Hezekiah's Alleged Cultic Centralization

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Vol 32.4 (2008): 395-434 © 2008 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore DOI: 10.1177/0309089208092138 http://JSOT.sagepub.com

Hezekiah’s Alleged Cultic Centralization DIANA EDELMAN Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN

Abstract The recent article in this journal by I. Finkelstein and N. Silberman (JSOT 30 [2006]: 25985), in which the authors attempted to establish the historicity of Hezekiah’s religious centralization by linking it with archaeological evidence for the closing of shrines at Arad, Beersheba, and Lachish, highlights the need for historians to reconsider this issue. Finkelstein and Silberman’s article lacks the mandatory critical evaluation of the biblical text and inappropriately dates selected archaeological evidence to the reign of a specific king. A re-examination of the highly charged issue of cult centralization in the late eighth century BCE is overdue, and this study offers some needed corrections to the analysis of Finkelstein and Silberman and proposes what is considered to be a more cogent understanding of the reality underlying the biblical claim of a cultic centralization undertaken by Hezekiah. This study does not deal with the separate issue of Hezekiah’s alleged cultic reform. Keywords: Ahaz, Arad, Asuhili, Beersheba, cultic centralization, Hezekiah, Lachish, Sennacherib, 2 Kings 18–19; 2 Chronicles 29–31.

I wish to thank P. Davies, F. Stavrakopoulou, S. Dalley and R. Mullins for their helpful queries and comments on earlier drafts that led me to clarify and develop certain points further.

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I. The Literary Testimony The account of Hezekiah’s reign opens with the usual introductory accession formula (2 Kgs 18.1-2) and then moves immediately into a summary of the king’s important cultic and military accomplishments (vv. 3-8). No dates are given for his removal of the high places, his implied purge of the temple in Jerusalem, or for his attack against the Philistines. It is only after this opening summary that specific events are highlighted for more detailed narration, and these are presented in a chronological progression, beginning with incidents in regnal year 4 (vv. 9-12) and moving on to events in year 14 (18.13-20.19), before ending with the normal summary of the reign, before the death, burial, and succession notice (20.20-21). The opening summary of important cultic and military deeds seems to serve the same function as the placing of important cultic actions in the opening years of a monarch’s reign in Mesopotamian tradition (Tadmor 1981). As such, the practice serves as a non-chronological opening selected summary, similar to the comment on the thoroughness of religious adherence that immediately follows the accession summary in the regnal accounts in the books of Kings. In Kings, an assessment of whether the king followed in the footsteps of David or Jeroboam regularly (but not always) appears after the accession formula and is often immediately qualified by the statement that a given Judahite king did not remove the high places. In Hezekiah’s case, however, he is praised for having removed the high places, pillars, asherah/asherim, and Nehushtan (18.4-5), which illustrated his trust in Yahweh that resulted in divine favour (vv 5-7). This information is located in the same place as the usual qualification and serves the same function. The accounts vary in their inclusion of more detailed narrative sections after the opening assessment of the king’s religious adherence. Of those that go on to include detailed narration, a few include at least one specific regnal year, implying a possible chronological progression in the account (e.g. Jehoash, 2 Kgs 12; Hoshea, 2 Kgs 17; Josiah, 2 Kgs 22.1–23.30; Zedekiah, 2 Kgs 24.17–25.21), while the majority do not include regnal years, making it difficult to know if the various events are intended to be understood to proceed in chronological order or not (e.g. Jehoahaz, 2 Kgs 13.1-9; Amaziah, 2 Kgs 14.1-20; Jeroboam, 2 Kgs 14.23-29; Menahem, 2 Kgs 15.17-22; Ahaz, 2 Kgs 16; Manasseh, 2 Kgs 21.1-18; Jehoiakim, 2 Kgs 23.34–24.6; Jehoiachin, 2 Kgs 24.6-17). It can be noted that in the case of the other reported cultic centralizer, Josiah, the particulars of his

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actions are given in a detailed, dated regnal narration segment and not in the introductory assessment, as here. But when this is viewed within the larger context of all the regnal accounts in both books, it seems to be of little significance. The most important point to bear in mind is that Hezekiah’s closing of bamot and elimination of altars and religious symbols that perhaps were meant to have been located inside the bamot are not dated by the author of the book; they occur in an initial summary statement and it would be wrong to conclude that the text implies they occurred within the first three years of his reign because they precede the details of selected events that are placed in his fourth regnal year. The author of Kings has ostensibly composed his account of the reign of Hezekiah in such as way as to compare and contrast the fates of Israel and Judah at the hands of the Assyrians. He moves from his account of the fall of Israel directly to Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah, which looks as though it will end similarly, but ultimately, does not. However, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that he is more specifically commenting on the eventual fall of Judah in 586 BCE through contrastive analogy of the attitudes and responses of the people and kings in the two attacks on Jerusalem (Ben Zvi 2003: 82-83). In the first, the people are pious, and while Hezekiah rebelled, he submitted to save the city and worked closely with Isaiah. Sennacherib is cast as a mocker of Yahweh. In the second, during the reigns of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, the people are not pious and the kings who rebel do not submit to save the city. Nor do they do listen to Jeremiah (Ben Zvi 2003: 84-85; for a source-critical consideration of the relationship of the account in Kings and the narrative in Isaiah, which distinguishes a historical report in 2 Kgs 18.9-16 from a legendary narrative in 2 Kgs 18.9-16, see Hardmeier 1990: 87-142—I prefer to focus here on literary-critical and ideological issues). Scholars have also long noted an alternating pattern of good king–bad king within the larger narrative dealing with the Judahite kings Ahaz– Hezekiah–Manasseh–Josiah. In this scheme, Hezekiah is particularly contrasted with Ahaz, who is condemned for his cultic and military actions. On the religious front, he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, making his son pass though fire; he sacrificed and made offerings on the high places, on the hills and under every green tree, and he introduced an altar that he had seen in Damascus for sacrifice and reserved the bronze altar for his personal use (2 Kgs 16.3-4, 10-16). Instead of taking religious counsel, he ordered the priest Uriah to follow his negative cultic reforms in Jerusalem. On the military front, he lost Elath to Edom and

