| Information about ancient priestesses comes from places that were religious centers in Mesopotamia, like Nippur and Sippar during the Old Babylonian period (ca. 18001700 B.C.E), with institutions called gagu (Akkadian term for cloister), which housed a hundred or more naditu. A naditu was of elevated priestly rank; she could be of royal birth; and the fundamental restriction was that she remain childless.41 The term "gagum" is also equated with the "house of the entu."42 |
| Sarah, as mentioned in chapter VI, seems never to have set foot on other than hallowed ground. Her extended residence at the sacred grove at Mamre implies that either her abode was cloistered, in the sense that she was enclosed or confined to her surroundings, or that it may have functioned as the gagu of the entu. |
| Little detail is given in Genesis about the grove at Mamre, other than to mention that the trees were terebinths and that Sarah lived in a tent. But Sarah's tent is a prominent feature in the narratives. If the terebinth grove where Sarah lived was a sacred area, her residence (the tent resembling the abodes of the goddesses) would have been also. In Genesis 18 reference is made to a tent five times in ten sentences: Abram is outside the tent (v. 1, 2); Sarah is inside it (v. 6, 9); and Sarah is at the entrance to the tent with the divine visitor (v. 10). This emphasis on the tent makes it the pivotal point around which the mystery of the annunciation of Sarah's conception takes place. Genesis does not specify what Sarah's tent was like, but it is certainly an abode of significance, seeing that it is mentioned so frequently, is located in a (sacred) grove, and is visited by a deity. |
| The abode of the Goddess Inanna, shown in relief on the alabaster trough from Uruk (see Plate 15) as a reed hut that could easily be described as a tent, will be seen later to be of great significance. |
| In II Kings 23:7 there is a strange reference to woven houses. Regarding the reformations of Josiah, it states: "he demolished the houses (batim) of the qedeshim that were in the house of YHWH, where the women wove houses for Asherah." (Since it did not seem likely that women would be weaving houses the literal translation scholars have interpreted batim to be stolas, hangings, etc.)43 Asherah was the Goddess who was venerated most by the Israelites in Canaan and whose influence was recorded by them. Since Asherah was identified with the terebinth, Sarah must have been familiar with her symbols. |
| The houses woven for Asherah in the priests' quarters, mentioned in II Kings, may have had a configuration similar to the Sumerian |
|
