Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them by Susan Ackerman

Author:Susan Ackerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Priestesses, Purity, and Parturition

I. Priestesses in the Ancient Near East

As I have noted elsewhere, the evidence for priestesses in the Northwest Semitic world is mixed.1 For example, priestesses are well attested in textual and iconographic materials from the Phoenician world, both in materials from the Phoenician mainland and the Phoenicians’ eastern Mediterranean colonies and also in Punic and Neo-Punic texts from the Mediterranean west. Conversely, none of the proposals various commentators have put forward regarding the presence of priestesses at the Late Bronze Age city-state of Ugarit, just 125 km north of the territory that defined Iron Age Phoenicia, is particularly convincing.

Still, as we move further east from Ugarit, into northern Syria and Mesopotamia, attestations of priestesses become more common. At the thirteenth-century BCE city-state of Emar, about 200 km east of Ugarit, there were women priests who served at the temple of the storm god (rendered at Emar using the Sumerian logogram dIM and probably called, as elsewhere in Late Bronze Age Semitic idiom, Baal).2 Indeed, one of the most remarkable texts discovered at Emar describes a nine-day ritual that marks the selection and installation of the storm god’s high priestess,3 who is identified using the Sumerian logo-grams NIN.DINGIR, for Akkadian entu, “priestess” (which was probably pronounced ittu in the local dialect).4 Emar texts also speak of other NIN.DINGIR priestesses: for example, the NIN.DINGIR priestess of the god Dagan from the nearby town of Šumi and, from Emar, the NIN.DINGIR priestess of the goddess Aštart/dIš8-tár.5 Second in rank in Emar’s religious hierarchy behind its NIN.DINGIR priestesses, moreover, is a different priestess:6 the mašʾartu, a priestess in the cult of Aštart/dIš8-tár, whose main role was “as a priestess for battle-preparation and military success.”7 In his book The Installation of Baal’s High Priestess at Emar, Daniel E. Fleming in addition identifies among the cultic specialists at Emar a woman called the nugagtu, or in Fleming’s words, a lamentation priestess, who gives special cries at a particular moment on the third day of the installation of the storm god’s NIN.DINGIR priestess and who also plays a role in the installation of the mašʾartu priestess and in one other ritual text.8

Others who play a role in the installation ceremony of the storm god’s NIN.DINGIR priestess include the “singers,” both male and female, who lead ritual processions and perform hymns for specific gods. Indeed, in the three-way division of the sacrificial meat that is part of the NIN.DINGIR priestess’s installation ritual, it is the singers, including the female singers, who take one of the portions (the other two go to the king and to the diviner who has a central role in the installation rite). The singers also get a gift of silver for their participation in the installation.9 Still another group of female cult servitors is attested at four different points elsewhere in the Emar archives:10 these are the munabbiātu of the goddess Išḫara. Fleming takes these to be the counterparts of the male nābû of Išḫara and understands both the nābû and munabbiātu to be “invocation-specialists.

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