Altars of Ancient Israel

Leviticus 6–7 repeats the offerings, this time as instructions for the priests. "The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out." Every morning the priest, dressed in linen, removes the ashes and adds wood.

The priests eat the grain offering in the courtyard, unleavened, "in the holy place." The purification offering is most holy: anything that touches its flesh becomes holy; a clay pot used to boil it must be broken. The priest who offers the burnt offering keeps its skin. The breast is waved before the LORD and given to Aaron and his sons, the right thigh to the officiating priest.

"This is the law of the burnt offering, of the meat offering, and of the sin offering, and of the trespass offering, and of the consecrations, and of the sacrifice of the peace offerings; Which the LORD commanded Moses in mount Sinai."

The shrine at Arad

Tel Arad, in the eastern Negev, was a royal Judahite fortress. Inside, Yohanan Aharoni's excavations in the 1960s found a sanctuary: a courtyard with a large altar of earth and unhewn stones (about 2.5 m square, matching the tabernacle's altar of five by five cubits), a hall, and a small raised niche, the "holy of holies," with two limestone incense altars on its steps and one or two standing stones (masseboth). Ostraca from the fortress mention "the house of YHWH" and priestly families known from the Bible, Pashhur and Meremoth, and the sons of Korah.

In 2020 Eran Arie, Baruch Rosen and Dvory Namdar analyzed the dark residue on the two incense altars. The smaller altar held frankincense mixed with animal fat; the larger held cannabis mixed with dung to keep it burning slowly. It is the earliest known evidence of cannabis in a ritual in the ancient Near East. The shrine dates to the mid-8th century BC and was apparently covered over within a few decades, perhaps in Hezekiah's or Josiah's reforms.

Arad shows Judahites worshiping the LORD with an altar of the right size and shape, incense, and priestly families. It also shows what the Bible's reformers condemned: a temple outside Jerusalem, standing stones, and a psychoactive incense the Torah never mentions.

The temple at Tel Motza

Excavations in 2012 and later at Tel Motza, about 7 km west of Jerusalem, uncovered a monumental temple built in the early 9th century BC (some date it to the late 10th). Like Solomon's Temple as described in 1 Kings 6, it faced east, with a courtyard and an altar before it. In a pit (favissa) the excavators found ritual vessels, chalices, and figurines of horses and of human heads. It was in use for over two centuries, close to the Jerusalem Temple, during the monarchy.

The horned altar of Beersheba

Described in the previous lesson: a large horned altar of cut stones, dismantled and reused in a storehouse wall in the late 8th century BC. Smaller four-horned limestone altars, for incense, have been found at Megiddo, Dan, Ekron and many other sites.

One sanctuary or many?