Jeremiah 7:1-20 - Jeremiah goes to the Temple to urge the people entering to truly reform and not to put their trust in ancient mantras of God’s favor: “Stop believing those deceitful words, ‘We are safe! This is the Lord’s Temple, this is the Lord’s Temple, this is the Lord’s Temple’” (7:4) The promises of the Lord are not meant to make the people feel that their behavior doesn’t matter, that they can always be sure of the Lord’s favor no matter what they do. The leaders have used God’s promises to build up a spirit of presumptuousness that God had no intention of inspiring. “Do you take this Temple that bears my name for a robbers’ den?’” (JB 7:11) They are reminded of what happened to Shiloh—the first place set up as a place of worship between the time of Joshua to the time of Samuel.  God abandoned it when people became unfaithful.  He can do the same with Jerusalem if people don’t shape up.

He warns Jeremiah that the people will not listen to him either. They are all involved in worshipping alien gods like “the queen of heaven” and other gods. (7:18). Who was this “Queen of Heaven”? At the time of Jeremiah, it was a Semitic goddess called Astarte or Ashtoreth or Ishtar. She was worshipped throughout the Mediterranean region and into the Middle East. The Greeks incorporated her into their pantheon as Aphrodite. She was a goddess of love, fertility, and war. That the same title should be attached to Jesus’ mother is difficult to explain. It is no doubt partly a process of religious evolution and cooptation of earlier devotions that could be fused with Christian associations. There is also direct Christian language in Revelation 12 that could be seen as justifying the use of the term for Mary. I think it was pretty established by the 5^th century. Protestants felt uncomfortable with it, believing that the practice of fusing earlier pagan holidays with Christian celebrations was not a good practice. Certainly Quakers were extremists in that phobia – abandoning even the names of the months and days of the weeks as having pagan roots. 

1 Corinthians 11:1-16 - Paul uses the prevailing cultural norms as ways of bringing out how Christ can be understood by the people of Corinth.  As a man is head over his wife in marriage, so Christ now is head over the man.  Women should not act like men—if she doesn’t wear the customary veil, she should logically have her head shaved like a man, but this she does not want to do. Women are to be veiled as a sign of submission – and for propriety’s sake.  These are all just customs, but people should not be rebellious in Paul’s view (11:16). It’s important to give this passage closer scrutiny, however; it’s VERY important to see these words: “[A]ny woman who prays or proclaims God’s message in public worship with nothing on her head disgraces her husband” (11:5). Later in the letter, we will see words that basically forbid women to speak in these public meetings (14:34). Scholars have speculated that these words forbidding female messages in worship were added later by someone even more conservative than Paul. Certainly the two passages are contradictory.