Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 7:18

"The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger." — Jeremiah 7:18 (ASV)

The queen of heaven. —The goddess so described was a kind of Assyrian Artemis, identified with the moon, and connected with the symbolic worship of the reproductive powers of Nature. Its ritual probably resembled that of the Babylonian Aphrodite, Mylitta, the mother-goddess, in its impurities , and so provoked the burning indignation of the prophet here and in Jeremiah 44:19, 25. The word rendered “cakes,” and found only in connection with this worship, was clearly a technical term, and probably of foreign origin.

Cakes of a similar kind, made of flour and honey, round like the full moon, and known, therefore, as selence or “moons,” were offered, like the Minchah or meat-offerings in the Mosaic ritual, the Neideh in the Egyptian worship of the goddess Neith, at Athens to Artemis, and in Sicily to Hecate (Theocritus, Idylls 2:33). The worship of Ashtoreth (Milton speaks of her as “Astarte, Queen of Heaven, with crescent horn”), though of a related nature, was not identical with that of the Queen of Heaven, as that name signifies a star and is identified with the planet Venus. A various reading gives, as in the margin, “the frame of heaven.”