Jezebel, oh Jezebel... Part 2

Just a brief note from Barbara Walker's "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets."

Jezebel
Sidonian queen of Israel, maligned in the Bible for worshipping Astarte instead of Yahweh. (1)  Jezebel and her husband King Ahab were murdered in a civil war fomented by Yahweh's devotees.  Her daughter, Athaliah became queen, but seven years later she too was murdered by treachery.  (2 Kings 11:16).  Thus, worship of the Goddess was abandoned.(2)

Notes:

(1) Boulding, 236.
(2) Stone, 188.

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Well - not really.  The worship of Astarte a/k/a Ashtoreth a/k/a Asherah never totally disappeared.  Her "poles" and sacred groves of trees remained on scattered sacred high areass in Israel as well as throughout the Middle East (and elsewhere all through Europe and Asia) right through the time of Buddha, Zoaroaster, Confucius, Christ, Mohammed, and thereafter.  The Goddess gave the early 'founding fathers' of Christendom fits because women would insist, year after year, on producing their 'hot cross buns' at Easter as well as promoting such symbols of the ancient fertility goddess as eggs and rabbits!  Across the world, the fathers of various patriarchal-oriented religions tried to wipe out the worship of the Goddess - to no avail.  Even today, in the Islamic Republic of Iran the festivities of Nowruz, harking back to celebrations surrounding the Persian version of the fertility/warrior goddess is popularly celebrated throughout the countrby Muslims. 

Many of the ancient sacred spots of the Goddess survive today, under a gloss whatever religion happens to hold sway in the particular country in which the Goddess' sacred places are located.

Royal Goddesses/Queens of Ebla

From Archaeology Magazine online

From the trenches
Royal Goddesses of a Bronze Age State
Volume 61 Number 1, January/February 2008
by Marco Merola

It's been more than 30 years since Italian archaeologists found a vast archive of 17,000 cuneiform tablets at the Bronze Age site of Ebla in northern Syria. But the ancient city is still surprising those who work there. Last year archaeologist Paolo Matthiae's team discovered two almost perfectly preserved figurines that confirm textual evidence for a royal cult of the dead focused on the city's queens. They also found an unusual tablet that allowed scholars to reconstruct the political climate that led to Ebla's destruction in 2300 B.C., when it was sacked by Sargon of Akkad.

"We made the finds in two peripheral rooms of the great Royal Palace, where we discovered the cuneiform archive in the 1970s," explains Matthiae. "They were part of the zone behind the Court of the Audience Hall, a sort of storage area which must have held the treasures of the king of Ebla."

Initially the team avoided the rooms, assuming they had been emptied when Sargon ransacked the city. "But we were wrong!" says Matthiae. "Evidently the two statues were crushed into the ground and miraculously escaped the pillage."

Both figurines are intricate representations of women, which are rare in Near Eastern Bronze Age art. One, made of steatite and wood, is depicted with her arms arranged in a gesture indicating prayer. The second figurine holds a goblet and wears an ornate gold dress. Both seem to have been used in a ritual mentioned in a tablet from Ebla that describes how the city's dead queens became female deities who were then worshiped privately by their successors. Matthiae suspects the steatite figure depicts a living queen who would have prayed to the gold-covered figurine, itself a representation of a dead queen who had become a goddess.

© 2008 by the Archaeological Institute of America www.archaeology.org/0801/trenches/goddesses.html