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was powerless against the Arameans, who besieged Jerusalem (16.5-6). The latter weakness led him willingly to give up his independence and become an Assyrian vassal, stripping the temple and palace of its precious metal to pay a bribe (16.7-9, 17-18). His reign is negatively assessed (16.2). Hezekiah’s reign, by contrast, is positively assessed (2 Kgs 18.3); he conducted welcome cultic reforms and centralization by closing/removing the high places and altars, breaking down the pillars, cutting down the asherah/asherim, breaking in pieces Nehushtan, and having the people worship in Jerusalem (18.4, 22). He fought the Philistines as far as Gaza, from watchtower to fortified city (18.8), and rebelled against Assyria, refusing to serve its king (18.7), which the author seems to view positively. While he subsequently submitted to the Assyrian king and paid a mandatory tribute (18.13-16), he did so under duress to save the devastated nation from further punishment, whereas Ahaz did it voluntarily. Hezekiah listened to Isaiah (2 Kgs 19) while Ahaz dictated policy to Uriah (2 Kgs 16.10-16). According to J. Blenkinsopp, Hezekiah was positively viewed by the author of Kings because of ‘his zeal for the purity and integrity of the state religion in keeping with the tenets of the Deuteronomistic school’, while his attempt to end his vassaldom to Assyria was ‘in keeping with the school’s strong sense of national identity’ (2006: 121). Both of these conclusions are debatable; however, Blenkinsopp also raises the possibility that the positive valuation may have been due to Hezekiah’s place in history (2006: 121) without further elaboration, and this point needs serious consideration. Hezekiah had a long reign of 29 years, which, in the ancient Judahite world-view, would have been an indication of divine favour and support and, by implication, a close and positive relationship with Yahweh. The Assyrian withdrawal from Jerusalem, leaving it intact in spite of the loss of much of the rest of the kingdom’s territory, would certainly have been viewed as proof of Yahweh’s support of Hezekiah. In assessing the success of the reign of a Judahite ruler, the author of Kings concentrates on his cultic and military deeds; these are his main royal duties as the earthly vice-regent of Yahweh. Bearing this in mind, an author seeking to contrast Hezekiah with Ahaz would have logically attributed to him positive cultic and military actions, which is what we find in the account of Hezekiah. Of the reported actions, the Assyrian texts confirm his rebellion against Sennacherib and could be seen to corroborate his fight against the Philistines in his guarding of Padi, the deposed king of Ekron,

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in Jerusalem, though S. Dalley reads this action quite differently, seeing it as proof of Hezekiah’s pro-Assyrian stance at the time (1998: 90). The Assyrian texts, however, make no mention of cultic reforms in Jerusalem or elsewhere, or to the closing of outlying sanctuaries, leaving open the question as to whether either or both of these reported actions were undertaken by Hezekiah or were secondarily attributed to him as a way to illustrate his actions as a good king who enjoyed a long reign because of divine favour, explicitly in contrast to Ahaz. The Chronicler dates Hezekiah’s cultic reforms in Jerusalem specifically to his opening regnal year (2 Chron. 29–31) before Sennacherib’s invasion in 701 BCE (2 Chron. 32.1). His decision to place the cultic reforms in Hezekiah’s first year is not likely to have been the result of his assuming, as do many current scholars, that they must have taken place before regnal year 4 because they were placed there by the author of Kings. He would have been quite familiar with the use of the non-chronological opening summary so his dating must reflect his own ideological concerns. The Chronicler offers a very different interpretation of Hezekiah’s reign from that of the author of Kings, with other ideological and rhetorical concerns. It is not set within the context of the fall of Israel and, by analogy, the fall of Judah, but instead is an illustration of Hezekiah’s pious deeds (2 Chron. 29–31). The Chronicler has eliminated all references to Hezekiah’s rebellion against the Assyrian king, the conquest of his cities, his submission to Assyria, and his ‘sin’; instead, he depicts him as an ideal king who responded to the Assyrian threat properly—by trusting in Yahweh, organizing the defence of Jerusalem, encouraging the people with theological speeches, and working together with Isaiah, becoming himself an ad hoc prophet. The Assyrian siege of Jerusalem is but one of many subunits that comprise the account of Hezekiah’s reign and is not the most elaborate (Ben Zvi 2003: 87; Bae 2005: 15-29, 42-43). Hezekiah is made a second Solomon in his economic and military actions of establishing treasuries, storehouses, and livestock stalls. After Solomon initiates the temple and its worship, including the priests, Levites, and festivals, Hezekiah introduces reforms that restore Solomon’s original plans for the operation of the temple, including the observance of Passover and the support of the Levites. In this way, the Persian-era cult in Jerusalem could be viewed by the Chronicler as a direct continuation of the monarchic-era temple and cult (Vaughn 1999: 174-81). By emphasizing Hezekiah’s cultic centralization, he could set

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the stage for the claim that probably was first introduced as an innovation in the Persian period that Jerusalem was to be the only place where animal sacrifice could legitimately be offered. To highlight the king’s good deeds, the Chronicler expanded the summary of the reforms as reflected in Kings considerably, specifying that the temple in Jerusalem was purged; in Kings, the original location(s) of Nehushtan, the massebot, and the asherah/asherim that Hezekiah orders removed was/were not given. His specific reason for the dating cannot be verified, but one option would have been to emphasize Hezekiah’s piety from the moment he assumed the throne. Another consideration could have been a desire to eliminate the possibility that the reforms took place after 701 BCE, because then they would not have been the voluntary initiative of Hezekiah but the natural outcome of his having lost control over a large portion of Judah. Centralization occurred in Judah de facto after 701 BCE, when Hezekiah’s domain was reduced to a rump kingdom that probably was confined to the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem. It can be noted that a minority of scholars who accept the historicity of the centralization in some part have dated it after 701 BCE (e.g. K. Fullerton according to Honor 1966: 76 n. 57; J. Skinner according to Todd 1956: 289-90, but no citation is given; Maag 1956: 18; Nicholson 1963: 385). Assyrian inscriptions (the Rassam Cylinder and the Oriental Institute Prism) claim that Sennacherib captured 46 fortified settlements of Judah, with their ‘daughter’ villages or farmsteads, and turned them over to the control of the kings of Ekron, Gaza, and Ashdod. The later Nineveh Bull inscription adds Ashkelon to the list of Philistine beneficiaries. There are mentions of the siege of Lachish and Azekah specifically, and in connection with the defeat of the Egyptian allies, the capture and plundering of Eltekeh and Timnah, which may or may not have been viewed by the Assyrians as Judahite vs. Philistine sites. Otherwise, the location of these captured settlements is unknown. It is generally assumed that they included other settlements in the Shephelah, either exclusively or in part, with more easterly regions in the Judean highlands perhaps also being ceded. It has even been proposed that they encompassed Philistine territory that Hezekiah had conquered early in his reign (e.g. Stohlmann 1983: 159; Halpern 1991: 48; Dalley 2004: 394), though this view has found less support. It has been argued in the case of Beth Shemesh at least, that the Philistines and Assyrians deliberately forced out the Judahite settlers, blocking the water system when some refugees tried to resettle shortly after 701 BCE. The plan was to leave the olives and vines intact for

