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pa rt i i i

OF F PAGE :
AC T UA L I Z AT IONS
A N D PE R FOR M A NC E S
OF S C R I P T U R E
BE YON D
PROT E STA N T
MODE L S OF
‘R E A DI NG ’

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chapter 27

The A ncien t G odde ss,

the Biblica l Schol a r,
a n d the R eligious Past
Re-imaging Divine Women

Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Any academic discipline is inevitably and inherently bound up with the social and cul-
tural dynamics of scholarship itself as a human and collective activity. Like a number of
other disciplines, biblical studies remains dominated by European and north American
male, white scholars. But unlike some other areas of academic enquiry, it also continues
to be shaped—whether inadvertently or not—by the confessional heritage and invest-
ment of large parts of the Western academy in the religious texts and traditions at the
heart of the discipline. As is well-known, these features of the discipline can often skew
or distort scholarly constructions of both gender and the religious past. Within this con-
text, goddesses have long proved a particularly contentious topic of enquiry, for in the
very notion of a ‘female’ deity, the academic interrogation of gender-constructs and
assumed categories of the divine intersect in distinctive and often problematic ways.
Older generations of scholars, for most of whom the biblical portrayal of the past was
both historically secure and confessionally ‘true’, once dismissed what appeared to be
oblique references to goddess worship in the Hebrew Bible as evidence of ‘deviant’ and
‘demoralizing’ religious practices, alien to ‘traditional’ or normative forms of monothe-
istic Yahweh worship.1 Biblical allusions to certain forms of cultic malpractice, includ-
ing activities among trees, religious ‘whoring’, the use of ‘sacred poles’, and offerings to a
divine figure known as the Queen of Heaven (Jer. 7:18; 44:17–25), were all broadly cast as

1  B.W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957); W.F.
Albright, ‘The Role of the Canaanites in the History of Civilization’, in The Bible and the Ancient Near East:
Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, edited by G.E. Wright (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 338;
G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Vol. I: The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions (London: Oliver and
Boyd, 1962), 22–3; J. Bright, A History of Israel, 3rd edn. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), 118–19.

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superstitious ‘fertility’ rituals.2 For most scholars, these were the ‘nature’ cults of ‘for-
eign’ deities,3 including the ‘lascivious’ and ‘licentious’ goddesses whose images were
particularly well-known from a variety of terracotta artefacts depicting nude or partially
adorned women.4 The presence of these artefacts and the biblical castigation of those
worshippers of Yahweh participating in such abhorrent cults was merely evidence of the
corruption of the monotheistic Israelites by the indigenous Canaanites and similarly
‘heathen’ and ‘primitive’ peoples distinct from the community of Yahweh.5 In associat-
ing goddess worship with sex, ‘superstition’, and ‘nature religion’, scholars tended to pre-
sent and privilege biblical monotheism and its texts as the religion of a spiritually,
intellectually, and morally enlightened cultural elite—an elite with whom they could
(and would) identify.6
More recently, most biblical scholars and historians of ancient Israelite and Judahite
societies have come to recognize this older portrait as little more than a derogatory cari-
cature. Widespread shifts in the discipline in recent decades, prompted in part by the
persuasive influence of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and social-scientific criticism, have
not only seriously challenged confidence in the historical reliability of the biblical por-
trayal of the past, but have encouraged greater acknowledgment of the ways in which
the othering strategies of both biblical writers and scholars themselves can often misrep-
resent the likely religious realities of ancient Israel and Judah.
Following increased archaeological interest in sites beyond the tels associated with
primarily urban centres, a more richly textured understanding of the religions of the
ancient societies that gave rise to the biblical texts has emerged. Coupled with more
robust and critical analyses of texts and artefacts from comparative southern Levantine
cultures and communities (particularly those from Ugarit), scholars are now broadly
agreed that worship of the goddess Asherah, widely identified as a regional variation of a
high-goddess comparable to Ugaritic Athirat, formed a part of normative religious prac-

2  e.g. on trees, see Deut. 12:2; 1 Kgs 14:23; 2 Kgs 16:4; 17:10; 2 Chr. 28:4; Isa. 57:5; Jer. 2:20; 3:6, 9, 13; Ezek.
6:13; for ‘sacred poles’, see Exod. 34:13; Deut. 7:5; Judg. 6:25–30; 1 Kgs 16:33; 2 Kgs 17:16; Isa. 17:8; 27:9; Jer.
17:2; Mic. 5:4; for religious ‘whoring’, see Isa. 57:3; Jer. 2:20; 3:1, 6, 9; Ezek. 16:15–17; 23:3–5, 30; Hos. 2:5; 4:12.
3  e.g. M. Noth, The History of Israel, 2nd edn. (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); W. Harrelson, From
Fertility Cult to Worship (New York: Doubleday, 1969); J.L. McKenzie, A Theology of the Old Testament
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974); J.B. Segal, ‘Popular Religion in Ancient Israel’, JJS 27 (1976), 1–22.
4  W.F. Albright, ‘Astarte Plaques and Figurines from Tell Beit Mirsim’, in Mélanges syriens offert à
Monsieur René Dussaud I, Bibliothèque archéologique et historique 30 (Paris: Geuthner, 1939), 107–20;
J.B. Pritchard, Palestinian Figurines in Relation to Certain Goddesses Known Through Literature, AOS 24
(New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1943).
5  W.F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1942), 74–7; G.E.
Wright, The Old Testament against Its Environment, SBT 2 (London: SCM Press, 1950); Y. Kaufmann, The
Religion of Israel from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. and abridged by M. Greenberg (New
York: Schocken, 1960); W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament: Volume I, trans. J.A. Baker, OTL
(London: SCM Press, 1961); W.F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two
Contrasting Faiths (London: Althone Press, 1968).
6  See further F. Stavrakopoulou, ‘ “Popular” Religion and “Official” Religion: Practice, Perception,
Portrayal’, in Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah, edited by F. Stavrakopoulou and J. Barton
(London: T&T Clark, 2010), 37–58.

