Asherah Alienated: A Gender-Discursive Analysis of

the Goddess and her Cult(s) in Ancient Israel

by

Benjamin R. Siegel

A Thesis Submitted inPartial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree ofMaster of Arts

in Religion, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies

atThe Claremont School of Theology

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ABBREVIATIONS

AfO Archiv für Orientsforschung

AOS American Oriental Series

ArOr Archiv Orientalni

BAR Biblical Archaeology Review

BZAW Beihefte zur Zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

DOT Dictionary of the Old Testament: Penteteuch

EB Encyclopædia Biblica

HSM Harvard Semitic Monographs (Missoula, Mont. AndAtlanta)

HTR Harvard Theological Review

IEJ Israel Exploration Journal

IMC Israel Museum Catalogue (Jerusalem)

JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JPS Jewish Publication Society

JSB Jewish Study Bible

JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

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JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplements

KAR Keilschrifttexte aus Assur religiosen Inhalts

KTU M. Bietrich, O. Loretz, and J. Sanmartin, DieKeitalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, 1: Transkription, AOAT 24/1(Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vlyun, 1976)

OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis

PR Peace Review

RB Revue Biblique (Paris)

SBL Studies in Biblical Literature

SBLMS Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series

SPSM Studia Pohl Series Major

TDOT Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament

UT C.H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook, AnOr 38 (Rome, 1965)

VT Vetus Testamentum

ZAW Zeitschrift für Althebraistik (Berlin)

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Prior to the documentary hypothesis,1 the dominant paradigm

in Biblical scholarship maintained that the Torah was dictated by

God to Moses on Mt. Sinai.2 The question of faith dictated that

of authorship. However, recent development in scholarship has

posited the model of an oral literary tradition written in

various stages by several scribal communities which received

final redaction sometime during the Second Temple period.3 The

Biblical authors and editors thereby projected their own

religious standards onto legendary history. Thanks to textual

scholarship and archaeological discoveries, Biblical scholars

have opened the door to a new interpretation based less on faith

than the pursuit of literary and historical truth. Through this

1 Advanced by Julius Wellhausen, the documentary hypothesis holds that biblical text was originally composed of separate yet parallel narratives which were aggregated and redacted by a number of editors or groups of editorsin varying period of Israel’s history. For Wellhausen’s argument, see Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Trans. by Black and Menzies. Cleveland, OH: WorldPublishing, 1957. For further reading, see Alt, A. Der Gott der Väter: Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der israelitischen Religion. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1929; Noth, M. The Deuteronomistic History. JSOT 15, 1991; Friedman, R.E. The Bible with Sources Revealed. San Francisco: Harper, 2003 --- Who Wrote the Bible?, 1987; Rendtdorff, R. The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch, JSOTSup 89, 1990; Blum, E. Studien zur Komposition des Pentateuch, 1990; Seters, J.V. Abraham in History and Tradition, 1975. Although I have certain misgivings about fully embracing the documentary hypothesis, I nonetheless recognize a certain Deuteronomistic discourse characterized by violent repulsion of competing syncretic or heterodox religious expressions.2 Deut. 31:9–12, 24.3 Cohen, Shaye J.D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2006, 11-12.

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interpretive lens, the Israelite religion emerges within the

context of the prevailing Canaanite cultural stratum.

The chance discovery of the Late Bronze Age Ugaritic

cultural wealth in the early 20th Century shed invaluable light

on the socio-cultural milieu in which Israelite religion evolved.

Many of the deities mentioned in the Ugaritic texts are those who

find disfavor in the eyes of the Hebrew Bible prophets, authors

and redactors. However, the prominence of Asherah,4 “Creatrix, or

Progenetrix, of the Gods,”5 questions the central monotheistic

ideal of ancient Judaism before and after the emergence and

legitimization of Deuteronomistic discourse.

By examining the evidence for the goddess Asherah in the

Hebrew Bible,6 relevant ancient Near Eastern texts, as well as

the archaeological record, I will present the case that Asherah

was a goddess whose cult existed in the land of Israel until her

veneration was eliminated from the orthodox religion as late as

4 In Ugaritic,’aṯrt ym, ’Aṯirat yammi, or 'Athirat of the Sea.' The name Athirat means “she who treads the sea.”5 Coogan, M. D. Stories From Ancient Canaan, 1978, 97.6 For the sake of brevity, this examination will be reduced to only the most significant evidence. More exhaustive examinations can be found in Binger, Tilde. Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament, JSOTSup 232, 1997; Day, John. Asherah In The Hebrew Bible And Northwest Semitic Literature. JBL 105:3, 1986; Hadley, J. M. The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess, 2000; Olyan, S.M. Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel. SBLMS 34, 1988.

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the 6th Century B.C.E. Although Judaism is commonly understood as

the first great monotheistic and aniconic religious expression,

the existence of a consort of El suggests that this

identification belongs to a later stage of evolution and

revolution in the history of Israelite religion. Judaism did not

develop in a vacuum, but rather in dialogue with rival religions.

Though marginalized by the dominant rhetoric of the text, the

Hebrew Bible nonetheless preserves the voices of those it seeks

to invalidate and malign.

Starting with Asherah as the focus, though not the center,

of my analysis of the textual tradition, I will examine the

dimensions of heterodox religion gendered by the Yahweh-alone

party. This will be accomplished by looking at the discourse

concerning apostasy/adultery in the Hebrew Bible, particularly as

it relates to the goddess Asherah, in correlation with the

gendered image of Israel as adulterous wife who has broken a

marriage covenant with YHWH. Using an intertextual approach, I

will demonstrate how the dominant theological tradition

consistently conflates the two rhetorical devices, thereby

producing a pornographic stereotype of cultic activities that

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fall outside of the legitimate theological view of the text. The

purpose of this parallel is the privileging of exclusive devotion

to Yahweh by feminizing, demonizing, and thoroughly dismissing

polytheistic religious practices and professional functionaries

who are identified as Judaism’s polar opposite: false, foreign

and feminine.

There are forty individual occurrences7 of the noun asherah

(or its plural form, asherim) in the Tanakh,8 referring either to

a deity or some kind of ritual object.9 The passages refer either

to a goddess, a living tree or a pole/pillar.10 The Mishnah

7 The majority of these references are examples of Deuteronomistic discursive expression. See Reed, 1949, 59-68; Yamashita, 1963, 125; Lamaire, 1977, 605-6;Olyan, 1988, 3-4.8Ex 34:13; Dt 7:5, 12:3, 16:21; Jg 3:7, 6:25, 6:26, 6:28, 6:30; I Ki. 14:15, 14:23, 15:13, 16:33, 18:19, II Ki. 13:5, 17:10, 17:16, 18:4, 21:3, 21:7, 23:4,23:6, 23:7, 23:14, 23:15; II Chron. 14:2, 15:16, 17:6, 19:3, 24:18, 31:1, 33:3, 33:19, 34:3, 34:4, 34:7; Isa. 17:8, 27:9; Jer. 17:2, and Mi. 5:13 (Pettey, 41).9 de Moor, J.C. הההה

.ʼashērāh in TDOT 1, 441-444 הההה10 The verbs describing actions upon the Asherah are krt, “to cut”: Ex. 3:413; Judg. Vi 25, 26, 28 and 30; II Ki. 18:4; and 22:14; gd’, “to cut down”: Deut. Vii 5; II Chron. Xiv 2; and xxxi 1; śrp, “to burn”: Deut. 12:3; (implied in Judg. Vi 26; II Ki. 23:6, 15; nṭ̔̔‘, “to plant” or “to establish: Deut. 16:21; śh,“to make”: I Ki. 14:15; 16:33; II Ki. 17:6; 21:3, 7; II Chron. 33:3; bnh, “to build”: I Ki. 14:23; ‘md, “to stand”: I Ki. 13:6, or “to set up” (Hiphil): II Chron. 33:19; nṣb, “to set up” (Hiphil): II Ki. 17:10; yṣ’, “to bring out” (Hiphil): II Ki. 23:6; dqq, “to make into dust” (Hiphil): II Ki. 23:6; and II Chron. 34:4; swr, “to take away” (Hiphil): II Chron. 17:6; b̔̔‘r, “to consume, burn remove” (Piel): II Chron. 19:3; ṭhr, “to purge” (Piel): II Chron. 34:4; šbr, “to break into pieces” (Piel): II Chron. 34:4; ntṣ, “ to pull or break down”: II Chron. 34:7; and ntš, “to pluck up”; Mi. v 13 (Hadley, 54-5).

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defines the term as a living tree worshipped as an idol.11

Asherah also appears in several biblical toponyms. Among these

are Ashtaroth12 and Ashteroth-Karnaim.13

Judges 3:7 refers to Israelites who “…ignored the Lord their

God and worshipped the Baals and the Asherahs.” The theme of

apostasy, Israel’s turning away from the covenant of Yahweh to

worship other deities14, is the most horrendous offense to the

Deuteronomistic historian. The Mosaic third Commandment in Ex.

20:4 prohibits the worship of any iconic representation “in the

heavens or on the earth or in the sea.” When reiterated in Ex.

