faithless sexual conduct treated as a settled condition: harlotry used literally once, and far more often as a picture of breaking faith with God
This word is built as a plural that names not a string of separate acts but a condition or bent of the whole person. It is best heard as the state of being given over to faithless conduct, the way we might speak of someone's "promiscuity" as a settled trait rather than counting up incidents. That is why the phrase in Hosea, often translated "a wife of harlotry," does not mean a professional prostitute; it means a woman whose defining tendency is unfaithfulness. Hebrew has a separate, blunt word for a paid prostitute, and the prophets pointedly avoid it here.
Only once, in the story of Tamar, does the word describe literal sexual sin. Everywhere else it is a picture. Israel's turning to other gods, Jezebel's foreign cult, a nation's scheming alliances with empires: all of these get named as harlotry, because the marriage bond between God and his people is the frame the prophets keep reaching for. Breaking faith with God is portrayed as a spouse betraying a marriage.
What the picture points at shifts from passage to passage. In Hosea it is chiefly worshipping other gods; in Ezekiel and Nahum it leans toward a nation's faithless dealings with foreign powers; and many readers hear an overtone of social and economic betrayal as well. These are not sharply separate; the force of the image comes from letting one word carry unfaithfulness of every kind at once.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the prophets' language of harlotry reflects a real practice of temple or sacred prostitution in Canaanite and Israelite religion, or is purely a metaphor for unfaithfulness.
- majorityIt is a metaphor for covenant unfaithfulness (idolatry and foreign alliances); an organized institution of sacred or cultic prostitution never existed in the ancient Near East and should not be read into these texts. The pairing of qedeshah with zonah is polemical smear, not a factual identification.; P. A. Bird, "'To Play the Harlot': An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor," in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. P. L. Day (Fortress, 1989), 75-94; S. L. Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2008); J. G. Westenholz, "Tamar, Qedesa, Qadistu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia," HTR 82/3 (1989): 245-265
- minorityA few texts still likely reflect some genuine, smaller-scale cult-connected prostitution, even if the older sweeping picture of a fertility-cult institution is overstated.; J. Day, "Does the Old Testament Refer to Sacred Prostitution and Did It Actually Exist in Ancient Israel?" in Biblical and Near Eastern Essays (Studies in Honour of Kevin J. Cathcart), JSOTSup 375 (T&T Clark, 2004), 2-21; E. Lipinski, "Cult Prostitution in Ancient Israel?" Biblical Archaeology Review 40/1 (2014): 48-56, 70