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harvesting and to have teams of workers collect the ripe fruits and undertake all necessary annual pruning and maintenance (Bunimovitz and Lederman 2003). It is uncertain whether such a policy would or could have been enforced at sites in the Judean highlands beyond the Shephelah, had any been ceded to the Philistines. More recently, however, A. Fantalkin has offered a cogent reassessment of the ceramic evidence found inside the blocked water system and has concluded that the site was resettled some decades after 701 BCE, probably by Judahites during the reign of Manasseh in the mid-seventh century. In his opinion, it was finally destroyed in 586 BCE, with the water system blocked to prevent its use by potential Judahite guerrillas (2004). In his opinion, the site provides testimony for the cooperation of Judah and Philistia, especially Ekron, during the pax assyriaca. Under the watchful eye of local Assyrian representatives, Judah supplied the olives for the massive oil processing operation housed inside the lower city of Ekron. However, this cooperation would not have taken place immediately after 701 BCE but would have developed only some decades later, according to the current understanding, when the sites in the Shephelah were resettled during the reign of Manasseh. Unless archaeologists and historians want to argue that these supposedly devastated sites were resettled immediately, such close cooperation between Judah and Philistia could not have been the first Assyrian vision for the region. So, perhaps the scenario of the use of harvesting teams as sketched by Bunimovitz and Lederman was initially used but proved to be impractical and was subsequently changed when the new Judahite king came to the throne and demonstrated his loyalty to his Assyrian overlord. Alternatively, any Judahite sites that were not destroyed in 701 BCE or which were resettled shortly thereafter may have maintained their traditional inhabitants, who were now to pay taxes and do service to one of the Philistine lords instead of Hezekiah. Either way, we can assume that any Judahite forts among the ceded settlements would have been cleared of their civilian-soldiers and either left unoccupied or resettled with Philistine civilian-soldiers. It would have been dangerous to leave soldiers recently loyal to a foreign regime in place and hope they would support the new power against the former one in the case of contested authority or control. We also need to consider the possibility that the Assyrians maintained control over certain captured strategic forts rather than ceding them to the Philistines and chose to station their own designated troops in them,

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having them supplied by the remaining local population, which was either under Judahite or Philistine control. No study has been done of how the Assyrians may or may not have garrisoned standing troops in vassal areas that had rebelled. Thus, it is unclear whether a small contingent of Assyrian troops would have been left behind to man forts that might have been deemed particularly important because of their location on a vital trade route near a frontier zone prone to raiding or near the capital, to keep an eye and ear on the comings and goings of messengers. It is even possible that mercenaries might have been assigned to one or more such sites. In either case, if Assyrian or Assyrian-employed troops were garrisoned in a vassal territory, it is likely that they would have been provisioned at the expense of the local vassal king, be that Hezekiah or one of the Philistine kings who might now have controlled the region. A growing number of scholars has emphasized that unlike the other fortified cities around the kingdom, Sennacherib never besieged Jerusalem, but instead confined Hezekiah within it, depriving him of his freedom of movement (e.g. Honor 1966: 15; Millard 1985: 59-60; Gallagher 1999: 133; Knauf 2003: 187; Mayer 2003: 179-81; Dalley 2004: 392). According to W. Mayer, he laid out forts against Hezekiah, employing a tactic that had worked well for his ancestor, Tiglath-pileser III, who had found that the lines of communication and reaction time had lengthened as the borders of the Assyrian empire had expanded. Sennacherib’s forts may have been basic facilities in the countryside housing patrols that could terrorize the countryside and control access routes to Jerusalem, preventing its inhabitants and refugees from ‘going out of the gates’ (2003: 179-81). A. Millard thinks they were a string of watchtowers that encircled the city proper (1985: 69), but S. Dalley rejects the idea that the city was completely encircled. She notes that the Assyrian inscription describes a blockade at a single city-gate: Sennacherib ‘turned the exit from Hezekiah’s city-gate (in the singular) into an abomination, ikkibu, making it impossible for the king to pass in and out’ (2004: 392). In light of the claim in the Chicago and Taylor prisms that Hezekiah had set up forts, it would make sense to conclude that some of the existing forts in the countryside that had been conquered were reused to house Assyrian troops during the campaign and blockade. Temporary facilities would have been placed fairly close to Jerusalem proper, with a small force left to monitor the blockade, but other established ones at key locations on important roads in and out of the capital would also likely have been appropriated as part of the larger plan. Unless Sennacherib was planning

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to remove Judah’s vassal status and create a new province, however, he would not have planned to leave Assyrian troops permanently in the vassal region after the campaign. It is curious that the Assyrian writer has not used the usual siege language to describe Sennacherib’s dealing with Jerusalem. One would have expected a main objective to have been the capture of the capital of the ring-leader of the anti-Assyrian coalition to ensure his punishment. This raises the question as to whether, in the eyes of the Assyrian writer, the intention of a siege was normally the capture and partial destruction and looting of a city and the deportation of its population. If so, the description used would tend to indicate that Sennacherib’s intention was rather to force Hezekiah’s surrender by preventing movement of people and goods in and out of Jerusalem, waiting out the eventual effects of starvation but otherwise leaving the city and its remaining population intact. In this case, barricades may have sufficed. It is even more surprising that Sennacherib did not depose Hezekiah in favour of another, more loyal candidate when he eventually capitulated. According to H. Tadmor, the Assyrian scribes had to abandon the normal literary conventions in depicting the defeat of an enemy in light of the circumstances, using other conventions and creating new solutions to deal with the failure to capture the city and depose its rebellious king (1985: x). Millard makes similar observations, noting that the account of the campaign against Hezekiah is atypical when read against other such accounts (1985: 67-72), as is the depiction of the capture and submission of notables of Lachish in his palace reliefs rather than of Jerusalem and Hezekiah. In reference to the reliefs of Lachish in palace room 36 at Nineveh, a few points need consideration. B. Oded (1998: 423) has suggested that the double-walled city was taken from an artist’s sketch of Jerusalem during its siege, in anticipation of its capture, and was only adapted afterwards with stock images of departing deportees and captives led from the city into the presence of the king, and the caption reading ‘Lachish’ instead of ‘Jerusalem’ when the capture of Jerusalem did not happen. His proposal is made after accepting the majority of arguments made by A. Laato (1995) about the use of literary and stylistic devices by the scribe(s) who composed the various accounts of this campaign in such a way as to disguise Sennacherib’s failure to capture Jerusalem. Oded would therefore presume that a siege had been placed against Jerusalem but had been abandoned for some reason, and that the avoidance of its

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explicit mention in the inscriptions and the use of the circumventing reference to setting up forts and a blockade was to hide this failed action. Even if one were to accept this logic, however, it would only require a change of the name of the city, since the artist could have drawn Jerusalem upon arrival at the siege and put stereotypical scenes down on the illustration in anticipation of the outcome. The sketches could equally have been altered back home before the reliefs were carved, as necessary, substituting a group doing obeisance before Sennacherib for the king, as would have been expected. Lending partial support to Oded’s proposal, however, D. Ussishkin has noted that the drawings reflect well the palace fort that was the largest structure inside Lachish and the siege ramp that has been excavated in the southwest corner of the mound but do not correspond to the city walls as they have been uncovered, and there is no evidence of a second siege ramp as seen in the drawings to the left of the city gate. He suggests that the balustrade and towers depicted in the reliefs might have been a stereotypical Assyrian means of portraying city walls and citadels, since they appear in other cities depicted in the palace at Nineveh (1980: 19293). There is no evidence for them at Lachish proper, however. Thus, the details in the drawings do not accurately reflect the situation at Lachish. Oded has not demonstrated, however, that they match the details at Jerusalem more precisely. A second point to be considered is the identity of those doing obeisance before Sennacherib in the final scene found in the palace at Nineveh. S. Dalley has noted that their curly hair and thick noses are characteristic of Nubians/Cushites, not Judahites (2004: 391). If she is correct, the drawing would seem to suggest that Nubians had taken control of the fortified store-city and were responsible for rebelling against the Assyrian king, not Judahites or their king, Hezekiah. Whether there were Nubian mercenaries at Lachish who were being made scapegoats here or whether this is an ideological attempt to exempt Hezekiah from blame and make the Nubians the instigators of the regional rebellion is unclear. Nubian forces had been defeated at Eltekeh during the campaign, so there was physical involvement of Nubian troops in the larger campaign. This observation would suggest that a different strategy may have been at work for dealing with the Judahite element in the rebellion, and, as seen above, the failure to claim to have besieged Jerusalem can be taken at face value to indicate that the intention was never to capture and destroy the capital.

