Goddesses: Biblical Echoes

Tikva Frymer-Kensky is a wonderful human being whom I’ve known for a long time. She observes the Sabbath, she does not drive on the Sabbath, which begins Friday night. So last night we all went to the hotel where our speakers are staying, to eat. Before we went to the restaurant, we met in Tikva’s room and said the Sabbath blessings, including the chanting of the Kiddush, the traditional blessing over the Sabbath meal. And I think we were all taken aback at what a gorgeous, beautiful voice Tikva has. In some ways, I wish this were a concert today, instead of a lecture.

On the other hand, Tikva is one of the sharpest and broadest Bible scholars it has ever been my privilege to meet and interact with. She received her Ph.D. from Yale. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Wayne State, Beer-sheva University in Israel and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She is currently director of biblical studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. This January she will be going to Chicago as a full professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. We congratulate her and wish her well in her prestigious new position as professor of Hebrew Bible.

Tikva is the author of several books, including The Judicial Ordeal in the Ancient Near East. She is, incidentally, also a legal historian. She has another book about to be published, Mother Prayer, and, most relevant to her talk today, her most recent book, In the Wake of the Goddesses. She will address us today on “Goddesses: Biblical Echoes.”—H.S.

The current interest in women in the Bible is partly theological. The wave of feminism has raised fundamental questions about the nature of monotheism, the sexuality of monotheism and the gender messages it conveys. In the last 25 years or so, a new mythology has grown, the mythology of the Goddess, the Great Goddess, who was peaceful, earth-loving, women-loving, everything of perfection that can be imagined, and who was displaced by patriarchy.

This is a myth that is growing into a new religion. It has no relationship to historical fact, but it has become a foundational document and an orientational theology for many women struggling with the issues of how to maintain a religious consciousness when that consciousness has, for so long been accompanied by cultural messages of unequal gender relationships and male domination in a hierarchy.

When we look at history, we realize that the myth of the Great Goddess is less history than psychology because, to some extent, it represents the wish of all of us to go back to the absolute peace and bliss we felt at our mother’s breast and even before that in our mother’s womb. The real world is not that peaceful; the real world is certainly not that blissful.

The last 150 years have witnessed not only the development of many historical techniques for studying the Bible, but also the development of the great disciplines of history and archaeology. We have discovered the ancient civilizations that surrounded and accompanied Israel, sometimes with animosity and sometimes with cultural interchange, on Israel’s quest for a religious conception of the world. These are the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, the Hittites, the Edomites, the Moabites and, to a lesser extent, the Greeks.

We know those languages now, more or less—our Edomite is a bit shaky, our Sumerian is still a little primitive—but we have their documents, particularly of the Mesopotamians, because they had no wood, so they wrote on clay, which is not biodegradable. These documents present us with a picture of living polytheism. What does a priest believe when he stands up and sings a hymn? What does the hymn say, not as recollected hundreds of years later by antiquarians, but in the lived experiences of, at least, elite worshipers?

When we read these documents, we realize that some of our precious new myths of this halcyon antiquity are not borne out by the facts. I’ll mention just one, the one that is repeated so often in biblical studies—that the Canaanites had a female-centered, earth-friendly religion. When we read the texts, we find that the three female figures in Canaanite texts are extremely marginal and that the world is seen as a competition between the male forces of El, Baal, Mut and Yah.

I like to focus on Sumer because there we have the most texts—a third-millennium assemblage of texts, extending into the first several hundred years of the second millennium. The second millennium—actually the years between 1800 and 1000 B.C.E.—was a time of tremendous transformation. Political institutions became more and more broad scaled. Religion was transformed in a way that continually and constantly diminished the role of goddesses.

The Sumerians invented writing. Their texts show us the most balanced position of female and male deities in the ancient world. But even in Sumerian culture, where our documents start around 2800 B.C.E. with the rudimentary beginnings of writing and end around 1700 B.C.E. with religious texts, we see tremendous changes. We can, in fact, detect a pattern. Female deities are more important early in the Sumerian period and less important later. Female deities that had control over certain cultural events and activities in the early period, let’s say in 2300 B.C.E., become sidekicks by the later period.

Nevertheless, let me give you a picture of the role of goddesses in the classic flowering of Sumerian civilization, which is reflected in the literature composed during the periods we call Ur III and the early Old Babylonian period, from about 2200 to 1700 B.C.E. In these texts, goddesses fulfill certain specific functions. They are women in the sky, but they play the same roles in the family as women on earth. Their position and their nature are frequently discussed through stories about family relations.

