 2004 championship run, Russia and Czech Republic, joined Greece and Poland in Group A on 2 December 2011 at the tournament's final draw in Kiev. Upon drawing the lowest-ranked teams from Pots 1 and 2 as well as the second-lowest from Pot 4, Greece's prospects of passing the group stage at Euro 2012 were given a boost.


title: Greece national football team

text: Ideas of steering "To Piratiko" to a dream start in host-nation territory as Greece did in Portugal eight years before, rapidly turned sour during the opening match's first half. From the outset Greece appeared uncomfortable holding the ball for long spells and seemed content to allow hosts Poland to push numbers forward with the ball, hoping to score through counter-attacks. However, Poland made the most of its early possession, as top scorer Robert Lewandowski converted a header from a goal line cross past a scurrying Kostas Chalkias. Hope and momentum continued to tip in favor of Poland when Sokratis Papastathopoulos received his second yellow card of the game in just the 44th minute from Spanish referee Carlos Velasco Carballo. Greece began to boss the game after halftime while playing down a man. Dimitris Salpingidis made the greatest impact on the game for Greece as a second-half substitute, making brilliant penetrating runs behind the Polish defense, eventually bringing the game level 1–1 on a mistake by Poland keeper Wojciech Szczęsny. Salpingidis was then responsible for levelling up the numbers for Greece when Szczęsny made a red-card foul on Salpingidis' breakaway attempt on goal in the 68th minute. But Greece captain Giorgos Karagounis' subsequent penalty kick was turned away by substitute keeper Przemysław Tytoń. A second goal by Salpingidis was disallowed as he was assisted by an offside Kostas Fortounis, denying Greece's best opportunity to take three points from what ended as an improbable 1–1 draw.


title: Greece national football team

text: The Czech Republic exploited Greece's weakness at the left-defender position early in the second group stage match, notching two goals in the first six minutes. Just as Poland had, the Czechs repeatedly penetrated Greece back line behind left-side defender José Cholevas, scoring on a through-ball and a cross from Cholevas' side. Petr Čech's gaffe on a Georgios Samaras cross in the second half turned into a gift goal for Fanis Gekas. The Czechs then eased off on their early pressure, opting to sit back and guard their lead for much of the second half, but Gekas' goal was too little too late. Greece lost the match 2–1, placing them at the foot of Group A in need of a victory over the attack-minded Russians to advance to the knockout rounds.


title: Greece national football team

text: After thrashing the Czech Republic 4–1 and displaying more offensive potency in a 1–1 draw with Poland, the Russians were favored to earn the one point they needed to advance against the Greeks, especially since defeating the team in both of the previous two European Championships. However, Greece delivered a trademark 1–0 defensive victory and advanced to the Euro 2012 quarterfinals. Greece scored when Russia defender Sergei Ignashevich errantly headed a Greece throw-in behind the Russian defense for Giorgos Karagounis to pounce on. Greece's captain sprinted in on goal and struck the ball at the back post under keeper Vyacheslav Malafeev in first-half stoppage time to send the Russians reeling into the locker rooms. Ignashevich appeared to have conceded an additional golden scoring opportunity for Greece upon tripping Karagounis in the Russian penalty area early in the second half, but referee Jonas Eriksson instead booked Karagounis for what he believed to be simulation. This being Karagounis' second yellow card of the tournament, Greece was to be without its suspended captain in the next round. With that victory, Greece qualified to the quarterfinals for a second time after their successful Euro 2004 campaign.


title: Greece national football team

text: In the quarter-finals, Greece met with a Germany side that won all three of its group matches against Portugal, Denmark and the Netherlands. Greece applied very little pressure in the midfield in the opening period, slowing the tempo of the game and affording Germany the majority of possession. Young Sotiris Ninis switched off momentarily in defence, allowing German captain Philipp Lahm to cut infield and open the scoring with a long-distance strike. Greece remained calm as in Georgios Samaras they carried a constant threat. On the counter-attack, they pulled level early in the second half; regaining possession in their defensive third, Giorgos Fotakis found Dimitris Salpingidis streaking 40 yards deep into German territory. Salpingidis delivered a ball five yards in front of goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, which Samaras was able to meet and power underneath Neuer for the equalizer. Twenty minutes later, however, the Germans led 4–1. Greece scored an 89th-minute penalty kick by Salpingidis, but the match ended 4–2 to the Germans, ending Greece's Euro 2012 campaign.


title: Greece national football team

text: To reach the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Greece had to contend with a team on the rise in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a dangerous Slovakian side seemingly in decline since its memorable 2010 World Cup qualifying and finals performances. Latvia, a familiar qualification foe for Greece in its previous two major tournaments (2010 World Cup, Euro 2012), joined the fray as well. Ahead of those aforesaid tournaments, Bosnia twice narrowly missed out on its first major international tournament appearance due to consecutive playoff defeats at the hands of Portugal. No playoff would be necessary for Bosnia in 2013, as it won its qualifying group over Greece on goal difference. The decisive match was in Bosnia on 22 March, when Greece succumbed to three set-piece goals (two free-kick headers and one penalty miss rebound) in a 3–1 defeat. Greece's defense proved rigid throughout qualifying, conceding zero goals in open play. Four goals were allowed by Greece in ten games, the first of which was a penalty by Latvia, and yet four goals were too many for a relatively unproductive Grece attack to overcome. Though Greece was shut out just once, the team only managed to score 12 goals, an output Bosnia reached in its second game.


title: Greece national football team

text: Following group play Romania, which claimed second place over Hungary and Turkey in a group dominated by the Dutch, awaited Greece in a two-legged playoff. The last time the two sides met in late 2011, Romania came into Greece and dealt Fernando Santos his first defeat as Greece manager in his 18th game at the helm. Greece reversed the prior 3–1 result in their favour this time, scoring each goal through skillful one-touch passing and finishing. Kostas Mitroglou accounted for three of Greece's four goals in a 4–2 aggregate playoff victory, though none were actual game-winners. Dimitris Salpingidis notched the game winner in Athens, while the second leg finished 1–1 in Bucharest.


title: Greece national football team

text: Aracaju was chosen as the team's base camp for the tournament in Brazil. Greece was drawn into Group C with Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire and Japan and ultimately created an extraordinarily similar tournament experience as it did two years prior at Euro 2012. Greece conceded an early goal in their first game against Colombia, but Panagiotis Kone narrowly missed equalizing just one minute after Colombia's fifth-minute goal. Trailing 2–0 in the 63rd minute, Fanis Gekas' header from six yards struck the crossbar for Greece's best chance of the match. The Colombians proved to be the more clinical finishers, prevailing 3–0 despite an even number of shots for both teams and a slight possession advantage in Greece's favor. To stave off the threat of elimination, the Greece needed to earn at least a point in their second match with Japan, who sat alongside them at the bottom of Group C. The task grew more difficult once captain Kostas Katsouranis received two yellow cards, reducing Greece to ten men in the 38th minute. Greece held out for a 0–0 draw and remained tied with Japan on points. The draw made it necessary for Greece to defeat Ivory Coast in their final group match in order to reach the round of 16 for the first time in their history. An early injury to midfielder Panagiotis Kone brought on young Olympiacos midfielder Andreas Samaris, who would score his first international goal after intercepting a poor back-pass by an Ivorian defender. Swansea City striker Wilfried Bony equalized for Ivory Coast in the 73rd minute. In the first minute of stoppage time, Ivory Coast striker Giovanni Sio obstructed a Samaras shot by clipping him from behind in the Ivorian penalty area, resulting in a Greece penalty kick which Samaras converted with 30 seconds remaining in the game, prompting wild celebrations in Greece.


title: Greece national football team

text: As Group C runners-up Greece was paired in the round of 16 with Group D shock winners Costa Rica, who won their first-ever World Cup group stage ahead of former world champions Uruguay, Italy and England. Trailing 1–0 but handed an advantage by the dismissal of Costa Rican Óscar Duarte, Greece forced extra time through a Sokratis Papastathopoulos equalizer ten seconds into stoppage time. This was the only goal that Costa Rica goalkeeper Keylor Navas conceded in open play throughout the tournament. Navas thwarted several opportunities for Greece throughout the 30 minutes of extra time and saved Fanis Gekas' penalty in the game's concluding penalty shootout. Costa Rica claimed its first World Cup knockout stage victory and denied Greece its first by defeating Greece 5–3 on penalties.


title: Greece national football team

text: The team appointed Claudio Ranieri as head coach in July 2014. He was sacked in November of the same year after a shocking home defeat to the Faroe Islands. Sergio Markarián was appointed in his place, but he too has come under fire, after the team's terrible performances in the remaining UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying. The team's form after September 2014 proved to be abysmal, with no wins in over a year. Greece finished in bottom place in their Euro Qualifying group, earning just one victory against Hungary in the final round, and failing to qualify for the tournament. Greece, along with the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina were the only nations from Pot 1 not to qualify for the finals. Those three had taken part in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Incidentally, the three teams would also fail to qualify for the World Cup in 2018.


