Endnote 6 – What’s a Bamah? How Sacred Space Functioned in Ancient Israel

Rudolf Kittel, an early pioneer in the study of Israelite religion, considered the bamah to have been the place for the enactment of Canaanite cult. The later tendency of Israel to revert to Canaanite religious practices he likened to the allure of Catholicism (“pleasing both to the senses and to the imagination”) over and against the “sternly ethical” Protestantism of the Reformed Churches. The latter, in Kittel’s opinion, was closely aligned to the “serious form of worship” offered by the prophets (The Religion of the People of Israel, trans. R.C. Micklem [New York: Macmillan, 1925], pp. 34–35, 146).