7. Law, Religion and Theology

Abstract

This collection of essays consolidates a lifetime’s scholarship on women in the cult, together with representations of goddesses, female priests, prophets, and queen mothers. Originally published individually, each piece is updated and accompanied by explanatory introductions and postscripts, which trace the development of the author’s views during her distinguished career. The opening section on goddesses revisits her highly persuasive thesis—that Jeremiah’s Queen of Heaven embodied a synthesis of Western Semitic Astarte and Eastern Semitic Ištar. Evidence of the Ugaritic goddess Athart Šud now indicates that the Western Semitic Asherah can be associated with fertility, rather than spinning and weaving exclusively. Alternatively, the comparison of the death and dismemberment of the Levite concubine (Judges 19) with the conquest and defeat of Tiamet in Enuma Elish, as literary types ‘whose stories present an object lesson to their audiences regarding proper gender behavior’ (p. 58), seems less convincing. The second section (on female priests and prophets) identifies restrictions on the agency of women from priestly families in Phoenician, Punic, and Neo-Punic societies—where, despite their participation in the cult, they were excluded from the performance of blood sacrifices. The analysis of queen mothers then prompts the intriguing observation that ‘even within the radical religious transformation that was early Christianity, the old mythic paradigm that linked the queen mother and the mother goddess still reverberated in the emerging Marian cult’ (p. 186). Concluding with accounts of women’s personal worship that look beyond the ‘corpus of prophetic diatribe’ (p. 222), it is suggested that the impact of Josiah’s reforms may also have removed women from ‘some important and honoured functions’ (p. 233). These included the manufacture of textiles for the statue of the divine consort and/or women’s musical accompaniment at ritual celebrations. The studies are characterized throughout by A.’s innate humility and academic caution, where she readily acknowledges those ideas which could be considered speculative. The volume is highly recommended to both lay and academic readers alike, and sheds substantial light on these fascinating contexts. SandRa JacobS