to make cakes for the Queen of
the Heavens. The Queen of the Heavens is the Assyro-Babylonian fertility
goddess Ishtar, associated with the evening star Venus. The Canaanite
equivalent is Astarte. The cult of astral deities was especially popular in the
last two centuries of the First Temple period. There is archaeological evidence
that sweet cakes, shaped in the image of the goddess, were used in the cult of
Ishtar. One should note that the Masoretic Text has melekhet, “work of,”
instead of malkat, “queen of,” but that is almost certainly a pious
euphemistic alteration by the Tiberian grammarians in order to avoid the
suggestion that there could be a Queen of the Heavens. (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:883)