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A final point in the reliefs of the capture of Lachish concerns the booty being carried before the king, consisting of two censers, a chair or throne, a chariot, and weapons (spears, shields, and swords). Its symbolic import can be interpreted in two ways. According to N. Naaman, it represents three categories of objects frequently mentioned in booty lists: cult vessels, treasures of the palace, and weapons. It thus depicts booty as a stereotypical theme (1999: 404). He suggests that the censers were made of bronze and were used to symbolize the cult because the sanctuary at Lachish would have contained a stone massebah representing Yahweh, as had the sanctuary at Arad, so that the censers would have made more impressive booty (1999: 408). An alternative view, which I propose, would see the booty as representing the palace alone and, by extension, the king in absentia. The booty is presented immediately behind the Nubians making obeisance, and can all arguably represent items captured from the palace complex that represent the absent Hezekiah, king of Judah. The censers need not have been strictly used in the cult. Legislation against using the incense mixture sacred to Yahweh for any other purpose (Exod. 30.34-38) indicates that incense would have been used in contexts outside the temple. Nevertheless, as an expensive item, its noncultic use would have been restricted to elites (so also Münnich 2004: 337). The multiple spears, shields, and swords represent the might of the missing Judahite king, who had been symbolically vanquished by Sennacherib at Lachish. The second option for understanding the booty would be consistent with a creative use of symbolism to represent the expected but absent vanquished king, and possibly a second strategy, alongside the submissive Nubian rebels, for dealing with the unusual situation encountered in the Judahite segment of the campaign in Sennacherib’s third year. Since this was the first known act of rebellion on the part of Judah after becoming an Assyrian vassal, the temporary(?) assignment of large portions of Judahite territory to Philistine control and the imposing of a heavier annual tribute may have been deemed sufficient to ensure its future loyalty. However, as Dalley (1998: 89, 93-97; 2004: 394-96) has pointed out, another contributing factor in this particular instance that could have led to a more lenient attitude toward the rebellious Hezekiah may have been his blood-ties to the Judahite-born Assyrian queens Yaba and Atalya. The former was the primary wife of Tiglath-pileser III and mother of Shalmaneser V, while the latter was the principal wife of Sargon II and possibly the mother of Sennacherib, so that Sennacherib

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and Hezekiah might have been cousins. This might then account for the description of Hezekiah in Assyrian texts as ‘tough and strong’ (Gallagher 1999: 130, 141-42), while the other rebels were called ‘sinners, abominable breakers of oaths’ (Dalley 2004: 393). The depiction of the capture of Lachish around the walls of a single room of the palace was not unusual; it was the rule for Sennacherib’s battle scenes at Nineveh, rather than an exception (Russell 1991: 169-71). Nevertheless, the possible inclusion of Nubians doing obeisance, which might imply that they were the ringleaders, and the possible indirect representation of the absent Judahite king via the booty removed from the palace being taken before Sennacherib as he sits on his throne indicates that this battle-scene is atypical in its content. Extended family required special treatment, even when they rebelled. II. The Archaeological Testimony We should evaluate the proposed closures of sanctuaries at Arad, Lachish, and Beer-sheba by Finkelstein and Silberman against the post-701 BCE situation in Judah, the Shephelah, the Judean highlands, and the Beersheba Valley rather than the post-721 but pre-701 BCE context, as they do. As argued above, the biblical text does not provide the specific historical context of the alleged reforms, and the post-701 situation provides a more plausible setting for the closure of such sanctuaries, when one and perhaps all three sites were lost from Judahite control. A. Arad The discovery of an assumed Yahwistic temple in the fortress of Arad during its excavation in the 1960s created a huge stir. The excavator, Y. Aharoni, initially concluded that the temple had been built in Str. XI when the first walled fortress had been created, which he dated to the tenth century and the United Monarchy, and that it had been in use until it was decommissioned during Str. VII, which he dated to the time of King Josiah (Aharoni 1968: 18, 23, 26). Z. Herzog, who has been charged with preparing the long-awaited final publication of the site, has re-examined all the records and finds and heights of pottery baskets and building remains taken in the five seasons of work and has concluded, after painstaking work, that the temple was first built in Str. X, which he dates on the basis of the pottery analysis of L. Singer-Avitz (2002: 114-19) to the mid-eighth century BCE (rather than the ninth century, as Aharoni had

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proposed; Herzog 2002: 14, 49-51). In his opinion, the sanctuary was deliberately buried in the course of Str. IX, which existed in the second half of the eighth century. Like Finkelstein and Silberman, I will adopt the revised stratigraphy proposed by Z. Herzog (2002: 49-67) for the founding of the sanctuary at Arad in Str. X, with its continuing use, after modifications, in Str. IX, as well as the dating of both strata within the eighth century. I will contest, however, his proposed closing date for the shrine sometime before the destruction of Str. IX; it is more logical to date its elimination after the end of Str. IX, as part of the changes instituted by the occupiers of the fort in Str. VIII. Finkelstein and Silberman accept Herzog’s entire reconstruction. Herzog’s evidence for his proposed date is inconclusive, though without a final report it is difficult to appraise the situation fully. He bases his dating on the absence of any indication of destruction inside the sanctuary complex before the lowering of its walls and the burial of the entire area under 1 m of fill. Yet he cites no specific evidence of destruction inside the temple complex in connection with the violent end of Str. X, which necessitated the many modifications made there in Str. IX. He states that the ‘severe damage the temple suffered in the conflagration apparently accounts for the need for total rebuilding of the structure’ (2002: 59). There is no reference to an ash layer or evidence of burning on walls inside the complex proper, however, and he explicitly argues that the fire that burned the cover of the postern hidden behind the debir (holy of holies) and damaged the exterior western wall of the debir did not penetrate inside the temple structure (2002: 64). Modifications made to the temple complex in Str. IX include the raising of the courtyard floor by 1.2 m, which would have required the raising of the walls and roofs of the hekal, debir, and storage buildings, the rebuilding and raising of the sacrificial altar, and the creation of steps down into the hekal (2002: 58-64). The floor inside the hekal was also raised to a height that covered the original steps up to the debir, which were .30 m above the original hekal floor (2002: 64), so the difference in height between the courtyard and hekal would have been less than 1 m. This would still have required a few steps to negotiate, however. A sunken, stone-lined bin was built into the new courtyard floor (2002: 5864). The debir was rebuilt, though its original layout in Str. X is unclear. In my opinion, the original western wall of the debir and of the hekal south of the debir were likely built of stones in Str. X, like the stretch of the western hekal wall north of the debir. It was probably razed or badly