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re-imaging divine women    497

tice across socio-religious groups in Israel and Judah, from rural households to elite
city-dwellers.7 In particular, the discovery of inscriptions appealing for blessings from
‘Yahweh and his Asherah’ at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom, dated to the mid-late
eighth century BCE, has confirmed for many the existence of Asherah worship along-
side that of Yahweh.8
Indeed, these inscriptions appear to better contextualize a number of biblical
­attestations of the term ‘asherah’ (hr#) in its singular and plural forms. The majority
refer disparagingly to the material manifestation of the goddess in the form of her cult
image or object,9 whilst the term also occurs as the name of the goddess (Judg. 3:7; 1 Kgs
14:13; 15:3; 18:19; 2 Kgs 21:7; 23:4) whose cult is located in sanctuaries also dedicated to
Yahweh, including the Jerusalem temple (Deut. 16:21; 2 Kgs 21:7; 23:4–7). Given the
sharp biblical polemic against this deity, many scholars now increasingly agree that
Asherah was neither simply a ‘foreign’ import nor a stubborn vestige of ‘popular’ reli-
gious practice; rather, she was likely worshipped as the consort of Yahweh.
Despite this re-evaluation of goddess worship, however, the socio-cultural dynamics
of contemporary Western academia continue to colour and distort discussions about
goddesses. Whilst the days of explicitly hostile Jewish and Christian scholarly attacks on
the assumed religious realities of the past have (mostly) disappeared, the predominantly
Western gaze of biblical scholars nonetheless continues to view goddess worship against
the backdrop of the academy’s own social and cultural preferences.

Imaging Goddesses: Body and Gender

Just as a binary model of gender remains strongly prevalent in Western constructions of

sociality and personhood today, so too it pervades scholarly discussions about the
­deities of ancient West Asian and eastern Mediterranean cultures. As a social construct,
any notion of ‘gender’ is inevitably bound up with the specifics of the particular context

7  On the correlation of Asherah with Athirat, see S.A. Wiggins, A Reassessment of Asherah with
Further Considerations of the Goddess (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007). On Asherah worship across
socio-religious groups in Israel and Judah, see particularly S. Ackerman, ‘At Home with the Goddess’, in
Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the
Late Bronze Age through Roman Palestinia, edited by W.G. Dever and S. Gitin (Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 2003), 455–68.
8  Secondary literature on this subject is vast. See S.M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel,
SBLMS 34 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature), 1988; M. Dietrich and O. Loretz, ‘Jahwe und seine
Aschera’: Anthropomorphes Kultbild in Mesopotamien, Ugarit und Israel - Das biblische Bilderverbot, UBL 9
(Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 1992); T. Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament,
JSOTS 232 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); J.M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel
and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess, UCOP 57 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
B. Becking, M. Dijkstra, M.C.A. Korpel, and K.J.H. Vriezen, Only One God? Monotheism in Ancient Israel
and the Veneration of the Goddess Asherah, BS 77 (London: Continuum, 2001).
9  The term is problematically rendered ‘sacred pole(s)’ in most English translations. For examples, see
the biblical references given in n. 2.

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in which it is operative as a system of differentiation. The ancient societies of West Asia

appear to have been ‘gendered’ in certain ways, but it is uncritical to assume these con-
structions mapped neatly onto present-day Western paradigms.10 Nor can it necessarily
be supposed that divine gender in these societies was understood to reflect human gen-
der constructs.11 And yet, in spite of evidence for constructions of varied, absent, or
multiple genders in these cultures,12 scholars often narrowly categorize without careful
qualification most anthropomorphic forms of deities as either ‘male’ or ‘female’ accord-
ing to their iconographic portrayal and/or their titles, functions, and descriptions in
extant textual sources, and project these onto assumed human—and pointedly binary—
constructs of gender.
Within the divine pantheons of Late Bronze and Iron Age southern Levantine
­societies, many (although not all) deities appear to be gendered ‘male’ or ‘female’ in rela-
tion to one another—although the fluidity of these genders suggests these were not
‘­stable’ differentiations nor linked to bodily forms, as shall be seen presently. These
­deities performed a number of roles and functions, including some of those familiar in
the world of their human worshippers. For both male and female deities, these roles
might include mixed-gender (though not necessarily sexually active) pairing, and the
parenting (broadly understood) of other gods and divine beings.13 And yet, more often
than not, these are the particular roles emphatically highlighted by scholars to elucidate
their discussions of goddesses in these ancient cultures—often to the diminishment or
exclusion of the other roles credited to them in texts and inscriptions. As such, god-
desses tend to be categorized overwhelmingly as either ‘fertility’ deities or ‘mother’
­goddesses—flattening their portrayed characteristics and functions into a reductive,
‘biologically’ essentialist frame of reference rarely imposed upon male deities. As Jo Ann
Hackett commented in 1989 of the Ugaritic (‘Canaanite’) pantheon:
. . . the deity in Canaan who is most obviously concerned with fertility of crops is a
male god, Baal, and the one most obviously concerned with human fertility is El,
another male god. Yet, when they are given one-word descriptions, they are usually
not called ‘fertility’ gods; rather, Baal is a ‘storm’ god and El is the ‘chief ’ god of the

10  So too M.W. Conkey and R.E. Tringham, ‘Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours
of Feminist Archaeology’, in Feminisms in the Academy, edited by D.C. Stanton and A.J. Stewart (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 102–39, 216.
11  I. Zsolnay, ‘Do Divine Structures of Gender Mirror Mortal Structures of Gender?’, in In the Wake of
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, edited by S. Holloway, J.-A. Scurlock, and R. Beal, GPP 4 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias
Press, 2009), 103–20.
12  See further S. Parpola and R.M. Whiting (eds.), Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings
of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki, July 2–6, 2001, CRRAI 47 (Helsinki: Neo-
Assyrian Corpus Project, 2002); D. Bolger (ed.), Gender Through Time in the Ancient Near East, Gender
and Archaeology 17 (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2008); M. Masterson, N.S. Rabinowitz, and J. Robson
(eds.), Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World (Abingdon: Routledge,
2015).
13  See further I. Zsolnay, ‘Deity: Ancient Near East’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and
Gender Studies: Volume I, edited by J.M. O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 69–74.

