The qdesha in Hosea 4:14: Putting the (Myth of the) Sacred Prostitute to Bed

Abstract

Despite a lack of evidence for the practice of sacred prostitution in the ancient Middle East, scholars have continued to understand the wordqdešɔin Hosea 4:14 to denote a female officiant who performed sexual acts in a cultic setting. This article argues that the understanding of theqdešɔas a cultic prostitute has appealed to interpreters for over two millennia because the Hebrew word has a semantic range that includes both female cultic functionaries and prostitutes. The lexeme denotes a class of women who are employed outside of the patrimonial estate, including priestesses or prostitutes (but never both at the same time). When the prophet indicts the Israelites for sacrificing with qdešot, he deploys a pun that strengthens his metaphor of Israel as a wayward woman.

Weaning Away from Idolatry: Maimonides on the Purpose of Ritual Sacrifices

“…The idea of widespread ritual prostitution or temple prostitution in ancient idolatrous cult by mainstream academia, who find examples of words that resemble kedeisha in other ancient Semitic langu idea is not uniformly accepted, (see Westenholz 1989, pp. 245-65;Glatt-Gilad 2011, p. 596;DeGrado 2018, p 38 (Katzenelson 1928 This does not necessarily fit with Maimonides' four reasons for the laws of ritual purity and impurity (G explains that they distance people from whatever is disgusting. Second, they reinforce the sanctity of the Ho foodstuff by limiting the situations in which one may enter the Sanctuary or eat sacred foods.…”