The Untouchables: Scholars Fear to Publish Ancient House Shrine

Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 2005

To encounter ancient Near Eastern religion, one can hardly do better than to begin with the clay model house shrines that appear as early as the third millennium B.C. and continue through the Biblical period.

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Footnotes

See Lawrence E. Stager, “When Canaanites and Philistines Ruled Ashkelon,” BAR, March/April 1991.

See “Should Scholars Look at Finds that May Have Been Looted?” and “Statement on Inscribed Artifacts Without Provenience,” in “Update—Finds or Fakes?” BAR, September/October 2005.

Endnotes

The scholars who studied the shrine noted that the iconography indicates that it dates no later than the ninth century B.C.

Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 340.