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pantheon; the ‘fertility’ epithet as a one-word explanation is often reserved for the
female deities of Canaan.14
Relatively little appears to have changed in the years since Hackett’s piece was pub-
lished.15 Indeed, the same tendency remains evident in analyses of iconography pertain-
ing to goddesses. Whilst the overtly derogatory interpretation of anthropomorphic
material artefacts as ‘toys’ or superstitious ‘charms’ offered within earlier scholarship has
receded,16 southern Levantine goddess iconography is still subjected to a reductive
essentialism. Among the many iconographic forms and motifs identified as ‘female’, bib-
lical scholars tend to draw particular attention to the so-called Nude Female—an image
widely attested across Levantine cultures, and frequently identified with goddesses of
regional pantheons or their worshippers. Across the Levant, including the Syro-
Palestinian cultures of the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, a vast range of terracotta, metal,
ivory, and stone artefacts (such as figurines, plaques, and seals) depict a nude or partially
nude female, usually en face, with her arms by her side, or gesturing to her genitals, or
holding her breasts or various objects and symbols.17 Well-known examples pertaining
to debates about so-called west Semitic religions, of which Israelite and Judahite prac-
tices were a type, include the gold foil relief from Lachish, depicting an adorned divine
female standing on a horse; the Revadim figurine holding open her labia with children
at her breasts; the bronze pendant from Acre showing a woman standing on a lion, hold-
ing lotus stems; the woman between two lions on the Ta‘anach cult stand; and the group
of artefacts commonly known as the Judahite Pillar Figurines, which image women
holding their breasts.18

14  J.A. Hackett, ‘Can a Sexist Model Liberate Us? Ancient Near Eastern “Fertility” Goddesses’, Journal
of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 5 (1989): 65–76, 74, (emphasis original). On the label ‘Canaanite’, see
H. Niehr, ‘ “Israelite” Religion and “Canaanite” Religion’, in Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and
Judah, edited by F. Stavrakopoulou and J. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 23–36.
15  In biblical studies, notable exceptions complementing Hackett’s critique include C.R. Fontaine, ‘A
Heifer from Thy Stable: On Goddesses and the Status of Women in the Ancient Near East’, in The Pleasure
of Her Text: Feminist Readings of Biblical and Historical Texts, edited by A. Bach (Philadelphia: Trinity
Press International, 1990), 69–95; P.L. Day, ‘Anat: Ugarit’s “Mistress of Animals” ’, JNES, vol. 51 (1992):
181–90; T.S. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation
of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992); B.A. Nakhai, ‘Gender and Archaeology in Israelite Religion’,
Religion Compass, vol. 1, no. 5 (2007): 512–28.
16  See the critique in P.R.S. Moorey, Idols of the People: Miniature Images of Clay in the Ancient Near
East (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2003), 7–11.
17  See further S.L. Budin, ‘The Nude Female in the Southern Levant: A Mixing of Syro-Mesopotamian
and Egyptian Iconographies’, BAAL Hors-Série X (2015): 315–35.
18  For these artefacts, see (conveniently) O. Keel and C. Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of
God in Ancient Israel, trans. T.H. Trapp (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), figs 70, 71, 82, 184, 321a–c. For
other detailed studies of ‘goddess’ iconography, see also U. Winter, Frau und Göttin: Exegetische ind
ikonographische Studien zum weiblichen Gottesbild im Alten Israel und in dessen Umwelt, OBO 53
(Fribourg: Academic Press and Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987); R. Kletter, The Judean Pillar-
Figurines and the Archaeology of Asherah (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1996); I. Cornelius, The Many
Faces of the Goddess: The Iconography of the Syro-Palestinian Goddesses Anat, Astarte, Qedeshet, and
Asherah c. 1500–1000 BCE, OBO 204 (Fribourg: Academic Press and Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2004).

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Despite notable diversity across the repertoire of styles and motifs associated with the
‘Nude Female’ (which might represent human as well as divine women), these artefacts
are frequently and collectively identified simply as ‘fertility’ or ‘mother’ images of divine
women—the former often being described as ‘erotic’, and the latter as ‘nurturing’.
Problematically, however, these interpretations simply anatomize and dissect the body
imagery of these iconographic females to index ‘biological’ functions of sex, so that they
are held to represent divine women who are sexually ripe or successfully reproductive,
perpetuating the essential reductionism common in debates about ancient goddesses.
Indeed, as some scholars have argued of these and similar iconographies and textual
imageries, constructions of ‘nudity’ or ‘nakedness’ in ancient societies need not simply or
exclusively signal sexuality and the erotic, just as breasts and genitalia need not point to
a concern for fertility, reproduction, and motherhood.19 Ancient constructs of both
­sexuality and reproduction management were likely far more complex, and perceptions
of body motifs in visual and textual cultures so inextricably caught up in the specifics of
their producers and varied audiences, that such scholarly generalizations are at best
unhelpful, and at worse distortive.20
Yet biblical scholars and historians of ancient Israel and Judah continue to resort to
the caricaturing of goddesses and their depictions as primarily or exclusively ‘biological’
or anatomically sexual in form and function. Whether cast as a fertility deity or a nurtur-
ing mother, goddesses all too often appear to be presented in scholarly discussions as an
assumed cultural token of the unbounded body—a body that is distinctively female,
whether human or divine. Thus it is common to find goddesses described in language
peppered with highly charged terms denoting intensity and extremity, such that Anat is
‘a ruthless mysogynist [sic]’ and ‘an unattached female with an uncontrollable passion’,21
and the high-goddess at Ugarit is ‘a power-greedy woman who manipulates the heav-
enly court’.22 Indeed, scholarly descriptions can often morph into forms of language
reminiscent of the familiar tropes of Western androcentrism and sexism: the Minet el-
Beida ivory carving from Ugarit shows ‘a very attractively carved topless goddess’;23