34:13, the Israelites are instructed to abandon acceptance and

embrace fanaticism; to tear down the altars and asherim of “the

Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the

Hivites, and the Jebusites.”15 Deut. 12:29-31 forbids the worship

of all “other gods” while Deuteronomy 32:17 claims that the

foreign deities are in fact “no-gods.” This gloss exhibits a

11 See ‘Orlah 1:7, 8; Sukkah 3:1-3; ‘Abodah Zarah 3:7, 9, 10; Me’ilah 3:8. However, Larocca-Pitts cautions against assuming that all asherim were live trees (Larrocca-Pitts, 161-185).12 Ruled by the Amorite king Og. See Deut. 1:4.13 Gen. 14:5, Josh. 12:4.14 The most well known instance in the biblical tradition being that of the Golden Calf from Ex. 32. 15 Ex. 34:11.

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later version of Israelite theology, moving beyond monolatry into

true monotheism and with it, the intolerance of all other means

of religious expression in favor of exclusive Yahwism.

Gideon, the Judge of chapters six through eight, receives a

vision during his preparation of a ritual meal of kid and milk16

under a tree at Ophrah. After fulfilling the commandment of the

Lord to “pull down the altar of Baal which belongs to your

father, and cut down the asherah which is beside it,”17 Gideon is

threatened with execution by an angry mob. In his son’s defense,

Joash the Abiezrite pleads that the people should ignore his

son’s blasphemy by questioning its rationality. “If he is a god,

let him fight his own battles, since it is his altar that has

been torn down.”18 When Baal fails to smite Gideon, the mob

agrees. In time, Gideon became so popular that the Israelites

asked him to become their first monarch. Although he resists,

16 The injunction against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk is stated three separate times; in Ex. 23:19; 34:26 and Deut. 14:21. Maimonides was correct instating that this was an idolatrous ritual action (Moreh, 3:48).17 Judg. 6:25.18 Ibid., 6:31.

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Gideon fashions a golden ephod,19 a ritual object of uncertain

character which, ironically, became a new object of worship.

According to 1 Ki. 16:33, King Ahab deserves an exceptional

amount of contempt because, in addition to erecting an altar in

the Samarian temple of Baal, he “made an Asherah pole. Ahab did

more to vex the Lord, the God of Israel, than all the kings of

Israel who preceded him.” 1 Ki. 18:1 details a theological battle

on Mt. Carmel between Elijah and “the four hundred and fifty

prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who

eat at Jezebel’s table” (i.e. receive financial support from

Queen Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab). Yahweh’s prophet Elijah

wins the challenge of whose god can immolate a sacrifice on a wet

altar, and the prophets of Baal are put to death. When Hezekiah

forbade the practice of polytheistic worship,20 his son Manasseh

reinstated the tradition and “took the carved Asherah pole he had

made and put it in the temple.”21 2 Ki. 23:4 concerns the removal

19 Though the origin of the term is unclear, in this context the word probablyrefers to an idol (1 Sam. 21:9, 23:6), not the ritual garment (1 Sam. 2:18; 6:14; 22:18). See Cheyne, T.K. and J. S. Black. “Ephod” in EB vol. 2, 1306-9). Gideon’s request of the people’s gold to make the ephod recalls Aaron’s equally idolatrous construction of the Golden Calf, Ex. 32:4.20 See 2 Ki. 18:4. For a discussion on the Nehushtan, the “brazen serpent” of Moses from Num. 21:6, as a potential symbol of or associated with Asherah, seeAckerman, 1993, 385–401.21 2 Ki. 21:7.

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from Solomon’s temple of “all the objects made for Baal and

Asherah and all the host of heaven” by the order of the high

priest Hilkiah during the reign of King Josiah.

The practice of worshiping iconic representations of the

gods was a primary means of experiencing the presence of a

particular divinity in the ancient Near East.22 The prophets of

the Babylonian Exile blamed the destruction of the southern

kingdom on this illicit “foreign” custom. Ezekiel states the

cause of the Exile as the result of “harlotries with the nations,

for defiling yourself with their fetishes.”23 Prostitution and

marital infidelity are two of the most frequently employed

metaphorical images within prophetic literature in order to

demonstrate the accusation of Israel’s apostasy and idolatry.

Deutero-Isaiah fumes against the “sons of a sorceress, seed from

an adulterer and a harlot”24 whose lust burns “under every green

tree.”25 However, the prophetic book with perhaps the most

hostile – or at least the most thoroughly fleshed-out - opinion

of idol worship is Jeremiah. 22 Assmann, Jan. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, 2001, 40-47; Bottero, Jean. Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, 2001, 65.23 Ezek. 23:3024 Isa. 57:325 Ibid. 57:5

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Jer. 10:2-8 offers one of the most fully-formed anti-idol

and anti-foreign polemics in the prophetic books, stating that

“the statutes of the nations are vanity.”26 Their gods are mere

objects crafted from wood by human hands, but Yahweh is Lord of

the Universe eternally present and transcendent. This

delegitimizing strategy is advanced by the appearance of a female

divinity within Jeremiah’s anti-pagan discourse. Jer. 7:17-18 is

part of a prophetic oracle condemning Israel’s disobedience in

worshiping the Queen of Heaven and Jer. 44 centers around a

dialogue between the prophet and the exilic community in Egypt.

While the former is clearly meant to represent the dominant

textual view, the latter is presented as a confession of the same

pro-goddess theology and praxis previously condemned. The entire

community, men and women, respond to Jeremiah’s rhetoric in

apparent dismay:

“But we will certainly perform every word that is gone forthout of our mouth, to offer unto the queen of heaven, and topour out drink-offerings unto her, as we have done, we andour fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities ofJudah, and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then had weplenty of food, and were well, and saw no evil.”27

26 Jer. 10:3.27 Jer. 44:17, JPS.

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Although this theodicy maintains the traditional view of

punishment for turning from the deity, it nonetheless differs

dramatically in its divine object, citing a failure to observe

worship of the goddess as the root cause of national ills of

sword and famine.28 The fact that these Israelites attribute the

origin of their tradition to Judah and Jerusalem is compelling

evidence that their worship of this particular goddess29 was,

indeed, native and endemic to the land of the Israelites.

Regardless of the people’s sense of theological agency, Yahweh

and Jeremiah have the final word, effectively silencing the

Egyptian community by declaring that “hope for the future is

vested by implication and by process of elimination in the exiled

community in Babylon.”30 Jeremiah’s condemnation of the exiles in

28 Ibid., 44:18.29 Though unidentified in the text, John Day asserts that “there is nothing infirst-millennium BCE texts that singles out Asherah as 'Queen of Heaven' or associates her particularly with the heavens at all” (Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan, 146). Susan Ackerman contends that the deity in question is,in fact, a form of the Assyrian Astarte (Ackerman, Susan. “’And the Women Knead Dough’: The Worship of the Queen of Heaven in Sixth-Century Judah” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, 2006, 109-124). However, Mark Smith has arguedthat “Astarte may have been the bearer of some features earlier associated with Asherah” (The Early History of God, 129), particularly the title “Queen of Heaven.” 30 Keown, Gerald L., Pamela J. Scalise and Thomas G. Smother. Word Biblical Commentary Vol. 27: Jeremiah 26-52. Ed. David A. Hubbard et al. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000, 269.

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Egypt,31 and all religious ideologies and practices that fall

outside of his orthodox vision, presumes upon the legitimacy of

his claim to authority derived from Yahweh.32 This rhetorical and

textual authority depends upon a masculinized divine

representation and identification of a male worship community,

the intended effect of which is to discursively nullify the

claims of those who advocated these unacceptable aspects of

Israelite religion.

When the Phoenician city of Ugarit was discovered in

Northern Syria in 1928, the world learned of a late Bronze Age

port city that had been lost to the annals of history. Found in

the city’s immense archives were several stone tablets that

contained mythic texts dating from 1600 to 1200 B.C.E.33 These

writings would have been (and still are by many Biblical

scholars) considered notoriously Canaanite and certainly not

canonical. But unlike the God with whom Western civilization is

31 Jer. 44:1-14, 20-30.32 See Jer. 1:4-9. Jon L. Berquist contends that Jeremiah “may stress a connection or close relationship with Yahweh, thus claiming that the propheticword is actually Yahweh’s word. In this way, responsibility for the prophecy is placed on Yahweh… other prophets may be condemned for being aligned againstYahweh” (Berquist, 139).33 Cotrell, L. Ed. The Concise Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Hawthorne, 1960, 405-6.

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so familiar, this version of El in the Ugaritic literature is not

the sole divine power in creation.

In the mythic Baal cycle, Baal engages in combat against the

sea dragon Yam. When Yam is defeated, Asherah asks that Baal not

deliver the killing blow against her son, saying “Shame, thou

Rider on the Clouds! For Sir [Sea] is now our (common) captive,

the Ruler of the Stream(s) is our (common) captive, and [it was

against us all that] he went forth!”34 Later in the narrative,

the god travels with his sister/lover, the goddess Anath, to

request that Asherah beseech her husband El on Baal’s behalf.