We have the mother, the sister, the mother-in-law, the daughter (less important) and the wife. The mother is wonderful. There is no dark side to the mother in Mesopotamian mythology. This is long before Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. (Chuckles.) The mother is a pasteboard figure who is selfless, devoted and loyal to her child. She does “what’s good for you.” The sister is her shadow, the most loyal person a man can expect, faithful unto, and even beyond, death. To have a sister is to be the most fortunate of all heroes. Even the mother-in-law is a lovely figure. She is particularly the friend of the daughter-in-law, if you can imagine such a thing. She is her key ally in the house. So that’s all the good parts.

What a wife is like we do not know. We do have wives—we have the prototype of all wives, a goddess named Uttu, the goddess of weaving and spinning. In the magic literature, you call upon Uttu when you want to weave a web around someone. You would want to do that because one of the most dramatic kinds of magic ritual involves tying a person up, spinning a spell, and then cutting the threads. As the threads are cut, so are the evil forces that hold this person in their thrall. So Uttu appears fairly regularly in magic literature.

She also appears in several myths, and that’s where we realize she is the archetypical wife, just as spinning and weaving are the archetypical wifely duties. Uttu appears first in a tale about the birth of the gods. At first, there are only two divine beings worth mentioning—Enki, a male figure, and Ninhursag, Mother Earth. And they copulate. From this union is born a goddess. Then Enki, who is male water (the subterranean waters and the river waters), copulates with his daughter, and another goddess is born. Enki looks at the new goddess and sees she’s beautiful and sleeps with her, too. In each case, he seduces her very easily, and she gives birth very easily, in nine days rather than nine months. And the baby comes out slick as juniper oil.

The fifth or sixth generation is Uttu. When she is born, Ninhursag, the grandmother of all, says to her, “When Enki comes to lie with you, do not say yes. Tell him if he wants you, he must bring you presents.” Uttu is a comely female, and Enki desires her. At her request, he performs the Sumerian marriage ceremony—he brings a basket of fruit and knocks on her door. They are married, and they have sex. But Uttu’s nine months are not nine days. She has become a wife and has such difficulty giving birth that the mother of all has to turn into the birth goddess—and that is why women always need help.

Uttu appears in another myth important for biblical studies, the story of the ewe lamb and the stalk of wheat. As one kind of entertainment in pre-MTV days, the Mesopotamian elite held banquets where they staged debates between winter and summer—which is more beneficial for humankind—or between the palm and the tamarisk—which is a more important cultural element.

We have some 20-odd debates like this, among which is a debate between a ewe lamb and a stalk of wheat or grain. It begins, as they all do, with how these elements came to be, going back to the beginning. It tells the story of how the gods, when they created humanity, which, as everybody knows, was done for the purpose of providing servants, gave humans the task of feeding them.

But in the beginning humans didn’t have very much. When we were first created, we walked around naked like the animals, we ate fruits and grasses, and we drank water. And that’s what we gave the gods—because that’s what we had. But the gods got sick and tired of drinking water and eating grasses, so they held a council meeting and decided to elevate the condition of humankind so we would have better gifts to give them. (Chuckles.) In order to do that, they created the ewe lamb, the source of wool, and the stalk of grain, the source of bread and beer. They created Uttu, the goddess of spinning and weaving to teach humans how to make cloth from the ewe lamb. The debate about the ewe lamb and the stalk of wheat then goes off in areas that don’t particularly interest us about which is more essential to civilization.

In this myth, Uttu is the foundational, transformative agent that moves us from the realm of natural existence— nakedness, water and grasses—to the beginnings of culture—wearing clothes and bringing meat and bread for the gods. Beyond this we know nothing about Uttu, and that is very significant, not because the texts are haphazardly silent about her, but because what a woman is supposed to do, what a wife is supposed to do, once she is married, is make cloth, bake bread and make beer. And that’s a full-time occupation. Beyond that, she has no persona, no characteristics, no desires, no influence, no life. So the literature tells us nothing about her.

There are two more goddesses I would like to tell you about. Although Uttu, the standard middle-class and poorer-class wife, is not heard from again, upper-class women who are courted by rich men are promised a share of power. In fact, Sumerian royal women exercised considerable administrative duties and diplomatic functions and had a good deal of economic impact.

