**7. Conclusions**

We return to the original point that we raised at the beginning of the study. Was Kuntillet ޏAjrud a religious site? Our contention here is that strictly speaking it was not. However, we also note that the interpretation of the site over the past few decades reflects the ways in which religion is often defined and studied in our field. Some of the first studies asked whether or not the site was a religious *site*. The debates over this question that followed tended to discuss this question from a top-down approach. Discussion of the religion of the site was framed within the question of whether or not there was evidence for the site to be identified as a cultic or religious site. The search for the religious nature of Kuntillet ޏAjrud was closely tied to the interpretation of the architecture, furniture, and location of the site. That is, did it have an altar or a shrine? We argue here that the study of Kuntillet ޏAjrud provides a heuristic model for thinking about the definition of religion in ancient Israel. It is common to define religion within the parameters of architecture with the goal of locating the places of religion. Temples, shrines, altars, and other cultic locals are deemed the places of religion. As a result, there is a tendency to study Israelite and Judean religion through the search for the locations of religious practice. The problem with this, of course, is that religion formed in many ways the very fabric of daily life in ancient Israel and Judah, as more recent studies have emphasized (Stavrakopoulou and Barton 2010; Albertz and Schmitt 2012). While many of our texts that offer a window into the religious life of ancient Israel and Judah reflect the ideology of the elite, we must remember that the archaeological remains of these regions reflect a picture of religion embedded within all streams of Israelite and Judean life and within all of the spaces in which such streams were located (i.e., houses, gateways, seals, amulets, bodies, etc.) (see Dijkstra 2001, p. 22).

When we think about the way that religion permeated the scribal exercises and other materials at Kuntillet ޏAjrud we may approach the question from a different angle. Kuntillet ޏAjrud may not have been a religious site, but it attests to the great import that religion held in the education and practice of Israelian scribes in the early Iron Age. Indeed, religious themes so permeated the texts left by the scribes at the site that it became difficult not to interpret it as a religious site. However, was Kuntillet ޏAjrud constructed to function as a cultic site? No. The site's religious character only arrived when scribes used its walls and other materials to practice educational curriculum. Here we have a picture of religion embedded within the scribal curriculum of the northern kingdom of Israel. This picture of religion reminds us of the extent to which the biblical texts also offer a window into the melding of religion and scribalism.

**Author Contributions:** The authors contributed equally to all parts of the article.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors have no conflicts of interest.
