How Sacred Prostitution Is Faring in Academic Publications.

• Author: Budin, Stephanie Lynn
• Position: Harlot or Holy Woman? A Study of the Hebrew Qedesah; Sacred Prostitution in the Ancient Greek World from Aphrodite to Bauho to Cassandra and Beyond

More than a decade ago I published a book arguing that sacred prostitution did not exist in the ancient world. (1) I was not the first person to make this argument. In fact, there was already a trend prevalent in both Classics and ancient Near Eastern Studies that the "fact" of sacred prostitution was probably more imagined--or accusatory--than real. See, for example, on the Near Eastern side, works such as Stephen Hooks' 1985 dissertation (2) and Robert Oden's 1987 study, (3) and for Classics most notably Mary Beard and John Henderson's 1998 essay (4) and that of Vinciane Pirene-Delforge in 2007. (5) Mostly, these works chipped away at the sacred prostitution construct, debating whether it existed in either the Near East or Greece, whether it was a matter of orientalism or accusation. My book simply pulled both sides together and declared unambiguously that the construct was merely a construct and that sacred prostitution did not exist at all.

Reactions were mixed, often amusingly along gendered lines. Some condemned it; LenaSofia Tiemeyer, Helen Morales, and Corrine Bonnet all approved. (6) For a while it was difficult to know what effect the book would have.

It is thus interesting to see that two monographs on sacred prostitution came out in 2019, one by a renowned biblical scholar and one by an economist, one basically arguing against the historicity of sacred prostitution and one arguing most vociferously for it. What follows is my assessment of both.

HARLOT OR HOLY WOMAN?

Phyllis A. Bird's hefty tome is a large-scale examination of the identity and function(s) of the qedesah (f.) and qades (m.) (mainly the former) in the Hebrew Bible. Her approach is to consider these in light of the long-standing belief that both were sacred (cult, temple) prostitutes. As such, the work may be divided into two categories: an examination of the construct and historiography of sacred prostitution in ancient studies, and a gathering of data from the ancient Near East (and beyond) whose comparanda might shed light on the biblical qedesah.

To begin, Bird establishes that she believes sacred prostitution itself not to have existed in the ancient world. As she puts it (p. 1 n. 3), she specifically uses the term sacred prostitution in italics "to indicate that it represents usage that is not my own. I reject it as misleading and fundamentally nonsensical."

The introductory chapter lays out the problem of the identity of the qedesah and qades, citing the ten places--five each--where they appear in the Hebrew Bible and how these words have been translated in ancient (e.g., LXX) and modern (e.g., NIV) renderings. The words "harlot" and "prostitute" feature prominently. Bird then takes a closer look at the case of Genesis 38 and the narrative of Tamar and Judah, which accounts for three of the five references to qedesot. Bird presents the works of various scholars who have attempted to make sense of this narrative since antiquity, considering the interpretations of, inter alia, the Testament of Judah, Jubilees, Aquila, Carl Friedrich Keil, and Hermann Gunkel.

Chapters 2 and 3 look at the historiography of the construct of sacred prostitution. Chapter 2 continues with the more modern historiography, focusing mainly on four historians whose work preceded that of Sir James G. Frazer: C. Staniland Wake and Sir John Lubbok on the British side, Jacques-Antoine Dulaure and Pierre Dufour on the French. The work of these men is summoned to show that the construct of sacred prostitution existed well before Frazer's Golden Bough, and also to reveal how such notions as "sacred sex" and hieros gamos entered into the scholarly literature. Bird places the understanding of sacred prostitutes into a matrix of nascent anthropology on the one hand, and new ethnographies--especially of the Indian devadasis--on the other. Needless to say, every single theory proffered is predicated on the notion that women were without agency and existed merely as items of trade amongst men.

Chapter 3 is an in-depth study of Frazer's Golden Bough itself, generally regarded as the cornerstone of modern understandings of sacred prostitution. As Bird notes, though, sacred prostitution itself was not a focus of Frazer's initial interest when writing Golden Bough, nor, obviously, is he the "father" of the topic. Rather, as Bird observes, the significance of Frazer's work was the introduction of the idea of fertility ritual into the sacred prostitution construct. It was mainly with the Golden Bough that the idea that the sex provided by sacred prostitutes was understood as some kind of fertility-inducing rite, a religious act in itself.