Baal, one of Asherah’s seventy sons, is without a temple or any

other sort of permanent residence. When she enters El’s tent, he

asks “Why has Lady Asherah-of-the-Sea arrived? Why has the Mother

of the Gods come?” The supreme god, El/Yahweh, bears some of the

exact same names and titles as those of the God in the Hebrew

Bible. Throughout the text, El is described as the “King”35 of

the universe, and a lusty one. He asks Asherah “does the King’s

passion excite you? Does the love of the Bull arouse you?”

34 Gaster, 170.35 El’s identification with the bull reflects a certain degree of syncretism with Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Hittite iconography; El (הה in Hebrew) means “bull.”

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Asherah’s title of “Mother of the Gods” would seem to put her in

the position of El’s wife and parent of his children.

The poem of the “Gracious Gods” is a ceremonial text from

Ugarit concerning a sacred marriage between El, Anat and a third

goddess whose identity remains uncertain. The text describes the

fields as “like the field wherein the gods do dwell, where walk

the Mother and the Maid, the Blessed Damozel,” which Gaster

translates literally as “the field of Asherat and the Virgin,

i.e. Anat.” 36 The ritual then calls for a kid to be seethed in

milk, recalling Gideon’s sacrifice from Judges 6. Religious

ceremony gives way to ribald mythological drama as El woos and

impregnates two goddesses who birth the gracious gods, Dawn and

Sunset.

We now turn to some of the archaeological evidence for the

goddess Asherah and her symbolic repertoire. The site of Khirbet

el-Qom has yielded several inscriptions that may refer to the

goddess Asherah. One of the inscriptions found at that site,

labeled no. 3, dates to c. 750 BCE37 and translates

“Uriyahu the rich wrote it.

36 Gaster, 422.37 Lamaire, 1977, 603.

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Blessed be Uriyahu by YahwehFor from his enemies by his (YHWH’s) Asherah he (YHWH) hassaved him.

by Oniyahuby his AsherahAnd by his a[she]rah.”38

While Yahweh is clearly the deity who has blessed Uriyah, most

likely with the aforementioned prosperity, this action appears to

have been enacted via his (YHWH’s) Asherah. Tigay has explained

that in both the Mishnah and the Tosefta, the altar appears in

concert with Yahweh and is an object of honor unto itself.39 We

might interpret the Khirbet el-Qom inscription as evidence for

Yahweh’s assimilation of Asherah imagery into his own

representational inventory.

Similarly, the finds from Kuntillet ‘Arjud, roughly 50 km

south of Kadesh-barnea in northern Sinai, offer inscriptional and

pictorial clues to understanding the pairing of Yahweh and

Asherah. The site appears to have been a rest stop for travelers,

as evidenced by the diversity of peoples present at the site.40

Written in a Phoenician script, Inscription no. 1 from Pithos A

38 Hadley, 86.39 Tigay 1990, 218.40 For further reading, see Meshel,Z. Kuntillet ‘Arjud: A Religious Centre from the Time of theJudean Monarchy on the Border of Sinai, IMC 175, 1978.

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reads, “X says: say to Yehal[lel’el] and to Yo’asah and [to Z]: I

bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and by his asherah.”41 Pithos A

also bears an illustration of a stylized tree flanked by two

goats or antelopes above a lion. The goddess Qudshu, imported to

Egypt from the Levant, was commonly depicted standing atop a lion

and flanked by two gods.

Written on Pithos B, inscription no. 2 reads, “Amaryau says:

say to my lord: Is it well with you? Bless you by Yahweh of Teman

and by his Asherah. May he bless you and keep you and be with my

lord…”42Another inscription, this one on damaged plaster reads,

“They will celebrate unto/give to… asherah/Asherata.”43 While the

fragmentary nature of this inscription should cause us to examine

this inscription cautiously, other uses of the word

asherah/Asherata provide a consensus that this message refers

either to the goddess or the item associated with her veneration.

Small statues of nude female figures cupping their breasts

are widely distributed throughout the Levant44 as far back as the

41 Hadley, 121.42 Ibid., 125.43 Ibid., 130.44 These figures have been found at Tell Beit Mirsim, Gezer, Beth-shan and Megiddo. See Pritchard, J.B. Palestinian Figurines in Relation to Certain Goddesses Known through Literature. AOS 24, 1943.

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Chalcolithic period. Figurines dating from Middle Bronze to Iron

II portray a female figure, almost always nude, but always

topless and showed in a full frontal view, supporting her breasts

in her hands. They are crudely made and have mainly been found at

domestic sites, which Dever has suggested is evidence that these

figurines may be votive offerings and examples of a practice of

folk religion as opposed to the royal or administrative aspects

of a more orthodox religious system.45 They may represent a

Canaanite goddess with nurturing and fertility aspects, an

example of teraphim; small portable statues depicting a god or

goddess eventually forbidden by Josiah.46 They may merely be

statues of stylized, essentialized women and not a goddess.

Evidence for large scale statues of nude goddesses in the Ancient

Near East is scant.47

From Nahariya, a Middle Bronze Age site in the southern

Levant, we find a statue mold depicting a nude Canaanite goddess

with a pointed hat and two horns. Although the mold predates the

Ugaritic texts by anywhere between three and six hundred years,45 Dever, 46-50. Stavrakopoulou contends that the occurrence of a goddess in every echelon of Israelite society should cause us to question the distinctionbetween popular/official religion (Stavrakopoulou, 50).46 2 Kings 23:24.47 Excepting the life-sized nude of Ishtar from Ninevah . See Ornan, 31.

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it suggests a strong propensity toward iconographic goddess

worship. An ivory pyxis lid dating from the thirteenth century

B.C.E. and demonstrating Grecian influence was found at Minet el-

Beida, the port of Ugarit. It depicts a topless female figure,

her face shown in profile, seated upon what appears to be a

throne decorated in a polka dot pattern. She wears a Mycenaean-

style paneled skirt and a spiraled band on her head beneath

curled hair. In her hands, she holds up stalks of what may be

wheat or corn. She is flanked on both sides by goats recalling

the image on Pithos A from Kuntillet ‘Arjud as well as the

contemporaneous48 ewer found in a pit near the Fosse Temple at

Lachish, which depicts a tree flanked by two horned animals,

possibly goats or ibexes. The pitcher bears the inscription “A

gift: a lamb to my Lady 'Elat.” The sacrifice of a lamb evokes

those described in the Gideon narrative and the Ugaritic ritual.

The iconographic constellation of an enthroned (either on an

actual depiction of a throne or its zoomorphic equivalent, a

lion) nude goddess bearing plants in hand, flanked on both

sides, while Western Asiatic in origin, was co-opted by Egypt in

48 Sass, Benjamin, The Genesis of the Alphabet and its Development in the Second Millennium B.C.,Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988, 151.

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representations of the goddess Qudshu. The goddess is presented

as fully naked in full frontal view, wearing a Hathor wig,

holding a plant in each hand,49 flanked by the gods Min and

Resheph and standing atop a lion. The Winchester Stela,

considered to date from the nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty, is

unfortunately lost. However, the stela bore an inscription that

reads “Made for the necropolis official Neferhotep, true of

voice. Qudshu-Astarte-Anat.”50 Her name, Qdsh, not only means

“holiness” or “Holy One,” it is one of Asherah’s titles from the

Ugaritic texts, most likely derived from the Semitic root, ששש,

“holy, sacred, set apart, taboo.”

Representing a deity iconographically was one of the primary

means of religious experience in the Ancient Near Eastern world.

As a via negative, the commandment against idolatry attests to the

prevalence of this devotional practice. According to Hadley,

“Since all (or nearly all) the references to Asherah in the

49 Though sometimes, a staff or serpent is substituted for the plant which Pritchard has identified as a lotus. See The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954, note no. 470.50 Edwards, I.E.S., "A Relief of Qudshu-Astarte-Anath in the Winchester College Collection,” JNES 13 (1955) 49-51.

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Hebrew Bible appear to date to dtr51 or later, some scholars have

suggested that the Asherah was an invention of dtr to explain the

fall of the northern kingdom and to warn Judah against

apostasy.”52 The asherah is the symbol par excellence of apostasy and

idol worship in almost every occurrence of the term. However,

given our understanding from the Ugaritic texts of Asherah as an

indigenous Canaanite goddess, these condemnations seem to be

polemical against perceived foreign influence rather than actual

religious syncretism. As Mark S. Smith writes in The Early History of

God, worship of the goddess Asherah was not an uncommon or even

forbidden practice in ancient Israel, at least during the period

when the Ugaritic texts were written up to the reforms of Josiah.

