Endnote 16 – What’s a Bamah? How Sacred Space Functioned in Ancient Israel

The reference to the bamot of Baal in the Transjordanian Balaam story (Numbers 22:41) comes rom the Elohist’s text (eighth-seventh centuries B.C.E.; see Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? p. 253), although the story originally may derive from earlier epic material (see Jo Ann Hackett, “Religious Traditions in Israelite Transjordan,” in Miller, Hanson and McBride, eds. Ancient Israelite Religion, p. 128). From this perspective, the mention of a bamah (or bt bmt) in the Mesha Inscription is interesting. This Transjordanian text describes the mid-ninth-century B.C.E. victory of Mesha, king of Moab, over Israel. It mentions that Mesha’s father built a bamah for Kemosh in Qarhoh, and that following its destruction, Mesha restored it (Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd edition, ed. James B. Pritchard [Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955], pp. 320–321; Mitchell Dahood, “The Moabite Stone and Northwest Semitic Philology,” in The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies, ed. Lawrence T. Geraty and Larry G. Herr [Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews Univ. Press, 1986], p. 437). Biran has noted the close (although not necessarily amicable) relationship between Moab and Israel during these centuries (see “To the God Who Is in Dan,” p. 143), and this relationship may well extend to shared modes of worship.