19  See S.L. Budin, ‘Creating a Goddess of Sex’, in Engendering Aphrodite: Women and Society in
Ancient Cyprus, edited by D. Bolger and N. Serwint (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research,
2002), 315–24; J. Asher-Greve and D. Sweeney, ‘On Nakedness, Nudity, and Gender in Egyptian and
Mesopotamian Art’, in S. Schroer, Images and Gender: Contributions to the Hermeneutics of Reading
Ancient Art, OBO 220 (Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 125–76.
Note also the methodological points raised by M. Weismantel and L. Meskell, ‘Substances: “Following
the Material” through Two Prehistoric Cases’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 19 (2014): 233–51.
20  See further B.L. Voss, ‘Sexuality Studies in Archaeology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 37
(2008): 317–36.
21  B. Margalit, The Ugaritic Poem of Aqht, BZAW 182 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), 477; R.S. Hess, Israelite
Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 100.
22  M.C.A. Korpel, ‘Asherah outside Israel’, in B, Becking, M. Dijkstra, M.C.A. Korpel, and K.J.H.
Vriezen, Only One God? Monotheism in Ancient Israel and the Veneration of the Goddess Asherah, BS 77
(London: Continuum, 2001), 127–50, 137.
23  D.P. Wright, ‘Syro-Canaanite Religions’, in The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World.
Volume I: From the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic Age, edited by M.R. Salzman and M.A. Sweeney
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 129–50, 135.

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re-imaging divine women    501

­gurines indicate that goddesses’ bodies ‘are either young and taut or maturely
fi
Flemish’,24 and the biblical pairing of Baal and Asherah suggests the goddess who went
‘awhoring . . . eventually got her man’.25 Stitching together disparate pieces of informa-
tion from textual and iconographic images of ancient West Asian goddesses is a prob-
lematic tendency in itself,26 but in embellishing ancient material with the fabric of their
own cultural backdrop biblical scholars have created an uncritical and distorted effigy of
a supposedly near-universal type of divine female that is overtly fecund, innately sexed,
and at times, dangerously uncontrolled.
Whilst this pointed emphasis on the unbounded female divine body reflects in part
the continued orientalizing tendencies of Western scholarship, in which the ‘other’ is
imagined as the hyper-sexed, uncontrolled primitive,27 it also reproduces the gender
polarities arising from the body/mind, nature/culture, and emotion/reason dualisms
inherent in Western culture, in which innate, qualitative differences between genders are
assumed and enforced, and women’s bodies are particularly problematized and con-
trolled by predominantly male brokers of power. Like most other Western institutions,
academia is not immune from the distorting and damaging dynamics of this broader
cultural norm. This is well-illustrated by an influential 2005 monograph about goddess
religion in ancient Israel and Judah by the American scholar William Dever, in which
(like many others) he particularly associates goddess worship with women’s religious
practice. In setting out his approach to the topic, he writes:
. . . I remain convinced that there are significant differences in men’s and women’s
fundamental approach to religion and to the study of religion, men generally being
perhaps more analytical (i.e., inclined to theology), and women by and large more
attuned to the emotional aspects of religion (experiential). Neither approach is
­necessarily ‘better’ than the other; but ironically here I side as a man more with the
latter. I can only hope I will not be thought presumptuous.28
For many readers, ‘presumptuous’ may not be the first adjective to spring to mind in
response to Dever’s words. But his comments suggest a fossilized internalization of those
notorious and deeply problematic Western dichotomies in his assumption not only that

24  Z. Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London: Continuum,
2001), 273.
25  J. Day, ‘Asherah in the Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Literature’, JBL 105 (1986), 385–408,
399.
26  So Wiggins, Reassessment of Asherah, 5.
27  The classic study remains E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). For further discussion of
orientalist interpretations of goddess iconography, see Z. Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and
Representation in Mesopotamia (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. 161–79.
28  W.G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake,
IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), xiv. Interestingly, Dever is not the only scholar to reference his gender in writing
about female deities. Izak Cornelius expresses his hope that ‘women will forgive me if I as a male deal
with goddesses’ (Cornelius, Many Faces of the Goddess, 2 (emphasis original)). He is sharply reprimanded
for this comment in a review by Dennis Pardee (JNES 68 [2009], 120–9), who remarks, ‘he is to be con-
gratulated for not allowing some perverted form of political correctness to set his research agenda, but
the very expression of the idea should be banned from a serious piece of research’ (121).

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in the contexts of both religion and academia all women are the same and unlike all men,
but that they manifest and represent in the world the bodily and emotional—as opposed
to men, who mark the cultural and intellectual. The essentialist frame within which he
repeatedly contextualizes and aligns women’s religion and goddess worship derives from
his assumption that ‘there may be fundamental differences, socio-cultural if not biological,
in the way men and women view religion’, so that ‘men want to theorize, while women
need to do something about religion’.29 Dever casts this as a female form of piety
(­supposedly) well-attested within today’s monotheistic religions in ‘less-developed cul-
tures’, in which ‘bemused husbands’ tolerate their wives’ religious activities.30
Whilst not all scholars share this derogatory and outdated assumption that ‘female’
and ‘feminine’ constructs of religion derive from biological and bodily difference, many
exhibit a shared notion that goddess worship in ancient West Asian societies is best iden-
tified as ‘women’s religion’. It may be that this tendency to generalize about goddesses
and gender derives from a concern to recover the ‘visibility’ of ancient women in the
religious past, coupled with a privileging of biblical constructs of the divine—points to
which the discussion will now turn.

