All this fits in well with Islamic and pagan Arab traditions concerning the Black Stone and its precincts. By word-play, the Beni Shaybah are at once the Sons of the Old Woman, the Sons of the Seven, and the Sons of the Oath; they are also the successors of the seven sky-clad servitors of Al'Lat, whose Babylonian predecessor ruled the sevenfold palace of the underworld; and of the seven Anunnaki.
Like many examples of the axis mundi, the Black Stone has a sacred well nearby, and is associated with oath-taking. The Queen of Sheba, bearing in mind the lore associated with Beer-sheba, takes on further significance: tradition has it that she was black, and of djinn ancestry - in other words, she was a divine being in her own right, possibly even a hypostasis of Al'Lat herself.
As for Q're: the identification with Kore (a title of Persephone) is a familiar notion, but one that is almost certainly mistaken. In Greek, kore can denote a girl, and koros a boy; the word actually comes from the same Indo-European stem as a number of other words meaning 'to grow', and denotes more or less the same thing - an increase in size.
Any phonetic similarity between Q're and Kore is coincidental, but oddly fortuitous if the former is an aspect or title of Al'Lat: Persephone, 'bringer of destruction', is Queen of the Underworld in Greek myth, daughter of Demeter, who represents the earth as mother. Persephone's son is Triptolemos, who resembles Tammuz/Dumuzi.
Essentially, Demeter and Persephone are effectively twin aspects of the Earth - mother and grave of all - and have no real connection with the moon whatsoever. Hekate, who figures in their myth, cas indeed be seen as a representation of the moon, but is in herself a triad of maleficent, nocturnal entities; she is quite separate from Persephone and Demeter. The supposed triad of Kore, Demeter, and Hekate is a relatively modern invention, with no real foundation in ancient Greek myth or iconography.
Little of this affects Bob Trubshaw's reading of Camphausen's analysis, other than to suggest that worship of the moon is probably not as dominant in the pre-Islamic Meccan schema as Camphausen thinks.
There is always a chance that Al'Lat did become linked with a lunar cult at some point, but little evidence to suggest that she or her sisters were moon-goddesses.
On the whole, the pattern presented here suggests that Al'Lat is essentially a chthonic mother-goddess, a deity of the underworld also associated with fidelity and covenants - a later form of Ereshkigal, who has retained many of her older attributes, albeit in a slightly distorted form.
After Mecca and Medina, the third most holy site of Islam is surely the Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. One reason for this is undoubtedly the influence of Judaic and Christian monotheism upon Mohammed's early teachings; but another major reason for it is probably the fact that in the Dome of the Rock is the Eben Shetiyyah, a flat, yellow-brown, asymmetrical rock believed by many Jews to be, as its name implies, the 'Stone of Foundation', around which God built the world, and which was used as the pedestal of the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark, as is well known, was a symbol of the Hebrews' communal pact with God; it was also used as a weapon in the destruction of Jericho, an event replete with sevens; and it contained the two stone tablets engraved with the Law - which have been roundly equated with baetyls by a number of Biblical scholars, and sometimes presumed to have been of meteoric origin. Beneath the Eben Shetiyyah is a deep hollow known to Muslims as Bir-el-Arweh, the Well of Souls.
In Jewish lore, the Eben Shetiyyah rests upon and keeps in place the waters of the Abyss (that is, abzu).
One Jewish tradition has it that David dug the foundations of the Temple at Jerusalem, and discovered the Eben Shetiyyah during his excavations. When he tried to remove the stone, the waters of the Abyss began to well up.
This parallels the Islamic tradition that has Mohammed casting down an idol that stood in the sacred complex at Mecca.
According to the tradition, this idol was blocking a well inside the Ka'bah, and the waters began to flow from that moment. Supposedly, the idol represented a deity named Hubal, which seems to be a version of the name of the goddess who was known elsewhere as Kybele, and who was venerated in Phrygia in the form of a stone, a black aerolite that was presented to Rome in 204 BCE by King Attalus.
Knowing that the Arabs habitually worshipped stones as representations of their divinities, it seems probable that the idol Hubal was a stone, perhaps of celestial provenance. Interestingly, the goddess Na'ila - one of a veritable host of divinities venerated at the Meccan site - supposedly appeared in the form of a black woman at the time Mohammed destroyed the idols, and ran screaming from the sacred place.
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