Act 19:27 So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great Goddess Artemis/Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.
Point to the word in the Greek that is translated as "world".
Jer 7:18 The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their 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.
Jer 44:17 But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil.
Jer 44:18 But since we left off to burn incense to the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.
I'm not denying that goddesses were worshipped. Clearly they were, and clearly there were many queens of heaven and so forth. That has no relationship to the figurines of the paleolithic which all date to the period between 23,000 BCE to 21,000 BCE. As Dr. Cynthia Eller notes, "The Paleolithic Venuses, relatively few in number and tens of thousands of years old, provide us with few clues to their use or meaning."
Tens of thousands of Goddess statues - some still in their Shrines - have been dug up in Israel.
No, they haven't. Nor are we usually ever close to sure what figurines from prehistory were supposed to represent. I can't give you Bailey's book on the subject, but I can link you to an accessible article summarizing it and quote from what he says about such figurines:
"They are miniature, they are representational, and they depict the human form. In this sense, I made no distinction among prehistoric, ancient, or modern miniature, anthropomorphic representations. I assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use, and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women, and children, and the Paleolithic painters of caves.
In my work on the figurines of southeastern Europe from the Neolithic and Copper Age (6500–3500 cal. bc), I sought to understand what it was about these objects that would have made them succeed in their past functions (regardless of whether they were used as votives, toys, portraits, or the representation of divinities)...When the people of that Pre-Cucuteni community looked at their figurines, and when they placed the little bodies onto the little chairs, arranging (and rearranging) them into different scenes and settings, they were entering other worlds. It is entirely possible that these other worlds were spiritual, though I am not convinced that they were of the type that either Gimbutas or the excavators of Poduri-Dealul Ghindaru imagined."
The Figurines of Old Europe
For a more technical piece with "goddess figurines" that aren't shown in any books promoting the view that these figurines represent the goddess, I can't offer much that you wouldn't have to pay for but can give you something:
Naumov, G. (2010).
Neolithic anthropocentrism: principles of imagery and the symbolic manifestation of corporeality in the Balkans.
Documenta Praehistorica (Ljubljana),
37, 227-38.
Biblical Archaeology has an article on these Goddess Statues.
There are thousands of studies on these statues. I can probably link you to a hundred or more you can access for free and provide you several hundred more (all the way back to Ucko) by uploading them for you. That's without getting into the Catalhöyük debacle and the years wasted because of an inaccurate working model (see e.g.
Refiguring the Corpus at Catalhöyük and one of the two uploaded studies).