title: Greece national football team

text: In attempting to qualify for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Greece would suffer a second successive failure to reach a major tournament, despite improvements and some positive results. They finished second in Group H of the European qualifying stages, nine points behind runaway leaders Belgium and two points clear of third placed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Greece were subsequently drawn against Croatia in the play-off round, where they were knocked out over two legs; a 4–1 away defeat set the tone for Greece's campaign, and in the second leg they drew a blank in a 0–0 stalemate against the Croats to signify the end of their World Cup hopes.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece had to start their UEFA Nations League in League C due to previously poor performance. Greece won and lost three games each to these opponents altogether, and only finished third in the Nations League and was unable to promote to League B when the UEFA revised the format.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece's qualification campaign for UEFA Euro 2020 commenced with the team being placed in Group J. Due to disappointing results, John van 't Schip decided not to call-up some of the leading members of the squad, such as Sokratis Papastathopoulos and Kostas Manolas for their final matches. A more youthful Greek showed a massive improvement in their attacking and pressing style of play. In the final three games Greece achieved successive victories. Greece finished third in the final table but this was still not enough to earn a play-off spot.


title: Greece national football team

text: Having been forced to remain in League C due to poor performance, Greece had to start its campaign on their quest to be promoted. Greece needed a win in the last game against Slovenia at home to achieve promotion to League B. The match ended on 0-0, with Greece failing to promote a second consecutive time, despite being unbeaten and having conceded just one goal.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece was put in Group B for the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifiers. The campaign started with an upset away 1-1 draw against group favourites Spain, but was followed by two 1-1 draws to Georgia at home and Kosovo away. A 2-1 home win over Sweden kept the hopes for qualification alive, and was followed by a 2-0 away win against Georgia. At the crucial away match in Stockholm, Greece made a good performance in the first half but eventually lost 2-0 to Sweden. Another loss, 1-0 at home to group winners Spain ratified Greece's elimination from the finals, with Greece failing to qualify for a World Cup for the second consecutive time.


title: Greece national football team

text: Under the instructions of manager Gus Poyet, Greece had a successful run in the Group C2 of the 2022–23 competition. The Galanolefki secured promotion to League B by topping the group ahead of Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Cyprus.


title: Greece national football team

text: Traditionally, Greece have spent most of their history playing their home matches in different stadiums primarily in or near Athens, but also in a number of other cities around the country. The home ground of the national team was the Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus, since its reconstruction in 2004 until 2017.


title: Greece national football team

text: Since their first international fixture in 1929 and for the next 33 years, Greece regularly used Apostolos Nikolaidis Stadium as their home ground. Their first home match away from it was played at the Nikos Goumas Stadium in 1962, while the Karaiskakis Stadium was used for the first time in 1964, when it was renovated. In 1966, Kaftanzoglio Stadium in Thessaloniki became the first stadium outside of the Athens area to be used. Since then all of these stadiums were alternately used until the early 1980s, while a few other stadiums were inaugurated by the national team as well such as Thessaloniki's Toumba Stadium and Harilaou Stadium in 1975 and 1977 respectively. Greece also held matches at other home grounds outside of the two major cities in 1976, such as Panachaiki Stadium in Patras and Kavala Stadium in Kavala. In 1982, Georgios Kamaras Stadium was added to the list of home grounds for the national team, the first in Athens out of the three major stadiums.


title: Greece national football team

text: On 16 November 1983, the newly built Athens Olympic Stadium, to date the largest stadium in the country, housed the national team for the first time in a qualifier for UEFA Euro 1984 against Denmark. It served as the primary home ground for the team for the rest of the 1980s and the 1990s, until 2001 when it was closed for renovations. Meanwhile, a large number of matches were held in various stadiums including old choices and some new in provincial cities all over the country, something that did not change until the early 2000s, when the Athens Olympic Stadium was almost abandoned. From the start of the 2000 until the qualifiers games of Euro 2004, the Greek National Team uses Leoforos Stadium as its home. Since 2004 Greece has mainly used Karaiskakis Stadium, with very few of Greece's matches being played in other stadiums. They returned to OAKA in 2018 for a friendly against Switzerland and announced they would play their home matches for the new UEFA Nations League there, as well. For the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifiers, they were slated to split time between OAKA in Athens, and the Pankritio Stadium in Heraklion on the island of Crete, but with the latter requiring upgrades to be fit for FIFA standards, the entire campaign was held in Athens.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece's traditional colours are blue and white, originating from the Greece flag. Although blue was used as the home kit since the team's inception, white became the primary home color following UEFA Euro 2004. In recent decades, Greece wear either a set of white jerseys, shorts and socks, or an all-blue combination. Formerly, the kit consisted of a combination of blue jerseys and white shorts and vice versa. Meanwhile, Greece's kit has occasionally featured stripes, crosses or other designs, as well as various values of blue.


title: Greece national football team

text: On 10 April 2013, the Hellenic Football Federation announced a partnership with American manufacturer Nike, which is Greece's current official supplier, with their first kit debuting on 7 June 2013 in the away match to Lithuania. On 4 March 2014, Greece unveiled their latest kit also worn at the 2014 FIFA World Cup.


title: Greece national football team

text: The crest ("εθνόσημο" means "national sign"), which is used in the kit, is the official emblem of the national team.


title: Greece national football team

text: Traditionally, Greece is referred to by the media and the Greeks in general simply as "Ethniki" (Εθνική) in Greek, which literally means 'National'. The team is often called "Galanolefki" (Sky blue-white) due to the use of the colours of the Greece flag as kit colours. Both nicknames are used for the country's national teams in other sports as well.


title: Greece national football team

text: During the opening ceremony at the UEFA Euro 2004, which took place right before the inaugural game of the tournament between Greece and hosts Portugal, a replica of a 16th-century ship was used referring to the expeditions of the Portuguese explorers of that time. Greek radio sports journalist Georgios Helakis, while broadcasting the opening match, commented that ""since the Portuguese team appeared in such a ship, it's time for us to become pirates and steal the victory"". Eventually, Greece beat the hosts and the team was described as "Piratiko", meaning the 'Pirate ship', which emerged as the new nickname of the team repeated at every win during the tournament. Especially after Greece won in the final to Portugal, the new nickname was established to commemorate the coronation of Greece as European champions.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece has a historical rivalry with Turkey; having played them a total of 13 matches, winning three, drawing three and losing seven games. Both countries have been described as "punching above their weight"; with Greece winning Euro 2004 despite being classified as underdogs prior to the competition, and Turkey followed-up their World Cup semi-final appearance in 2002 by advancing to the semi-finals of Euro 2008, where they were knocked out by Germany. The relationship with Turkey is very intense overall. It is fueled by a dispute between the two countries, the dispute over Cyprus, and several incidents occurring during matches between Turkish and Greece clubs, it has been described as one of the international football rivalries.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece has also a football rivalry with Romania, because it is the team that has been met the most times in their history (36 times). Greece has won 8 matches and Romania has won 18 matches (10 matches between them ended in draw).


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece's qualifying matches and friendlies are currently televised by Nova Sports and Alpha TV, a trademark of Digea.


title: Greece national football team

text: The following is a list of match results from the previous 12 months, as well as any future matches that have been scheduled.


title: Greece national football team

text: The following table lists all assigned football managers for the national team and their record since Greece's first international game in April 1929.


title: Greece national football team

text: [*] Greece sanctioned for fielding ineligible player (Apostolos Giannou) in the international friendly match played between Turkey and Greece on 17 November 2015. The match is declared to be lost by forfeit and awarded 3–0 in favor of Turkey.


title: Greece national football team

text: The following players were called for the friendly matches matches against Malta on 17 November 2022 and Hungary on 20 November 2022.


title: Greece national football team

text: These are Greece's results in the major competitions that they have participated in. The results in the main tournaments have been listed directly in the total column.


title: Greece national football team

text: Greece's history in the FIFA World Rankings. The table shows the position that Greece held in December of each year (and the current position as of 2021), as well as the highest and lowest positions annually.


title: Greece national football team

text: a) The game against Great Britain's Olympic Team (1952) was recognised as official game of the Greece National Team by the Hellenic Football Federation


