*5.1. Public Cultic Space*

The history and archaeology of the Iron Age II Levant furnish examples of a range of public cultic space types. The most well-known of these come from the Hebrew Bible, whose texts describe a portable public shrine known as the tabernacle (Exodus 25–31, 35–40) and then the more permanent temple said to have been built by Solomon (1 Kings 6) and then later destroyed in 586 BCE when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and its temple (2 Kings 25:8–10). It is also clear from the Hebrew Bible that other public cultic spaces existed, though they are polemicized as illegitimate. In one of the classic passages describing the destruction and desecration of illegitimate places of worship we hear of the radical actions ordered by the reformer king, Josiah and of some of the places at which people were engaging in religious actions. The types of places mentioned are set in boldface to make them more visible.

The king commanded the high priest Hilkiah, the priests of the second order, and the guardians of the threshold, to bring out of the temple of the LORD all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. He deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places (*bam¯ ôt*) at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of the heavens. He brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the LORD, outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people. He broke down the houses of the male temple prostitutes that were in the house of the LORD, where the women did weaving for Asherah. He brought all the priests out of the towns of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had made offerings, from Geba to Beer-sheba; he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on the left at the gate of the city. The priests of the high places, however, did not come up to the altar of the LORD in Jerusalem, but ate unleavened bread among their kindred. He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of Ben-hinnom, so that no one would make a son or a daughter pass through fire as an offering to Molech. He removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance to the house of the LORD, by the chamber of the eunuch Nathan-melech, which was

in the precincts; then he burned the chariots of the sun with fire. The altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars that Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the LORD, he pulled down from there and broke in pieces, and threw the rubble into the Wadi Kidron. The king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem, to the south of the Mount of Destruction, which King Solomon of Israel had built for Astarte the abomination of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milkom the abomination of the Ammonites. He broke the pillars in pieces, cut down the sacred poles, and covered the sites with human bones.

Moreover, the altar at Bethel, the high place erected by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who caused Israel to sin—he pulled down that altar along with the high place. He burned the high place, crushing it to dust; he also burned the sacred pole. As Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount; and he sent and took the bones out of the tombs, and burned them on the altar, and defiled it ... (2 Kgs 23:4–16a).

The clear polemical tone and purpose of this text means that a lot of questions remain about the seeming ubiquity of the "high places"; nonetheless it gives some sense of the range of public cultic spaces that are visible to the biblical author. Among other things, we hear of the *bam¯ ôt*, "high places," high places at the gates, the Topheth (apparently a place for child sacrifice), houses of *haqqˬdešîm ¯* , "the holy ones" (often thought to be male prostitutes), and altars in other places (roofs, in the Temple, in Bethel). Some of these spaces are understood to have cultic functionaries (i.e., priests) and paraphernalia such as pillars/standing stones (*mas.s.eb¯ <sup>ô</sup>t*) and poles (ގ*ăšerîm ¯* ; related to the name of the goddess Asherah).

Archaeological excavations provide examples of a range of public cultic spaces as well. Iron Age II temples of varying sizes and construction have been excavated at sites such as Tell Tayinat in southern Turkey (Haines 1971, pp. 53–55; Harrison and Osborne 2012), Tel Dan (Davis 2013) and Arad in Israel (Aharoni 1968; Herzog et al. 1984), and Deir ގAlla in Jordan (Franken 1969; Hoftijzer and van der Kooij 1991; Ibrahim and van der Kooij 1991). Small yet public cultic spaces have been discovered at gates such as at Bethsaida (Bernett and Keel 1998). Shrines separate from urban areas have been excavated at sites such as Kuntillet ގAjrud (Meshel 2012), and at Tell Damiyah (Petit and Kafafi 2016) 51 and Wadi ath-Thamad WT-13 in Jordan (Daviau and Steiner 2017). Given this cross-section of public cultic spaces known from the Levant, it is to be expected that the Ammonites had a similar range of sites even though the extant textual and archaeological records provide only a few hints and clues to their existence.<sup>52</sup>