Citing Saul M. Olyan, Smith suggests

“criticism of the goddess Asherah… was restricted to asingle quarter of Israelite society, namely, theDeuteronomistic tradition. From this limited base ofopposition, it might be inferred that many other quarters ofIsraelite society either accepted the asherah (afreestanding pole or tree regarded and venerated as thesymbol of the goddess) or at least did not oppose it.”53

51 I.e. the Deuteronomistic tradition. 52 Hadley, 57.53Ibid., 109.

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Martin Noth argued that much of the language and content of the

books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2

Kings were written no earlier than the mid-late 6th century B.C.

during the reign of certain theologically revolutionary

monarchs.54 Concerning the event on Mt. Carmel, only the four

hundred prophets of Baal are executed whereas the fate of the

prophets of Asherah has either been omitted or neglected

entirely, leading some scholars to suggest that 1 Ki. 18:19 is a

later gloss.55

According to II Ki. 22:8, these texts are not new additions

to the tradition but had simply been misplaced: during the time

of Josiah, “the high priest Hilkiah found a scroll of the

teaching in the House of the Lord.” Many of the textual

injunctions prohibited worship of divinities considered foreign,

especially Asherah. Whether this “found” scroll was unearthed

within the Temple of Jerusalem or a pseudepigraphic work,

claiming authority by declaring ancient authorship, is a matter

of debate. Nonetheless,

54 Refer to Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, 1943.55 Knoppers, G.N. “The Deuteronomist and the Deuteronomic Law of the King: A Reexamination of a Relationship.” ZAW 108:3, 329–46.

23

“the monarchs of Israel were the most guilty in toleratingand sometimes even importing deities and religious practicesallegedly alien to Yahwism….The monarchy was responsible forsome of the developments leading to the eventual emergenceof monotheism. The monarchy generally maintained a specialrelationship with Yahweh; Yahweh was the national god andpatron of the monarchy.”56

Worship of the goddess Asherah and her cultic symbol may

have been acceptable religious tradition and practice up to the

period of the United Monarchy and the succeeding religious

reforms of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah. Israel Finkelstein and Neil

Asher Silberman write in The Bible Unearthed that in the destruction

of Samaria, a city notorious in the Hebrew Bible for Ahab’s

polytheism, the Deuteronomistic authors saw the hand of God

acting in judgment.

“From the point of view of the Deuteronomistic historian theclimax of the story of the northern kingdom is… in thesummary that tells the story of Israel’s sins and God’sretribution. This theological climax is inserted in themiddle of the great drama, between the two calamities –immediately following the description of the capture ofSamaria and the deportation of the Israelites.”57

It appears the biblical writers, proponents of an exclusively

monotheistic theology, attributed the fall of Samaria and the

56 Smith, M.S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2002, 11.57 Finkelstein, I. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. 2001, 223-4.

24

dispossession of Israel to the practice of apostasy as

exemplified by the worship of gods other than Yahweh.

Even if those gods and goddesses forbidden by the

Deuteronomists were excluded from orthodox worship, the evidence

suggests that their prohibitions were a later development of

Israelite theology and not contemporaneous with the historical

and legendary figures about whom they wrote. As the Queen of

Heaven incident from Jeremiah suggests, Yahweh and his Asherah

were a matched set for a significant amount of time. In

discussing the reign of King Manesseh several decades before the

religious reforms of the Deuteronomists, Donald B. Redford

explains,

“in concert with the vast majority of kings before him, layin treating the temple in Jerusalem… as a royal chapelwherein, although Yahweh held primacy of place, guest cultsof other deities could be housed. There was nothing at allunusual about this by contemporary standards; but it illsuited the mind-set of the puritanical innovators of twogenerations later.”58

If Solomon’s temple functioned as a wedding chapel for the

hierogamy between Yahweh and Asherah, the Deuteronomists demanded

58 Redford, 437.

25

nothing short of a divorce. Dever posits in Did God Have a Wife? that

Hezekiah and Josiah

“attempted to purge Israelite religion of ‘Canaanite’practices, partly under the influence of the prophetic‘Yahweh-alone’ movement. Among their specific targets werethe high places and the ‘asherahs,’ the incense altars andthe other associated cult paraphernalia in the Temple.”59

Furthermore, according to Smith, “In the post-exilic period, the

old motifs associated with… Asherah in Canaanite tradition ceased

to refer to the cults of deities other than Yahweh.”60

By the time the Hebrew Bible emerged in its final form, it

reflected the ideal of a temple-centralized Israelite religion

and projected these standards of religious purity onto its past.

The biblical authors condemned many of the gods that were

worshipped alongside El/Yahweh, blaming these practices for

Israel’s conquest by other nations. Henotheistic Yahweh worship,

under external and internal pressures, became exceptionally

patriotic, spurning all forms of religious devotion and objects

of worship deemed foreign.

59 Dever, William G. Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel. 2005, 94. 60 Smith, 146. For a discussion on Yahweh’s appropriation of the characteristics of the goddess and feminine gendered imagery, see The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2002, 137-44.

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Despite inconclusive evidence that remains open to

interpretation, there is an ever-growing scholarly consensus that

the asherim were not only cultic paraphernalia,61 but a symbolic

representation of the goddess. The case for Asherah presents us

with a revolutionary line of inquiry in modern biblical

scholarship. As socio-political circumstances drove the Israelite

towards monotheism, this potentially native divinity became

vilified and, like the “other gods” worshipped in Solomon’s

Temple, cast out as corrupting foreign influences.

There can be little doubt that theopolitical polemics in the

literature of ancient Israel have – at least in part - their

genesis in geopolitical conflicts. Both the Assyrian and

Babylonian exiles left a lasting impression on the religious

thinking of ancient Israel. Attempting to understand why their

deity would allow these tragedies to occur, the view arose that

Israel and Judah were punished for violating an exclusive

covenant with Yahweh. Perhaps the most pervasive discursive

representation of the apostasy accusation is the image of the

nation as an adulterous wife to represent the national sin of

61 “Whatever an asherah is, Yahweh had one!” (Lemaire, 1984, 42) See also Larocca-Pitts, 2001, 161-204.

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apostasy. The text portrays cultic behaviors and individuals as

those who have whored after foreign deities. Interpretations of

the Hebrew Bible assign a predominantly sexual character to

religious activities occurring beyond the geographical and

ideological precincts of Yahweh’s Holy Mount Zion, the city of

Jerusalem.

However, these assumptions are probably more proscriptive

than descriptive and the MT as well as archaeological and

critical biblical scholarship suggests that the diversity of

religious practices in ancient Israel force us to reconsider the

text’s own claims to socio-religious authority. The notion that

acceptance of more complex and pluralistic religious attitudes

than the dominant voice of the text propagates was itself the

norm in ancient Israel has gained serious ground in recent

decades.62 Because “’false” worship is frequently structured

along a strict gender binary that also intersects with a strict

insider/outsider dichotomy, the understanding that Asherah was a

deity with devotees within Israel and Judah forces interpreters

62 For an excellent treatment on this subject, see Zevit, Z. The Religions of AncientIsrael: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches. 2001, 537-538.

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to evaluate the polemics against apostasy from the position of

Feminist biblical criticism.

Interpreters of the Hebrew Bible tend to approach the

religions of ancient Israel with a pre-existing value judgment,

favoring the sort of exclusive universal monotheism advocated in

the text itself as the pinnacle of moral progress while seeing

Canaanite polytheism as primitive, vile and immoral nature

worship characterized by ritualistic sexual activities. John

Bright holds that

“Canaanite religion… was, in fact, an extraordinarily debasingform of paganism, specifically of the fertility cult… As inall such religions, numerous debasing practices, including sacredprostitution, homosexuality, and various orgiastic rites, wereprevalent. It was the sort of religion with which Israel,however much she might borrow of the culture of Canaan,could never with good conscience make peace.”63

Such homogenizing, unsubstantiated claims about the broad,

indistinct category of “Canaanite religion” potentially

misrepresent these religions by accepting the literary portrayal

the Bible presents as genuine historical anthropology instead of

delegitimizing anti-Canaanite discourse. By refusing to

interrogate the issue of cultural representation, scholars

63 Bright, 118-119, emphasis mine.

29

uncritically accept the textual portrayal of these practices,

legitimizing the dominant theological perspective and justifying

the rhetorical and physical violence advocated therein.

Commentators’ view of women in these “deviant” rites reveals

their own heterosexist assumptions about women in religious

communities, presuming that any activity in which women engage in

within a cultic context categorically demands female sexual

performance. This conjecture may be identified as a fallacy of

biological determinism in regards to women’s participation in the

religious sphere. The bias of malestream64 scholarship must be

challenged in order to hear not only what the text says, but why

it may choose to frame its message in such a way. By viewing the

Hebrew Bible’s treatment of what it positions as “other,” as well

as biblical interpreters who side with the bias of the text, we

may attempt to see past the violently chauvinistic viewpoint of

the Hebrew Bible and listen to the voices of those the normative

tradition has attempted to silence. The cultic zonah, qodeshim and64 This term comes from Keefe, Alice A. Women’s Body and the Social Body in Hosea 1-2. JSOTSup 338, 36-65. Keefe, in discussing the marriage metaphor of Hosea 1-2, criticizes the both pornographic gaze of masculinist scholarship that assumes sexual acts to be the core of women’s religious activities in Canannitish contexts, as well as the value reversal made by feminist scholars who accept the sexualized vision of Israelite polytheism. It is in this sense that I consider the dominant interpretation to be “malestream.”

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qadeshot, the women who weave batim for Asherah, and her

abominable asherim – while certainly suggesting the presence of a

female deity in the lives of ancient Israelites – hint at a

matrix of religious activity that transcends the simple binary

gendering the text wishes to foster.