The image of the upper-class woman is the goddess Ninlil, who is raised like a proper daughter and to whom the god Enlil speaks. Enlil is the chief god of the capital city; he is the essence of the young macho male who goes to war and then organizes things to his desires.

There are two tales about the meeting of Enlil and Ninlil. In one, he rapes her, is brought to trial and is banished. She, having been thoroughly seduced by the rape (that’s a very old myth), follows him to the depths of the netherworld. Enough said about that myth. (Laughter.)

In the other myth, he sees her playing in front of her mother’s house. He speaks to her mother and offers his hand in marriage. He promises her that her daughter will become, by marrying him, the chief administrator in Nippur, that she, second only to him, will make decisions and, along with him, decide the fates—kind of like Rosalynn and Hillary. (Chuckles.) In both the rape version and the marriage version of the tale, Ninlil becomes the mother of a vast array of important gods, all of whom are related to Enlil. She is the queen and queen mother who shares her husband’s reflected glory and position.

The most enduring goddess, Inanna, starts out the same way as Ninlil. She comes from a middle-class family. We know this because she doesn’t work as a child; she’s playing on the steps in front of her house when she is seen by the god Dumuzi, who falls madly in love with her and tries to seduce her. He asks her to come away with him: “We will tarry in the moonlight, we will dally in the moonshine.” And she says, “But what will I tell my mother?” He responds, “I will teach you the lies that women say.” (Laughter.)

But she doesn’t buy any of this, and after a long courtship he has to come and ask for her hand. I mention the long courtship because the courtship of Dumuzi and Inanna was celebrated culticly—and probably also in the bars. We have lots of their love songs. If you were Sumerian and wanted to write a love song you wrote it as Dumuzi speaking to Inanna or Inanna speaking to Dumuzi. These love songs are not going to become big hits. They don’t translate very well: “Your hair is lettuce, your hair is cucumbers falling.” They don’t have much modern appeal. (Laughter.) But they meant a great deal to them. (Laughter.)

Ultimately, Inanna and Dumuzi get married. Their marriage is the most consequential event that ever happened for humans. Every year in Sumer, the wedding was celebrated. As far as we can tell, it was always celebrated the same way in the royal period. The male figure, who was the king and who was also Dumuzi, was brought, presumably by the men of the town, in a procession with appropriate singing to the door of the palace or the temple where Inanna dwelt. There she, played by an anonymous woman, ornamented, adorned, washed and oiled like a bride, opened the door. The two of them then disappeared into the bedroom, where they spent the night. In the morning, there was a wedding feast to which all the nobles were invited, and Inanna blessed the king and the land.

The love songs and the marriage songs reveal a great deal about the nature of this marriage and what makes Inanna different from Ninlil. One text called “Preparing the Linen Garments” is a dialogue between Inanna and her brother. He says it’s time to make the wedding sheets. And she says, “Who will grow the flax for me?” He says, “I’ll grow it.” “Who will dry the flax for me?” “I’ll dry it.” “Who will stretch the flax for me? Who will beat the flax for me? Who will ret the flax for me? Who will weave the linen for me? Who will cut the cloth?” At each point her brother Utu (not Uttu, but Utu) says, “I will do it for you. I will do it for you.” The last line is, “Who will sleep with me there?” And he says, “Not I, that will be your bridegroom, Dumuzi.” (Laughter)

Everybody gets a laugh. I’m sure that was true in ancient times, too. But, from all that we know from anthropology and from ancient documents, there is something wrong here. Flax making is a woman’s job. Anything connected to making clothing basically, is a woman’s job. Women laid out flax even when they were old. Inanna basically says, “I’m going to get married, but don’t expect me to do any of that stuff.”

We have another dialogue, a wedding dialogue, between Dumuzi and Inanna in which he says to her, “I am not marrying you to be my servant. Bread you will not bake for me. Clothes you will not make for me. Food you will not cook for me. But you will sit with me at the table.” Inanna is relieved of all the economic duties of a woman. Of course, wealthy women had servants to do the work, but it was their responsibility; they oversaw it. Inanna doesn’t have any of those concerns, however. She has only one concern. In this same text, Dumuzi brings her before his gods, introduces her to the tutelary deity and prays that she will be the mother of many sons.

But she isn’t! The epic literature contains references to just two minor children. And if Inanna had them, she must have had full-time nannies for them because she never turns into a mother figure. She never changes shape from the nubile young model of sexual attractiveness. She is called the “mistress of sexual attractiveness.” She never turns into the antique woman with pendulous breasts and large thighs. She is eternally young and nubile—the Playboy bunny—the object of love and the personification of lust.