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Tommy Deebo "Tiny" Lister Jr. (born Thomas Duane Lister Jr.; June 24, 1958 – December 10, 2020) was an American character actor and occasional professional wrestler known for his roles as the neighborhood bully Deebo in the 1995 film "Friday", its 2000 sequel and as President Lindberg in "The Fifth Element". He had two short professional wrestling stints, with Hulk Hogan in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) after appearing as Zeus in the 1989 film "No Holds Barred" and resuming the feud as Z-Gangsta in 1996 for World Championship Wrestling (WCW). He was born with a detached and deformed retina and was blind in his right eye, which drooped, a unique look that he turned to his advantage in film. He played in both comedies and dramas, usually cast as 'the heavy/big bully'.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister was born on June 24, 1958, in Compton, California, to Thomas Duane Lister and Mildred (Edwards) Lister. Since his birth, he had a deformed and detached retina in his right eye, causing permanent blindness.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister attended Palomar Junior College before transferring to Long Beach City College for his sophomore year. While at Long Beach, he recorded a shot put throw, which helped to earn him a scholarship to California State University, Los Angeles. In his senior year, he won the national shot put title with a mark of over . Lister was the 1982 NCAA Division II National Shot Put Champion.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: After college, Lister competed for the Converse Track Club, eventually raising his shot put mark to , before trying out with the New Orleans Breakers of the United States Football League. He was cut after two exhibition games and opted to pursue acting instead.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister was mostly recognized as the antagonist known as Deebo from 1995's "Friday". Deebo was the neighborhood's dog-eat-dog thug and bruiser to every character, including Ice Cube's main character Craig Jones. He reprised the role in the film's sequel, "Next Friday" (2000), but did not appear in the third film of the series, "Friday After Next" (2002). He did, however, appear in Cube's directorial debut "The Players Club". He played the role of Obodo in Mario Van Peebles' "Posse" (1993), along with Tone Loc.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister had numerous guest appearances on TV series, including playing Klaang, the first Klingon to make contact with humans, in the of "". He co-starred in a two-part episode of the courtroom series "Matlock" as Mr. Matlock's in-prison bodyguard. He appeared in season 7 episode 9 of "In the Heat of the Night". He starred in the sitcom "1st & Ten" as Otis.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister's film roles included playing in "The Dark Knight", "Austin Powers in Goldmember" and "The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)". Lister was featured in "The Fifth Element" as the Galactic President. He appeared in the Adam Sandler film "Little Nicky" as Nicky's older brother Cassius.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister was the main police officer in Chamillionaire's "Ridin'" video and reprised his role as a police officer in Chamillionaire's 2012 single "Show Love". He has appeared in the Ice Cube videos for "Friday" (from the "Friday" soundtrack) and "You Can Do It" (from the "Next Friday" soundtrack). Lister appeared via both original footage and film clips from the fi. He was in the videos for Young Bleed's "How You Do Dat", French Montana's "I Told 'Em" and 50 Cent's "Many Men (Wish Death)". Lister portrayed Sancho in the Sublime music video "Santeria".


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: In the Quentin Tarantino film "Jackie Brown", he played bail agent Winston, who "finds people who don't want to be found". In 2015, Lister filmed "Busy Day" in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lister had a supporting role in the 2016 Disney animated movie "Zootopia" as the voice of the diminutive fennec fox, Finnick. He appeared in a commercial that year for Ball Park-brand beef jerky, advertised as "tough, but tender."


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Cast as an habitual 'bad guy' in films, his career prospered. He became the spokesperson for Monster Energy Drink. He was a frequent collaborator with Ice Cube. In a Twitter encomium, he recalled Lister's sense of humor: "RIP Tiny 'Deebo' Lister. America's favorite bully was a born entertainer who would pop into character at the drop of a hat terrifying people on and off camera. Followed by a big smile and laugh ... Thank you for being a good dude at heart. I miss you already."


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister appeared in the 1989 wrestling movie "No Holds Barred", which was financed by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and starred Hulk Hogan. Lister's role was Zeus, a brutal monster heel. "No Holds Barred" inspired a feud in the WWF during the latter half of 1989. Lister was billed as "Zeus: The Human Wrecking Machine", and used the same "monster heel" gimmick in his matches by no-selling his opponent's moves. He would yell, "Aw! Aw!" and pound on his chest several times during his interviews and in the ring. Zeus would eventually demand Hogan to face him in the ring.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Citing jealousy for being billed under Hogan and anger over losing to Hogan in the film, Zeus wanted to beat him in "real life". Zeus formed an alliance with fellow Hogan rival "Macho Man" Randy Savage to feud with Hogan and his friend, Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake. The two teams faced off at the 1989 SummerSlam event in a tag team match which saw Hogan and Beefcake prevail as the victors, with Hogan pinning Zeus. Following SummerSlam, Zeus formed an alliance with "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase leading into that year's Survivor Series.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: At the event, the team of The Hulkamaniacs (Hulk Hogan, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, and Demolition) faced The Million Dollar Team (Ted DiBiase, Zeus, and The Powers of Pain). Zeus was eliminated from the match via disqualification after refusing to break a chokehold on Hogan and shoving the referee away. The Hulkamaniacs went on to win the match, defeating the other team. After the Survivor Series, the feud between Hulk Hogan and Brutus Beefcake versus Randy Savage and Zeus ended with a steel cage match on December 27, 1989, at the pay-per-view event. Hogan and Beefcake were once again victorious in what would be Zeus's last match in the WWF. Lister's final WWF appearance was a promotional spot for the 1990 Royal Rumble.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: On July 7, 1990, Zeus fought Abdullah the Butcher in a double countout at a World Wrestling Council show in Puerto Rico.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister spent March 1996 in World Championship Wrestling (WCW) as Z-Gangsta, as part of The Alliance to End Hulkamania, culminating in failure at Uncensored. He debuted the previous week with fellow actor/wrestler Robert Swenson, who was billed as The Ultimate Solution.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: U.S. national shot put title with a mark of over and 1982 NCAA Division II National Shot Put Champion.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: The athletic department of Lister's alma mater Cal State LA sponsors an annual track meet in his name.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: In 2016, he was nominated for the "Best Bad Mu#&a Award" at the All Def Movie Awards. In 2014 at the Orlando Urban Film Festival, he won "Best Star Spotlight" for his performance in "No Weapon Formed Against Us".


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: On August 31, 2012, Lister agreed to plead guilty to conspiring to commit mortgage fraud, in a scheme that led to $3.8 million in losses. He was charged with fraudulently buying homes in order to withdraw $1.1 million in home equity loans. In April 2014, he was out on bail and was confident of avoiding prison. He stated, "What's so cool about God and our government is that you can make a mistake and they will forgive you if you just a good person and doing right."


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: Lister was diagnosed with COVID-19 around August 2020 and overcame the illness. He became ill with symptoms similar to COVID-19 a second time in early December, exhibiting weakness and trouble breathing, which forced him to cancel shooting for a film. His manager Cindy McGowen, who said it was not normal for him to miss filmings, became concerned and sent her assistant to his house to give him vitamins and antibiotics.


title: Tommy Lister Jr.

text: On December 10, police who were called to check on Lister found him dead in his home in Marina del Rey, California; he was 62 years old. The coroner's office investigated his cause of death, which was originally suspected to be from complications of COVID-19. However, the final autopsy report revealed that the cause of death was hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. However, due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications; however, many large financial institutions were still developing new systems in COBOL as late as 2006.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It was originally seen as a stopgap, but the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. It was standardized in 1968 and has since been revised four times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is "ISO/IEC 1989:2014".


title: COBOL

text: COBOL statements have an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words. In contrast with modern, succinct syntax like , COBOL has a more English-like syntax (in this case, ).


title: COBOL

text: COBOL code is split into four "divisions" (identification, environment, data, and procedure) containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences. Lacking a large standard library, the standard specifies 43 statements, 87 functions and just one class.


title: COBOL

text: Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL was created and were not involved in its design; it was (effectively) designed from the ground up as a computer language for business, with an emphasis on inputs and outputs, whose only data types were numbers and strings of text.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL has been criticized throughout its life for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses result in monolithic, verbose (intended to be English-like) programs that are not easily comprehensible.


title: COBOL

text: For years, COBOL has been assumed as a programming language for business operations in mainframes, although in recent years an increasing interest has surged on migrating COBOL operations to cloud computing.


title: COBOL

text: In the late 1950s, computer users and manufacturers were becoming concerned about the rising cost of programming. A 1959 survey had found that in any data processing installation, the programming cost US$800,000 on average and that translating programs to run on new hardware would cost $600,000. At a time when new programming languages were proliferating at an ever-increasing rate, the same survey suggested that if a common business-oriented language were used, conversion would be far cheaper and faster.


title: COBOL

text: On 8 April 1959, Mary K. Hawes, a computer scientist at Burroughs Corporation, called a meeting of representatives from academia, computer users, and manufacturers at the University of Pennsylvania to organize a formal meeting on common business languages. Representatives included Grace Hopper (inventor of the English-like data processing language FLOW-MATIC), Jean Sammet and Saul Gorn.


title: COBOL

text: At the April meeting, the group asked the Department of Defense (DoD) to sponsor an effort to create a common business language. The delegation impressed Charles A. Phillips, director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD, who thought that they "thoroughly understood" the DoD's problems. The DoD operated 225 computers, had a further 175 on order and had spent over $200 million on implementing programs to run on them. Portable programs would save time, reduce costs and ease modernization.


