Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay first traces the association of ancient goddesses with so‐called fertility cults and sacred (or cultic) prostitution to J. J. Bachofen’s once influential model of human social development, and places prefeminist Hebrew Bible/Old Testament scholarship on this trajectory. It then discusses two streams of feminist theological response to the model, a Great Goddess stream that inverted the values that traditional scholarship associated with ancient goddesses and their worship, and a revisionist stream that strove to reimage the God of the Hebrew Bible to include aspects of the feminine divine. Both streams are assessed critically from the perspective of secular feminist scholarship. Feminist scholars’ challenges to the stereotyping of Canaanite goddesses as primarily associated with sexuality and reproduction are then presented, followed by feminists’ critiques of both the relevance and veracity of the ancient sources alleged to be evidence for the practice of sacred (or cultic) prostitution. Finally, the essay turns to the texts of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament per se and focuses on the three Hebrew Bible goddesses most discussed in the secondary literature, i.e., Asherah, Astarte/Ashtart and the Queen of Heaven.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".