Certain terms are pertinent to understanding the picture of

apostasy as is expressed by the dominant voice of the biblical

text. The triliteral root ההה features prominently in the MT ofthe Hebrew Bible. The verbal form means “to commit fornication,

be a harlot/prostitute” in biblical Hebrew as well as the Aramaic

dialects, including Jewish Aramaic, Samaritan, Syriac and

Mandean.65 When the noun zanah is used literally, it describes

sexual acts that either transgress or operate outside of

covenantal marriage arrangements. Deut. 22:21 advocates execution

by stoning for any and all female parties who are found guilty of

adultery against their husband. The noun form zonah, frequently

translated as “prostitute,” “whore,” or “harlot,” is applied to

65 Erlandsson, Seth. ההה zānāh TDOT vol. 4, 1977, 99.

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several female characters within the textual tradition.66

However, the figurative meaning of the term must be understood as

the rhetorical and theological focus of its usage. The dominant

voice of the text effectively others those who act a zonah,

positioning their religiosity far beyond the outer limits of

acceptable social behavior and personal belief.

Because Israel’s relationship with Yahweh is often

conceptualized in covenant terminology similar and/or parallel to

that of marriage, “apostasy” is as much a legitimate translation

of the verbal form as adultery. Exod. 34:15-16 warns its

presumably male Israelite audience making covenants with non-

Israelites so that if the Israelites take from them wives for

their sons, the daughters won’t veheeznu et-baneicha acharei eloheyhen.67

While it can sometimes be difficult to discern whether the text

is referring to the act of illicit sexual or religious relations,

the conception fusion serves not only to reinforce the husband’s

exclusive ownership of his wives but also the text’s opinion of

Yahweh as the only deity whom Israelites may worship.

66 In particular, Tamar (Gen. 38), Rahab (Josh. 2:1; 6:17, 22, 25) and Jephthah’s mother (Judg. 11:1) all receive the title of zonah.67 “…cause your sons to prostitute themselves after their gods” (Exodus 34:16c).

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Despite the rhetorical significance of the term zonah, many

translators and interpreters of the Hebrew Bible tend to gloss

over the religious dimension in their understanding of any woman

identified as such unequivocally selling the sexual use of her

body for profit. For instance, Tamar has customarily been

understood to disguise herself as a prostitute in order to

conceive a child by her step-father Judah.68 Not only is this

story peculiar because it interrupts the progression of the

Joseph narrative for an entire chapter, but because Tamar’s

actions do not step in line with what scholarship knows about

prostitutes in the ancient Near East. Although Tamar disguises

herself and dons a veil in Gen. 38:14, an Assyrian legal text

from the thirteenth century B.C.E. forbids prostitutes from

wearing the veil but requires it for women of an elevated

economic or social status.69

The range of meaning for verbs in Genesis 38 suggests a

certain degree of wordplay. If the author wished to be clear that

Judah approached the costumed Tamar for sex, we might expect him

68 Gen. 38:14-30.69 Keddie, Nikki R. and Beth Baron. Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender. 1991, 3.

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to request that he could or “sleep/lay” with her,70 or even הההה

utilize a more common colloquialism for sexual intimacy, or ההה “know.”71 However, avoh elayich72 can mean “come into you” as well as

“come to you.” While the implication is clearly sexual in the

context of the narrative, can ההה also be used to suggest

entering into religious service73 or sacred space.74 That Tamar

asks “what will you give me”75 might be interpreted in religious

terms as is also used to mean “offer (as a (”to give“) ההה

sacrifice).”76 Perhaps the most unusual verb associated with

Tamar’s performance as zonah Judah’s command that she be

“burned,” This does not correspond with the punishment by .הההה

stoning laid out in Deut. 22:21. However, Lev. 21:9 allows for

the daughter of a priest who has polluted herself by acting as a

zonah is to be ba’esh teesasref - burned with fire. This may explain

the fate from which Tamar was saved, as immolating persons,

70 For example, David’s rape of Bathesheba in 2 Sam. 11:14.71 Adam “knows” Eve and from this union Cain is born; Gen. 4:1.72 Gen. 38:16b.73 Deut. 22:3.74 Ex. 28:29.75 Gen. 3816e.76 Ex. 30:14; Num. 3:9.

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places and objects associated with non-exclusively Yahwistic

religion is an act lauded by the dominant voice of the Bible.77

Although she “plays the zonah,” Tamar does so to fulfill the law

of Levirate marriage, seemingly to justify her unorthodox actions

for their support of Judah’s patrilineal kinship group. While

some scholars see Tamar’s actions as those of a temple prostitute

based on comparisons with Mesopotamian data,78 this

interpretation relies on an a priori assumption that such is the

entire meaning of zonah.

Another term intimately related to and used interchangeably

with the concept of is ההה the verbal root ששהה . Verbal,

adjectival, substantive and proper noun derivatives of this root

are demonstrated in all Semitic languages, though the original

meaning appears “irretrievable.”79 In biblical Hebrew, ששהה hasthe meaning of “holy, sacred, set apart, taboo.” To appreciate

the far-reaching applicability of this term, we must take into

77 Especially the case of Josiah in 2 Ki. 23:4-20. 78 Most notably Astour, Michael C. Tamar the Hierodule: An Essay in the Method of Vestigial Motifs. JBL, 1966, 185-196. However, as we will see, this theory cannot stand up to scrutiny.79 Kornfeld, Walter. הההה qdš in TDOT vol. 12. 1977, 526.

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account some of the more frequent ways in which it is used

semantically. The term functions as a toponym,80 a designation

of sacred space,81 the Aaronid priesthood,82 Mount Zion,83 the

Jerusalem temple including the qodesh qodashim (Holy of Holies),84

Israelites who keep the covenant with Yahweh,85 and ultimately

Yahweh himself.86 Further, sanctity is transferable category,

contagious to other objects and persons,87 and thus necessitates

taking the proper precautions in order to prevent death by

holiness.88

In its noun form, qodesh/qedeshim (masc. sing./plur.) and

qadesshah/qadeshot (fem. sing./plur.) is striking for its

ideological remoteness from accepted religious orthodoxy. Though

poorly attested, male and female qdshm function in some Ugaritic

texts. The majority of Ugaritic lexicons translate the term as “a

class of priests.”89 Sometimes it describes a cultic singer who

80 Gen. 14:7; 16:14; 20:1.81 Ex. 3:5; Lev. 10:17; 14:13;82 Ex. 28:3, 41; 29:1, 33, 44; 30:30; Lev. 8:12, 30; 21:8.83 1 Ch. 6:34; Ps. 2:6; 3:5; 15:1; 43:3;48:2; 87:1; 99:9; Joel 2:1; 3:17.84 1 Ki. 7:50; 8:6, 8, 10; Ps. 79:185 Deut. 7:6; 26:19; Isa. 62:1286 Josh. 24:19; Isa. 40:25; Mal. 2:11.87 Ex. 29:36-37; 40:9; Lev. 8:10; Num. 7:1.88 Num. 4:19-20.89 Gordon, Cyrus H. UT Gloss. no. 2210; Aistleitner, J. Worterbuch der Ugaritischen Sprache. 1963, no. 2393.

36

performs during sacrificial rituals.90 Administrative texts from

Ras Shamra tally the offerings of qdshm along with those of

another class of priests, khnm.91 Qedeshim were also allowed by

law to marry, have children, and bequeath their title and status

to their heirs,92 demonstrated by a feminine qdst in a clan name

appearing in the alphabetical texts as bn.qdst.93

There is attestation of a so-called qadistu/qassatu/qasdatu

woman with certain sacerdotal functions in Akkadian texts

starting during the Old Assyrian period.94 However, we must note

that there is no masculine noun equivalent derived from the

Akkadian root qds, probably because the religious structures of

ancient Mesopotamia had “gender-differentiated ecclesiastical

role specialization.”95 During the Isin-Larsa period, King Sin-

iddinam essentially called his enemies uncivilized for failing to

inaugurate qadistu-women in the sanctuaries of the deities.96

90 KTU 1.112 = Ugaritica VII pp. 21-25, RS 24.256.91 UT 63:3 (= CTA 77).92 MRS 6 140ff. RS 16.132.7.93 UT 400 = CTA 113 v. 11; UT 2163. See also Grondahl, Frauke. Die Personnamen der Texte aus Ugarit. SPSM 1, 1967, 371; 348; 407.94 Hirsch, Hans. Untersuchungen zur altassyrischen Religion. AfO.Beih. 13/14, 1972, 58; Menzel, Brigitte. Assyrische Tempel. SPSM 10, 1981, 262.95 Westenholz, Joan G. “Tamar, Qědēša, Qadištu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia” in HTR 82:3, 1989, 254.96 Hallo, William W. “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa. II. The Appeal to UTU,” in Zikir Sumim, Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, 1982, 107-124.

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Though infrequent in later Babylonian writings, a Middle

Babylonian text mentions a qadistu who is also a mother.97 Standard

Babylonian texts paint a portrait of the qadistu-woman who

performed a purifying ritual during birth,98 but who was also

grouped together with practitioners of witchcraft99 and who

participated in the ritual consumption of sacrificial meals.100

Joan G. Westenholz lays particular blame on the Greek

historian Herodotus for overly sexualizing the female religious

functionaries of Mesopotamia, charging the classical author with

intellectual colonialism by asserting Mesopotamian authors failed

to understand their own religious culture, traditions, and

history.101 She argues that it is “the Greeks and their

denigration of the female sex and of barbarians that caused them

to lump together the negative attributes of both groups in their

description of Babylonian cultic rites.”102 Considering that

substantial doubts have been issued against Herodotus and his

97 Clay, Albert T. Documents from the Temple Archive of Nippur Dated in the Reigns of the Cassite Rulers. 1912, 122.22.98 KAR 321.7.99 Rollin, Sue. “Women and Witchcraft in Ancient Assyria,” 1983, 34-45.100 See Menzel, Assyrische Tempel, SPSM 102, T2-T4.101 Westenholz, 263.102 Ibid., 265.

38

methodology,103 we have no choice but to reassess the impact his

prejudices have had upon ancient Near Eastern scholarship.

Furthermore, recognition that neither the Ugaritic qadeshah nor

the Mesopotamian Qadistu-woman had any erotic occupation as a

temple prostitute may no longer allow for similar arguments

concerning the qadeshot identified in the Hebrew Bible. The

translation of qadeshah as “sacred prostitute” must be

reconsidered given the lack of “convincing evidence for the

existence of cultic prostitution either in the ancient Near East

or in Israel.”104 As Tilde Binger argues, the textual occurrence

of qodeshim and qadeshot most likely represent

“…priests in the ‘Canaanite’ cult, that is, the non-Yahwistor not-exclusively-Yahwist cult that the Deuteronomists wereopposing. Since all not-exclusively-Yahwist cult was‘Canaanite’ and equaled whoring with ‘foreign’ gods… ‘holyprostitution’ need not refer to a sexual act, but couldrefer to association with other gods than Yahweh.”105

Like zonah, many translators presume an essentially sexual

quality to the cultic role of the qodeshim and qadeshot. The MT

103See Baumgartner, William. “Herodots babylonische und assyrische Nachrichten,” in ArOr 18, 1950, 69-106; Ravn, Otto E. Herotodus’ Description of Babylon, 1942.104 Marsman, Hennie J. Women in Ugarit & Israel: Their Social and Religion Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East. 2003, 548.105 Binger, Tilde. Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament. JSOTSup 232, 1997, 120.

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employs the use of the terms qodesh/qedeshah and qedeshim/qadeshot

sparingly. Hirah the Adullamite uses qashesha instead of zonah

while searching Ennaim for Tamar in order to fulfill the vow made

with Judah.106 Because Hebrew syntax requires that groups of mixed

gender be identified in the masculine plural, it is possible to

understand qedeshim in this light. Therefore, unless

categorically indicated, we could presume that the plural

masculine noun form may designate female practitioners along with

their male counterparts. Clearly, the text has a strong aversion

to both qedeshim and qadeshot. Deut. 23:18 forbids the daughters of

Israel from becoming a qedeshah, as well as any sons from

becoming a qadesh. JPS translates qedeshah as “harlot” and qadesh as

“sodomite,” while NIB offers “shrine-prostitute” for both gender-

specific terms. After describing the presence of bamot107 and

asherim on every hill and under every green tree,108 1 Ki. 14:15 is

part and parcel of the constellation of religious expressions detested

by the text, the sins that led Yahweh to condemn Jeroboam and his

106 Gen. 38:21.107 For a discussion of the cultic high places, see Fried, Lisbeth S. “The HighPlaces (Bamot) and the Reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah: An Archaeological Investigation” in JAOS 122:3, 2002, 437-465.108 1 Ki. 14:15.

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northern kingdom.109 However, Judah also did that which was evil in

Yahweh’s eyes: 1 Ki. 14:24 describes qadesh under the reign of

Rehoboam. Although the noun appears here in the masculine

singular construction, it is nonetheless “possible to understand

the Hebrew noun collectively… and also as including both men and

women.”110 John Grey presumes that ritual sexuality occurs in the

Asherah cult and in the job description of the qadesh, which he

defines as “ministers of rites of imitative magic designed to

promote fertility in nature,”111 reflecting the normative

malestream reading.

Asa removed112 these qedeshim in 1 Ki. 15:12. His next step

was to “remove”113 – from the verb turn“)ששש aside”), a

biblical euphemism for apostasy or improper worship - his mother,

Maaccah from the position of gebira because she made a statue of

109 Ibid., 14:7-15.110 Omanson, Roger L. and John E. Ellington. 1-2 Kings: Volume One. 2008, 467.111 Grey, John. I & II Kings: A Commentary. 1970, 343.ה 112

ההcause to go through, pass“ – ההה Hiph. Converted Imperfect 3ms. of - הההההההה

by, disappear.”ה113ההה ,take away“ – ההה Hiph. Converted Imperfect 3ms. w/ 3fs. suffix of - הההההההה

remove.” This usage is important because the verbal root ההה is often used to refer to turning away from Yahweh in apostasy. See Deut. 9:12; 11:6; 2 Ki 18:6.

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Asherah. Susan Ackerman has made a convincing argument that “we

should see the cultic functions undertaken by the Judean queen

mothers on behalf of the goddess Asherah as standing in close

relationship to the political responsibilities assigned to the

gebirot within their sons’ courts.”114 If the qedishim are indeed

related to the cult of Asherah, and the qedeshim/zonot form

covenants and establish ceremonial kinship bonds though

sacrifice,115 there is a possibility that the qebira served as

kingmaker, legitimating the royal line of succession.116 In

Throughout Your Generations Forever, Nancy Jay explains that sacrifice

is an effective symbolic act that “joins people together in

community, and conversely, it separates them from defilement,

disease, and other dangers”117 including individuals or groups

excluded from the imagined community generated by the covenant-

establishing act of ritual murder. Disinvesting his mother from114 Ackerman, Susan. “The Queen Mother and the Cult in Ancient Israel” in JBL 112:3, 1993, 400.115 See Ex. 34:15-16; Lev. 17:7; Num. 25:1; Hos. 4:14.116 “For if the Judean royal ideology holds that Yahweh is the adopted father of the king, then is it not possible that the adopted mother of the king is understood to be Asherah, given… that Asherah was seen by many – in both the state and popular cult – as the consort of Yahweh? The language of divine adoption… may imply not only Yahweh, the male god, as surrogate father, but also Asherah, the female consort, as surrogate mother” (Ackerman, “The Queen Mother and the Cult in Ancient Israel,” 1993, 400).117 Jay, Nancy. Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity, 1992,17.

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this powerful position on theological grounds may be seen as an

attempt on Asa’s part to purge the nation not only of those

cultural elements positioned by the text as false, foreign and

feminine, but also to remove any threats to his regal lineage.

Although no explicit references to qedeshim/qadeshot are found

during the reign of Hezekiah, his removal of the bamot - the

locus of non-exclusively Yahwistic religious practices – demands

a theological reading. Again, the word for “remove” stems from

the verb This cues the reader in to .(”to turn aside“) ששש Hezekiah’s unwavering devotion to Yahweh, turning away from sites

of unorthodox or syncretistic worship. However, no king in

Israel’s history appears as anti-pagan as Josiah. The text likens

him to David in piety and, unlike many Israelite monarchs, he did

not His 118.ששש father Amon’s assassination is his sole

contribution to the narrative. This suggests that he is merely

meant to serve as a link in the genealogical chain between Josiah

and his grandfather, Manasseh, whom the text views as a

“structural antagonist”119 to Josiah in his support of what the DH118 2 Kings 22:2.119 Long, B.O. 2 Kings, 1991, 249.

43

constructs as foreign and idolatrous religions.120 Manasseh is

envisioned as following the sins of Jeroboam,121 the establishment

and fortification of religious centers other than the Jerusalem

temple, the northern shrine of Bethel.122 More than any other

ruler, Manasseh is held culpable by the biblical authors for

idolatrous actions resulting in the Babylonian Exile.123

2 Ki. 23 recounts the actions undertaken by Josiah during

the eighteenth year of his reign to remove forms of worship that

differed from the book of the Law discovered during renovations

to the Jerusalem temple.124 The prophetess Huldah legitimated the

authenticity of the scroll and prophesized national destruction

for abandoning Yahweh and worshipping other gods.125 The

subsequent chapter opens with a covenant ceremony binding Josiah

and all the male leaders of Judah together in a pledge to uphold

the laws presented in the newfound scroll. Therefore, it is

important to understand Josiah’s cultic reforms within this

120 2 Kings 21:2-15.121 1 Kings 14:16122 Ibid., 12:25-33123 For a discussion of this issue, see Halpern, Baruch. “Why Manasseh Is Blamed for the Babylonian Exile: The Evolution of a Biblical Tradition” in VT 48:4, 1998, 473-514.124 2 Ki. 22:8.125 2 Ki. 22:16-17.

