a consecrated woman: a woman set apart for the service of a god at a shrine, a title the Bible also uses of a woman taken for a prostitute
The word is built on the same root as "holy" (קֹדֶשׁ) and on the verb for setting a person or thing apart for a god (קָדַשׁ). Taken plainly, it means a consecrated woman, one dedicated to a deity. Yet almost every English Bible prints "prostitute", "harlot", or "temple prostitute". The distance between those two ideas is the whole story of this word.
What such a woman actually did is never described in the Bible, so scholars look to the surrounding cultures, where women holding the matching title appear often. In Babylonian and Assyrian records, and in the administrative lists from the city of Ugarit where the men of this class rank immediately below the priests, the evidence points to ordinary religious work:
- they served as midwives and wet nurses
- they sang in temple ceremonies
- they wove cloth for a goddess's image
- they married, owned property, and adopted children
No text from anywhere in the region shows them having sex as a religious duty. Since the late 1980s specialists have concluded that the sacred prostitution earlier writers pictured was never an institution at all, in Canaan or in Babylon.
The link with prostitution comes instead from how Israel's writers used the word. They set it beside the ordinary word for selling sex (זָנָה) in order to discredit the worship they opposed. Deuteronomy forbids any daughter of Israel to become one, and the next verse bars a prostitute's wages from God's house. Hosea condemns men who keep company with prostitutes and men who sacrifice with the consecrated women in the same breath. Whether such pairings identify the two kinds of women or simply tar one with the other is still argued, but the ancient Greek and Latin translators settled it early, and their plain words for a prostitute are what English inherited.
Genesis 38 is the famous puzzle. Judah mistakes his veiled daughter-in-law Tamar for a common prostitute, and the narrator says so with the ordinary word. But when Judah's Canaanite friend goes back to pay her, he asks the local men for the consecrated woman, and they answer using the same title. Tamar served no shrine and no goddess. Readers have explained the switch as polite phrasing, as a Canaanite's natural vocabulary, as the storyteller's joke at Canaanite religion, or as a friend covering for Judah, and no explanation has won the field.
Nuances
Whether the following verse (Deuteronomy 23:18 in English Bibles, 23:19 in the Hebrew), which bars the wages of a זוֹנָה and the price of a כֶּלֶב from the sanctuary, explicates this prohibition by equating the קְדֵשָׁה with a prostitute and the קָדֵשׁ with a dog, or legislates an unrelated matter. The two verses stand adjacent with no connective, so the relationship must be argued from content.
- contestedThe second verse explains the first: the consecrated personnel are precisely the prostitutes and dogs whose earnings are refused at the sanctuary; Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary, 1996), on 23:18-19; Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)
- contestedThe verses are independent: this one bans Israelites from becoming consecrated to a foreign cult, while the next separately prohibits bringing any prostitute's wages or any dog's price into the house of the LORD; Phyllis A. Bird, Of Whores and Hounds: A New Interpretation of the Subject of Deuteronomy 23:19, Vetus Testamentum 65 (2015): 618-25; Elaine A. Goodfriend, Could keleb in Deuteronomy 23:19 Actually Refer to a Canine?, in Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 381-97
Whether Hosea 4:14 attests actual cultic sexual practice in northern Israel. The line pairs men who consort with the זֹנוֹת and men who sacrifice with the קְדֵשׁוֹת, and the sacrificial verb in the second half has long been read as evidence of ritual sex at the shrines.
- minorityThe parallelism reflects literal fertility-cult ritual sex practised in the northern kingdom; Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Hosea (Anchor Bible 24, 1980), 369-70; Hans Walter Wolff, Hosea (Hermeneia, 1974), 86-87
- majorityThe word keeps its cultic-functionary sense; Hosea exploits the two terms as a deliberate pun that sharpens the metaphor of Israel as an unfaithful woman, without implying that a sex cult existed; Jessie DeGrado, The qdesha in Hosea 4:14: Putting the (Myth of the) Sacred Prostitute to Bed, Vetus Testamentum 68 (2018): 8-40; Karin Adams, Metaphor and Dissonance: A Reinterpretation of Hosea 4:13-14, Journal of Biblical Literature 127 (2008): 291-305; Phyllis A. Bird, Harlot or Holy Woman? A Study of Hebrew Qedesah (University Park: Eisenbrauns / Penn State University Press, 2019)
Why Genesis 38 switches terms. The narrator calls Tamar a זוֹנָה (38:15), but Hirah the Adullamite and the men of Enaim use הַקְּדֵשָׁה (38:21-22). Tamar has no cultic affiliation of any kind, so the substitution has to be explained on rhetorical, sociolinguistic, or historical grounds. Five readings are live and none commands the field.
- minorityA decorous euphemism: Hirah elevates his wording when addressing villagers, asking after a courtesan rather than a common whore; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1, 1964), 299-300; Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary, 1996), on 23:18
- minorityA genuine Canaanite cult functionary: Hirah, himself a Canaanite, uses the term naturally of a woman attached to a local goddess; Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (Old Testament Library, rev. ed. 1972), 359; Ilona N. Rashkow, Taboo or Not Taboo: Sexuality and Family in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 57
- contestedAuthorial irony: the term is placed only on Canaanite lips so that the Israelite audience can savour a Canaanite dignifying a roadside encounter as something sacred; Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Tamar, Qedesa, Qadistu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia, Harvard Theological Review 82 (1989): 245-65; Elaine Adler Goodfriend, Prostitution (OT), in Anchor Bible Dictionary 5 (1992), 505-10
- minorityTamar poses as a woman discharging a vow through a single act of prostitution, an attested practice that makes Hirah's inquiry plausible cover; Karel van der Toorn, Female Prostitution in Payment of Vows in Ancient Israel, Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 193-205
- contestedThe term never meant prostitute at all; Hirah substitutes it evasively, to shield Judah's reputation before the townsmen; Phyllis A. Bird, Harlot or Holy Woman? A Study of Hebrew Qedesah (University Park: Eisenbrauns / Penn State University Press, 2019)