Endnote 5 – Mysterious Standing Stones

At Byblos in Lebanon, more than 40 standing stones were set up around a small, raised, round, early-second-millennium B.C.E. chamber/cella that the excavators suggest housed the emblem of some deity (M. Dunand, Byblos II [1950], p. 644). This, too, suggests that the cella (and more specifically the deity housed within it), and not the standing stones surrounding it (no matter how nicely these were shaped), served as the focal point of this sacred area that the latter meant to face and lends support to my interpretation of the standing stones at Hazor.