Demonic · Deliverance tradition · c. 400 BCE
The Queen of Heaven
A goddess the people of Judah tell Jeremiah, to his face, that they will keep worshipping — because things went better when they did.
Narrow source base
Jeremiah 44 contains one of the bluntest exchanges in the prophetic books. The people answer him directly: we will burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her as we and our fathers did, for then we had plenty of food and saw no evil; since we stopped, we have wanted everything and been consumed. They are making an empirical argument, and it is the only place in the Bible where the other side of the polemic gets to state its own case at length.
Who she is remains disputed — Ishtar, Astarte and Asherah have all been proposed and the text does not say. Chapter 7 adds that the whole household is involved: children gathering wood, fathers kindling fire, women kneading dough for her cakes. This is domestic religion, not a state cult.
In territorial-spirits writing the title is treated as a ruling spirit over regions and over rival devotions. That application is modern; the text names a rival worship, not an entity with a strategy.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Jeremiah's Judahites bake cakes for her in the streets of Jerusalem, which is the closest thing to a cult site the title has. Behind it stand Astarte and Ishtar, who had many.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Named there as
- The queen of heaven
- Rank
- Named Spirit
- Order
- Deliverance tradition
- Base of operations
- Jeremiah's Judahites bake cakes for her in the streets of Jerusalem, which is the closest thing to a cult site the title has. Behind it stand Astarte and Ishtar, who had many.
- Era
- c. 400 BCE
- Traditions
- Christian, Deliverance & Spiritual Warfare
Traits
- Domain
- Popular devotion, household cult, competing worship
- How firm the basis is
- Strong — a title in the text, though the referent is disputed
- Textual basis
- Jeremiah 7:18, 44:17-25
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to The Queen of Heaven, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- social1
- malefic1
- material1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names The Queen of Heaven, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 2,391 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as The queen of heaven, Queen of Heaven
- Rank: given as Title of a goddess; Territorial spirit
Receives incense, drink offerings and cakes from whole households in Judah and among the exiles in Egypt, who tell Jeremiah plainly that they were better off when they worshipped her.
“We will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven.”
Named in strategic-level warfare writing as a ruling spirit over regions and over competing devotion.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention The Queen of Heaven?
Is The Queen of Heaven the same as Astarte?
What rank is The Queen of Heaven?
How else is The Queen of Heaven spelled?
What is The Queen of Heaven said to do?
How old is The Queen of Heaven?
Nearest in the corpus
If The Queen of Heaven is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
The Korah Spirit
Named Spirit · Deliverance tradition
Deliverance teaching names this spirit for the Levite who told Moses the whole congregation was holy, so why did he exalt himself — and was swallowed by the ground.
The Jezebel Spirit
Named Spirit · Deliverance tradition
The most discussed figure in modern deliverance teaching, and a category rather than a being — built from a queen in Kings and a rival teacher in Revelation.
The Absalom Spirit
Named Spirit · Deliverance tradition
Named in deliverance teaching for the son who stood at the gate, listened sympathetically to everyone with a grievance, and stole the hearts of Israel.
The Ahab Spirit
Named Spirit · Deliverance tradition
The passive half of the pair — named for the king who let his queen act and then took the vineyard she obtained for him.
The Familiar Spirit
Named Spirit · Deliverance tradition
The biblical term for a medium's attending spirit — and at Endor, the one occasion where the practice is depicted as working.
The Leviathan Spirit
Named Spirit · Deliverance tradition
Job's sea-beast read as a spirit of pride, and specifically of the twisting of words between people who are trying to understand each other.
The books behind The Queen of Heaven
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Territorial Spirits & Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare
C. Peter Wagner and the Third Wave writers · 1989-1996 · English
Read Territorial Spirits & Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.