Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The Queen of Heaven
A goddess whose cakes the women of Judah baked, and who told the prophet life was better when they did.
Jeremiah 7:18, in every translation this tool compares.
The women of Judah baked cakes for her, and when Jeremiah confronted them they told him to his face that life had been better when they did it. Her title carries the same doctored vowels as Ashtoreth's, so even the name on the page is an argument.
Whole families bake cakes for her, and the women of Judah tell Jeremiah to his face that things went better when they did. The Masoretic vowels on her title are polemic too, like Molech's and Ashtoreth's. Read one way the title says "the Queen of Heaven"; read the way the Masoretes pointed it, it says "the work (that is, host) of heaven," turning the goddess into an abstraction. The LXX's "queen of heaven" confirms the original sense was suppressed on purpose.
H4446, 5 occ
Usually identified with Ishtar or Astarte, and the title fits both, so it reads best as a blend of the two. Ishtar's cult used cakes called kamanu, cognate with the Hebrew kawwanim, "cakes," in Jeremiah's account. Anat and Asherah also carry the title or near equivalents elsewhere in the ancient Near East, so DDD treats the identity question as secondary: by the sixth century BC "Queen of Heaven" worked as a general label for the universal mother goddess, worshipped under whatever local name suited the worshipper. A temple to the Queen of Heaven at Syene in Egypt, attested independently of Jeremiah in the fifth-century BC Hermopolis letters, sat in the same Jewish community in Egypt that Jeremiah addresses.
- Jeremiah 7:18
- Jeremiah 44:17-19,25
- Susan Ackerman, "Queen of Heaven," Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, 1104
- DDD s.v. "Queen of Heaven," 678-679