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damaged in the destruction of Str. X, necessitating its rebuilding in Str. IX. Bricks were used above the three original lower courses of stone that were left intact to serve as the foundation. Herzog argues that this brick segment was part of the original Str. X construction, but he does not say why (2002: 56, 64). The only reason that comes to mind is the desire to erect a slightly lighter wall above the fill and water channel that directed rainwater into the cisterns and reservoir. However, I do not find this compelling, since the weight of either wall would have compressed the soil of the fill above the channel, and the conduit itself would have been capped with stones, so it is unlikely that a stone wall would have potentially caused more damage to the system than a brick one built above the three-course stone foundation. The wall was plastered on both faces, so the construction material would not have been visible. In this case, a second option could have been a desire to avoid the unnecessary use of stones as a construction material since their sourcing and transport was more labour-intensive than mud-bricks, which could have been made on site. If so, however, why would the back wall of the hekal north of the debir have been built entirely of stone? There were abundant stones brought in for the construction projects of Str. X, probably allowing walls of internal buildings to be built entirely of stone, while the repairs made after the destruction of this fort may have been done as economically as possible. Herzog argues that the incense altars that had stood on the Str. X steps up to the debir were probably reused in Str. IX above the raised hekal floor that covered the original steps to the debir but were subsequently buried in this fill when the complex was decommissioned sometime before the violent end of Str. IX. The Hellenistic-era casemate wall that was cut into most of the hekal disturbed the area greatly, making it easy to miss the presence of the two intrusive pits containing the altars (2002: 64). He also raises the alternative possibility that the altars were only used in Str. X and deliberately and carefully buried in the alterations in Str. IX, which makes more sense to me. The published photo of the uncovered altars in situ shows the more northerly one lying on its side directly on top of the upper step to the debir. Why these would have been cut into the fill separating Str. X and IX while the stela in the debir was only laid to rest within the 1 m fill separating Str. IX and Str. VIII in this area is unclear if all three were in use when the temple was eliminated, as Herzog suggests (2002: 63-65).

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The basis for Herzog’s proposed date of the elimination of the temple complex within Str. IX rests solely on the apparent lack of destruction debris within the temple (2002: 66) and the good state of preservation of the debir and altar underlying the 1 m of fill that buried the entire complex. As noted above, however, the intrusive, Hellenistic casemate wall has destroyed most of the interior of the temple (2002: 50), so it is difficult to say much about the presence or absence of an ashy layer in the hekal at the end of Str. IX. D. Ussishkin thinks the temple was destroyed, citing thick diagonal layers of ash in photos taken inside the holy of holies (1988: 154). N. Naaman has raised the possibility that signs of desecration and destruction might have been removed from the complex before its careful burial (1999: 406); this idea addresses larger ideological issues about the sanctity of a sacred place that we cannot answer with our limited current knowledge but which should be considered, nonetheless. More importantly, he asks why the complete vessels found in loci 380, 383 and 788 in the temple courtyard, allegedly in Str. IX, were not collected and put into a favissa before the Judahites buried the temple complex (2002: 588). We know that cultic vessels, including altars, had been ‘contained’ or disposed of in this manner in the southern Levant over a long time period, so it is likely that similar practices would have been observed by priests in Judah during the monarchy (contra Münnich 2004: 336). It is also possible that the fort could have been taken at the end of Str. IX without the entire interior area catching on fire. Without final reports that allow us to see if ashy layers were found anywhere in the complex underneath the fill that buried the temple or how widespread they were elsewhere in the interior of the fortress at the end of Str. IX, it is impossible to make an independent assessment of what might have occurred. In theory, however, it is possible to date the burying of the temple complex after the destruction of Str. IX, in the rebuilding that took place in Str. VIII. It makes more sense for the temple to have been buried in the wake of the capture of the fort by an enemy, or its surrender to an enemy, who then took it over. A change in the political regime controlling the fort would likely have led to the closing of the temple dedicated to the god of the defeated nation. Yahweh would no longer have controlled the territory in which the fort was located. The newcomers appear to have respected the sanctity of the defeated deity to the extent that they decommissioned his temple, burying it and certain cultic appurtenances (a massebah and

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two altars). They did not feel compelled to establish an alternate shrine for their own deity, unless they built such a structure over the former Yahwistic shrine or nearby, in the area later destroyed by the Hellenistic tower. As Herzog notes, we know nothing about the buildings that might have overlaid the temple complex because the Hellenistic builders pulled them down to fill in the nearby collapsed cisterns (2002: 49, 72). Nevertheless, scraps of a wall that overlay the westernmost, back wall of the temple broad-room, both north and south of the former debir, are included by Herzog on his top plan for the Str. VIII fortress. He postulates that this wall formed part of a cluster of rectangular storerooms that were built in the northwest corner of the fort, in part over the area that had formerly been the temple building proper in Str. IX (2002: Fig. 16). However, the nature of the building that was erected on top of the buried Str. IX sanctuary is unknown; it may be significant, nevertheless, that the area was not left vacant. There was no avoidance of former sacred ground. N. Naaman has demonstrated from three photos taken during the excavation of the temple debir that a wall was built to block the original entrance to the holy of holies. It included the two altars put on their sides as integral stones. He suggests that a new, indirect-access entrance may have been created to the south (2002: 589-91). In his opinion, the shrine remained in use throughout Str. IX until the destruction of Str. VIII by Sennacherib in 701 BCE and was not decommissioned in Str. IX, as Herzog has proposed. According to his reconstruction, Manasseh would have decided not to reactivate the shrine when he regained control of the site and rebuilt Str. VII (2002: 592). It is a bit surprising that the altars would have been incorporated into the new wall of the holy of holies rather than deposited in a favissa, but this would have maintained their sacred associations. The same may have been done with a massebah from an earlier phase of temple, which was incorporated into the rebuilt back wall. Given the uncertain stratigraphic assignments of many loci and the recently raised question as to whether there was a destruction between Str. IX and Str. VIII or not, Naaman’s reconstruction is certainly possible and might be preferable to the one I have proposed above if there was no destruction of Str. IX. However, there is no proof that Arad was destroyed in 701 BCE; the fort might have surrendered after the capitulation of Hezekiah, without suffering widespread damage. Str VIII might have been destroyed by the Arab leader, Asuhili, whom E.A. Knauf has proposed was responsible for the demise of Str. II at Beer-sheba (2003:

