וַיִּשְׁאַ֞ל אֶת־אַנְשֵׁ֤י מְקֹמָהּ֙ לֵאמֹ֔ר אַיֵּ֧ה הַקְּדֵשָׁ֛ה הִ֥וא בָעֵינַ֖יִם עַל־הַדָּ֑רֶךְ וַיֹּ֣אמְר֔וּ לֹא־הָיְתָ֥ה בָזֶ֖ה קְדֵשָֽׁה׃
He inquired of the locals, “Where is the ‘attendant,’ the one at Enaim, by the road?” But they said, “There has been no ‘attendant’ here.”
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew term in question, qedeshah.)
This Hebrew term is a rare and obscure female-role noun. (The speaker is Hirah the Adullamite, a friend of Judah’s.)
In 2004–2006, I consulted eight academic experts, seven of whom (Carol Meyers, Jeffrey Tigay, Mayer Gruber, Tamar Kamionkowski, Tikva Frymer-Kensky z"l, David Sperling, and Elaine Goodfriend) pointed to the striking absence of evidence that cultic prostitution existed in the ancient Near East—despite decades of searching for it.
The counterargument offered by the remaining scholar, Richard Elliott Friedman (in his commentary at Deut. 23:18), is based on the biblical text alone, without drawing upon cultural factors gleaned from extrabiblical evidence. It did not strike me as persuasive.
Controversy remains among scholars as to what the “dictionary definition” of the term was, given the limited evidence. Nonetheless, during the RJPS adaptation project, Hilary Lipka did offer a piece of incisive advice. She noted, “When Hirah asks about the qedeshah, he adds that the woman was by the road. I think that is a clue. Why would a woman be hanging out alone by a road? It is the very same reason that Tamar, her identity hidden by a veil, was understood by Judah to be open to sexual solicitation when he encountered her hanging out by the road, by herself, at the entrance to the town.”
In other words, Hirah is asking about what he believed to be a prostitute—without invoking temples or cultic functionaries. At the same time, he seems to employ qedeshah as a vague euphemism, as if winking while he spoke. The term thus designates some kind of service worker or functionary, but not a prostitute per se—except by implication in an evocative context.
As for the translation, the NJPS “cult prostitute” presumes a Hebrew idiom (so the JPS Notes on the New Translation of the Torah, 1969) that has since fallen out of favor among scholars. The revised rendering more closely matches the usage in the Hebrew text.