While reading the Hebrew Bible I almost fell off my seat when I read the words “male temple prostitutes” in 1 Kings 14.24. It didn’t take long to find the same words in 1 Kings 15.12, 22.46, and 2 Kings 23.7, plus Deuteronomy 23.17 and Job 36.14.
My first thought was that this expression must refer to male homosexuals, but I was wrong. With a little research I learned from Strong’s Concordance that the original word in Hebrew is qadesh (H6945). The feminine form is qedeshah.
It turns out that qadesh and qedeshah worship the Canaanite fertility goddess Ashtoreth. We are warned throughout the Hebrew Bible against worshiping other gods, including Ashtoreth’s husband Molech. It is important to note that qadesh is not the same as zanah, which can refer to both a temple prostitute and a street prostitute.
But whether we are talking about qadesh or zanah, neither are necessarily homosexuals.
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It seems to me that there has always been a bit of back-and-forth in the scholarship on this. The Anchor Bible Dictionary has a two-part essay on "Prostitution," the first part of which is on prostitution in the OT and deals briefly with cultic prostitution, the second part of which deals solidly with cultic prostitution in the ancient Near East generally.
ReplyDeleteAs with "eunuchs" and similar topics, I think the scholarship reveals as much about the presuppositions and comfort level of the scholars as about the subject matter!