Not having to cook or weave or even take care of children from morning to night, she is the most incongruous of all creatures—a woman who is not kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. But she is restless. She comes to Enki, the administrator who’s divvying out cosmic tasks, and says, “What have you got for me to do? You gave midwifery to Ninhursag. You gave sewing and weaving to Uttu. Why don’t I have a job?” And he says, “But you are joy and lust and desire, and you are every place.” And she says, in effect, “But what does that do for me?” (Chuckles.)

Inanna is portrayed as always trying to get more power. She manages, through her charm (and “hollow leg”), to become a co-administrator of the orders of the universe. She is known by the epithet of “the one who walks about.” Only demons and Inanna walk about. Inanna is ferocious, the personification of blood lust, whether it is sexual blood lust or aggressive, warrior blood lust. So we have this strange creature, the undomesticated woman. She is basically unconfined. She sets out to conquer the netherworld but is trapped there and is finally rescued by the wise god Enki.

She is allowed to leave only if she delivers to the netherworld a substitute because nobody can leave the netherworld once they’ve been there. When Inanna leaves the realm of the dead, a retinue of sheriffs (which becomes the word for demon)—two in front, two behind, and one on each side—accompanies her. She stalks the land looking for a substitute who will be doomed to the netherworld. She comes to where her husband lives and sees that he has been playing around with every girl in the palace; she gets very mad—and sends him to the netherworld. (Laughter.)

Imagine this. It’s the night of Halloween, the night of the long knives or the night of Passover. Everybody trembles in their houses while Inanna stalks the land looking for somebody to doom. And this is the goddess of joy, delight and sexuality! Somehow Freud was born a little earlier than we thought.

Inanna’s husband would have been doomed to the netherworld forever, except that he has a sister who laments for him. She misses him beyond death, and she sings song after song for him. She makes such a big pest of herself that no one can stand it any more. So they decree, “Okay, you can take his place. Half of every year he will live here and you will go down there; the other half he will be dead.” Suddenly we recognize this as an agricultural cycle of a dying and resurrected god. In fact, every year the Sumerians celebrated the birth of Dumuzi and the death of Dumuzi in the month of Tammuz (named for him). And every year they celebrated his meeting Inanna and the love songs and the sacred marriage.

Despite her powers, Inanna has no real place in the hierarchy. She’s restless because women are supposed to be confined to their homes and their home duties, and she is not even occupied there. She is like a free radical—she is approachable, she floats around, and she’s ready to bond. And she bonds with the highest of all humans, the King of Sumer.

From earliest recorded history, the kings of Sumer called themselves the spouse of Inanna and celebrated a sacred marriage to her. By so doing, they accomplished several things. They go back to the ritual, in which we don’t know who the female is. She could be Mrs. King but it’s not said. She could be a prostitute or a priestess. Whoever she is, she is just Inanna, while the king is specifically said to be the king and also Dumuzi.

Through the ritual, the male and female principles of the world are brought together. Culture, in the sense of urban life, represented by Inanna, and the forces within nature, represented by Dumuzi, are brought together. And the human world is related to the divine. The king is semidivine by virtue of his being the spouse of Inanna and also born of a goddess. From Inanna, who is on the periphery of the divine hierarchy, come divine blessings, including the cultural arts and agricultural fertility.

Every year this marriage is celebrated. At the wedding breakfast, the goddess Inanna announces a year of peace and abundance upon the land and security for the king. Inanna, with all her strangeness, is vital to the Sumerian understanding of the world. She is the goddess of agricultural fertility.

One of the major functions of goddesses is to be fertile. But there is no Great Goddess despite some recent claims to the contrary. Inanna is agricultural fertility; Ninhursag is the great mother and midwife, the mistress of animal and human fertility. We are so accustomed to the Bible putting together the fruits of the belly and the fruits of the land that we think of fertility as one. But the Sumerians didn’t. They kept them separate. Basically, through the vagina the female force of the universe was considered determinative for the continuation of the universe—through birth by the mother goddess and through sexual encounter by the sex goddess, the madonna and the whore, if you wish.