Imaging Goddesses: Characterizing

the Divine

A heritage of ‘visibility’, by which contemporary social preferences and identities are

sought in the visual and textual artefacts of the past, often undergirds debates in schol-
arly discourse about ancient religions, whether explicitly articulated or not. Just as those
academics who once vilified ‘Canaanite’ goddess worship sought to identify their own
theological preferences with those promoted in the biblical texts, so the theological and
cultural preferences of more recent scholarship have prompted many to look for dis-
cernible traces of a more religious and gendered diversity in the societies from which the
Hebrew Bible emerged. To a certain extent, recent postmodern quests to find those ‘like
ourselves’ in the people and practices of the past have helped to dislodge and disem-
power some of the more damaging colonial, masculinist, and heteronormative ideolo-
gies inherent in the efforts of previous generations of scholarship. But such endeavours
can at times result in competing but similarly misrepresentative portrayals of ancient
societies and their religious activities.31

29 Dever, Did God Have a Wife?, 56, 249. Note that Dever abandons any attempt to adopt a cautious
tone when he remarks: ‘if women had written their own Bible, God would have appeared very differ-
ently—and perhaps more humanely. That is not reverse sexism, but simply the recognition of biological
facts’ (310).
30 Dever, Did God Have a Wife?, 191, 246. On the pernicious orientalizing of ‘women’s religion’ and
‘folk religion’ in Dever’s work, see Stavrakopoulou, ‘ “Popular” Religion’, 43–4.
31  One such example is the ‘modern myth’ of the universal Mother Goddess, associated with the so-
called Goddess movement, which argues for a prehistoric, egalitarian, and matriarchal origin of religion

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re-imaging divine women    503

The scholarly rehabilitation of the place of goddesses in ancient Israelite and Judahite
religions is closely tied to the quest for women’s social identities in the past. But this
rehabilitation can often exhibit generalizing and essentialist tendencies, and project
onto its subject assumptions shaped by biblical and Western theological preferences.
Discourse continues to revolve primarily around the deity Asherah not only as a regional
‘type’ of paradigmatic fertility or mother goddess, but also as the goddess with whom
most ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ divine manifestations and religious experiences were config-
ured in Israelite and Judahite societies. As such, there is a proclivity towards ‘Asherah-
ology’ as a taxonomical methodology, whereby women’s religious practice, or elements
of religion engaging the female body, are all indexed as aspects of the cult of Asherah—
despite evidence suggesting participants in goddess worship and women’s body prac-
tices might be of a range of gender constructs.32
The cost of this scholarly habit is not only the perpetuation of essentializing gender
categories, but the diminishing of variety and diversity both among deities and within
the religious experiences of the people of the past. Whilst there is some evidence for dis-
tinctly scribal, royal, and imperial discourses of what has been termed divine ‘translata-
bility’ across ancient West Asian religions, there is little reason to assume that certain
deities were understood by their worshippers to be directly identifiable with others
across societies.33 Accordingly, it is more appropriate to avoid analysing goddess cults as
regional manifestations of a common or paradigmatic ‘type’ of deity.
Similarly, it is unwise to suppose that epigraphic attestations of Asherah all refer to
precisely the same goddess. At Kuntillet ‘Ajrud alone, appeals to Asherah alongside
‘Yahweh of Samaria’ (on pithos A) and ‘Yahweh of Teman’ (pithos B) are suggestive of
localized but distinct and independent cults of a divine pair.34 Thus, just as it is more
appropriate to speak of a number of different Yahwehs—or ‘poly-Yahwism’—in debating

in the worship of a Great Mother, from which a variety of ancient European, eastern Mediterranean, and
West Asian goddesses derived and survived in various fragmented forms in the face of subsequent patri-
archal religions. But the paradigm relies heavily on universalisms and essentialisms in its portrayal of
early societies as ostensibly identical in their development, and in casting motherhood as the archetypal
paradigm of womanhood. See further L. Goodison and C. Morris, ‘Exploring Female Divinity: From
Modern Myths to Ancient Evidence’, in Ancient Goddesses, edited by L. Goodison and C. Morris (London:
British Museum Press, 1998), 6–21.
32  S.M. Olyan, ‘What Do We Really Know about Women’s Rites in the Israelite Family Context?’,
JANER, vol. 10 (2010): 55–67; cf. F. Stavrakopoulou, ‘Religion at Home: The Materiality of Practice’, in The
Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel, edited by S. Niditch (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016),
347–65.
33  Whilst the identification of deities across societies and cultures is a view encouraged by some mul-
tilingual divine ‘directories’, listing deities, their addresses, or aspects of their cults, these god-lists do not
imply the equation or identification of deities; so M.S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural
Discourse in the Biblical World, FAT 57 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 41–3; contra J. Assmann, Moses
the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1997),
44–54.
34  Cf. J.M. Hutton, ‘Southern, Northern and Transjordanian Perspectives’, in Religious Diversity in
Ancient Israel and Judah, edited by F. Stavrakopoulou and J. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 149–74,
esp. 152–3.

