A Claim Built on Herodotus

The claim that sexual intercourse was performed as a temple ritual in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean rests overwhelmingly on a small number of ancient testimonies, the most cited being Herodotus's account, in his Histories, of every Babylonian woman being required once in her life to have intercourse with a stranger in the precinct of a temple of Aphrodite, alongside Strabo's later description of sacred prostitutes attached to the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, and biblical polemic against the qedeshah and qadesh, terms often translated cult prostitute, associated with Canaanite worship the Hebrew prophets condemn. These accounts were combined by nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars into a general theory of an ancient Near Eastern institution of sacred or temple prostitution, sexual intercourse understood by its participants as a ritual act, sometimes linked to fertility religion or to the goddess Ishtar or Inanna, and the theory became a standard feature of comparative religion textbooks for much of the twentieth century, cited as an example of how ancient religion differed from later monotheistic sexual ethics. The theory's appeal to earlier generations of scholars owed a great deal to a wider assumption, now itself revised, that ancient Near Eastern religion was organized around fertility cults in which sexuality played a direct ritual role.