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180, 191). If the fort changed hands at the end of Str. IX, then the wall built over the opening to the holy of holies noted by Naaman could have been part of the changes made by the new foreign occupants of the fort as they eliminated the Yahwistic temple. In this case, some sort of long room that reused the back and front wall lines of the debir would have existed in Str. VIII—perhaps a storage space, but not as reconstructed by Herzog on his plan (2002: Fig. 16), or even an Assyrian-style shrine entered from the north or the south. The final report for Arad, with heights and photos, is urgently needed in order to sort out when the shrine went out of use and whether it was destroyed or not prior to its permanent burial and demise. D. Conrad has suggested that the closing of the temple at Arad might have resulted from changed social and economic conditions after the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom in 722 BCE rather than from Hezekiah’s efforts at religious reform. He points out that archaeological results are mute and must be interpreted (1979: 31; also Naaman 2002: 597). The first explanation that springs to mind for the phenomenon of a buried temple is not cult reform or cult centralization. However, more logical explanations have rarely been explored because a ready answer has been seen by many to exist in the account of Hezekiah’s cultic purge and centralization in 2 Kings 18–19. Conrad thinks that the reforms attributed to Hezekiah are fictitious, post-Dtr insertions, as indicated by the three verbs in weqatal form in 18.4 (1979: 28-29). His arguments highlight our need to evaluate the available textual testimony carefully before undertaking historical recreation. A. Vaughn has suggested that the lmlk jars were instituted before Hezekiah rebelled against Assyria and that they contained one or two royal commodities that were deployed to government officials or troops or traded on the market within the kingdom. His idea could be seen by some to corroborate Conrad’s larger idea that economic conditions changed (for the better?) in the wake of the creation of the province of Samerina in 722 BCE. Vaughn thinks the jars contained royal wine and possibly oil and that their introduction began already before 705 BCE as part of Hezekiah’s economic development and his creation of store cities (2 Chron. 32.27-29) (1999: 137-57). On closer inspection, however, the jars cannot firmly be associated with economic change. According to Vaughn, the lmlk jars were not used by Hezekiah to stockpile supplies in towns facing imminent siege on the eve of Assyrian invasion, as is commonly assumed. Rather, he notes that the style of jars

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was already in use in the mid-ninth century and continued in use into the seventh century. Those specifically marked with the lmlk insignia were found at a number of unfortified, agricultural sites, showing they were not solely military in purpose. In his opinion, once Hezekiah decided to withhold tribute, royal jars probably would have been sent to sites facing imminent attack as military supplies (1999: 156). Although Vaughn raises the possibility of trade, he really seems to be suggesting that the jars were part of a long-term plan Hezekiah instituted to stockpile supplies around the kingdom well in advance of his rebellion (1999: 157); he is unclear whether the creation of the store cities was ever part of a plan for economic development that was not tied to the thought of rebellion. Ultimately, his argument differs in its time-frame rather than its understanding of the function of the jars. Vaughn’s analysis fails to explain fully or convincingly why some well-established styles of jars suddenly started being stamped with lmlk + a two or four-winged scarab + one of four town names—Socoh, Mmsht, Hebron, and Ziph—or why some also bear the stamps of officials, and others seems to show some sort of cancellation mark. Why could not oil and/or wine have been stockpiled in unmarked jars in royal storehouses? He ignores the presence of the four town names on the jars altogether and never addresses whether the commodities stored in the jars came from royal estates or from taxes in kind that were paid in these specially marked jars or were secondarily transferred to them. Why would officials need to add their personal seals to jars already stamped with the other identifying marks? Ultimately, the lmlk jars cannot be used to help elucidate possible economic moves by Hezekiah because we are still uncertain about their function(s). N. Naaman has pointed out that the decommissioning of temples was a known practice that was not limited to the eighth century BCE, calling into question the association of the termination of the temple at Arad with the putative religious reform by Hezekiah. He cites five possible examples: (1) Building 338 at Megiddo, which was buried at the end of the tenth century BCE (Ussishkin 1989) and also (2) Building 2081, which was partially buried at the same time; (3) a cultic building at Taanach, which was destroyed and subsequently buried in the late tenth century BCE; (4) a small shrine at Tel Amal on the south side of the Jezreel Valley that was destroyed at the same time and never rebuilt, whose cultic objects were buried underneath the building; and (5) a small shrine and nearby bamah at Lachish V that were probably both buried in the late tenth century BCE

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but the location of the shrine was remembered and subsequently used as a favissa and depository for broken pillars, possible massebot (Naaman 1995: 187-88; 2002: 595-96—but see the discussion of the Lachish evidence below). Unfortunately, none of the examples cited by Naaman is secure. The identification of Building 338 at Megiddo as a shrine has been successfully disputed by E. Stern (1990) and the attempt by Z. Zevit to maintain its identity as a shrine is unconvincing (2001: 227-30). The evidence does not support the structure’s subsequent deliberate burial either; after a long period of abandonment, it eventually was overlaid by the Str. II fortress, which was built on the highest point of the mound (Stern 1990: 107). Similarly, the identification of locus 2081 in Str. VA–IVB as a shrine (Loud 1948: 44-46; Ussishkin 1989: 170-72; Zevit 2001: 220-26) because of its free-standing pillars inside the entrance of one long room behind locus 2081 proper is questionable. The finding of a limestone slab with a depression, square limestone altars, a round limestone stand, a fenestrated ceramic stand with bowl, a basalt three-legged mortar and pestles, kraters and small juglets and burnt grain in the south-east corner of what appears to be the outer court space does not cry out unequivocally ‘sacred space’ either. The complex was well constructed of ashlar masonry with stonepaved interior floors and a rectangular outer courtyard with a surface of packed chalk at its front. The objects from the corner were clearly cultic in function but may have been used by the residents/workers in their personal daily devotions. The larger building complex either had some sort of administrative function or, if private, belonged to someone of means and status. J.S. Holladay considers the courtyard to have been a semi-public space in front of the residence of an important government official (1987: 253). One’s view of the private vs. semi-public nature of the space is influenced by how enclosed one considers the space to have been. In Loud’s report, most of the southern outer wall was missing and not dotted in as an original feature; D. Ussishkin, on the other hand, reconstructs a closed southern wall with a small entrance into the courtyard. Ussishkin suggests the structure was partially buried because the pillars were found standing, with the adjoining ashlar door-jamb also preserved to quite a height. He notes, however, that city wall 325 was built above the rear portion of the building complex in the succeeding stratum (IVA), which could explain why these elements were left standing: a deep fill was desired to level the area for a new city lay-out in front of the wall.