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504   francesca stavrakopoulou

the religious realities of ancient Israel and Judah, so too it is critically more rigorous to
recognize the probability that many Asherahs were worshipped in Israel and Judah. This
makes better sense of biblical polemics against goddess worship, in which the names of
the deities Asherah and Ashtart (MT Ashtaroth) can also function in their plural forms
as generic terms referring to ‘goddesses’, much like the related goddess-names Ishtar and
Astarte are attested in some textual and epigraphic sources as generic plurals best ren-
dered ‘goddesses’.35 Some of these goddesses condemned in the Hebrew Bible perhaps
also included Anat and Mut, for whom archaeological evidence suggests a presence in
the regions and communities associated with the Iron Age societies of Israel and Judah,
and a goddess whose epithet in biblical texts is ‘Queen of Heaven’ (Jer. 7:18; 44:17–25).36
The difficulty or reluctance with which some biblical scholars engage evidence of
divine plurality—particularly in relation to Yahweh, but increasingly pertaining also to
Asherah—might well reflect in part a cultural clash or discomfort arising from the reli-
gious and philosophical preferences of Western intellectual traditions—preferences
arguably amplified in the biblical studies academy, given its confessional heritage. The
very concept of a (theoretically) monotheistic and transcendent ‘God’ which continues
to dominate Western cultural discourse is that of a single and solitary deity of ‘macro-
religious’ performance and engagement, so that (simply put) the cult places and people
of the deity tend not to be perceived as independent religious socialities, but related iter-
ations. And yet this appears not to have been the religious experience of ancient ­societies
of the southern Levant.37
Distinct too were ancient constructions of divine bodies and genders, and their cor-
responding functions. The ‘rediscovery’ of goddess worship in the societies from which
the Hebrew Bible would emerge, and the greater emphasis on the place of women in the
religious past, has greatly contributed to the long-standing interest in the ‘feminine’

35  On these generic plurals, see S. Anthonioz, ‘Astarte in the Bible and her Relation to Asherah’, in
Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar – Astarte – Aphrodite, edited by D.T. Sugimoto, OBO 263 (Fribourg/
Göttingen: Academic Press/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 125–39. In the MT, Ashtart’s name occurs as
a singular in 1 Sam. 31:10; 2 Kgs 11:5, 33; 2 Kgs 23:13, and as a plural in a number of texts, including Judg.
10:6–7; 1 Sam. 7:2–4; 12:8–11; see further N. Wyatt, ‘Astarte’, DDD, 109–14, esp. 112–13.
36  For biblical and non-biblical evidence for Anat-worship in Israel and Judah, see J.H. Stuckey, ‘The
Great Goddesses of the Levant’, Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, vol. 30 (2003):
127–57; on Mut, see C.R. Hays, ‘The Covenant with Mut: A New Interpretation of Isaiah 28:1–22’, VT,
vol. 60 (2010): 212–40, and C.R. Hays, ‘The Egyptian Goddess Mut in Iron Age Palestine: Further Data
from Amulets and Onomastics’, JNES, vol. 71 (2012): 299–313. Scholars widely identify the Queen of
Heaven as Ishtar or Ashtart; see further S. Ackerman, ‘ “And the Women Knead Dough”: The Worship
of the Queen of Heaven in Sixth-Century Judah’, in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by
P.L. Day (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), 109–24; J.M. Hadley, ‘The Queen of Heaven—Who is
She?’, in Prophets and Daniel, edited by A. Brenner, Feminist Companion to the Bible 2/8 (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 30–51; see also T. Ornan, ‘Ištar as Depicted on Finds from Israel’, in
Studies in the Archaeology of the Iron Age in Israel and Jordan, edited by A. Mazar (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 2001), 235–56.
37  See further B.N. Porter (ed.), One God or Many? Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World, TCBAI
1 (Maine: Casco Bay Assyriological Institute, 2000) and S.L. Allen, The Splintered Divine: A Study of Ištar,
Baal, and Yahweh Divine Names and Divine Multiplicity in the Ancient Near East, SANER (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2015).

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re-imaging divine women    505

dimensions of biblical theology, so that gendered aspects of the divine continue to come
under ever sharper scrutiny. Despite the rejection of goddess worship in biblical texts,
the continued theological value of the divine female remains attested for many scholars
in the Hebrew Bible. Several seek to highlight the ‘feminine’ characteristics of biblical
portrayals of Yahweh, drawing particular attention to his ‘mothering’, ‘nurturing’, and
‘fertile’ qualities as reflexes of the (implicitly secondary) assimilation of goddesses and
their imagery.38 But these scholarly efforts are at times undermined by a resistance to
notions of divine corporeality and gender fluidity, coupled with a preference for meta-
phor in interpretations of biblical texts—a position shaped, perhaps, by a biblically
informed, Western Christocentric discourse of masculinist divine transcendence.
Whilst acknowledging that some ancient Yahwisms were comfortably anthropomorphic,
many scholars privilege the ideological biblical polemic against cult statues by prioritiz-
ing a ‘metaphorical’ function of divine body language in the biblical texts.39 This
approach to the biblical Yahweh has spilled over into debates about Israelite and Judahite
goddesses, so that it is common to find the cult object of Asherah problematically distin-
guished from the goddess, rendering it not the deity materialized, but only her ‘symbol’,
both in the biblical texts and in the inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-
Qom. Indeed, some go so far as to employ the loaded theological language of ‘hypostasis’
to argue that the term ‘asherah’ in these inscriptions attests to the incorporation of this
symbol into the cult of Yahweh, expressing his ‘feminine’ or ‘female’ aspects and his
power to mediate fertility.40
Whilst the quest for ‘feminine’ aspects of the divine might render the god of the
Hebrew Bible more palatable to certain present-day theological tastes, the assumption
that fertility is a predominantly ‘feminine’ divine attribute and might be used as a
­taxonomy of gender differentiation is fraught with difficulties. A number of deities are
presented as gods of ‘fertility’ (whether human, animal, agricultural, or cosmic fertility)
and this function need not index unambiguous nor fixed constructs of divine sex and
gender. In many myths, fertility is presented as an attribute of putatively ‘male’ deities or
as a construct placed beyond the bounds of divine anatomy or the sexed body. Thus, as
well as having sex with other gods, deities might bring about new life by means of
‘­parthenogenetic’ processes of masturbation, ingestion resulting in ‘male’ pregnancy,

