worship 43
lampstands and a gold table for the ‘bread of the Presence’. In the external
courtyard were found the altar and an enormous bronze basin, called
‘the sea’ in the text of Kings, with lavers and other bronze objects.
Within the inner sanctuary was to be found the ‘ark in which is the
covenant of the Lord’ which had been brought to Jerusalem by David,
protected by the outstretched wings of two enormous cherubim, made
of olive wood and covered with gold.^7
The building thus described is similar in plan and decoration to other
temples from this region and period, in particular the Syro- Hittite
temple excavated at Ain Dara, north- west of Aleppo in Syria, but it was
not identical to any of them – unsurprisingly in view of the range of
forms found in regional temple architecture. The Bible portrays the cen-
tralizing of cult in Jerusalem as a gradual process, with what is seen as
frequent backsliding by the people into worship in other places, and the
relationship between the Jerusalem Temple and other Israelite shrines in
the Iron Age period is unknown. A small courtyard shrine of around the
tenth century bce at Megiddo has offering stands and a limestone altar.
At Ta’anach, near Megiddo, a rather larger shrine has two terracotta
stands with sun discs, sacred trees, cherubs, lions and other motifs. The
massive ashlar podium of the monumental altar at Dan in northern
Israel may date to a century later. Similar in design to the Temple of
Solomon was a temple in Arad, which was still being rebuilt in the sev-
enth century bce. At Kuntillet Ajrûd, in the Sinai desert, a building of
the eighth century bce was found at the entrance to a caravanserai,
with plastered benches on each side and plastered walls covered with
inscriptions which invoked El, Yahweh and Baal. ‘El’ and ‘Yahweh’
were names used by Jews to refer to the Jewish God, but ‘Baal’ was not,
and it is clear that this was a society which continued to embrace poly-
theistic worship. Storage jars within the fortress are decorated with
scenes including sacred trees and a half- nude female seated on a throne,
and an inscription referring to blessings by ‘Yahweh of Samaria and his
asherah’, providing some context to the urging of the biblical prophets
to forsake the worship of other gods. ‘Asherah’ was the name of a
Canaanite goddess known best from the Ugaritic texts discovered at
Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, in which she is often represented as the
consort of the god El.^8
The biblical narrative has remarkably little to report about the
appearance of the Second Temple built by Zerubbabel in the late sixth
century bce. Solomon’s Temple was said to have undergone many
changes over the years, including the plundering of its treasures by later