Dea Gravida

I bought the little goddess in, of all places, Jerusalem.

“How many people come to Jerusalem to buy idols?” I laughingly asked the dealer in the little antiquities shop where I bought—say, maybe, redeemed—her. In Hebrew, the question has a certain pungency that it lacks in English.

(In an even deeper irony, the real answer is: millions do. Books like the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an are the most dangerous idols of all; they've caused more human suffering than any statue ever did.)

She's maybe 2500 years old, of a Phoenician iconographic type known as the dea gravida, the “pregnant goddess.” (In English, to be “gravid” is not just to be pregnant, but to be really pregnant.) Nearing the end of her term, with her elaborate hairdo and veil, she sits in a chair with her right hand held protectively, reflectively, over her belly. There's a stillness to her. She's waiting.

Mold-made, an affordable best-seller of her day, tens of thousands like her survive. That explains how someone on a student budget like me could afford to buy one, and why the Israeli government would let her out of the country. (Nation-states are usually jealous of artifacts found within their borders: in this case, up north in “Galilee of the gentiles,” where Phoenician influence was strong.)

The little goddess sits on an altar in my bedroom, where I see her every day. In a house filled with Green Men and Astartes, somehow this is the time of year, this pregnant time before Yule, when I find myself noticing her most.

A birth is coming. Like the little clay goddess, we wait.