Dever Prize Winner Identifies Sacred Israelite Cult Bowl from Tel Dan
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The ninth annual Sean W. Dever Memorial Prize for the best published article or paper (in English) presented at a conference by a Ph.D. candidate in Syro-Palestinian and Biblical archaeology has been awarded to Jonathan S. Greer of the Pennsylvania State University, as recently announced by the William F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.
The Sean W. Dever Memorial Prize was established in 2001 by Professor William G. Dever and Mrs. Norma Dever in memory of their son Sean.
In his winning paper, Greer identifies a bowl excavated at Tel Dan in northern Israel as a mizraq, a vessel used in the Temple/Tabernacle service and in other cultic connections. The word appears 32 times in the Hebrew Bible. It is mentioned as part of what Greer calls the “altar kit” or, as denominated in various English translations, as “vessels of the altar,” “utensils of the altar,” “equipment of the altar” and “altar accessories” (Numbers 4:14; Exodus 38:3). The mizraq was one of the vessels or utensils. It can be made of gold, silver or bronze.
From these Biblical references, Greer concludes that the mizraq is “clearly … a cultic bowl made of metal.” The bronze mizraq was “most likely … used for collecting the blood of the sacrificial victim and splashing it against the altar.” The Solomonic Temple also included a gold mizraq “whose function is less easy to discern.” Perhaps, Greer suggests, some of the blood from the bronze mizraq was transferred to the gold mizraq when it was brought from the altar into the Temple.
In Amos’s famous condemnation of those who are at ease in Zion while lolling on ivory couches, the prophet describes them as drinking wine from mizraq vessels, “wine bowls” (Amos 6:1–6). Thus you can also drink from a mizraq.
Drinking and offering bowls are common in Near Eastern cultures, but none has so far been found in Israel—until Greer’s identification of the Tel Dan bowl.
The Tel Dan bowl, like many of the examples from Assyrian, Phoenician, Egyptian and other Mediterranean cultures is shallow, carinated (that is, with an angled side), with a flaring rim, and an omphalos, or bump, in the middle of the bottom—and it is made of bronze.
Greer concludes that the Tel Dan bowl is a cultic mizraq because of the cultic context 017in which it was found. It was excavated in a room within the two sides of a casemate wall adjacent to Tel Dan’s Sacred Precinct with its monumental four-horned altar. The excavators, Greer says, correctly designated this casemate room as a lishka, a multipurpose cultic chamber described in the Bible as associated with the Jerusalem Temple. It was here in this same room that a pair of long-handled metal shovels was recovered. They were probably used for handling red-hot incense. Moreover, a pot in the same room was filled with charred animal bones. As Greer notes, every time a bronze mizraq is mentioned in the Bible, there is also a reference to shovels and pots for collecting sacrificial remains.
Greer concludes that all of these utensils represent the remains of an “altar kit,” possibly for the service of the monumental horned altar in the courtyard of the Tel Dan shrine.
A revised version of Greer’s winning paper has been accepted for publication in the prestigious scholarly journal BASOR (the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research).
The ninth annual Sean W. Dever Memorial Prize for the best published article or paper (in English) presented at a conference by a Ph.D. candidate in Syro-Palestinian and Biblical archaeology has been awarded to Jonathan S. Greer of the Pennsylvania State University, as recently announced by the William F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. The Sean W. Dever Memorial Prize was established in 2001 by Professor William G. Dever and Mrs. Norma Dever in memory of their son Sean. In his winning paper, Greer identifies a bowl excavated at Tel Dan in northern Israel as a mizraq, […]
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