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context of Judah’s independence from Assyrian rule, as well as

the centralization of cult in Jerusalem and the covenantal union

of the male Judahite leaders.

As we have seen previously, sacrifice is an important ritual

act that establishes covenantal and kinship bonds. Ancient Near

Eastern suzerainty treaties and biblical covenant texts usually

include a domesticated animal sacrifice with varying degrees of

immolation;126 the covenant ceremony in 2 Ki. 23:1-3 depicts no

such sacrifices. Despite the absence of this customary act of

ritual violence, 2 Ki. 23:4-20 depicts a much more sinister

variation of this bloody rite. As the narrative extends beyond

the walls of the Jerusalem temple, violence escalates

exponentially culminating in the ritualistic murder of the

priests of Bethel.

We have already considered the possibility that the qedeshim

and qedeshot may have performed some sacrificial function, perhaps

in connection with the gebirot in legitimating descent patterns

and securing a financial or political inheritance. Expelling them

from the Temple precincts, Josiah removed any priestly individual

126 See Janzen, David. The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible: A Study of FourWritings, BZAW 344, 2004.

45

who could, through sacrifice, establish a covenant of kinship on

behalf of a deity, effectively eliminating all local competition.

Unlike the covenant at Sinai wherein all the people of Israel

pledge allegiance to Yahweh,127 Josiah’s covenant consists solely

of male participants. In establishing a new, exclusively

Yahwistic covenant with the Judean and Jerusalemite male elite,128

Josiah enacts a revolutionarily homosocial vision of Israelite

religion that not only removes the goddess and her devotees from

the Temple, but excludes women from the covenantal community

altogether.

Although the qedeshim in v. 7 appear to escape the same

fiery punishment earned by the other objects of heterodox

worship, their houses or temples129 are nonetheless “pulled down,

demolished.”130 The presence of verbs associated with burning play

a crucial role in this section. As hinted at during our

discussion of Tamar, the verb has שששש enormous religious127 Ex. 19:8.128 2 Ki. 23:1-3.129 Both renderings are substantiated translations of ההההההההה 130.הההההה - Qal Converted Imperfect 3ms. of ההה – “to pull/tear down, demolish.” Association of this action with the destruction of the symbols pagan worship, particularly those of the goddess Asherah is common; see Ex. 34:13; Deut. 7:5; Mic. 5:13.

46

significance in regards to heterodox religious practices and

practitioners. Verbs derived from the Hebrew root 131,שששש

meaning “to burn,” appear as actions taken against the Asherah132

in the Jerusalem temple (verses 4, 6), Judahite ritual objects

(verse 11), Samarian bamot and ritual items (verse 15), or human

bones in exhumed Samaria (verses 16, 20). All occurrences of

are in the qal active form describing firsthand actions by שששש

Josiah himself. Since the root ששש may be translated either as“to slaughter (for sacrifice)” or “to sacrifice,” we may note its

appearance qal (verse 20) as a sacrificial action performed by

Josiah against the priests.

If the covenantal ceremony from verses 1-4 is meant to

incorporate the Judahite male leaders as the authoritative social

and religious body under the aegis of Josiah, then the subsequent

defilement of cultic sites and objects in addition to violence

perpetrated against the priests of Bethel indexes the privileged131 As a plural noun, the term can refer to fiery serpents (Num. 21:6; Deut. 8:15) or divine beings in the Jerusalem temple (Isa. 6:2; 14:29; 30:6).132 Like Asa (1 Ki. 15:13; 2 Chron, 15:16), Josiah deposits the Asherah’s ashesat the Wadi Kidron.

47

status of the Judahite theocratic apparatus over their neighbors

to the north. The text portrays Josiah as an ideal Davidic ruler

in his attempt to reunite a divided kingdom; because the DH

historian demonizes all unorthodox practices, particularly those

occurring at the Bethel shrine, viewing aggression towards the

site and its officiates as a logical and divinely sanctioned

result of their own apostasy.

The pericope recalls the man of god from Samaria, and his

prophecy (v. 16-18) reveals characteristics of Josiah’s violent

purge beyond those of identity formation, privilege and power.

Josiah inquires about the grave of the man of God who prophesied

to Jeroboam that the future king of Judah would burn the priests

of Bethel with human bones on their altar.133 This oracle may be a

relatively late gloss,134 but its rhetorical usage lends credence

to Josiah’s violent actions, envisioning “a day when ‘pure

Yahwism’ (a creation… never a reality in history in Israel) could

be restored.”135 Furthermore, the prophecy functions as a

133 “O altar, altar! Thus said the Lord: A son shall be born to the House ofDavid, Josiah by name; and he shall slaughter upon you the priests of theshrines who bring offerings upon you. And human bones shall be burned uponyou.” (1 Ki. 13:2, JPS).134 Nelson, R.D. The Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History, JSOTSup 16, 1983, 17.135 Niditch, Susan. War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence, 1993, 76.

48

theodicy,136 explaining and justifying the present violence

committed as a punishment for acts of apostasy that, according to

DH, also brought about the northern kingdom’s destruction at the

hands of the Neo-Assyrian empire. Jeroboam’s temple of Bethel is

seen as a turning away from Yahweh throughout both books of

Kings, bringing division to the United Monarchy and the wrath of

God upon Israel.137 We can understand Josiah’s violence against

the northern shrine of Bethel as an effect of the mechanism of

sacrificial scapegoating that allows for the collective ritual

activity of a specific elite male community “which purifies itself

of its own disorder through unanimous immolation of a victim… at the

paroxysm of ritual crisis.”138

The northern kingdom’s apostasy, constructed and denounced

by DH, is such a misunderstanding. The brazen calf of the Bethel

shrine appears to be a regional iconographic representation of

Yahweh, not Baal.139 However, the longstanding mimetic rivalry

136 See Crain, J.C. Reading the Bible as Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge: PolityPress, 2010, 120.137 As a theological interpretation, this view represents an historical misconception; king Hoshea of Israel broke his treaty with Assyria for an alliance with Egypt, leading to the destruction of his kingdom. (2 Ki. 17:1-5).138 Girard, René, The Girard Reader, 1996, 11.139 See van Dam, C. “Golden Calf” in DOT, 2003, 369.

49

between the two kingdoms finds its cathartic outlet in “the

collective murder itself insofar as it effectively resolves and

terminates” the perceived theological and political crisis.

Josiah’s fiery offering is conceived of as sacrificial communion

and expiation as defined,140 unifying the newly centralized nation

while purging the sins of apostasy and partition brought about by

the northern kingdom.

Josiah engages in a form of the ḥerem or ban, “the war

demanded by God always including the annihilation of men, women,

and children, other times including the killing of domestic

animals, the wanton destruction of whole cities, and the

reduction of all cultural artifacts to rubble” much like Joshua’s

conquest of the land and Canaanite dispossession.141 The sacred

sites and cultic items, because they are dedicated to other gods,

cannot be taken for Yahweh. Destroying them and sprinkling their

140 “Communion sacrifice unites worshipers in one moral community and at thesame time differentiates that community from the rest of the world. Expiatorysacrifice integrates by getting rid of countless different moral and organicundesirable conditions: sin, disease, drought, divine wrath, famine, barrenness,spirit possession, armed invaders, blood guilt, incest, impurity of descent,pollution, pollution of childbirth or of corpses… What is integrated is one.What is differentiated is logically without limit and can be expressed in asingle term only negatively, as not the integrated whole, as opposed to it asdisorder is to order, as unclean is to clean” (Jay, 19, emphasis mine).141 Josh. 6:24.

50

dust on graves effectively contaminates and desacralizes142 the

objects, as well as the murdered priests, bringing an end to

their ritual purity and their lives. Though his act of sacrifice

and burning of the bones of the deceased on the priests’ corpses

qualifies the offering, profaning the altar of Bethel and thereby

maintaining the exclusive holiness of the Jerusalem temple and

cult, there can be no question that the violence is seen as the

sacred duty of a holy war. Susan Niditch argues that although the

biblical tradition differentiates the ban as sacrifice143 - an

older form of ritual annihilation - from the Deuteronomic ban as

justice,144 the sacrificial element nonetheless points to an act

of murder on God’s behalf, seemingly embodying characteristics of

both forms of ḥerem. Although DH and biblical critics cannot

abide the ban as human sacrifice,145 the religious implications of142 Num. 19:11-13. However, Jer. 31:40 states that Kidron will become holy (הההה.to Yahweh after the new covenant (Jer. 31:31-37) (הה

143 “In giving humans to God, the Israelites are not saving the best booty forthemselves. To the contrary, the best sacrifice, the biggest sacrifice, is thehuman life” (Niditch, 35).144 “…not a means of gaining God’s favor through offering human booty, but…through expurgation of the abomination, external to the people Israel orinternal” (Ibid., 57).145 “For these writers, the ban becomes something else that has to do withmatters of justice and injustice, right and wrong, idolatry versus worship of the trueGod. One of the most central Deuteronomic themes is that of blessing versuscurse: the good win God’s blessing, the evil, God’s curse… Ḥerem, the ban,becomes the form of enacting the punishment of curse for Israelites and non-Israelites alike. Idolaters are perceived as deserving the ban” (Ibid., 49, emphasis

51

these deaths cannot be ignored. Josiah ritually slaughters the

Bethel priests, transforming them and the bones of the dead into

an expiatory sacrifice in the form of a whole burnt offering to

Yahweh, unifying the community of the faithful by purging all

threats to the exclusive religious vision of the Deuteronomist.