title: COBOL

text: On 28 and 29 May 1959 (exactly one year after the Zürich ALGOL 58 meeting), a meeting was held at the Pentagon to discuss the creation of a common programming language for business. It was attended by 41 people and was chaired by Phillips. The Department of Defense was concerned about whether it could run the same data processing programs on different computers. FORTRAN, the only mainstream language at the time, lacked the features needed to write such programs.


title: COBOL

text: Representatives enthusiastically described a language that could work in a wide variety of environments, from banking and insurance to utilities and inventory control. They agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program and that the new language should not be restricted by the limitations of contemporary technology. A majority agreed that the language should make maximal use of English, be capable of change, be machine-independent and be easy to use, even at the expense of power.


title: COBOL

text: The meeting resulted in the creation of a steering committee and short, intermediate and long-range committees. The short-range committee was given to September (three months) to produce specifications for an interim language, which would then be improved upon by the other committees. Their official mission, however, was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing programming languages and did not explicitly direct them to create a new language.


title: COBOL

text: One member, Betty Holberton, described the three-month deadline as "gross optimism" and doubted that the language really would be a stopgap.


title: COBOL

text: The steering committee met on 4 June and agreed to name the entire activity as the "Committee on Data Systems Languages", or CODASYL, and to form an executive committee.


title: COBOL

text: The short-range committee was made up of members representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies. The six computer manufacturers were Burroughs Corporation, IBM, Minneapolis-Honeywell (Honeywell Labs), RCA, Sperry Rand, and Sylvania Electric Products. The three government agencies were the US Air Force, the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). The committee was chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National Bureau of Standards. Work began by investigating data description, statements, existing applications and user experiences.


title: COBOL

text: The FLOW-MATIC language was particularly influential because it had been implemented and because AIMACO was a derivative of it with only minor changes.


title: COBOL

text: FLOW-MATIC's inventor, Grace Hopper, also served as a technical adviser to the committee. FLOW-MATIC's major contributions to COBOL were long variable names, English words for commands and the separation of data descriptions and instructions.


title: COBOL

text: Hopper is sometimes referred to as "the mother of COBOL" or "the grandmother of COBOL", although Jean Sammet, a lead designer of COBOL, stated that Hopper "was not the mother, creator or developer of Cobol".


title: COBOL

text: IBM's COMTRAN language, invented by Bob Bemer, was regarded as a competitor to FLOW-MATIC by a short-range committee made up of colleagues of Grace Hopper.


title: COBOL

text: Some of its features were not incorporated into COBOL so that it would not look like IBM had dominated the design process, and Jean Sammet said in 1981 that there had been a "strong anti-IBM bias" from some committee members (herself included).


title: COBOL

text: In one case, after Roy Goldfinger, author of the COMTRAN manual and intermediate-range committee member, attended a subcommittee meeting to support his language and encourage the use of algebraic expressions, Grace Hopper sent a memo to the short-range committee reiterating Sperry Rand's efforts to create a language based on English.


title: COBOL

text: In 1980, Grace Hopper commented that "COBOL 60 is 95% FLOW-MATIC" and that COMTRAN had had an "extremely small" influence. Furthermore, she said that she would claim that work was influenced by both FLOW-MATIC and COMTRAN only to "keep other people happy [so they] wouldn't try to knock us out".


title: COBOL

text: Features from COMTRAN incorporated into COBOL included formulas, the clause, an improved codice_1 statement, which obviated the need for GO TOs, and a more robust file management system.


title: COBOL

text: The usefulness of the committee's work was subject of great debate. While some members thought the language had too many compromises and was the result of design by committee, others felt it was better than the three languages examined. Some felt the language was too complex; others, too simple.


title: COBOL

text: Controversial features included those some considered useless or too advanced for data processing users. Such features included boolean expressions, formulas and table "" (indices). Another point of controversy was whether to make keywords context-sensitive and the effect that would have on readability. Although context-sensitive keywords were rejected, the approach was later used in PL/I and partially in COBOL from 2002. Little consideration was given to interactivity, interaction with operating systems (few existed at that time) and functions (thought of as purely mathematical and of no use in data processing).


title: COBOL

text: The specifications were presented to the executive committee on 4 September. They fell short of expectations: Joseph Wegstein noted that "it contains rough spots and requires some additions", and Bob Bemer later described them as a "hodgepodge". The subcommittee was given until December to improve it.


title: COBOL

text: At a mid-September meeting, the committee discussed the new language's name. Suggestions included "BUSY" (Business System), "INFOSYL" (Information System Language) and "COCOSYL" (Common Computer Systems Language). It is unclear who coined the name "COBOL", although Bob Bemer later claimed it had been his suggestion.


title: COBOL

text: In October, the intermediate-range committee received copies of the FACT language specification created by Roy Nutt. Its features impressed the committee so much that they passed a resolution to base COBOL on it.


title: COBOL

text: This was a blow to the short-range committee, who had made good progress on the specification. Despite being technically superior, FACT had not been created with portability in mind or through manufacturer and user consensus. It also lacked a demonstrable implementation, allowing supporters of a FLOW-MATIC-based COBOL to overturn the resolution. RCA representative Howard Bromberg also blocked FACT, so that RCA's work on a COBOL implementation would not go to waste.


title: COBOL

text: It soon became apparent that the committee was too large for any further progress to be made quickly. A frustrated Howard Bromberg bought a $15 tombstone with "COBOL" engraved on it and sent it to Charles Phillips to demonstrate his displeasure.


title: COBOL

text: The sub-committee did most of the work creating the specification, leaving the short-range committee to review and modify their work before producing the finished specification.


title: COBOL

text: The specifications were approved by the executive committee on 8 January 1960, and sent to the government printing office, which printed these as "COBOL 60". The language's stated objectives were to allow efficient, portable programs to be easily written, to allow users to move to new systems with minimal effort and cost, and to be suitable for inexperienced programmers.


title: COBOL

text: The CODASYL Executive Committee later created the COBOL Maintenance Committee to answer questions from users and vendors and to improve and expand the specifications.


title: COBOL

text: During 1960, the list of manufacturers planning to build COBOL compilers grew. By September, five more manufacturers had joined CODASYL (Bendix, Control Data Corporation, General Electric (GE), National Cash Register and Philco), and all represented manufacturers had announced COBOL compilers. GE and IBM planned to integrate COBOL into their own languages, GECOM and COMTRAN, respectively. In contrast, International Computers and Tabulators planned to replace their language, CODEL, with COBOL.


title: COBOL

text: Meanwhile, RCA and Sperry Rand worked on creating COBOL compilers. The first COBOL program ran on 17 August on an RCA 501.


title: COBOL

text: On 6 and 7 December, the same COBOL program (albeit with minor changes) ran on an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer, demonstrating that compatibility could be achieved.


title: COBOL

text: The relative influences of which languages were used continues to this day in the recommended advisory printed in all COBOL reference manuals:


title: COBOL

text: Many logical flaws were found in "COBOL 60", leading General Electric's Charles Katz to warn that it could not be interpreted unambiguously. A reluctant short-term committee enacted a total cleanup and, by March 1963, it was reported that COBOL's syntax was as definable as ALGOL's, although semantic ambiguities remained.


title: COBOL

text: Early COBOL compilers were primitive and slow. A 1962 US Navy evaluation found compilation speeds of 3–11 statements per minute. By mid-1964, they had increased to 11–1000 statements per minute. It was observed that increasing memory would drastically increase speed and that compilation costs varied wildly: costs per statement were between $0.23 and $18.91.


title: COBOL

text: In late 1962, IBM announced that COBOL would be their primary development language and that development of COMTRAN would cease.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL-60 was replaced in 1961 by COBOL-61. This was then replaced by the COBOL-61 Extended specifications in 1963, which introduced the sort and report writer facilities.


title: COBOL

text: The added facilities corrected flaws identified by Honeywell in late 1959 in a letter to the short-range committee.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL Edition 1965 brought further clarifications to the specifications and introduced facilities for handling mass storage files and tables.


title: COBOL

text: Efforts began to standardize COBOL to overcome incompatibilities between versions. In late 1962, both ISO and the United States of America Standards Institute (now ANSI) formed groups to create standards. ANSI produced "USA Standard COBOL X3.23" in August 1968, which became the cornerstone for later versions. This version was known as American National Standard (ANS) COBOL and was adopted by ISO in 1972.


title: COBOL

text: Independently of the ANSI committee, the CODASYL Programming Language Committee was working on improving the language. They described new versions in 1968, 1969, 1970 and 1973, including changes such as new inter-program communication, debugging and file merging facilities as well as improved string-handling and library inclusion features.


title: COBOL

text: Although CODASYL was independent of the ANSI committee, the "CODASYL Journal of Development" was used by ANSI to identify features that were popular enough to warrant implementing.


title: COBOL

text: The Programming Language Committee was not well-known, however. The vice-president, William Rinehuls, complained that two-thirds of the COBOL community did not know of the committee's existence. It was also poor, lacking the funds to make public documents, such as minutes of meetings and change proposals, freely available.