This all changed when Sumerian civilization was overwhelmed by the Semites. Babylonian civilization brought a new synthesis. Despite what you might hear about the sexiness of paganism, the Babylonians were prudes. They stopped celebrating the sacred marriage. Henceforth, they celebrate the marriage of a god and his or her spouse by taking two statues into a garden, singing a couple of songs and leaving the statues in the garden overnight.

They also perceive the rejuvenation of the world in nonsexual terms. Instead of celebrating the sacred marriage each year, they develop a completely different type of mythology. Written in Akkadian, this mythology began to have an impact during the second half of the second millennium. In the new Babylonian story, the Enuma Elish, formless waters co-mingle in the beginning and ultimately evolve into gods. There are two kinds of Babylonian gods—active gods who move around in the air and sky, creating winds, and static gods, denizens of the watery depths. When the winds move, they disturb the depths. So the male water figure attacks them to try to keep them quiet, but he is defeated by Enki. Then the mother water of us all pays heed to her children, the gods of stasis, who complain that they can not sleep. So she threatens the newly emergent creativity.

Suddenly the gods who were able to defeat Apsu cannot defeat the mother water Tiamat. They are afraid even to approach her—except for Mr. Macho—Marduk—a young god who does not yet have a place on the divine council. Marduk is very strong and has twice as much godliness as anybody else. His father Enki tells him, “Come to the council. Do not bow down. Do not show respect. March in like a warrior, and they will listen to you.” Marduk does this, and says, “I can fight for you, you divinities of the air and sky, you with your creative energy. After all, it’s only a woman who’s attacking you.” A new spirit is in the air. “If you make me king of the gods,” he says, “I will defeat her.”

At this point, young Mr. Macho doesn’t even have status as a fate-determining god. He can’t do anything. But the others agree to his terms. To show him that he has moved into the realm of the mighty and powerful, they give him the power of the creative word. They say, “Speak.” He speaks and a constellation comes into being. They say, “Speak again.” He speaks and the constellation disappears.

So, armed with weapons of the storm and the wind, Marduk goes to fight the mother goddess Tiamat. They meet in single combat—and he defeats her. When she opens her mouth to swallow him, he blows her up with his winds. She becomes big as a balloon. He then takes his arrow of lightning and pierces her. A very ignoble ending. Then he takes her body and creates the universe, providing a permanent place for the gods so that each one knows his place, and there will be order in the universe, a differentiated world.

He then establishes a hierarchical state, where everybody knows his function, everybody has his place. I say “his” because there are no goddesses in this tale, just gods. They are the state and the governors. In order to support this system, so the male gods won’t have to work, he conceives of the brilliant idea of creating an underclass, which is us, to do all the work. And every year his victory over disorder is celebrated as the governing principle of the world. As long as hierarchy, domination and order subdue the rash natural elements of the cosmos, the world is safe for another year.

This is not monotheism. This is classically developed polytheism. The same story, with some variations, is found in Canaan, among the Hittites and among the Greeks. The mythology of the last half of the second millennium tells of a world of power, hierarchy, status and the orderly control of things. And women have no place in this hierarchy.

Goddesses have no place in it. Goddesses are either trivialized into “consorts,” Mrs. Gods, “first ladies,” or domesticated, called upon in private situations, like the mother goddess at childbirth. The only goddess who escapes this eclipse is Inanna, who is called Ishtar by the Babylonians. Unable to be domesticated by her very nature, she becomes a major warrior goddess. At the same time, she makes men look beyond their roles in the cosmos to the messy stuff of home and procreation, something they wouldn’t do if they really were orderly creatures.

What we find in developed paganism, in other words, in the religion of all the cultures that surrounded Israel, is not feminist religion but models of patriarchy and the patriarchal state. The divine image of patriarchy is of a king of the gods who sits on his throne, uses his power and collects his tribute.

Does this have anything to do with Israel? Yes and no. Israel has a fundamentally different system, in which the gender line is totally ignored or obscured. Rather than presenting a model of how women should be controlled, Israelite theology doesn’t talk about women at all. We can argue ad infinitum about which is worse for women—to be dominated explicitly or to be ignored and rendered invisible. But without female principles, the nature of God undergoes a major transformation. God ceases to be phallic. You do not see God below the waist. There is no mention of God’s fertility as coming from his loins. On the contrary, everything is cerebralized into the divine word, and God becomes a talking torso.