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The sacred ground was not left abandoned, as Ussishkin argued was the case in Building 338, so he has no analogous situation where the sanctity of a former temple or shrine would have been respected even after the decommissioning of the physical building. It can also be noted that at Arad, the massebah was not left standing but rather placed on its side for burial. Why the difference here? While the finding of two cult stands with related cultic vessels at Taanach clearly indicates there was at least one temple, shrine, or bamah there, perhaps in the tenth century or perhaps earlier, I am not yet fully convinced that the building that P. Lapp identified as a ‘cultic structure’ was a temple (see Zevit 2001: 237 where this identification is rejected). The complete lay-out is not known, but it includes two rooms beside a courtyard that contained an olive press. The contents of Room 1 suggest a storeroom that could have belonged to the private dwelling of a religious functionary. By Lapp’s own admission, it was the finding of the pig astragali (knuckle bones used in divination or as game pieces) that led him to posit the function of the building; otherwise, ‘nothing clearly indicated a cultic function’ among the vessels inside its two partial rooms (1964: 26-28). A grouping of some 70 sheep astragali was found in tomb 251 at Megiddo, suggesting the person buried there was a cultic or healing functionary whose professional ‘tools’ were placed with him/her (Lapp 1964: 35). The figurine mould found in Room 1 does not automatically signal the cultic nature of the site either; an example was found at Tell el-Far’ah North from a clearly domestic context (Lapp 1964: 39). The cult stands were found within meters of these two rooms; one by Sellin in 1902 (1904: 75-79, 109-11), which prompted Lapp to open squares in the immediate vicinity in 1963, and another at the bottom of a cistern in the floor of the courtyard adjoining the rooms, not in situ. As Holladay notes, the storeroom and court could have belonged to a sanctuary, to a devout household, or to an individual with close commercial connections to a nearby sanctuary (1987: 253). The sole factor that might favour the reconstruction of this complex as a temple or shrine is that in the subsequent 1968 excavation season, a hoard of pig astragali and a ‘good portion of figurine fragments’ were recovered from the LB I and twelfth-century BCE strata under the tenthcentury alleged ‘Cultic Structure’ (Lapp 1969: 27). Thus, it is possible that this location had housed a religious complex for centuries. On the other hand, the earlier finds might have been inside a favissa whose presence was unknown to the tenth-century builders; an occupational gap

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of over a century has been postulated between these two strata (Lapp 1964: 8). No sanctuary building was identified by the excavators of Tel Amal in their initial published report so this example also must be rejected. An incense stand/cult stand, painted in red and hand-burnished, was found in Str. IV, in Room 36 (Levy and Edelstein 1972: 338-39, 362-63). This room was part of a larger structure, of which only three rooms were partially excavated. Its overall dimensions and layout are unknown. Just inside the entry from Room 34, Room 36 contained a semi-circular, plastered installation against its western wall, which stood .40 m tall; this was perhaps a grain bin (1972: 332, pl. XX). In Str. III, an unusual, threefooted stand topped by a Phoenician-style bowl was found in Room 12, inside an in-ground basin measuring 1.40 × 0.40 m. Another partially reserved basin lay close by, and a jar was sunk(?) in the space between them; the adjoining floor contained abundant ceramics (Levy and Edelstein 1972: 329, 339-40, 362-63). This room seems to have been used for industrial purposes, like retting or dying flax. Chalices, which often are assumed to have cultic significance, were found in Rooms 10, 11, and 16, while the foot of another three-footed stand was found in Room 15, all in Str. III (Levy and Edelstein 1972: 362-63). None of these rooms contain any features that would identify them as a shrine, and the suite of rooms did not overlay the building complex that contained the cult stand in Str. IV, which might have allowed the postulation of the continuation of a sacred complex on site, had other indications strengthened such an identification. Both strata were destroyed by fire, so that these objects may not have been in their ordinary locations; they could have been dropped during looting or may have been moved by the inhabitants in the face of threatened invasion. Subsequent salvage excavations conducted in 1983 and 1985 by N. Feig (1983; 1986) before the expansion of the museum built on the tell uncovered a number of Middle Bronze tombs and a domestic area of Str. III, with more chalices, storage jars, and grinding stones inside a complex with a paved courtyard. It appears that the identification of Room 12 as part of a possible ‘cultic structure’ measuring c. 225 m2. and lying east of the weaving and dying workshops, across a street, was a secondary guess based primarily on the presence of the cult stand and chalices in adjoining rooms (Edelstein and Feig 1993: 1450). No shrine or cultic complex has been excavated to date. The alleged shrine at Lachish V will be discussed separately below, since it is cited by Finkelstein and Silberman as evidence for Hezekiah’s

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cultic centralization. Its existence has been challenged, however, so unfortunately, none of the examples cited by Naaman are clear-cut illustrations for the handling of ‘decommissioned’ temples and shrines. It needs to be noted, however, that all of the buildings discussed by Naaman, had they been legitimate cultic sites, would have been destroyed by enemies before their decommissioning/abandonment (so also noted by Münnich 2004: 343). Thus, they do not offer parallels to internally decommissioned temples that had not been desecrated. Let us assume that there are legitimate examples of temples, destroyed or not, that were deliberately buried; the MB IIB temple in Stratum V at Tel Kitan seems to be an example (Eisenberg 1993: 880). Naaman suggests that such burial might have been carried out to prevent future desecration, such as is described in 2 Kgs 10.27 (1995: 188). This idea fails to account, however, for why such shrines or temples were not rebuilt and rededicated to the same deity. Ordinarily, the desecration of a holy place by an enemy could be overturned through the performance of prescribed rituals. Presumably this was done at the temple at Arad when it was reused in Str. IX. So we are left to wonder if irreversible sacrilege was possible, whether in some instances survivors could not afford to rebuild their shrines and did not consider them to be essential and so chose to bury them out of respect for their holiness, or whether a change in population at one or more sites might have led to the elimination of the worship of deities of the former group in favour of the introduction of gods of the new group. In the latter instance, would the new group have built a new shrine elsewhere within the settlement, or over the former shrine, on traditional holy ground? Finally, while it has generally has been assumed that Megiddo, Tel Amal IV or III, and Taanach were destroyed by Shishak in his campaign conducted sometime between 930–925 BCE, the pottery repertoire and chronology would equally allow a date in the first half of the ninth century, so it would be possible to associate the general destruction at the last two sites with Aramean invasions as well (so now also Naaman 2002: 595-96 vs. 1995: 187-88, where he attributed all three to Shishak). The presence of a portion of a stela erected by Shishak at Megiddo shows he gained control of that town, though it is not certain whether he destroyed it in the process or whether it surrendered, so it remains to be determined if one of the destruction levels there should be associated with Shishak or not.

