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178 terms with the official spouse, "providing for the comfort and adornment of the goddess Ningal." Other instances where kings sought the Entu office for their daughters abound. The reason that emerges from the inscriptions is that by having such intimate access to the god, the Entu could plead the case and cause of the king for "long days of life and good health"—the very requests made by the male king on the occasion of the Sacred Marriage with Ishtar. With such a direct access to the city god through the "God's Lady," no wonder that successive kings all over the ancient Near East built and rebuilt the Gipars in their cities, making sure that their daughters, and no one else, would be the Entu. This high and unique office was totally different from that of a variety of priestesses who served in the temples as "holy prostitutes," referred to by the general term Qad- ishtu—an occupation frequently mentioned derogatively in the Bible (and specifically prohibited for the Daughters of Israel: Deuteronomy 23:18). The Entu was different from the concubines that gods (and kings, or Patriarchs) had, in that the Entu did not and apparently could not (through unknown procedures) bear children, while the concubines could and did. These rules and customs meant that kings seeking or claim- ing divine parentage had to find other ways than descent from an Entu (who could not bear children) or a concubine (whose offspring lost out to those of the official spouse). It is thus no wonder that during the last glorious era of Sumer, the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, some of its kings, emulating Gilgamesh, claimed that they were mothered by the goddess Ninsun. The Assyrian king Sennacherib, unable to make such a claim, asserted instead in one of his inscriptions that "the Mistress of the gods, the goddess of procreation, looked upon me with favor (while I was still) in the womb of the mother who bore me and watched over my conception; Ea provided a spacious womb, and granted me keen understanding, the equal of the master Adapa." In other instances Mesopotamian kings asserted that this or that goddess raised them or breast- fed them. In Egypt, too, claims of divine births were made (and de- DIVINE ENCOUNTERS