ly for generations.[1943] Such service was sometimes a
necessary preliminary to marriage. This seems to be the case in the
custom reported by Herodotus[1944] that every native Babylonian woman
had, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Mylitta (Ishtar) and wait
till a piece of money was thrown into her lap by a stranger, to whom she
must then submit herself--this duty to the goddess accomplished, she
lived chastely. In Byblos a woman who refused to sacrifice her hair to
Ashtart on a certain festival day had to yield herself to a
stranger.[1945]

Official male prostitutes also there were in some ancient cults; but
information about such persons is scanty, and they seem not to have been
numerous.[1946] The most definitely named case is that of the Hebrew
official class called _kedeshim_, that is, persons devoted to the
service of the deity and therefore sacred[1947] (as it is said in Zech.
xiv, 20 ff., that bells on horses and temple-vessels shall be sacred to
Yahweh). These, together with the female devotees, _kedeshot_
("prostitutes"), are denounced as abhorrent to Yahweh; both were
features in the ritual of the Jerusalem temple of the seventh century
B.C. and apparently earlier.[1948] The female devotee is called a
"harlot" and the male a "dog" (_kalb_). The original religious sense of
the latter term is uncertain. In the Old Testament it occurs, in this
sense, only in the passage cited above. In a Phoenician inscription of
Larnaca (in Cyprus)[1949] the plural of the word designates a class of
attendants in a temple of Ashtart, and there are proper names in which
the term is an element (and therefore an honorable title). It is not
improbable that it meant originally simply a devotee or minister of a
god in a temple,[1950] the bad sense having been attached to it in the
Old Testament from the license sometimes practiced by such ministers.

The sentiment of chastity is a product of the highest civilization. In
many savage and half-civilized tribes the obligation on a woman to keep
herself pure is not fully recognized, and in the case of married women
the opposition to unfaithfulness sometimes springs from the view that it
is a violation of the husband's right of property in the wife. In some
ancient civilized communities a god's right to a woman seems to have
been taken for granted.[1951] Ordinary prostitution seems to have
existed in the world, in all grades of civilization, from the earliest
times. This attitude t