title: COBOL

text: In 1974, ANSI published a revised version of (ANS) COBOL, containing new features such as file organizations, the statement and the segmentation module.


title: COBOL

text: Deleted features included the statement, the statement (which was replaced by ) and the implementer-defined random access module (which was superseded by the new sequential and relative I/O modules). These made up 44 changes, which rendered existing statements incompatible with the new standard.


title: COBOL

text: The report writer was slated to be removed from COBOL, but was reinstated before the standard was published. ISO later adopted the updated standard in 1978.


title: COBOL

text: In June 1978, work began on revising COBOL-74. The proposed standard (commonly called COBOL-80) differed significantly from the previous one, causing concerns about incompatibility and conversion costs. In January 1981, Joseph T. Brophy, Senior Vice-president of Travelers Insurance, threatened to sue the standard committee because it was not upwards compatible with COBOL-74. Mr. Brophy described previous conversions of their 40-million-line code base as "non-productive" and a "complete waste of our programmer resources".


title: COBOL

text: Later that year, the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) said it was "strongly opposed" to the new standard, citing "prohibitive" conversion costs and enhancements that were "forced on the user".


title: COBOL

text: During the first public review period, the committee received 2,200 responses, of which 1,700 were negative form letters.


title: COBOL

text: Other responses were detailed analyses of the effect COBOL-80 would have on their systems; conversion costs were predicted to be at least 50 cents per line of code. Fewer than a dozen of the responses were in favor of the proposed standard.


title: COBOL

text: ISO TC97-SC5 installed in 1979 the international COBOL Experts Group, on initiative of Wim Ebbinkhuijsen. The group consisted of COBOL experts from many countries, including the United States. Its goal was to achieve mutual understanding and respect between ANSI and the rest of the world with regard to the need of new COBOL features. After three years, ISO changed the status of the group to a formal Working Group: WG 4 COBOL. The group took primary ownership and development of the COBOL standard, where ANSI did most of the proposals.


title: COBOL

text: In 1983, the DPMA withdrew its opposition to the standard, citing the responsiveness of the committee to public concerns. In the same year, a National Bureau of Standards study concluded that the proposed standard would present few problems. A year later, DEC released a VAX/VMS COBOL-80, who noted that conversion of COBOL-74 programs posed few problems. The new codice_2 statement and inline codice_3 were particularly well received and improved productivity, thanks to simplified control flow and debugging.


title: COBOL

text: The second public review drew another 1,000 (mainly negative) responses, while the last drew just 25, by which time many concerns had been addressed.


title: COBOL

text: In 1985, the ISO Working Group 4 accepted the then-version of the ANSI proposed standard, made several changes and set it as the new ISO standard COBOL 85. It was published in late 1985.


title: COBOL

text: Two amendments followed in 1989 and 1993, the first introducing intrinsic functions and the other providing corrections.


title: COBOL

text: In 1997, Gartner Group estimated that there were a total of 200 billion lines of COBOL in existence, which ran 80% of all business programs.


title: COBOL

text: In the early 1990s, work began on adding object-orientation in the next full revision of COBOL. Object-oriented features were taken from C++ and Smalltalk.


title: COBOL

text: The initial estimate was to have this revision completed by 1997, and an ISO Committee Draft (CD) was available by 1997. Some vendors (including Micro Focus, Fujitsu, and IBM) introduced object-oriented syntax based on drafts of the full revision. The final approved ISO standard was approved and published in late 2002.


title: COBOL

text: Fujitsu/GTSoftware, Micro Focus and RainCode introduced object-oriented COBOL compilers targeting the .NET Framework.


title: COBOL

text: There were many other new features, many of which had been in the "CODASYL COBOL Journal of Development" since 1978 and had missed the opportunity to be included in COBOL-85. These other features included:


title: COBOL

text: Between 2003 and 2009, three technical reports were produced describing object finalization, XML processing and collection classes for COBOL.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL 2002 suffered from poor support: no compilers completely supported the standard. Micro Focus found that it was due to a lack of user demand for the new features and due to the abolition of the NIST test suite, which had been used to test compiler conformance. The standardization process was also found to be slow and under-resourced.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL programs are used globally in governments and businesses and are running on diverse operating systems such as z/OS, z/VSE, VME, Unix, OpenVMS and Windows. In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code and 5 billion lines more being written annually.


title: COBOL

text: Near the end of the 20th century, the year 2000 problem (Y2K) was the focus of significant COBOL programming effort, sometimes by the same programmers who had designed the systems decades before. The particular level of effort required to correct COBOL code has been attributed to the large amount of business-oriented COBOL, as business applications use dates heavily, and to fixed-length data fields. Some studies attribute as much as "24% of Y2K software repair costs to Cobol". After the clean-up effort put into these programs for Y2K, a 2003 survey found that many remained in use.


title: COBOL

text: The authors said that the survey data suggest "a gradual decline in the importance of COBOL in application development over the [following] 10 years unless ... integration with other languages and technologies can be adopted".


title: COBOL

text: In 2006 and 2012, "Computerworld" surveys (of 352 readers) found that over 60% of organizations used COBOL (more than C++ and Visual Basic .NET) and that for half of those, COBOL was used for the majority of their internal software. 36% of managers said they planned to migrate from COBOL, and 25% said they would like to if it were cheaper. Instead, some businesses have migrated their systems from expensive mainframes to cheaper, more modern systems, while maintaining their COBOL programs.


title: COBOL

text: Testimony before the House of Representatives in 2016 indicated that COBOL is still in use by many federal agencies. Reuters reported in 2017 that 43% of banking systems still used COBOL with over 220 billion lines of COBOL code in use.


title: COBOL

text: By 2019, the number of COBOL programmers was shrinking fast due to retirements, leading to an impending skills gap in business and government organizations which still use mainframe systems for high-volume transaction processing. Efforts to rewrite systems in newer languages have proven expensive and problematic, as has the outsourcing of code maintenance, thus proposals to train more people in COBOL are advocated.


title: COBOL

text: During the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing surge of unemployment, several US states reported a shortage of skilled COBOL programmers to support the legacy systems used for unemployment benefit management. Many of these systems had been in the process of conversion to more modern programming languages prior to the pandemic, but the process had to be put on hold. Similarly, the US Internal Revenue Service rushed to patch its COBOL-based Individual Master File in order to disburse the tens of millions of payments mandated by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL has an English-like syntax, which is used to describe nearly everything in a program. For example, a condition can be expressed as   or more concisely as    or  . More complex conditions can be "abbreviated" by removing repeated conditions and variables. For example,    can be shortened to . To support this English-like syntax, COBOL has over 300 keywords. Some of the keywords are simple alternative or pluralized spellings of the same word, which provides for more English-like statements and clauses; e.g., the and keywords can be used interchangeably, as can and , and and .


title: COBOL

text: Each COBOL program is made up of four basic lexical items: words, literals, picture character-strings (see ) and separators. Words include reserved words and user-defined identifiers. They are up to 31 characters long and may include letters, digits, hyphens and underscores. Literals include numerals (e.g. ) and strings (e.g. ). Separators include the space character and commas and semi-colons followed by a space.


title: COBOL

text: A COBOL program is split into four divisions: the identification division, the environment division, the data division and the procedure division. The identification division specifies the name and type of the source element and is where classes and interfaces are specified. The environment division specifies any program features that depend on the system running it, such as files and character sets. The data division is used to declare variables and parameters. The procedure division contains the program's statements. Each division is sub-divided into sections, which are made up of paragraphs.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL's syntax is usually described with a unique metalanguage using braces, brackets, bars and underlining. The metalanguage was developed for the original COBOL specifications. Although Backus–Naur form did exist at the time, the committee had not heard of it.


title: COBOL

text: The height of COBOL's popularity coincided with the era of keypunch machines and punched cards. The program itself was written onto punched cards, then read in and compiled, and the data fed into the program was sometimes on cards as well.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL can be written in two formats: fixed (the default) or free. In fixed-format, code must be aligned to fit in certain areas (a hold-over from using punched cards). Until COBOL 2002, these were:


title: COBOL

text: In COBOL 2002, Areas A and B were merged to form the program-text area, which now ends at an implementor-defined column.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL 2002 also introduced free-format code. Free-format code can be placed in any column of the file, as in newer programming languages. Comments are specified using codice_13, which can be placed anywhere and can also be used in fixed-format source code. Continuation lines are not present, and the codice_14 directive replaces the codice_15 indicator.


title: COBOL

text: The identification division identifies the following code entity and contains the definition of a class or interface.


