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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > February 2003

Bible Books: It’s Not What You Learned in School

By Beth Alpert Nakhai

The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches

Ziony Zevit
(London and New York: Continuum, 2001) 821 pages, $150 (hardback)

This is how Ziony Zevit characterizes Israelite religions: They (not it) were polytheistic; the Israelite deity Yahweh, the Lord, was only the head of the pantheon. They were replete with divine couples (Yahweh and his consort Asherah were the most important pair, but there were also Baal and Anat or Anatot and perhaps others). They were not based exclusively at the Temple in Jerusalem; kings and Temple priests had only limited jurisdiction over religious matters. Israelite religions arose out of the needs and beliefs of the familial, kin and tribal groups, which formed the basic component of Israelite and […]

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Footnotes

1.

Elizabeth Bloch-Smith and Beth Alpert Nakhai, “A Landscape Comes to Life: The Iron Age I,” Near Eastern Archaeology 62:2 (1999), pp. 62–92, 101–127.

2.

For a different interpretaion of bamot and royal religion, see Beth Alpert Nakhai, “What’s a Bamah? How Sacred Space Functioned in Ancient Israel,” BAR 20:03, and Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel (Atlanta: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2001).