40 A History of Judaism
In the Pentateuch, this sacrificial cult is described as located in a port-
able tabernacle which travelled with the children of Israel during their
journeys across the Sinai desert. The construction and the appearance
of the Tabernacle are described in fine detail in the book of Exodus,
from the ark of acacia wood overlaid with gold to house the ‘testimony’
of the Lord (presumably a written text) to the golden ‘ mercy- seat’ or
cover, gold- winged cherubim, gold plates and dishes for incense, gold
flagons and bowls for drink offerings, the table overlaid ‘with pure gold’
for ‘the bread of the Presence’, the lampstand with seven lamps ‘of pure
gold’, and the ‘ten curtains of fine twisted linen, and blue, purple and
crimson yarns’, with images of cherubim skilfully worked into them.
The reason for their elaborate display is explicit in the biblical text:
Moses is said to have been commanded by the Lord to tell the Israelites
to gather an offering ‘from all whose hearts prompt them to give’ so
that they might ‘make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them’.^2
The notion that a divinity might expect his or her worshippers to
provide a dwelling place as a focus for ritual worship was common to
all the more complex societies which had contact with Canaan in the
first millennium bce. Animal sacrifices and other offerings were the
standard form of worship throughout the region. Stone cult temples
had been dedicated to gods in Egypt at least from the early third millen-
nium bce, and temples had been constructed from mud brick in
Mesopotamia from even earlier. In Palestine and the surrounding
regions a variety of Bronze Age temples from the second millennium
bce have been excavated, from fortress temples at Hazor and Megiddo
to the outdoor circular altar at Nahariyah and the ‘High Place’ at Gezer,
with ten huge standing stones in alignment, each adjacent to a large
stone basin, and the temples at Lachish and Tel Mevorakh, with their
rich collections of votive vessels, jewellery and other offerings. The var-
iety of temple styles, sometimes in imitation of Egyptian structures,
continued into the Iron Age, the period when, according to the biblical
account, the sacrificial cult also moved, through the initiative of Solo-
mon, from temporary tent- like structures, such as the Tabernacle
described in Exodus, to a more permanent building in Jerusalem.^3
The erection of permanent temples to house and honour divinities
was a gradual process in many parts of the Near East and the eastern
Mediterranean world. In Greece the worship of the gods had been
organized around the royal palaces in the Mycenaean period but by the
first millennium bce, with Greek society divided into separate commu-
nities without any centralized state, each community marked off, by a