**7. Why Was the Pattern Not Identified**

If temples are indeed so rare, why was this pattern not identified a long time ago? While this question is only of secondary importance of course, it is still intriguing—how could such a clear pattern be missed?

It seems that a combination of factors led to the fact that the obvious pattern was not identified, at least not explicitly.

First of all, it appears as if biblical data and interpretations were influencing previous scholarship, and many scholars attempted to reconstruct a religion which was to a large extent expected on the basis of the interpretation of the texts. As noted, Israelite religion was a focus of intensive research, and hence prior knowledge influenced research questions and agendas; if to be more specific, scholars "knew" that the Israelite religion was practiced all over the country until Josiah's reforms, and therefore reconstructed such a religion (or religions).16 The following quote illustrates how biblical-driven conceptions shaped historical reconstructions, "(A)t the end of the monarchy in Judah the relationship between local and central sanctuaries was reversed. While in the pre-state period there were only local sanctuaries, and during the whole monarchical period both existed side by side, under Josiah at the end of the seventh century the local sanctuaries were closed and the cult was centralized in Jerusalem" (Kessler 2008, p. 89; see also Hagedorn 2005, p. 204; Vogt 2006, pp. 44, 46).

Since the existence of such "local" temples was simply assumed, and with the absence of sufficient "examples" from the Iron Age, scholarship drifted to two solutions to illustrate the cultic landscape of Israel and Judah until the time of Josiah:

<sup>15</sup> I am not aware of any explicit attempt to challenge my argument, but many still follow the old consensus, for example (Schmitt 2014; Geller 2016, p. 312).

<sup>16</sup> For the significance of Josiah's (and Hezekiah's) reforms in this context, see, e.g., (Albertz 1994; Vogt 2006); see also (Fritz 1995, p. 145; Borowski 2003, p. 24).


While such an integrative methodology, which incorporates updated archaeological data with critical textual analysis, is usually the right approach, it has its risks. It appears that in this case, the biblical-driven expectations led (1) to a strong will to look for evidence for cult in general and cultic structures in particular (and it also encouraged the interpretation of finds as cultic, even when the evidence was dubious), and (2) to extrapolate from the finds, i.e., to use the data that was unearthed as an example of what must have been the reality elsewhere. This is of course the right procedure when the finds are representative, but this does not seem to be the case here, and the unique exceptions which required explanations were treated as representative examples of Israelite cult-places.

To this we can add another factor that contributed to the fact that this pattern was not addressed, and the influence of biblical scholarship and the situation in other Near Eastern societies of the Bronze and Iron Ages is exacerbated by the tendency of archaeologists to explain the evidence unearthed and, with a large degree of justification, to ignore "things" that were not found. As noted by Lamberg-Karlovsky (1985, p. 23), archaeologists are "burdened by their occupational hazard with a materialist bias." This is the reason why we (as archaeologists) usually tend to explain what there is, and ignore what there isn't. The study of Iron Age burials (to be discussed at some length below) can serve as another example. Hardly any Iron Age I (and early Iron Age II) burials were unearthed in Israel and Judah, but although this was "known" (e.g., Tappy 1995, pp. 65–66; Ilan 1997a, p. 385; 1997b, p. 220), the pattern was not systematically addressed until recently (Kletter 2002; Faust 2004). Studies of Iron Age burial practices concentrated (quite naturally) on the famous Judahite tombs of the late Iron Age and on the few tombs from the earlier phases of the period, and the "absence" of the finds during most of the period was not systematically dealt with. In this case, the few early tombs that were unearthed were discussed, and the degree of continuity between them and those of the preceding and succeeding periods was analyzed, but the most important element—that most of the population was not buried in such tombs—was usually not even mentioned until recently, let alone explained. It seems that after well over 100 years of extensive archaeological research in ancient Israel, we cannot ignore elements that were supposed to be found, but were not, and the absence or rarity of finds—temples in this case—must be acknowledged.18
