Queen of heaven

The Queen of Heaven (Hebrew melekheth hashamayim) was a pagan goddess worshipped by the women of Judah, to whom they made cakes, poured out drink offerings, and burned incense — practices Jeremiah condemned as provoking God to anger (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–25). The practice appears to have involved the whole household: children gathering wood, fathers kindling fire, and women kneading dough to make cakes "to the queen of heaven." When Jeremiah rebuked these women after Jerusalem's fall, they defended their worship by arguing that the disasters had begun only when they stopped worshipping her (Jeremiah 44:17–18).

The Queen of Heaven is most commonly identified with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar (Astarte or Inanna), the goddess of love, fertility, and war, whose worship was widespread across the ancient Near East. Her cult represents the persistent attraction of the fertility religions that surrounded Israel throughout its history. The episode in Jeremiah reveals the depth of syncretistic practice in Judah immediately before and after the Babylonian conquest, and it stands as a lament over the spiritual blindness that contributed to the exile.