Despite a lack of evidence for the practice of sacred prostitution in the ancient Middle East, scholars have continued to understand the wordqdešɔin Hosea 4:14 to denote a female officiant who performed sexual acts in a cultic setting. This article argues that the understanding of theqdešɔas a cultic prostitute has appealed to interpreters for over two millennia because the Hebrew word has a semantic range that includes both female cultic functionaries and prostitutes. The lexeme denotes a class of women who are employed outside of the patrimonial estate, including priestesses or prostitutes (but never both at the same time). When the prophet indicts the Israelites for sacrificing with qdešot, he deploys a pun that strengthens his metaphor of Israel as a wayward woman.

Recent studies of cultural interaction in the Assyrian empire have focused on the process of assimilation and the production of alterity. In this article, I argue that Assyrian royal rhetoric goes beyond emphasizing simple difference, instead using depictions of cultural diversity to demonstrate the truly universal nature of the empire. I elucidate this rhetoric by comparison the world fairs of the 19th and early 20th-centuries. These fairs advanced European imperialism by allowing visitors to explore the vast extent of empire. I argue that the enumeration of exotic tribute in Assyrian texts and the iconographic depiction of foreigners on reliefs similarly served to concretize Assyrian power. Unlike modern European empires, however, Assyrians did not consider ethnicity to be constitutive of citizenship. Thus, while the Assyrian approach to diversity was certainly instrumentalizing, it was also inclusive of cultural difference. In this respect, the Assyrian understanding of human diversity shares much in common with the way the empire treated other types of difference, ranging from topographic variation to biodiversity. From the imperial vantage point, each of these elements had the potential to be tamed in a way that highlighted the control of the king over the four quarters of the world.

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