title: COBOL

text: Classes and interfaces have been in COBOL since 2002. Classes have factory objects, containing class methods and variables, and instance objects, containing instance methods and variables. Inheritance and interfaces provide polymorphism. Support for generic programming is provided through parameterized classes, which can be instantiated to use any class or interface. Objects are stored as references which may be restricted to a certain type. There are two ways of calling a method: the statement, which acts similarly to , or through inline method invocation, which is analogous to using functions.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL does not provide a way to hide methods. Class data can be hidden, however, by declaring it without a clause, which leaves the user with no way to access it. Method overloading was added in COBOL 2014.


title: COBOL

text: The environment division contains the configuration section and the input-output section. The configuration section is used to specify variable features such


title: COBOL

text: as currency signs, locales and character sets. The input-output section contains file-related information.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL supports three file formats, or ': sequential, indexed and relative. In sequential files, records are contiguous and must be traversed sequentially, similarly to a linked list. Indexed files have one or more indexes which allow records to be randomly accessed and which can be sorted on them. Each record must have a unique key, but other, ', record keys need not be unique. Implementations of indexed files vary between vendors, although common implementations, such as C-ISAM and VSAM, are based on IBM's ISAM. Relative files, like indexed files, have a unique record key, but they do not have alternate keys. A relative record's key is its ordinal position; for example, the 10th record has a key of 10. This means that creating a record with a key of 5 may require the creation of (empty) preceding records. Relative files also allow for both sequential and random access.


title: COBOL

text: A common non-standard extension is the " organization, used to process text files. Records in a file are terminated by a newline and may be of varying length.


title: COBOL

text: The data division is split into six sections which declare different items: the file section, for file records; the working-storage section, for static variables; the local-storage section, for automatic variables; the linkage section, for parameters and the return value; the report section and the screen section, for text-based user interfaces.


title: COBOL

text: Data items in COBOL are declared hierarchically through the use of level-numbers which indicate if a data item is part of another. An item with a higher level-number is subordinate to an item with a lower one. Top-level data items, with a level-number of 1, are called '. Items that have subordinate aggregate data are called '; those that do not are called ". Level-numbers used to describe standard data items are between 1 and 49.


title: COBOL

text: In the above example, elementary item and group item are subordinate to the record , while elementary items , , and are part of the group item .


title: COBOL

text: Subordinate items can be disambiguated with the (or ) keyword. For example, consider the example code above along with the following example:


title: COBOL

text: The names , , and are ambiguous by themselves, since more than one data item is defined with those names. To specify a particular data item, for instance one of the items contained within the group, the programmer would use (or the equivalent ). (This syntax is similar to the "dot notation" supported by most contemporary languages.)


title: COBOL

text: A level-number of 66 is used to declare a re-grouping of previously defined items, irrespective of how those items are structured. This data level, also referred to by the associated , is rarely used and, circa 1988, was usually found in old programs. Its ability to ignore the hierarchical and logical structure data meant its use was not recommended and many installations forbade its use.


title: COBOL

text: A 77 level-number indicates the item is stand-alone, and in such situations is equivalent to the level-number 01. For example, the following code declares two 77-level data items, and , which are non-group data items that are independent of (not subordinate to) any other data items:


title: COBOL

text: An 88 level-number declares a " (a so-called 88-level) which is true when its parent data item contains one of the values specified in its clause. For example, the following code defines two 88-level condition-name items that are true or false depending on the current character data value of the data item. When the data item contains a value of , the condition-name is true, whereas when it contains a value of or , the condition-name is true. If the data item contains some other value, both of the condition-names are false.


title: COBOL

text: Type safety is variable in COBOL. Numeric data is converted between different representations and sizes silently and alphanumeric data can be placed in any data item that can be stored as a string, including numeric and group data. In contrast, object references and pointers may only be assigned from items of the same type and their values may be restricted to a certain type.


title: COBOL

text: A (or ) clause is a string of characters, each of which represents a portion of the data item and what it may contain. Some picture characters specify the type of the item and how many characters or digits it occupies in memory. For example, a indicates a decimal digit, and an indicates that the item is signed. Other picture characters (called ' and ' characters) specify how an item should be formatted. For example, a series of characters define character positions as well as how a leading sign character is to be positioned within the final character data; the rightmost non-numeric character will contain the item's sign, while other character positions corresponding to a to the left of this position will contain a space. Repeated characters can be specified more concisely by specifying a number in parentheses after a picture character; for example, is equivalent to . Picture specifications containing only digit () and sign () characters define purely ' data items, while picture specifications containing alphabetic () or alphanumeric () characters define ' data items. The presence of other formatting characters define ' or ' data items.


title: COBOL

text: The clause declares the format data is stored in. Depending on the data type, it can either complement or be used instead of a clause. While it can be used to declare pointers and object references, it is mostly geared towards specifying numeric types. These numeric formats are:


title: COBOL

text: The report writer is a declarative facility for creating reports. The programmer need only specify the report layout and the data required to produce it, freeing them from having to write code to handle things like page breaks, data formatting, and headings and footings.


title: COBOL

text: Reports are associated with report files, which are files which may only be written to through report writer statements.


title: COBOL

text: Each report is defined in the report section of the data division. A report is split into report groups which define the report's headings, footings and details. Reports work around hierarchical ". Control breaks occur when a key variable changes it value; for example, when creating a report detailing customers' orders, a control break could occur when the program reaches a different customer's orders. Here is an example report description for a report which gives a salesperson's sales and which warns of any invalid records:


title: COBOL

text: Four statements control the report writer: , which prepares the report writer for printing; , which prints a report group; , which suppresses the printing of a report group; and , which terminates report processing. For the above sales report example, the procedure division might look like this:


title: COBOL

text: Use of the Report Writer facility tended to vary considerably; some organizations used it extensively and some not at all. In addition, implementations of Report Writer ranged in quality, with those at the lower end sometimes using excessive amounts of memory at runtime.


title: COBOL

text: The sections and paragraphs in the procedure division (collectively called procedures) can be used as labels and as simple subroutines. Unlike in other divisions, paragraphs do not need to be in sections.


title: COBOL

text: A statement somewhat resembles a procedure call in a modern language in the sense that execution returns to the code following the statement at the end of the called code; however, it does not provide any mechanism for parameter passing or for returning a result value. If a subroutine is invoked using a simple statement like , then control returns at the end of the called procedure. However, is unusual in that it may be used to call a range spanning a sequence of several adjacent procedures. This is done with the construct:


title: COBOL

text: The reason is that COBOL, rather than a "return address", operates with what may be called a continuation address. When control flow reaches the end of any procedure, the continuation address is looked up and control is transferred to that address. Before the program runs, the continuation address for every procedure is initialized to the start address of the procedure that comes next in the program text so that, if no statements happen, control flows from top to bottom through the program. But when a statement executes, it modifies the continuation address of the called procedure (or the last procedure of the called range, if was used), so that control will return to the call site at the end. The original value is saved and is restored afterwards, but there is only one storage position. If two nested invocations operate on overlapping code, they may interfere which each other's management of the continuation address in several ways.


title: COBOL

text: One might expect that the output of this program would be "1 2 3 4 3": After displaying "2", the second causes "3" and "4" to be displayed, and then the first invocation continues on with "3". In traditional COBOL implementations, this is not the case. Rather, the first statement sets the continuation address at the end of so that it will jump back to the call site inside . The second statement sets the return at the end of but does not modify the continuation address of , expecting it to be the default continuation. Thus, when the inner invocation arrives at the end of , it jumps back to the outer statement, and the program stops having printed just "1 2 3". On the other hand, in some COBOL implementations like the open-source TinyCOBOL compiler, the two statements do not interfere with each other and the output is indeed "1 2 3 4 3". Therefore, the behavior in such cases is not only (perhaps) surprising, it is also not portable.


title: COBOL

text: A special consequence of this limitation is that cannot be used to write recursive code. Another simple example to illustrate this (slightly simplified from ):


title: COBOL

text: One might expect that the output is "1 2 3 END END END", and in fact that is what some COBOL compilers will produce. But some compilers, like IBM COBOL, will produce code that prints "1 2 3 END END END END ..." and so on, printing "END" over and over in an endless loop. Since there is limited space to store backup continuation addresses, the backups get overwritten in the course of recursive invocations, and all that can be restored is the jump back to .


title: COBOL

text: COBOL 2014 has 47 statements (also called "), which can be grouped into the following broad categories: control flow, I/O, data manipulation and the report writer. The report writer statements are covered in the report writer section.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL's conditional statements are and . is a switch-like statement with the added capability of evaluating multiple values and conditions. This can be used to implement decision tables. For example, the following might be used to control a CNC lathe:


title: COBOL

text: The statement is used to define loops which are executed a condition is true (not true, which is more common in other languages). It is also used to call procedures or ranges of procedures (see the procedures section for more details). and call subprograms and methods, respectively. The name of the subprogram/method is contained in a string which may be a literal or a data item. Parameters can be passed by reference, by content (where a copy is passed by reference) or by value (but only if a prototype is available).


title: COBOL

text: The statement is a return statement and the statement stops the program. The statement has six different formats: it can be used as a return statement, a break statement, a continue statement, an end marker or to leave a procedure.