38  See the discussion in H. Løland, Silent or Salient Gender? The Interpretation of Gendered God-
Language in the Hebrew Bible, Exemplified in Isaiah 42, 46 and 49, FAT II/32 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2008).
39  On the biblical polemic against cult statues, see K. van der Toorn (ed.), The Image and the Book:
Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East, CBET 21
(Leuven: Peeters, 1997); N.B. Levtow, Images of Others: Iconic Polities in Ancient Israel, BJS 11 (Winona
Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008).
40  e.g. Hadley, Cult of Asherah, 99, 207; P.D. Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel, LAI (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2000), 30, 36; A. Lemaire, The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance
of Yahwism (Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007), 60. For the asherah as a symbol of fertility
belonging to Yahweh, see J. Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, JSOTS 265 (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 42, 51–9; M.S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other
Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd edn. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), xxxv.

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translocation from one realm to another, or technologies of craft and magic, such as
clay-shaping or ritual speech.41
Notions of sex, gender, and performativity—particularly ‘femaleness’ and ‘maleness’,
‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’—in ancient West Asian constructs of the divine appear
to have been far more fluid and elastic than conventional Western assumptions allow—
as indeed were conceptions of divine corporeality and bodyliness.42 The dynamism
of divine gender constructs is well-attested at Ugarit. Whilst several deities are depicted
as ‘male’ or ‘female’ in language and portrayal, these gendered presentations are
­neither  dichotomous nor narrow. The high god El is described as having a large
penis,  and is portrayed as experiencing sexual desire and arousal, but he might be
addressed as ‘mother’, as well as ‘father’ (KTU 1.23). For some, this could reflect El’s
­distinctive role at Ugarit as the originator of all life, but it also suggests a more expansive
complex of divine masculinities similarly hinted of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, in
which (for example) he is simultaneously imaged as both a divine father and the b ­ irthing
Rock (Deut. 32:18).
Goddesses too might exhibit innate gender fluidity. Anat is a deity positioned
beyond the bounds of what is often regarded as ‘conventional’ ancient West Asian gen-
der performance, for she is at once a violent warrior and a hunter, a child-free wet-
nurse, and a deity sexually charged but inactive.43 This variety has perplexed some
scholars, who seek to account for her complex mythological roles by interrogating her
gender and status. For some, Anat is a ‘tomboy goddess’;44 for others, an ‘adolescent’
who ‘refuses to grow up’.45 More recently, Anat’s role as a female divine warrior has
been classed as a form of ‘gender inversion’, marking her as powerfully liminal and ren-
dering warfare alluring to human men, for whom the relationship with a female patron
deity might assume ‘a certain sexual tension’.46 And yet to suppose her various mytho-
logical depictions reflect an ‘inversion’ of gendered roles is to imagine notions of divine
masculinity and femininity were fixed polarities. Rather, Anat exhibits a vivid diversity
of mythological roles attested elsewhere—particularly in the figure of the goddess
Ishtar, whose expansive gender performances might enable her worshippers to partici-

41  See further S.L. Budin, ‘Fertility and Gender in the Ancient Near East’, in Sex in Antiquity: Exploring
Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, edited by M. Masterson, N.S. Rabinowitz, and J. Robson
(London: Routledge, 2015), 30–49.
42  The relative ease with which many Levantine cultures imaged their deities as beings of variable
bodies is signalled in iconographic and textual portrayals of gods exhibiting what Western scholars
might perceive as ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ anthropomorphic and zoomorphic parts. See further (e.g.) Smith,
Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 33–4.
43  See further Day, P.L. Day, ‘Why is Anat a Warrior and Hunter?’, in The Bible and the Politics of
Exegesis, edited by D. Jobling, P.L. Day, and G. Sheppard (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1991), 141–6, 329–32;
N. Walls, The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).
44  D. Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, Writings from the Ancient World 10 (Atlanta: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2002), 274.
45  P.L. Day, ‘Anat’, DDD, 36–43, 37.
46  M.S. Smith, Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early
Biblical World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 74.

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re-imaging divine women    507

pate in the fluidity of divine gender,47 or manifest such transformative power that she is
famously credited in Mesopotamian texts as being the deity who can ‘turn a man into
woman’ and ‘woman into man’.48
Relying on misrepresentative and essentialist taxonomies of gender to account for divine
attributes and activities is thus unhelpful. Within a context of dynamic bodily variability in
the divine, it is unwise to assume the sexed and gendered aspects of divine identity were as
bound as perhaps those of their human worshippers, regardless of literary or iconographic
references to the vulva, breasts, or phallus.49 As Ilona Zsolnay comments, ‘the sex of a god is
not assigned based on his or her genitalia, nor is the gender of a god assigned based on the
god’s sex’.50 Ancient West Asian deities were inherently unbounded, but in ways at odds
with the forms of divine transcendency particularly privileged of the ‘God’ of the Hebrew
Bible, which often resist or reject notions of divine plurality, corporeality, and materiality in
favour of a portrait of an aniconic, solitary, immaterial, and exclusive deity.51 Although
Yahweh’s biblical imaging as warrior, parent, and perpetuator of fertility often bears striking
similarities to goddess tropes elsewhere, these shared motifs more plausibly serve as biblical
claims of divine exclusivity, rather than remnants of appropriated function. Thus, just as it is
perhaps too hasty to cite models of assimilation or appropriation to account for either fertil-
ity or ‘femininity’ in depictions of Yahweh, so too it is uncritical to assume divine sex and
gender were fixed or dichotomous. The goddesses of the southern Levant were as complex
and as varied in role and function as their ‘male’ counterparts.

