On Cult Places and Early Israelites: A Response to Michael Coogan - The BAS Library
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On Cult Places and Early Israelites: A Response to Michael Coogan

In the January/February 1988 BAR an article entitled “Two Early Israelite Cult Sites Now Questioned,” BAR 14:01, presents the views of Professor Michael Coogan to the effect that the so-called “Bull Site” that I excavated in the Samaria mountains is not a cultic installation and is of questionable Israelite ethnicity.a Of course, every silent archaeological discovery can be interpreted in different ways. The question is what is the most sensible explanation of a particular archaeological phenomenon. In this case, I disagree with Coogan’s views on several basic points. Coogan lists four criteria that, to his mind, characterize a cult […]

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Footnotes

1.

Coogan originally presented these views in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly 119 (January/June 1987), pp. 1–8.

2.

See my original article, “Bronze Bull Found in Israelite ‘High Place’ from the Time of the Judges,” BAR 09:05, and the more technical version, “The ‘Bull Site’: An Iron Age I Open Cult Place,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR) 247 (1982), pp. 27–42.

3.

See the papers of Moshe Kochavi and Amihai Mazar in Biblical Archaeology Today (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1985), pp. 47–71; Lawrence E. Stager, “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” BASOR 260 (1985), pp. 1–35; Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988), an updated synthesis of the archaeological evidence.