title: COBOL

text: Exceptions are raised by a statement and caught with a handler, or ", defined in the portion of the procedure division. Declaratives are sections beginning with a statement which specify the errors to handle. Exceptions can be names or objects. is used in a declarative to jump to the statement after the one that raised the exception or to a procedure outside the . Unlike other languages, uncaught exceptions may not terminate the program and the program can proceed unaffected.


title: COBOL

text: File I/O is handled by the self-describing , , , and statements along with a further three: , which updates a record; , which selects subsequent records to access by finding a record with a certain key; and , which releases a lock on the last record accessed.


title: COBOL

text: Files and tables are sorted using and the verb merges and sorts files. The verb provides records to sort and retrieves sorted records in order.


title: COBOL

text: Some statements, such as and , may themselves contain statements. Such statements may be terminated in two ways: by a period (""), which terminates "all" unterminated statements contained, or by a scope terminator, which terminates the nearest matching open statement.


title: COBOL

text: Nested statements terminated with a period are a common source of bugs. For example, examine the following code:


title: COBOL

text: Here, the intent is to display codice_19 and codice_20 if condition codice_21 is true. However, codice_20 will be displayed whatever the value of codice_21 because the codice_1 statement is terminated by an erroneous period after .


title: COBOL

text: Another bug is a result of the dangling else problem, when two codice_1 statements can associate with an codice_26.


title: COBOL

text: In the above fragment, the codice_26 associates with the    statement instead of the    statement, causing a bug. Prior to the introduction of explicit scope terminators, preventing it would require    to be placed after the inner codice_1.


title: COBOL

text: The original (1959) COBOL specification supported the infamous    statement, for which many compilers generated self-modifying code. codice_29 and codice_30 are procedure labels, and the single    statement in procedure codice_29 executed after such an statement means    instead. Many compilers still support it,


title: COBOL

text: The statement was poorly regarded because it undermined "locality of context" and made a program's overall logic difficult to comprehend. As textbook author Daniel D. McCracken wrote in 1976, when "someone who has never seen the program before must become familiar with it as quickly as possible, sometimes under critical time pressure because the program has failed ... the sight of a GO TO statement in a paragraph by itself, signaling as it does the existence of an unknown number of ALTER statements at unknown locations throughout the program, strikes fear in the heart of the bravest programmer."


title: COBOL

text: When the – now famous – "Hello, World!" program example in "The C Programming Language" was first published in 1978 a similar mainframe COBOL program sample would have been submitted through JCL, very likely using a punch card reader, and 80 column punch cards. The listing below, "with an empty DATA DIVISION", was tested using Linux and the System/370 Hercules emulator running MVS 3.8J. The JCL, written in July 2015, is derived from the Hercules tutorials and samples hosted by Jay Moseley. In keeping with COBOL programming of that era, HELLO, WORLD is displayed in all capital letters.


title: COBOL

text: "Line 10 of the console listing above is highlighted for effect, the highlighting is not part of the actual console output".


title: COBOL

text: The associated compiler listing generated over four pages of technical detail and job run information, for the single line of output from the 14 lines of COBOL.


title: COBOL

text: In the 1970s, adoption of the structured programming paradigm was becoming increasingly widespread. Edsger Dijkstra, a preeminent computer scientist, wrote a letter to the editor of Communications of the ACM, published 1975 entitled "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", in which he was critical of COBOL and several other contemporary languages; remarking that "the use of COBOL cripples the mind".


title: COBOL

text: In a published dissent to Dijkstra's remarks, the computer scientist Howard E. Tompkins claimed that unstructured COBOL tended to be "written by programmers that have never had the benefit of structured COBOL taught well", arguing that the issue was primarily one of training.


title: COBOL

text: One cause of spaghetti code was the statement. Attempts to remove s from COBOL code, however, resulted in convoluted programs and reduced code quality. s were largely replaced by the statement and procedures, which promoted modular programming and gave easy access to powerful looping facilities. However, could be used only with procedures so loop bodies were not located where they were used, making programs harder to understand.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL code could be modularized only through procedures, which were found to be inadequate for large systems. It was impossible to restrict access to data, meaning a procedure could access and modify data item. Furthermore, there was no way to pass parameters to a procedure, an omission Jean Sammet regarded as the committee's biggest mistake.


title: COBOL

text: Another complication stemmed from the ability to a specified sequence of procedures. This meant that control could jump to and return from any procedure, creating convoluted control flow and permitting a programmer to break the single-entry single-exit rule.


title: COBOL

text: This situation improved as COBOL adopted more features. COBOL-74 added subprograms, giving programmers the ability to control the data each part of the program could access. COBOL-85 then added nested subprograms, allowing programmers to hide subprograms. Further control over data and code came in 2002 when object-oriented programming, user-defined functions and user-defined data types were included.


title: COBOL

text: Nevertheless, much important legacy COBOL software uses unstructured code, which has become unmaintainable. It can be too risky and costly to modify even a simple section of code, since it may be used from unknown places in unknown ways.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL was intended to be a highly portable, "common" language. However, by 2001, around 300 dialects had been created. One source of dialects was the standard itself: the 1974 standard was composed of one mandatory nucleus and eleven functional modules, each containing two or three levels of support. This permitted 104,976 official variants.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL-85 was not fully compatible with earlier versions, and its development was controversial. Joseph T. Brophy, the CIO of Travelers Insurance, spearheaded an effort to inform COBOL users of the heavy reprogramming costs of implementing the new standard. As a result, the ANSI COBOL Committee received more than 2,200 letters from the public, mostly negative, requiring the committee to make changes. On the other hand, conversion to COBOL-85 was thought to increase productivity in future years, thus justifying the conversion costs.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL syntax has often been criticized for its verbosity. Proponents say that this was intended to make the code self-documenting, easing program maintenance. COBOL was also intended to be easy for programmers to learn and use, while still being readable to non-technical staff such as managers.


title: COBOL

text: The desire for readability led to the use of English-like syntax and structural elements, such as nouns, verbs, clauses, sentences, sections, and divisions. Yet by 1984, maintainers of COBOL programs were struggling to deal with "incomprehensible" code and the main changes in COBOL-85 were there to help ease maintenance.


title: COBOL

text: Jean Sammet, a short-range committee member, noted that "little attempt was made to cater to the professional programmer, in fact people whose main interest is programming tend to be very unhappy with COBOL" which she attributed to COBOL's verbose syntax.


title: COBOL

text: The COBOL community has always been isolated from the computer science community. No academic computer scientists participated in the design of COBOL: all of those on the committee came from commerce or government. Computer scientists at the time were more interested in fields like numerical analysis, physics and system programming than the commercial file-processing problems which COBOL development tackled. Jean Sammet attributed COBOL's unpopularity to an initial "snob reaction" due to its inelegance, the lack of influential computer scientists participating in the design process and a disdain for business data processing. The COBOL specification used a unique "notation", or metalanguage, to define its syntax rather than the new Backus–Naur form which the committee did not know of. This resulted in "severe" criticism.


title: COBOL

text: Later, COBOL suffered from a shortage of material covering it; it took until 1963 for introductory books to appear (with Richard D. Irwin publishing a college textbook on COBOL in 1966). By 1985, there were twice as many books on FORTRAN and four times as many on BASIC as on COBOL in the Library of Congress. University professors taught more modern, state-of-the-art languages and techniques instead of COBOL which was said to have a "trade school" nature. Donald Nelson, chair of the CODASYL COBOL committee, said in 1984 that "academics ... hate COBOL" and that computer science graduates "had 'hate COBOL' drilled into them".


title: COBOL

text: By the mid-1980s, there was also significant condescension towards COBOL in the business community from users of other languages, for example FORTRAN or assembler, implying that COBOL could be used only for non-challenging problems.


title: COBOL

text: In 2003, COBOL featured in 80% of information systems curricula in the United States, the same proportion as C++ and Java. Ten years later, a poll by Micro Focus found that 20% of university academics thought COBOL was outdated or dead and that 55% believed their students thought COBOL was outdated or dead. The same poll also found that only 25% of academics had COBOL programming on their curriculum even though 60% thought they should teach it.


title: COBOL

text: Doubts have been raised about the competence of the standards committee. Short-term committee member Howard Bromberg said that there was "little control" over the development process and that it was "plagued by discontinuity of personnel and ... a lack of talent." Jean Sammet and Jerome Garfunkel also noted that changes introduced in one revision of the standard would be reverted in the next, due as much to changes in who was in the standard committee as to objective evidence.


title: COBOL

text: To combat delays, the standard committee allowed the creation of optional addenda which would add features more quickly than by waiting for the next standard revision. However, some committee members raised concerns about incompatibilities between implementations and frequent modifications of the standard.


title: COBOL

text: COBOL's data structures influenced subsequent programming languages. Its record and file structure influenced PL/I and Pascal, and the codice_32 clause was a predecessor to Pascal's variant records. Explicit file structure definitions preceded the development of database management systems and aggregated data was a significant advance over Fortran's arrays.