Therefore, Josiah enacted a ban of both human sacrifice to Yahweh

and justice on behalf of the deity.

The rhetorically indistinct actions of adultery and apostasy

forms the core of Jeremiah’s theological condemnation of Israel

and serves as the theodical justification for the destruction of

Israel and Judah by gendering apostasy as a feminine act. By

examining the intertextualities between the polemic category of

behavior practiced al-eretz ra’anan and its frequent relation to the

noun Asherah/asherim within the context of the dominant discourse

against worship of deities other than Yahweh, we may understand

the way in which this rhetorical imagery is used to gender the

cultic behavior of non-exclusively Yahwistic Jerusalem-

centralized worship practices.

mine).

52

The occurrence of the phrase va’asherechem al-etz ra’anan al geva’ot

hagvohot in Jer. 17:2 functions as an intertextual allusion with

a major pedigree in the theological discourse of the Hebrew

Bible. The importance of this idiomatic expression lies in its

condemnation of a specific vision of non-exclusively Yahwistic

religiosity associated with the goddess Asherah that allowed for

iconographic representation of the divine personae in question.146

These sorts of worship practices are discursively situated far

beyond the geographical and theological boundaries of Mount Zion

with the centralized theology of Jerusalem-based, Yahweh-alone

devotion by a lineage of male priestly functionaries.

V. 17:2 is part of a poetic oracle of disaster aimed at the

Israelite inhabitants of the land. The phrase va’asherechem al-etz

ra’anan appears only once in the entire MT, in Jer. 17:2b. It has

clear similarities with the more common idiom, vetachat kol-etz

146 “Even if there is no explicit mention of a sculpted or painted image of Yahweh, the Hebrew Bible provides a wealth of information about how the peopleconceived Yahweh anthropomorphically, theriomorphically, in metaphors and in symbols of the widest possible variety. This process of seeing… and imagining occurred in a context that was filled with literacy and iconographic images. The world of images that fills this context was subject to constant change, sometimes dominated by internal factors and sometimes by external ones…. To besure… the external evidence confirms neither the view that there was a fully developed Mosaic monotheism nor the popular view that late and even very late dates for the literature are justified” (Keel, Othmar and Christoph Uehlinger.Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God In Ancient Israel, 1998, 407).

53

ra’anan,147 commonly used to locate religious practices beyond the

geographical and ideological space of the Jerusalem temple with

its Yahwah-alone theology. The singular occurrence of this

phrasing is also interesting because the book of Jeremiah does

not shy away from using the more common rendering. Vetachat kol-etz

ra’anan occurs three times in Jeremiah, all of which are part of

prophetic oracles from Yahweh urging for Israel to repent of

apostasy.148 Charles L. Feinberg supports the understanding of

archaic Israelite polytheism in that v. 17:2a describes the

idolatrous actions הה – הההההההה “as/like a memory,” one as deeply

ingrained in the cultural consciousness in the same way Judah’s

sin is engraved upon their collective heart.149 He claims that the

people are “…so steeped in idolatry by their parents that the

desire for it will emerge at the slightest provocation… in accord

with the broad context… in Canaanite worship… Thus continuance in

idolatry is implied.”150 As worship of non-Yahwistic deities,

147 This phrase consistently refers to non-exclusively Yahwistic worship, typically interpreted as devotion to Asherah and/or other pagan deities; Deut.12:2; 1 Ki. 14:23; 2 Ki. 16:4; 17:10; 2 Chron. 28:4; Isa. 57:5; Ez. 6:13..148 Jer. 2:20; 3:6, 13.149 Jer. 17:1c.150 Feinberg, Charles L. Jeremiah: A Commentary, 1982, 127.

54

including the goddess Asherah, is well-attested in the Hebrew

Bible’s historiography and the archaeological history of ancient

Israel, the author of Jeremiah employs this customary,

exclusivist anti-pagan discourse to argue not only against any

religious practices he deems unacceptable, but also to identify

such worship practices as the direct cause of national disaster.

Angela Bauer argues that because feminine imagery and

feminizing rhetoric work throughout the book of Jeremiah, “from

call to repentance in the face of impending death and

destruction, through remembrance in mourning to an eschatological

vision of redemption in exile,”151 we may understand gender

discourse as one of the text’s main framing devices for its

theological message. One of the most cogent examples of gender

discourse’s prevalence in Jeremiah is the prophetic marriage

metaphor in v. 3.1-4:4. Furthermore, Mary E. Shields states in no

uncertain terms that

“Intertextuality, metaphor and gender are the primarythreads from which the prophet weaves a rich and complexrhetorical tapestry deigned to convince the people that

151 Bauer, Angela. Gender in the Book of Jeremiah: A Feminist-Literary Reading, SBL 5, 1999, 2-3.

55

their political and religious actions have been wrong andthat they must change their ways before it is too late.”152

Shields makes a persuasive case for the author of Jeremiah’s

dependence on other biblical texts as well as conventional gender

norms. Reinterpreting Deut. 24:1-4 - the law forbidding a man

from remarrying the wife he divorced if she had since become the

wife of another man – as an allegory for Israel’s apostasy and

potential for return under a new covenant with Yahweh. The

evident Deuteronomic intertext of Jeremiah’s oracles against

apostasy is complemented by the reference to worship tachat kol-etz

ra’anan in a prophetic message contemporaneous with Josiah.153 The

Judean monarch’s purge of all traces of heterodox religion154 was

lauded for removing the qedeshim and Asherah’s weavers from the

Jerusalem temple. The fact that Jeremiah is the son of Hilkiah,

the same high priest who discovered the lost book of Law during

Josiah’s reign, allows us to appreciate how steeped the prophet

is within a matrix of vehemently Yahwistic and anti-goddess

discourse.

152 Shields, Mary E. Circumscribing the Prostitute: The Rhetoric of Intertextuality, Metaphor and Gender in Jeremiah 3:1-4:4, JSOTSup 387, 2004, 1.153 Jer. 3:6.154 2 Ki. 23:4-20.

56

Jeremiah utilizes the image of Israel as

adulterous/idolatrous wife to Yahweh the husband to feminize the

presumably male audience of the text,155 effectively shaming them

by not only stripping away their assumed upon power and privilege

but also by suggesting male Israel has acted the harlot (i.e.

inappropriately) in its relationship with Yahweh by worshiping

other deities. This threatens the honor of Israelite men; “by

behaving improperly, they have shamed themselves.”156 Demonizing

the male audience by casting them as adulterous wives is further

complicated by the feminization of religious practices against

which the text polemicizes. This delegitimization of heterodox

religiosity becomes reinforced by the notion that the people

swear belo elohim157 - by “no-gods.” Such a strong dismissal of non-

exclusively Yahwistic worship rhetorically negates the myriad

forms of religious expression that constituted the diverse matrix

of Israelite culture. Swearing by these deities is portrayed as

pointless and sinful, leading the people to the house/temple of a

zonah.158

155 Shields, 110.156 Ibid., 132.157 Jer. 5:7c.158 Ibid.. 5:7d.

57

Regina Schwartz explains that throughout the Hebrew Bible,

the paradigm of ideologically-based identity exclusivism and

scarce access to resources engenders a monotheistic worldview

along with a history of colonialism. Such a worldview not only

excludes deities other than Yahweh, but also their devotees from

the imagined community of legitimate worship. The same

exclusionary dynamics apply to those whose religious affiliations

or practices differ from those of the normative in-group, often

leading to violent power struggles. Moreover, Schwartz explicitly

“locates the origins of violence in identity formation,arguing that imagining identity as an act of distinguishingand separating from others, of boundary making and linedrawing, is the most frequent and fundamental act ofviolence we commit. Violence is not only what we do to theOther. It is prior to that. Violence is the veryconstruction of the Other.”1593

Feminization appears to be the primary means of Othering in the

texts examined: delegitimizing all deviant practices, theological

attitudes and divinities, either by attacking (a) female deity

and her devotees or by sexualizing the office and duties of those

who inhabit the text’s own theological category of “harlotry.”

Therefore, apostasy functions as a gendered sense of disorder,

159 Schwartz, Regina. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, 1997, 5.

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disrupting and threatening the dominant cultural paradigm that

has rendered anything other than exclusive Yahwism

unintelligible, sinful and wicked. Though not always taking a

physical form, polemics against women’s and men’s devotion to a

goddess have proven effective at delegitimizing these individuals

and their beliefs, marginalizing their voices in the literature

of the Hebrew Bible. We would do well to reflect upon Ellen

Gorsevski’s claim that “linguistic violence is in fact a form of

physical violence.”160

160 Gorsevski, Ellen W. "The Physical Side of Linguistic Violence" in PR 10:4, 1998, 513-516.

59

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