Torah Study Blog

Rabbi Jennifer Jaech has returned from her summer hiatus of professional development and, perhaps inspired by the news cycles of one shocking development after another, zeroed in on a passage in this week’s Torah portion from Deuteronomy 23:

No Israelite woman shall be a cult prostitute, nor shall any Israelite man be a cult prostitute. You shall not bring the fee of a whore or the pay of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in fulfillment of any vow, for both are abhorrent to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 23:18-19)

These two lines present to us that there were prostitutes, both women and men, who worked near the temple and served as part of ritual. But this passage clarifies that these were not supposed to be Israelite people; they were others. Once these people earned their fee for performing their prostitution functions they were not allowed to turn around and offer their earnings to the God of Israel to try to curry favor with God. God would find that abhorrent, according to the text. (For clarification, “pay of a dog” likely refers to the pay of the male prostitute who might have performed his job in a dog-like position.)

Herodotus lived in Greece from approximately 484 to 425 BCE. He is known as “The Father of History” because he gave himself the task of systematically investigating history, as opposed to just passing along stories. One of the “histories” that Herodotus cataloged is about cult prostitutes:

The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger at least once in her life … Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple … After their intercourse, having discharged her sacred duty to the goddess, she goes away to her home … the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four. There is a custom like this in some parts of Cyprus.

Scholars note that, although Herodotus purported to pass along factual history, he did not have the resources to follow-up on everything. Additionally, he included in his works examples that started with, “A very wonderful thing is said to have happened...” Clearly, the telling that followed was not something Herodotus witnessed with his own eyes, or could state as being unequivocally true. While scholars have been able to confirm some of the statements of Herodotus and they believe his contributions to mankind are meaningful, they acknowledge that there are also some falsehoods in his work.

Rabbi Jaech pointed out to us that there is a lot of scholarly speculation about the actual existence of “cult prostitutes.” She is inclined to believe that, although it has not been proven one way or the other, the Temple did not employ the prostitutes. It is quite possible that because the Temple was a gathering place of a lot of people, many who had traveled far from home and on their own, it would have been a good place for a prostitute to set up shop. The prostitutes plied their trade in the vicinity of the Temple, and their existence was a known fact of the time.

Rabbi Jaech told us that the word used in the Deuteronomy passage for a female prostitute is “kedeshah.” The word kedeshah comes from the same root as kadosh, which means holy or set apart. These prostitutes were set apart from the others.

In Genesis 38 we can read about Judah and his association with someone he thought was a prostitute (but ended up being his daughter-in-law – that’s a story for another day). At one point the Bible language refers to the woman as a kedeshah, a cultic prostitute, and then a couple of sentences later as a zonah, which translates to harlot. Rabbi Jaech offered to us that perhaps these were just words used to describe the jobs of these particular women. Prostitution was an acknowledged and acceptable part of biblical life.

People in biblical times, just like today, are riveted by salacious stories. Herodotus recorded his history about cult prostitutes because it is juicy. And it gives people something scandalous to talk about. They can say to one another, “Those ancient people did these outrageous things. But we would never behave so scandalously!”

Although we think biblical times were so long ago and we have evolved so much, really people are still the same. People are still riveted by what titillates. Tara Keiter – me, your Torah Study podcaster - was struck by a comment from Jane Coaston on Vox’s The Weeds podcast of August 23 in discussing Ken Starr’s investigation into President Clinton’s potential wrongdoing. Jane noted that, “The ins and outs of campaign finance law are the kind of things that whenever people started talking about Whitewater, immediately everyone’s eyes glazed over, until it had to do with affairs and sex and then people were way more interested.” In biblical times, as today, sex and scandal gets attention.

Join us next week as we look at “the fee of a whole or the pay of a dog” and if those monies can be used toward religious life.

misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter