Day 22
CHALLENGE
“Catholics should not regard Mary as the “Queen of Heaven.” The Bible speaks of devotion to the Queen of Heaven and condemns it in unequivocal terms (Jer. 7:18, 44:17–19, 25).”
DEFENSE
The “Queen of Heaven” that Jeremiah refers to is not Mary. Therefore, he was not condemning Marian devotion. The fact that Jeremiah was not referring to Mary is obvious, since he was writing around 600 B.C., not the first century A.D. In his day, the title “Queen of Heaven” was used to refer to various pagan deities. There were many such deities, as every pagan pantheon had a major, ruling deity who was depicted as a king in heaven. Correspondingly, various goddesses were regarded as queens in heaven. Scholars are not sure which of these deities Jeremiah was referring to. It may have been a Canaanite goddess such as Ashtoreth (the wife of Ba’al), Asherah (the wife of El), or the warrior goddess Anat. Whichever he meant, it is clear that the condemned devotion was taking place in his own day, for Jeremiah refers to it as “what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem” (Jer. 7:17). He also promises that God’s wrath would fall on members of his own generation as a result of this practice (Jer. 44:24–30). The fact that “Queen of Heaven” was used for a pagan deity in Jeremiah’s day does not mean that it can’t also have a legitimate use. Words and phrases gain their meaning and connotations from the way they are used in a particular community, and they are not permanently ruined just because pagans once used them. As noted, the same pagan pantheons that had Queens of Heaven also had Kings of Heaven, but that didn’t stop the biblical authors from referring to the true God as a King (Ps. 29:10, 47:2, 6–7, 103:19; Isa. 6:5; Mal. 1:14; 1 Tim. 1:17; Rev. 15:3, etc.). They even used the exact title “King of Heaven” for him (Dan. 4:37; Tob. 1:18, 13:7). The question thus is not whether “Queen of Heaven” was once used for a pagan deity, but whether it can have a different and appropriate sense. As we discuss elsewhere, it can (see Day 64).