Pi-beseth

Pi-beseth ("house of Bastet") appears once in Scripture in Ezekiel's oracle of judgment against Egypt: "Aven and Pi-beseth shall fall by the sword: and these cities shall go into captivity" (Ezekiel 30:17). The city — also known as Bubastis to the Greeks — was the great Egyptian cult center of the cat goddess Bastet in the eastern Nile Delta. Herodotus describes the spectacular annual festival of Bastet at Bubastis as drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Ezekiel's pairing of Pi-beseth with Aven (Heliopolis, the sun-god cult center) signals divine judgment against the two great Egyptian religious capitals — Egypt's entire idolatrous infrastructure faces dismantling at Babylonian hands.