I was reading through a portion of Jeremiah on Thursday in my scheduled reading through God’s word, and that included chapter 7. As I read through, I came upon a phrase that I had never given too much thought to before, but when I finished the text for the day I went back to try to answer what I had questioned. The phrase was either a name or a title, “Queen of Heaven.” I read it in Jeremiah 7:17-20. Here is that text.
Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven. And they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger. Is it I whom they provoke? declares the LORD. Is it not themselves, to their own shame? Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, upon man and beast, upon the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched.” ~Jeremiah 7:17-20 ESV
The NET at 7:18 reads “Children are gathering firewood, fathers are building fires with it, and women are mixing dough to bake cakes to offer to the goddess they call the Queen of Heaven.” So my first question was “Who is the queen of heaven?”
In the notes from the NET explaining this, we read “The Queen of Heaven is probably a reference to the goddess known as Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Anat in Canaan, and Ashtoreth in Israel. She was the goddess of love and fertility.”
The real help in understanding came from Philip Graham Ryken in his commentary, Jeremiah and Lamentations.
“While these families were drawing closer together, they were moving farther away from God. The women were turning pagan religion into a cottage industry.
“Scholars are not completely agreed about the identity of this “queen of heaven.” Perhaps she was the Assyrian goddess Anat. Perhaps she was the Canaanite goddess Asherah (cf. 2 Kings 21: 1– 7; 23: 4– 16), called Ishtar by the Persians, from whom we get the word Easter. Both of these pagan goddesses were associated with the planet Venus. In any case, in the hidden life of the home the people of Israel were trying to match the Lord God up with a spiritual mistress.”
These families, from the children in gathering firewood to the fathers in building fires and the women in kneading dough, are doing so in false worship. As Ryken says, they are doing family things, drawing closer together as a family, but doing it in a manner which took them farther from their true God in pursuit of the queen of heaven.
Two things really hit me. First, that this queen of heaven most likely is the (false) deity from who we get the name for the event we are celebrating soon, the resurrection of Christ, Easter. It really bugged me, so I thought I would look up the entomology of the word, but then I realized that would get me nowhere, so I looked up its etymology instead. Not everyone agrees with Ryken on the origin of the word Easter, so let’s just treat it as one possibility.
It does kind of make sense, since that goddess was one of fertility, and the primary tokens of the worldly celebration of Easter are the prolific bunnies and chickens in the form of Easter eggs. So does it make sense, that we, as modern day believers in the work of Christ, His death and resurrection, should celebrate by worshipping the same way as those families in Jeremiah’s time? Should we include in our church’s celebrations things that Jeremiah quotes God as saying they do to their own shame?
What do you think?