title: COBOL

text: The focus on portability and standardization meant programs written in COBOL could be portable and facilitated the spread of the language to a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. Additionally, the well-defined division structure restricts the definition of external references to the Environment Division, which simplifies platform changes in particular.


title: Asherah

text: Asherah (; ; ; ; Qatabanian: ') in ancient Semitic religion, is a fertility goddess who appears in a number of ancient sources. She also appears in Hittite writings as "Ašerdu(s)" or "Ašertu(s)" (). Her name is sometimes rendered Athirat in the context of her cult at Ugarit.


title: Asherah

text: Asherah is identified as the consort of the Sumerian god Anu, and Ugaritic ʾEl, the oldest deities of their respective pantheons. This role gave her a similarly high rank in the Ugaritic pantheon. Deuteronomy 12 has Yahweh commanding the destruction of her shrines so as to maintain purity of his worship. The name "Dione", which like ʾElat" means "goddess", is clearly associated with Asherah in the "Phoenician History" of Sanchuniathon, because the same common epithet (ʾElat") of "the Goddess par excellence" was used to describe her at Ugarit. The Book of Jeremiah, written circa 628 BC, possibly refers to Asherah when it uses the title "queen of heaven" in Jeremiah 7:16–18 and Jeremiah 44:17–19, 25.


title: Asherah

text: In Ugaritic texts, Asherah appears as "ʾAṯirat" (Ugaritic: 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚), anglicised Athirat. Sources from before 1200 BC almost always credit Athirat with her full title "rbt ʾṯrt ym" (or "rbt ʾṯrt"). The phrase occurs 12 times in the Baʿal Epic alone. The title "rbt" is most often vocalised as "rabītu", although "rabat" and "rabīti" are sometimes used by scholars. Apparently of Akkadian origin, "rabītu" means "lady" (literally "female great one"). She appears to champion her son, Yam, god of the sea, in his struggle against Baʾal. Yam's ascription as "god of" the sea in the English translation is somewhat misleading, however, as "yām" () is a common western Semitic root that literally means "sea". Consequently, one should understand Yam to be the deified sea itself rather than a deity who holds dominion over it. Athirat's title can therefore been translated as "Lady ʾAṯirat of the Sea", alternatively, "she who walks on the sea", or even "the Great Lady-who-tramples-Yam". A suggestion in 2010 by a scholar is that the name Athirat might be derived from a passive participle form, referring to the "one followed by (the gods)", that is, "pro-genitress or originatress", which would correspond to Asherah's image as the "mother of the gods" in Ugaritic literature.


title: Asherah

text: Certain translators and commentators theorise that Athirat's name is from the Ugaritic root "ʾaṯr", "to stride", a cognate of the Hebrew root "ʾšr", of the same meaning. Alternative translations of her title have been tendered that follow this suggested etymology, such as "she who treads on the sea dragon", or "she who treads on Tyre"—the former of which appears to be an attempt to grant the Ugaritic texts a type of Chaoskampf (struggle against Chaos). A more recent analysis of this epithet has resulted in the proposition of a radically different translation, namely "Lady Asherah of the day", or, more simply, "Lady Day". The common Semitic root "ywm" (for reconstructed Proto-Semitic *"yawm-"), from which derives (), meaning "day", appears in several instances in the Masoretic Texts with the second-root letter ("-w-") having been dropped, and in a select few cases, replaced with an A-class vowel of the Niqqud, resulting in the word becoming "y(a)m". Such occurrences, as well as the fact that the plural, "days", can be read as both "yōmîm" and "yāmîm" (), gives credence to this alternate translation.


title: Asherah

text: Another primary epithet of Athirat was "qnyt ʾilm", which may be translated as "the creatrix of the deities". In those texts, Athirat is the consort of the god ʾEl; there is one reference to the 70 sons of Athirat, presumably the same as the 70 sons of ʾEl. Among the Hittites this goddess appears as "Ašerdu(s)" or "Ašertu(s)", the consort of Elkunirsa ("El, the Creator of Earth") and mother of either 77 or 88 sons. Within the Amarna letters is found reference to a king of the Amorites by the name of Abdi-Ashirta, "servant of Asherah".


title: Asherah

text: In the Ugaritic sources she is also called "ʾElat", "goddess", the feminine form of "ʾEl" (compare "Allāt"); she is also called "Qodeš", "holiness", in these sources.


title: Asherah

text: In Akkadian texts, Asherah appears as "Aširatu"; though her exact role in the pantheon is unclear; as a separate goddess, "Antu", was considered the wife of Anu, the god of Heaven. In contrast, ʿAshtart is believed to be linked to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar who is sometimes portrayed as the daughter of Anu while in Ugaritic myth, ʿAshtart is one of the daughters of ʾEl, the West Semitic counterpart of Anu. Several Akkadian sources also preserve what are considered to be Amorite theophoric names which use Asherah—usually appearing as "Aširatu" or "Ašratu".


title: Asherah

text: Beginning during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, a Semitic goddess named Qetesh ("holiness", sometimes reconstructed as Qudshu) appears prominently. That dynasty follows expulsion of occupying foreigners from an intermediary period. Some think this deity is Athirat/Ashratu under her Ugaritic name. This Qetesh seems not to be either ʿAshtart or ʿAnat as both those goddesses appear under their own names and with quite different iconography, yet is called "Qudshu-Astarte-Anat" in at least one pictorial representation, aptly named the "Triple Goddess Stone".


title: Asherah

text: In the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods in Egypt, however, there was a strong tendency of syncretism toward goddesses, and Athirat/Ashratum then seems to have disappeared, at least as a prominent goddess under a recognizable name.


title: Asherah

text: Religious scholar Saul M. Olyan (author of "Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel") calls the representation on the Qudshu-Astarte-Anat plaque "a triple-fusion hypostasis", and considers Qudshu to be an epithet of Athirat by a process of elimination, for Astarte and Anat appear after Qudshu in the inscription.


title: Asherah

text: Between the tenth century BC and the beginning of their Babylonian exile in 586 BC, polytheism was normal throughout Israel. Worship solely of Yahweh became established only after the exile, and possibly, only as late as the time of the Maccabees (2nd century BC). That is when monotheism became universal among the Jews. Some biblical scholars believe that Asherah at one time was worshipped as the consort of Yahweh, the national god of Israel.


title: Asherah

text: There are references to the worship of numerous deities throughout the Books of Kings: Solomon builds temples to many deities and Josiah is reported as cutting down the statues of Asherah in the temple Solomon built for Yahweh (2 Kings 23:14). Josiah's grandfather Manasseh had erected one such statue (2 Kings 21:7).


title: Asherah

text: Further evidence for Asherah-worship includes, for example, an eighth-century BC combination of iconography and inscriptions discovered at Kuntillet Ajrud in the northern Sinai desert where a storage jar shows three anthropomorphic figures and several inscriptions. The inscriptions found refer not only to Yahweh but to ʾEl and Baʿal, and two include the phrases "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" and "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah." The references to Samaria (capital of the kingdom of Israel) and Teman (in Edom) suggest that Yahweh had a temple in Samaria, while raising questions about the relationship between Yahweh and Kaus, the national god of Edom. The "asherah" in question is most likely a cultic object, although the relationship of this object (a stylised tree perhaps) to Yahweh and to the goddess Asherah, consort of ʾEl, is unclear. It has been suggested that the Israelites may have considered Asherah as the consort of Baʿal, due to the anti-Asherah ideology that was influenced by the Deuteronomistic Historians, at the later period of the kingdom. Also, it has been suggested by several scholars that there is a relationship between the position of the "gəḇīrā" in the royal court and the worship (orthodox or not) of Asherah. In a potsherd inscription of blessings from "Yahweh and his Asherah", there appears a cow feeding its calf. Numerous Canaanite amulets depict a woman wearing a bouffant wig similar to the Egyptian Hathor. If Asherah is then to be associated with Hathor/Qudshu, it can then be assumed that the cow is being referred to as Asherah.


title: Asherah

text: William Dever's book "Did God Have a Wife?" adduces further archaeological evidence—for instance, the many female figurines unearthed in ancient Israel, (known as "pillar-base figurines")—as supporting the view that during Israelite folk religion of the monarchical period, Asherah functioned as a goddess and a consort of Yahweh and was worshiped as the queen of heaven, for whose festival the Hebrews baked small cakes. Dever also points to the discovery of multiple shrines and temples within ancient Israel and Judah. The temple site at Arad is particularly interesting for the presence of two (possibly three) "massebot", standing stones representing the presence of deities. Although the identity of the deities associated with the "massebot" is uncertain, Yahweh and Asherah or Asherah and Baal remain strong candidates, as Dever notes: "The only goddess whose name is well attested in the Hebrew Bible (or in ancient Israel generally) is Asherah."