Endnote 9 – What’s a Bamah? How Sacred Space Functioned in Ancient Israel

The following comments of William G. Dever are most appropriate: “There seems to be a great deal of unnecessary confusion, not to mention skepticism, in our discipline about the use of social science ‘models’ in archaeology. Yet a model is simply a heuristic device, an aid in interpretation and understanding the basic evidence. It is, if you wish, a hypothesis to be tested against the evidence, and if necessary replaced by one that is more useful as new evidence becomes available. A model is simply a way of framing appropriate questions. And without doing that explicitly, I would argue that we can never hope to convert so-called archaeological ‘facts’ into true and meaningful data, data that can elucidate the complex cultural process in ancient Palestine” (“The Rise of Complexity in Palestine in the Early Second Millennium B.C.,” Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, 1990 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993). See also Norman Yoffee, “Social History and Historical Method in the Late Old Babylonian Period,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 102 (1982), pp. 347–348.)