Bird then moves to the ancient Classical evidence. Chapter 4 presents the "Classical Sources in Constructions of Sacred Prostitution," with appendix A providing a summary. Various (although not complete) Classical passages implicated in the creation of the sacred prostitution construct are presented and analyzed, beginning with Herodotos 1.199 (7) ("All women must once in their lives prostitute themselves at the temple of Mylitta"), passing through the works of Strabo, "Jeremiah," Clearchus, Aelian, and Valerius Maximum, inter alia, to end with an account of the forced prostitution in honor of Venus called for of the girls of western Locris in Italy. Early Christian sources are mixed in with pagan texts. Pindar is noticeably lacking, although appearing in the notes (p. 125 n. 81). Also lacking is reference to epigraphy: An inscription from Tralles referring to a sacred pallakis is mentioned in notes (p. 84 n. 69), but not discussed in the text. The Rapino Bronze is wholly absent. All texts are taken at face value, with no suggestion of accusation (in spite of Bird's strong reliance on Oden's publication of sacred prostitution as such) or even general inaccuracy. Thus, early Christian claims that, say, the rites of the Paphian were marked by orgies are accepted as fact. This greatly increases the number of cases of sacred prostitution in the Classical repertoire.

Chapter 5 begins the second portion of Bird's study--the collation of sources from the ancient Near East pertaining to an understanding of the biblical qedesah. This very long chapter pulls together all currently known references to the Mesopotamian qadistu (cognate of qedesah), summarized in appendices B {qadistu and Sumerian NU.GIG) and C (the NU.GIG exclusively). In all, some sixty-five texts are presented in translation and interpretation, including letters, contracts, ritual texts, and lexical lists. The chapter ends with a look at the evidence pertaining to the qdsm, the Canaanite cognate for the biblical qedesim, in the texts from Ugarit/Ras Shamra.

With chapter 6 the book returns to its primary object of interest: the qedesah (and, to a lesser extent, the qades). Not surprisingly, this is the strongest chapter in a book written by a highly adept biblical scholar. All passages under consideration are analyzed vis-a-vis language and linguistics, the probable date and circumstances under which they were written, contending theories of origins, and meaning. Here Bird considers again the tale of Tamar in Genesis 38, as well as the two other references to qedesot (Hos. 4:14 and Deut. 23:18-19). The analysis of Hos. 4 is slightly marred by reference to the "unattested" goddess name Elah, which surely has its parallel in the epigraphically attested goddess Elat (p. 382).

Bird then turns to the references to the qedesim in 1 and 2 Kings and the Book of Job. Her final analysis of this latter issue is that the male qedesim did not, in fact, exist, but were a later construct created to give a masculine parallel to the female qedesot in Deut. 23. Thus, "Masculine forms of the noun, found exclusively in Deuteronomistic texts, represent a secondary, purely literary, development without historical foundation or sociological integrity and must be excluded from any attempt to understand the historical place and function of this female class" (p. 401). Considering the qdsm cognates present in the Canaanite Ugaritic corpus (who are closely associated with the khnm, cognates of the biblical kohenim) this hypothesis seems strained. This is problematic, since all references to associations with Asherah, and thus a possible cultic function for both male and female functionaries, come via the qedesim.

In spite of the clearly extensive work poured into this book, its analyses do not live up to its data collection. Its conclusions are, I believe, flawed. To begin, the book is dated. Bird explains this herself in the book's preface. Individual chapters were completed between 2002 (chap. 1) and 2010 (chap. 6). Problems with the publisher caused delays in publication such that the book only appeared in November 2019. (I distinctly remember that it showed up on the penultimate day of the ASOR Meetings in San Diego in 2019.) Some attempts were made at updating the materials over this time (e.g., the reference to Mayer Gruber's 2017 commentary on Hosea [p. ix n. 7], my 2008 Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity [p. 105 n. 2]), but on the whole the book is rather behind the curve in current sacred prostitution studies.

This manifests itself in a significant way in the fact that, in spite of her claims in the opening chapter, Bird clearly does believe that sacred prostitution existed, and that, furthermore, the biblical qedesah was a sacred prostitute. If this sounds contradictory, let me explain. To begin, at no point does Bird provide a clear working definition of what exactly she believes sacred prostitution to be. Reading between the lines of over four hundred pages, it becomes evident that her definition, heavily predicated upon Frazer, is that a sacred prostitute is a woman affiliated with a temple who sells sex, and that the act of coitus is an aspect of religious ritual probably pertaining to fertility (p. 207). This is the construct whose historical validity she denies (rightly, in...