What Happened to the Cult Figurines? Israelite Religion Purified After the Exile - The BAS Library
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What Happened to the Cult Figurines? Israelite Religion Purified After the Exile

By Ephraim Stern

Accidental discoveries of two pits containing cult figurines have led me to discern an extraordinary development in Israelite religious observance. This development occurred when the Jews returned from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth to fifth centuries B.C. The first discovery took place in the opening season of our excavations at Tel Dor, on the Mediterranean coast of Israel, where we were fortunate enough to uncover a favissa (FAH-viss-uh). A favissa (plural, favissae [FAH-viss-ee]) is a pit into which votive figurines or statuettes have been thrown. Sometimes 024these figurines are made of metal or stone, but mostly they are […]

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Footnotes

1.

The World of the Phoenicians (London Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 62.

2.

See Ephraim Stern, “Excavations at Tel Mevorakh Are Prelude to Tel Dor Dig,” BAR 05:03.

3.

See Ze’ev Meshel, “Did Yahweh Have a Consort?” BAR 05:02; André Lemaire, “Who or What Was Yahweh’s Asherah?” BAR 10:06.

4.

The Samaritan temple at Gerizim was, of course, a schismatic exception. The Samaritans were expelled from the Jerusalem Temple in the fourth century B.C. They then built their own temple on the top of Mount Gerizim. The Samaritan settlement at this site is now being excavated by I. Magen. The residential quarter is very well preserved, but not the temple itself.

5.

See “Gamla: The Masada of the North,” BAR 05:01.

6.

See Hershel Shanks, Judaism in Stone: The Archaeology of Ancient Synagogues (Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society; New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 17–20.