This change has major implications. On the one hand, it removes the warrant for male domination. But, as you know, history and culture rushed in to project male domination onto the religious base anyway and to imagine God with a phallus. But the ordering of the world, the essential running of the world, is desexualized, as it already was in Babylonian mythology of the late second millennium. God now has all the powers, even the domestic power of the birth goddess. As those of you who read Scripture know, the Bible tells us over and over that God controls birth—he stops up wombs, he opens wombs, he forms the baby in the womb, he determines the destiny of the baby, he sees the baby in the womb. God does everything.

But if God does everything and God has all the power, why does anything ever happen? In paganism, the world is always in flux—god against god, god cooperating with god, gods merging with each other, fighting with each other. You can see why things happen. In monotheism, why should God ever do anything? It could be a static world. What happens in the Bible is that the role of humanity expands beyond anything imagined in paganism.

In the Bible, the creature is created as a creature. So far, we could be in Mesopotamia. But the creature is restless and determined to grow. The creature grabs for wisdom. The goddess Uttu taught humans how to make clothes; Eve discovers it on her own. The first couple eat the apple, their eyes are opened, and they sew themselves garments. Through eating they learn how to sew, they change from natural beings into cultural beings. The next step is agriculture. They leave the garden and become farmers.

In the genealogies of the first 11 chapters of Genesis, all the arts of civilization are developed by humankind. They are all born with us, including kingship. In Mesopotamia, kingship is a gift of the gods, as are smithing and artwork and song. Not in Genesis. There a formidable creature is developing. By the end of Genesis 11, the creature is so powerful that nothing can hinder it. It goes forth, is scattered over the whole world and builds a universe.

This creature is God’s counterpart, God’s tselem, the very image of God. In Mesopotamia, this term applies only to the king who is God’s foil. In the Bible, it applies to all humans. Humanity, in the persona of Israel, determines the fate of the world by how human beings order their own culture. If human beings are good to each other, there will be abundant rain. If they do not lead ethical lives, the prophets tell us, the earth will dry up and mourn, and the heavens will cease to rain. First, Israel will be lost, and, second, humanity will disappear from the cosmos. The issue—the difference between paganism and Israelite monotheism—is stark. We are no longer sitting in the bleachers rooting for our favorite gods in the divine soccer game. We are the players.

Is there room for goddesses here? Is there room for women? It depends on who you ask, and when. For as long as they could, human beings tried to escape the radical monotheism of Deuteronomy, in which human beings determine whether or not there will be births. Only in the last 10 or 15 years, with holes in the ozone and increasing pollution and nuclear threats and biological mutations and new viruses, has it become hard to escape the idea that humans determine the fate of the universe. And we had better do so consciously, because we do so unconsciously anyway.

But before we became so powerful that the results of our actions stared us in the face, we ran from our responsibility, partly by developing a theology of repentance. We could come to God and say, “Gee, I’m sorry, I broke it.” And God would fix it. Repentance became very important in the development of the image of God the Father, God who chastises but also accepts repentance. We developed the parable of the Prodigal Son who returns and other patterns of redemption through sacrifice, atonement and repentance. We find this idea both in temple theology and later in early Christianity and Judaism.

The search for ways to influence the Father to forgive us and, therefore, correct our mistakes also encompassed a search for anyone who could influence the Father on our behalf—for example, the prophet, whose job was to pray for Israel; the priest, whose job was to offer sacrifices. But why stop there? The dead, too, could intercede, especially mother Rachel. In Jeremiah’s famous vision, mother Rachel, the mother of the northern tribes, has been mourning, loudly, without stopping, for 150 years. She cannot be comforted. Finally God says, “Okay, I’m going to reward your labor, your children will come back.” So we look for a mother in Zion, the city herself, who opens her arms in the books of Lamentation and begins an incessant noise-making and crying to soften God’s heart, to bring the people back.

Our search for anyone who can intervene with God becomes the search for a beloved intermediary, Lady Wisdom, who unites us with God in our joint love for her, or Lady Jerusalem, who marries both God and Israel in the perfect eschaton and thereby conjoins them. Are these echoes of goddesses, who survived in some subterranean fashion? Or are these new manifestations of the same psychological and sociological phenomenon that gave rise to the goddesses in the first place?

Goddesses are mediators. Women are always mediators. Miriam is a mediator. You pray to your mother to help you with your father. You may pray to your father to help you with your mother, but if the father has the power, then you pray to your mother to help you. The development of female intercessors reaches a peak in the glorification of Mary; the Jewish counterpart is the devotion and pilgrimages to the tomb of Rachel.

