**5. Temples in Iron II Israel and Judah**

Despite the large number of excavations of Iron Age II levels in Israel and Judah, and the large overall exposure of many sites, and notwithstanding the great academic interest in Israelite religion, hardly any temples or buildings devoted to cultic purposes were unearthed in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. One can scrutinize the list of cultic structures supplied by various scholars, but to no avail. Most of the Iron II cult places are caves or cultic corners or rooms within structures (and the mere cultic nature of many is doubted). Thus, the finds in Lachish (Aharoni 1975), Megiddo (Zevit 2001, pp. 219–31 and references), Tell el-Farah (N) (Zevit 2001, pp. 238–41 and references), and more, are just cultic rooms or corners, i.e., rooms (or even parts thereof) that were used for cultic purposes, each located within a larger, non-religion complex. These are clearly not temples, and while they were used in the past to show that cult was widespread (by scholars who accepted the "consensus", see above), there was never real justification to call them temples or cultic buildings.

The only "real", secure temple excavated in the two polities is the one at Arad (Aharoni 1993; Herzog 1997, and references; Figure 1), and it appears that another one was discovered recently in Moza (e.g., Kisilevitz 2015). The complex at Dan might also be included (Biran 1994, pp. 159–233; Figure 2), although the identification of the latter is probably dependent on the biblical text.

**Figure 1.** A photograph of the temple at Arad, after its reconstruction (photographed by the author).

**Figure 2.** A photograph of the Tel Dan (reconstructed) cultic complex, with the platform at the background (photographed by the author).

The scarcity of finds is well known. Amihai Mazar (1992a), in an article on the temples of the Bronze and Iron Ages, devotes a lengthy discussion to the many temples of the second millennium BCE (pp. 161–83), and then notes the paucity of evidence for temples in the Iron II (p. 183): "(W)hereas finds from the Late Bronze Age are abundant, only a small number of sacred structures from the Iron Age II (tenth-sixth centuries B.C.) have been uncovered in Israel. These buildings are diversified in form and *each of them is problematic*" (p. 183; emphasis added). The only two examples of excavated Iron Age II temples cited by Mazar (published before the recent excavations in Moza) are indeed the temple at Arad and the complex at Dan (Mazar 1992a, pp. 184–86; see also Niditch 1997, p. 19).

Other scholars, moreover, include only the temple at Arad in the list of excavated Israelite temples (e.g., Ottosson 1980, p. 108; see also Fritz 1995, p. 147; Wright 1985, pp. 214, 252; Dever 2005, p. 170). The scarcity of temples is also expressed, indirectly, by Gabriel Barkay (1992) in his chapter on the Iron Age II in *The Archaeology of Ancient Israel* (Ben-Tor 1992); although this is the largest chapter in the book (and rightly so, given the large exposure of levels from this period), it does not even include a section or heading on temples and cultic structures, in stark contrast to chapters on earlier epochs (for example, Gonen 1992b, pp. 222–32; Kempinski 1992, pp. 174–75, 196–97).

Many of the above-quoted scholars who discussed Israelite religion(s) were of course aware of the paucity of the evidence, and Dever (2005, p. 170) explicitly wrote that "(T)he only known full-fledged Israelite temple of the monarchic period is the one excavated at Arad [ ... ]" (see also Dever 1983, p. 573). And Zevit admitted (Zevit 2001, p. 124) "(B)y quirk of fate, the clearest incontrovertible examples of cult sites relative to the religion of Israelites come from excavations at sites belonging to Israel's Iron Age neighbors [ . . . ]" (see also Wright 1985, pp. 248–249; Fritz 1995, p. 145).

It is important to note we are not suggesting that the temples at Arad and perhaps Moza (along with the probable one at Dan) were the only cultic building(s) that existed in Iron Age II Israel and Judah—it is quite clear that there was one in Jerusalem, for example, and one can assume that there were a few more (either of the few mentioned by name in the Bible, like Bethel, or some that were not mentioned) which were not yet discovered—but the evidence suggests that such buildings were a rare phenomenon, much rarer than in the Bronze Age or in the surrounding Iron Age polities. While a more quantitative assessment will be presented below, I would first like to review the detailed information available from a series of urban and rural settings in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, in order to demonstrate that should temples be prevalent, they were indeed expected to be found.
