Female and Male: The Cultic Personnel; The Bible and the Rest of the Ancient Near East.

• Author: Smith, Mark S.

This volume is a catalogue of terms for cultic personnel in Mesopotamian and Levantine sources. (No Egyptian or Hittite terms are included, making the subtitle of the work something of a misnomer.) The four chapters divide the subject matter into "chief functionaries," that is, priests of various sorts; musical personnel; specialists in incantations, divination, prophecy, magic, and sorcery; and "offices related to sexuality." The last chapter lists "officiants who symbolize, act out ... and are part of the main purpose of the ancient cultus, that of ensuring the fertility of human and animal," and discusses "officiants who somehow act out in the drama of the cult the mysterious nature of human sexuality in its transnormal aspects: transvestite, bisexual, and homosexual" (p. 191). Appendix 1 presents KAR 154, a Middle Assyrian ritual mentioning a qadistu and a sangu. Appendix 2 deals with females in figurines and cylinder and stamp seals. Appendix 3 deals with "a special class of officials, as a kind of actor in the cultic drama, whose forte is the interpretation of sexuality, but seemingly abnormal sexuality" (p. 284).

The value of this work is evident at the outset. It provides a wealth of information about various cultic offices. Henshaw encompasses within the pages of this volume a vast range of primary and secondary evidence worthy of a dozen or more books. The Sumerian and Akkadian names of offices begin with lexical information and proceed to mention specific texts where the offices are mentioned in context. Henshaw wisely prescinds from offering translations of many largely untranslatable names of offices. He also resists easy equations between titles. Indeed, the presentation of the information indicates the complexity of the titles' usages. Furthermore, Henshaw is quite careful in limiting his conclusions: he warns against imputing abnormal sexual categories to some cultic offices (p. 88), and he cautiously endorses G. Wilhelm's discussion of a Nuzi letter (SMN 1670) which seems somewhat to confirm Herodotus' report of Near Eastern temple prostitution (pp. 216, 225). The primary contribution of this book lies in presenting a formidable listing of evidence, not in offering new hypotheses regarding this evidence.

The volume suffers in a number of respects. As regards Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, my areas of research, the discussions are derivative and frequently dated; the vast bulk of secondary literature cited predates 1980. For...