he blame,
saying, "When we burned incense to the queen of heaven, and poured out
drink offerings unto her, did we make our cakes and pour out drink
offerings unto her without our men?"[140] That the husbands, and the
children even, assisted at the ceremony is made evident in another
reference to goddess worship: "The children gather wood, and the
fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cakes
to the queen of heaven".[141]

Jastrow suggests that the women of Israel wept for Tammuz, offered
cakes to the mother goddess, &c., because "in all religious bodies ...
women represent the conservative element; among them religious customs
continue in practice after they have been abandoned by men".[142] The
evidence of Jeremiah, however, shows that the men certainly
co-operated at the archaic ceremonials. In lighting the fires with the
"vital spark", they apparently acted in imitation of the god of
fertility. The women, on the other hand, represented the reproductive
harvest goddess in providing the food supply. In recognition of her
gift, they rewarded the goddess by offering her the cakes prepared
from the newly ground wheat and barley--the "first fruits of the
harvest". As the corn god came as a child, the children began the
ceremony by gathering the wood for the sacred fire. When the women
mourned for Tammuz, they did so evidently because the death of the god
was lamented by the goddess Ishtar. It would appear, therefore, that
the suggestion regarding the "conservative element" should really
apply to the immemorial practices of folk religion. These differed
from the refined ceremonies of the official cult in Babylonia, where
there were suitable temples and organized bands of priests and
priestesses. But the official cult received no recognition in
Palestine; the cakes intended for a goddess were not offered up in the
temple of Abraham's God, but "in the streets of Jerusalem" and those
of other cities.[143]

The obvious deduction seems to be that in ancient times women
everywhere played a prominent part in the ceremonial folk worship of
the Great Mother goddess, while the men took the lesser part of the
god whom she had brought into being and afterwards received as
"husband of his mother". This may account for the high social status
of women among goddess worshippers, like the representatives of the
Mediterranean race, whose early religion was not confined to temples,
but closely associated with the ac