It’s hard to say if Lady Wisdom is a survival of the great goddesses of wisdom of the third and early second millennium or if she and the goddesses of wisdom are the result of our experiences in the first few years of life, when the wise one, who brings us into civilization and teaches us to eat food and wear clothes and go to the potty, is our mother, who, at some point, is all-wise in our eyes. Or is Lady Wisdom a cultural memory that in earlier times, when forests had to be cleared and trenches had to be dug and oxen had to be guided and horses had to be tamed, the upper-body strength of men dictated that they would do the physical activity, which meant that everything else—cooking, sewing, pottery making, beer making— would be done by women? Of course, this “everything else” seems a little bit magical and more sophisticated, and women developed the reputation of having access to secret knowledge. We don’t know whether these are echoes or resonances.

In the time that remains, I want to focus on another aspect of this potential echoing. Goddesses are patrons of certain arts. In every pagan religion, humanity learns civilization from the gods. Everything is a gift from the gods, who oversee what you do and give you the skill to do it. If you look at what is associated with female gods and what is associated with male gods, you find an interesting pattern. The immediate transformational activities—making clothes, food, beer—are associated with goddesses because those are the things mothers do.

But goddesses are also mistresses of the obscure, the mantic arts, divination, riddle solving. Perhaps, this reflects the role of the mother in early childhood and the role of women in early economic systems. You want a dream interpreted? Speak to your goddess. Even Gilgamesh, when he needs a dream interpreted, asks his mother, Ninsun. You want to send a sage to a foreign army? If you live in the third millennium, the sage may very well be a woman.

So the cultural arts, the mantic arts, singing and dancing are all associated with females (although, to some extent, also with males). In Sumerian paganism, one particular god grows and grows and finally absorbs all of the cultural arts and the wisdom of the female deities. He is the god Enki.

But when we look at the Bible, we find something very interesting. In a patriarchal world where men were the major actors, in a world where women were not so much shackled as they were limited by the felt need to control their sexuality, despite all of the androcentric focus in the Bible, women keep cropping up as figures from the margin who know what should happen and who do whatever is necessary to make sure it happens.

Eve is just the first of many women who transform the human situation. She reaches for the fruit because she is fascinated by its ability to make one wise. But she isn’t very different from mother Rebecca, who is privy to an oracle (which, apparently, wasn’t given to Isaac) that Jacob, rather than Esau, is to be the inheritor, and who uses every means in her power to affect that outcome. Sarah also uses her power to insure that Isaac will be the heir. In her case we’re not told if she knows this is in accord with the divine will, but with Rebecca we are told quite clearly that she knows. During the period of the Exodus, we find women acting independently. Miriam supervises and knows what’s going to happen. Zipporah, Moses’ wife, knows what to do when God attacks.

When we look at the historical books of the Bible, this pattern becomes regularized and clear. The first story in the historical books, in Joshua 2, is the story of Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho. Rahab, the marginal of the marginal, a prostitute of a foreign people, proclaims the divine decree; she is the one who tells Israel God will give them the land. At the end of the historical books, another woman, Hulda the prophetess, proclaims that Israel’s occupation of the land will soon come to an end, at least temporarily. She is also the one who proclaims the validity or authoritativeness of the book of the Law we call Deuteronomy. In between, a female medium makes the pronouncement that Saul’s reign is about to end and David’s about to begin.

Whether these are echoes of the mantic rites of the goddesses or reflections of the psychological attachment to mother, we cannot say. But we should note that the Bible is consistently bracketed and punctuated by the wise words of women.

Tikva Frymer-Kensky is a wonderful human being whom I’ve known for a long time. She observes the Sabbath, she does not drive on the Sabbath, which begins Friday night. So last night we all went to the hotel where our speakers are staying, to eat. Before we went to the restaurant, we met in Tikva’s room and said the Sabbath blessings, including the chanting of the Kiddush, the traditional blessing over the Sabbath meal. And I think we were all taken aback at what a gorgeous, beautiful voice Tikva has. In some ways, I wish this were a concert today, instead of a lecture.

On the other hand, Tikva is one of the sharpest and broadest Bible scholars it has ever been my privilege to meet and interact with. She received her Ph.D. from Yale. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Wayne State, Beer-sheva University in Israel and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She is currently director of biblical studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. This January she will be going to Chicago as a full professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. We congratulate her and wish her well in her prestigious new position as professor of Hebrew Bible.