Nahum 2:7

"And it is decreed: she is uncovered, she is carried away; and her handmaids moan as with the voice of doves, beating upon their breasts."

The text in a number of places here is not certain; and scholars are much perplexed as to the identity of the feminine person "uncovered" or "stripped" and "carried away" to the accompaniment of the weeping handmaidens. Some see it as a personification of Nineveh; the New English Bible makes it to be the queen; and others see it as a reference to the patron goddess of Assyria, Ishtar, humbled, and bemoaned by her regiments of sacred prostitutes. There is really no good reason to suppose that any such disasters did not occur. The ruin of Nineveh was complete, let the details be filled in anyway one chooses!

J. M.P. Smith has this interesting comment:

"The probability that the goddess of Nineveh is referred to here is certainly greater than that it is the queen. The latter played no conspicuous part in Assyrian history, but the goddess occupied a very large part in the minds of Assyrian monarchs. If it is the goddess, the maidens are probably the female devotees of Ishtar (the sacred prostitutes)."[20]

Our own view is that the passage means any or all of the things suggested, because of the impressionistic nature of the description.

Watts also took the same view of this as did Smith:

"Ishtar's temple was destroyed, her image broken, and the base taken away as booty. The slave-girls, or maidens, are the sacred harlots who were an important part of the Ishtar cult. Normally, they would dance in the temple; but now they marched away with gestures of grief."[21]