Photos made May 3, 2013
Bible and Beyond
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We are what the outside world calls “settlers.” We live in the West Bank, but refer to it by its Biblical names, Judea and Samaria. I (Yoel) live in Ophrah, about 10 miles from the ancient site of Shiloh. Ophrah was established in 1975, the first Jewish settlement after the Six-Day War.
Doron is a second-generation settler in his thirties. He lived until recently in a settlement about a mile from Shiloh. That is when and where he found the altar.
I teach Bible and historical geography at two local colleges, so it was only natural that Doron called me as soon as he discovered it. He found it, he said, barely 100 feet from his house. “Come over as soon as you can,” he said. By the time I arrived, it was raining, so the young people of this new settlement gathered in one of the houses and I spoke to them about the history of the region. By the time it had stopped raining, it was dark, and Doron and I tramped through the mud to look in the dark at his discovery. Despite the darkness and the clouds, I could easily see that he had discovered a large, four-horned altar hewn out of living rock.
Our study of the object, a few days later, was marvelously exciting. Together we have published a scientific report on the altar in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly and in a Hebrew journal.1 We are pleased to be able to present here a less technical report to BAR readers.
There it was in plain view. No excavation necessary. Nearly square, the altar is approximately 8 feet on each side.2 Because it sits on a slope, the height of the structure varies. In the northeast, it is about 5 feet high.
It was hewn from soft Cenomanian limestone, which surely made the rock-cutters’ work easier, but led to later erosion.
The altar’s orientation is surprising. Its corners, not sides, point to the cardinal points of the compass—north, south, east and west.
Animal sacrifices were central to all religions of the Biblical world, and we knew that the altar was meant for such rituals. That sacrifices were burned on the altar is suggested by a piece of blackened rock found at the foot of the altar, about 3 feet from the base. It was apparently originally part of the hard upper layer of the altar top, and had clearly been burnt at a very high temperature.
The size of the altar generally matches the altar of the desert Tabernacle described in Exodus 27-1–2- “You shall make the altar … five cubits long and five cubits wide—the altar is to be square—and three cubits high. Make its horns on the four corners, the horns to be of one piece with it.” A cubit is 18 to 20 inches long (measures were not uniform in the ancient Near East).
The altar is located about one mile from Shiloh, the administrative and religious center of the Israelite tribes during the period of the Judges (the last centuries of the second millennium B.C.E.). The ark rested here for several decades until it was captured by the Philistines.a
We found no settlement whatever in the immediate vicinity of the altar. Yet within a radius of 2 miles from the altar are some 20 ancient sites, including Shiloh.
We would love to be able to date the altar confidently, but this is difficult to do. We found neither organic material nor relevant pottery sherds near the altar (except some Roman ware washed down from the upper part of the hill), which would be the typical way to date it. The surface here lacks architecture, masonry or any other archaeological artifact that would indicate a date.
When an animal sacrifice was made at an altar such as this one, the worshiper could give his god a gift, on the one hand, and symbolize the immolation of his own life, on the other. The Bible relates that the land was full of altars, “on every high hill and under every leafy tree” (Deuteronomy 12-2). Though animal sacrifice was characteristic of Canaanite culture, the Israelites continued the practice no less intensively, despite the protests of prophets and their circles (1 Kings 14-23; 2 Kings 16-4, 17-10; Isaiah 57-5; Jeremiah 2-20, 3-6–13; 2 Chronicles 28-4).
Even those who were faithful to the worship of the one God of Israel were accustomed to offering sacrifices on “high places” (bamot) all over the country. Before the erection of the first Temple by King Solomon, the prophet Samuel was “on his way up to the high place” (1 Samuel 9-14). “A band of prophets [came] down from the high place” in (1 Samuel 10-5). Solomon himself “sacrific[ed] and burn[ed] incense at the high places” (1 Kings 3-3). During the First Temple period, a repeated expression accompanying the description of most righteous kings of Judah is this- “And he did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord … However the high places were not taken away” (for example, 1 Kings 15-11–14, 22-43–44, 2 Kings 12-3–4, 14-3–4, 15-3–4, 34–35).
Occasionally sacrifices were offered on natural rock or on a large stone that later became an altar. This situation seems to be characteristic of the pre-monarchic era. In the days of the Judges, Gideon offered a sacrifice on a rock and thereafter built an altar on the site where an angel appeared to him (Judges 6-19–24; see also Judges 13-19; 1 Samuel 6-14).
Only with the religious reforms of King Hezekiah in the late eighth century B.C.E. and of King Josiah in the seventh century B.C.E. was the sacrificial cult centralized in Jerusalem. In the sources of the Second Temple (late sixth century B.C.E-first century C.E.) period, the high places are, as a rule, not known anymore. That at least tells us that our altar is likely pre-Exilic (before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., which led to the Babylonian Exile).
Can we be more specific about the date of the altar and the ethnic character of the people who used it? Perhaps the most significant factor suggesting our altar may be an early Israelite one is that according to the Bible, pagan altars were built atop hills. As the prophet Hosea says of pagan offerings- “They sacrifice on the mountaintops and offer on the hills” (Hosea 4-13). Our altar, by contrast, is built about halfway down the slope of the hill on a terrace overlooking a spring deep down in the valley, 400 feet below and 2,200 feet away to the west.
