The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot is written with two objectives: First to recover the core meaning
of the Hebrew stem ZNH as a complex of non-Yahwist rituals deities institutions and beliefs
prevalent in ancient Israel and Judah. With this understanding the author assigns the
translation value participate in non-Yahwist religious praxis to ZNH. The second objective is
to understand how this core meaning came to be encrusted with promiscuity prostitution and
detestable things and above all with adultery a capital offense as well as with religious
contamination and its destructive consequences. In the biblical texts the stem ZNH which
encompasses a complex of non-Yahwist religious practices operates in a powerful adversarial
relationship to the Yahwist complex of religious practices. Since non-Yahwist sacrifices
signify the repudiation of Yahweh non-Yahwist sacrifices arouse fierce opposition. The
prophets Hosea and Jeremiah grasp this adversarial relationship and in their advocacy for
Yahweh infuse non-Yahwist praxis with images of illicit sexual encounters and with the
production of religious contamination that will lead to the devastation of Israel and Judah and
to the exile of their inhabitants. The new structure of ZNH that emerges with Hosea and
Jeremiah is one that re-visions ZNH activities by incorporating repugnant sexual imagery and
devastating theological contamination into the core of non-Yahwist praxis. However ZNH also
has a sexual signification in contexts that are independent of and distinct from cultic
contexts. The stem ZNH is examined in its Ancient Near Eastern environment but the thrust of
this research is the analysis of ZNH in its Hebrew textual environment using concepts from
cognitive linguistics: network of associations associated commonplaces and blending.