Reflection and Refraction

Although analyses of ancient West Asian goddess iconographies, mythologies, and func-
tions have become more nuanced and critical, the cultural preferences of the West
­continue to distort the scholarly gaze. Goddesses remain subject to rigid and static

47  M. Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1998), 31–6; J. Assante, ‘Bad Girls and Kinky Boys? The Modern Prostituting of Ishtar, Her Clergy
and Her Cults’, in Tempelprostitution im Alterum: Fakten und Fiktionen, edited by T.S. Scheer and
M. Lindner, Oikumene 6 (Berlin: Antique, 2009), 23–54; J. Stökl, ‘Gender “Ambiguity” in Ancient Near
Eastern Prophecy? A Reassessment of the Data behind a Popular Theory’, in Prophets Male and Female:
Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East, edited
by J. Stökl and C.L. Carvalho (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 59–79.
48  M.E. Cohen, Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia, Volume II (Potomac, MD: Capital
Decisions, 1988), 596.
49  On the unbounded bodies of the divine, see further B.D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World
of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); M.B. Hundley, ‘Divine Fluidity? The
Priestly Texts in their Ancient Near Eastern Contexts’, in Text, Time, and Temple: Literary, Historical and
Ritual Studies in Leviticus, edited by F. Landy, L.M. Trevaskis, and B. Bibb (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix,
2015), 16–40.
50  Zsolnay, ‘Deity: Ancient Near East’, 70.
51  See further Sommer, Bodies of God, 140–3; G. Loughlin, ‘Omphalos’, in Queer Theology: Rethinking
the Western Body, edited by G. Loughlin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 115–27.

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classification according to assumptions about ‘bodily’ form in ways that male deities are
not. Their sexing in scholarship as alluring and erotic, or nurturing and motherly, may
chime with some features of their ancient religious worth, but these qualities are heavily
freighted with other cultural values attesting to their multifaceted functions. Thus, in her
role as consort of El, Athirat is not simply a wife and mother, but a powerful intermedi-
ary and petitioner within the divine realm; as a wetnurse of gods and kings, she is not
only a source of parental sustenance and protection, but a purveyor of political power
and a crucial player in the cosmic creation of order.52 Indeed, similarly complex values
are arguably credited to the biblical Queen of Heaven in Jer. 7:18; 44:17–25, whilst the
biblical Asherah’s high-status position in the elite cult of the Jerusalem temple suggests
she too is a powerful political patron (1 Kgs 15:9–13). Although intensely hostile to god-
desses, even the writers of these particular biblical texts are not quite able to present god-
desses as mere ciphers.
There is perhaps a paradox of sorts underlying debates about ancient goddess wor-
ship in biblical studies: in the quest to challenge and redress the marginalized presence
and status of women (human and divine) in the societies from which the Hebrew Bible
emerged, too many scholars have continued to perpetuate the Western, masculinist, and
heteronormative gaze they seek to critique by replicating the reductive generalizations
arising from binary gender constructs. And yet, as Sarah Nelson comments, ‘[t]he urge
to generalize deplorably essentializes women and obscures the activities of women in
the past no less than generalizations of women as sex objects’.53
The tenacity of the essentialist gaze may well signal entrenched hierarchies of power
in Western intellectual discourse, in which the agenda and interpretative frames within
long-standing academic disciplines have been established, shaped, and controlled by
Western androcentrism and masculinist values, so that even in scope and methodology,
there remains the risk that ‘every interpretation of the past is already heteronormative’.54
In biblical studies, these problematic cultural values are arguably amplified by virtue of
their being firmly embedded within the dominant forms of Western Christianity which
initially shaped scholarly constructions of both ‘religion’ and the ‘divine’ as categories
within the disciplines of theology and classics—disciplines from which biblical studies
emerged. These values continue to influence the ways in which religions of the past are
identified, characterized, analysed, and evaluated.55 Even among those in the academy
self-consciously eschewing Western or Christocentric theological or religious para-
digms, the possibility remains that the social and cultural contexts of any scholar play

52  For key texts, see N. Wyatt, ‘Religion at Ugarit: An Overview’, in Handbook of Ugaritic Studies,
edited by W.G.E. Waston and N. Wyatt, HdO 1/39 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 529–85.
53  S.M. Nelson, Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige, 2nd edn. (Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira Press, 2004), 130.
54  T.A. Dowson, ‘Archaeologists, Feminists and Queers: Sexual Politics in the Construction of the
Past’, in Feminist Anthropology: Perspectives on Past, Present, and Future, edited by P.L. Geller and M.K.
Stockett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 89–102; cf. P. Bourdieu, Masculine
Domination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
55  See further D. Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion, Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology,
trans. W. Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2003).

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re-imaging divine women    509

formative roles in their perception of ‘religion’ and the ‘divine’—after all, any under-
standing of what is indexed by these terms is inevitably prefaced by the ways in which
the notion of the ‘religious’ is understood and socialized in an individual’s own cultural
contexts long before a scholarly career.56 At the very least, any biblical scholar could and
should beware the restrictive yet loaded position from which we gaze at the past. Indeed,
the concerns addressed in this chapter likely reflect to a certain extent my own social
and cultural location as a woman working in a field heavily dominated both by men and
by those whose religious views I do not share.
Thus, although the potential impact of these conventional, value-laden disciplinary
tendencies is more evident in some forms of biblical scholarship than others, there
­plausibly remains a latent cultural desire within the discipline to essentialize, diminish,
or orientalize those deities othered in and by the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity,
and to cast them as wholly ‘other’ to the immaterial-yet-immanent, asexual-yet-masculine
God of Western culture. In the peculiar world of biblical studies, these disciplinary tics
can not only distort but inevitably cheapen the cultural currency assumed of goddesses
in their ancient contexts—and thereby extend further the project of goddess disem-
powerment so vehemently pursued by the biblical writers themselves.

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Sixth-Century Judah’, in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by P.L. Day
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