Moreover, our altar not only bears striking similarities to the Biblical description in Exodus, it also shares a peculiar characteristic of two other altars in the country. The first is the controversial stone-built structure from the period of the Israelite settlement on Mt. Ebal that excavator Adam Zertal identifies as the altar of Mt. Ebal mentioned in Joshua 8-30.b Whether Zertal’s Biblical identification is right or not, if one agrees only that the structure was indeed an altar, it is instructive to compare it with the one near Shiloh. Like the corners of our altar, the corners of the Mt. Ebal altar point to the cardinal points of the compass—north, south, east and west.3
Another altar with corners oriented to the points of the compass is found on the slope below ancient Zorah and is nicknamed Manoah’s altar. People have attributed this rock-hewn altar to Manoah, Samson’s father, who is described in the Scriptures as a resident of Zorah. According to Judges 13, an angel appeared to Manoah and his then-barren wife and assured them that she would bear a son. Manoah then offered sacrifices on a rock altar, and the angel ascended in the flames of the sacrifice. Shortly thereafter, Samson was born.
In many ways, Manoah’s altar is a twin of our altar. Both are hewn from natural rock outside an ancient settlement, are of similar dimensions and conform to the measurements specified in Exodus. In both altars, the base is slightly wider than the top, and they are both built on mid-slope rather than on top of the hill. However, there are also significant differences- Though our altar has impressive horns and a level top, Manoah’s altar has no horns, and part of its top is raised and contains small cupmarks, some interconnected. (Also, Manoah’s altar is not nearly as impressive as ours.)
Here our reader may ask a question- How do these altars compare with the dozens of other animal-sacrifice altars found in ancient Israel? The answer is quite surprising—dozens of other animal-sacrifice altars have not been found in ancient Israel. From a reading of the Bible, we might expect to find them in considerable quantity, but only few sacrifice altars are known in the country. By contrast, more than 50 small incense altars have been recovered.
There are only two known rock-hewn altars in addition to the one we found near Shiloh- Manoah’s altar and another found at Samaria (Sebaste), by Eleazer Sukenik before the Second World War.4 The Mt. Ebal altar is built of squared stones. In addition, we have a few animal-sacrifice altars built of stone and bricks, the most noteworthy of which are the 8.2 x 8.2 x 5-feet altar in the courtyard of the Israelite temple in Arad (though this altar does not have horns) and the course of stones found at Tel Shechem in the temple that has been identified as the “temple of Baal-Berit” from Judges 9.c
As for the orientation of our altar (as well as those of Ebal and Zorah), note that in pagan Mesopotamian temples, the corners are mostly oriented to the four points of the compass and the sides with the diagonal directions.
The Israelite desert tabernacle and the Israelite temple as described in the Bible, as well as temples discovered by archaeologists in ancient Israel and in neighboring countries, are oriented east-west (except for Shechem, whose front was oriented roughly 30 degrees north of west). But the three altars with corners oriented to the points of the compass are not associated with temples. This, too, opens up the possibility that our altar may be Israelite.
BAR readers are invited to make sense of all this on their own. It just might be that our altar represents one of the very few surviving examples of animal-sacrifice altars used in Israelite ritual. As for its date, the data perhaps allow us to speculate that it was in use during the childhood of the nation of Israel.
a. See Israel Finkelstein, “Shiloh Yields Some, But Not All, of Its Secrets,” BAR, January/February 1986.
b. See Adam Zertal, “Has Joshua’s Altar Been Found on Mt. Ebal?” BAR January/February 1985; Aharon Kempinksi, “Joshua’s Altar—An Iron Age I Watchtower,” BAR, January/February 1986; Adam Zertal, “How Can Kempinski Be So Wrong?” BAR, January/February 1986.
c. See Lawrence E. Stager, “The Shechem Temple,” BAR, September/October 2003.
1. Yoel Elitzur and Doron Nir-Zevi, “A Rock-hewn Altar Near Shiloh,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, January-June 2003; and Elitzur and Nir-Zevi, “Mizbeah hazuv ba-Selah mi-Maarav le-Shiloh,” Judea and Samaria Research Studies 12 (2003), pp. 35–48 (in Hebrew).
2. On the right-hand part of the southeast side, however, is a rounded projection and beside it a depression in the eastern corner. This somewhat mars the square shape of the altar.
3. A four-horned altar was also found dismantled at Beer-Sheva. See “Horned Altar for Animal Sacrifice Unearthed at Beer-Sheva,” BAR, March 1975 and Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (New York- Doubleday, 1990), pp. 495–496. Because the Beer-Sheva altar was dismantled, we don’t know its original measurements and orientation.
4. We do not count a few rock-cuttings that some scholars, eager to identify “cultic” remains, have defined as altars. See Shmuel Yeivin, “Bamah,” Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. 2, pp. 149–152 (in Hebrew). In Petra and its vicinity, many rock-hewn altars are known (see Gustave Dalman, Petra und seine Heiligtümer [Leipzig, 1908], pp. 79–82), but they are not relevant here as they belong to another cultural world, that of the Nabataeans in the first century B.C.E and first century C.E.