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The above discussion about the decommissioning of temples has implications for the date of the destruction of Str. IX. Sennacherib’s 701 BCE campaign in the region, which included a reported capture of 46 fortified settlements and their daughters, would more logically be associated with the destruction of the Str. IX fort than with the Str. VIII fort, as is commonly accepted (so also Fried 2002: 447). In the wake of the capture of the facility, the site was either ceded to the Philistines or perhaps occupied by Assyrian soldiers or mercenaries who were left there to exert direct control over the trade passing through the Beer-sheba Valley and to reinforce a tax collector who was to extract payments for the Assyrian king from the caravans moving through en route to the coast from Edom and the Arabian peninsula. The small building placed outside the gate in Str. VIII (Herzog 2002: 40) may have been used as a new, more convenient tax collection point. It appears that a tax collector may already have been installed on site in Str. IX; inside the fort in a building near the temple, a weight shaped like a crouching lion, with parallels at Nimrud in Assyria from the time of Sennacherib, was found along with a cylinder seal in neo-Assyrian style (Herzog 2002: 80, 82; Fig. 35). Tiglath-pileser III had placed tax collectors in the vassal city-states of Tyre and Sidon to extract a portion of all goods (or the equivalent value in silver) arriving by water, so it is likely he and subsequent Assyrian rulers would have done the same in other situations with the southern Levant where profit was to be made. The profit to be earned from the Arabian spice trade that passed through the Beer-sheba Valley as well as trade with Egypt was realized already by Tiglath-pileser III, who set up an Assyrian trading facility on the border of Egypt (Tadmor 1984: 178). Arad could have been a more easterly extraction point for taxes owed on goods heading to the centre along the Beer-sheba Valley route. Whether the Philistines or the Assyrians took over official control of Arad, the new occupiers would have made sure that in rebuilding the interior to suit their own needs, the Yahwistic temple would have been eliminated as a functioning cult place. Local potters continued to produce the pottery used at the fort, accounting for the continuation in Str. VIII of the forms in use in Str. X and IX before 701 BCE. The single lmlk-stamped jar handle that was found in situ in Str. VIII can reflect the salvaging of intact food supplies from the Str. IX fort; the remaining eight stamped handles were found in fill and so are of no help in determining which stratum might have been destroyed by Sennacherib. There would not have been an immediate change in the pottery tradition after 701 BCE, so that some sort of afterlife of the

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hallmark repertoire destroyed by Sennacherib at Lachish III in 701 BCE needs to be recognized. There is nothing to prevent the current synchronism between Arad Str. X, IX, and VIII with Str. III at Lachish to stand, even if Str. VIII represents the occupational aftermath of Sennacherib’s 701 campaign at Arad. Lachish probably remained uninhabited after its capture for some decades, accounting for the changes in the repertoire in Str. II. Str. VIII at Arad may have been short-lived; control of the Beersheba trade route may well have been contested as soon as the main Assyrian force returned home, or a raid or expedition designed to eliminate the newly established Assyrian tax collector could have been successful. Resentment over this additional imposition would have been natural; a letter sent to Tiglath-pileser III (744–727 BCE) from an unnamed official in an undisclosed location mentions that the Sidonians had chased off the tax collector (mikasu) whom the author of the letter had recently appointed ‘over those who come to the karrani (custom house) in Sidon’ (ND 2715; Saggs 2001: 155-58). The letter demonstrates similar sentiments at the introduction of Assyrian taxes, presumably on top of the existing royal imposts that remained in place in vassal territories. B. Beer-sheba Finkelstein and Silberman try to date the dismantled and dispersed blocks of a large horned altar made of worked sandstone found in secondary deposition in three locations in Str. III and Str. II to Hezekiah’s alleged reforms. Parts of the altar were used to repair a segment of wall belonging to the Str. II pillared storehouse complex. Six stones were found sealed in the fill underlying the Str. II glacis, one of which was reported as being part of a Str. III retaining wall within the rampart (Aharoni 1975b: 154; Herzog, Rainey, and Moshkovitz 1977: 57-58). Another altar block was found in the wall of a building west of the gate (Aharoni 1975b: 154). Unfortunately, the stratum of that building was not given. The four corner blocks that each included an altar horn were placed contiguously in the section of patched wall; one horn was lopped off from the rest of its block. Other ashlar blocks that had once been part of the altar were placed above the corner-pieces in the patch and in the nearby area (Aharoni 1974: 3). Finkelstein and Silberman admit that we do not know the original location of the sanctuary that contained the altar nor the specific stratum in which it was used (2006: 272), deeming irrelevant the suggestion of Naaman that the altar may have been part of a bamah rather than a

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temple complex (1995: 185). Nevertheless, in their opinion, Aharoni was correct in seeing the sanctuary containing the altar to have been destroyed in the early days of Hezekiah when the Str. II building projects were launched (2006: 271; earlier, Rainey 1994: 349). B. Halpern (1991: 25) and O. Borowski (1995: 150-51) similarly accept this dating. Finkelstein and Silberman (2006: 272) argue that the finding of the altar stones in only two secondary locations in Str. II points to its dismantling at the end of Str. III; otherwise, the blocks would have been found in a wider range of reuses. ‘Every other explanation would have to explain away this simple logic’. They seem to have overlooked three important details: (1) there were three find spots, not just two; (2) one block was found in a Str. III context; and (3) the blocks were used to repair the Str. II storehouse wall at some point during the existence of that level, not to build it at the beginning of the stratum. Their ‘simple logic’ assumes that the altar was disassembled immediately prior to its reuse, so to be internally consistent, they should have concluded that Hezekiah’s alleged reform at Beer-sheba took place sometime after the completion of the initial buildings of Str. II—if they want to continue to ignore the block already reused in Str. II— or at the beginning of Str. III, if they acknowledge its existence. Well, I for one am not convinced. Not all the stones of the altar have been recovered in the excavations conducted so far, which means that they have been reused in more than the three contexts where they have turned up. It is uncertain whether the altar originally measured three cubits or five cubits square (Aharoni 1974: 4; Zevit 2001:173), so the number of missing blocks is unable to be determined, but even if it were the smaller size, only about half of its stones have been recovered so far. If a sanctuary with its altar of worked stones had been disassembled at the time that Str. II was being constructed, it makes more sense to me to expect all the salvageable stones to have been reused in a single, nearby location and structure. It would have been a waste of valuable resources to place ashlars from the altar into the rampart matrix; yet this is what happened to six of them. Two were found in 1973; one large ashlar sandstone block was ‘in the slope, outside the gate, and a smaller fragment was found in the same area in one of the retaining walls of the Str. III glacis’ (Aharoni 1975b: 154). Four more were found in 1976 ‘embedded’ in the Str II rampart, sealed under the ‘covering glacis’ (Herzog, Rainey, and Moshkovitz 1977: 57-58). Otherwise, the rampart was composed of unworked limestone pebbles and boulders from the nearby wadi. This formed a vertical retaining wall and layer within the

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glacis, while two revetment walls constructed of bricks were found underneath the glacis. Other fill layers consisted of brick material, bricks and grey soil, grey-black soil, and red wadi material (Aharoni 1973a: 11; pl. 86). One would have expected all the blocks from the altar to have been be reincorporated into a new building of Str. II had it been disassembled at the time Str. II was begun. The four buried blocks found in the rampart originally may have formed the top surface of the altar, because there was evidence of burning on them (Herzog, Rainey, and Moshkovitz 1977: 57; Rainey 1994: 338). Even in this case, however, they still could have been used in the storehouse. The walls had been sealed inside and out with a limestone plaster measuring 2 to 3 cm thick, so the burnt parts would not have been visible (Herzog 1973: 23). Perhaps there was concern about the integrity of these four ashlars because the heat that had caused the burning could have made them more friable and for this reason they were ultimately rejected. Whatever the explanation for the placing of these four stones in the rampart, it is clear that one of the two earlier blocks found in the rampart in 1973 was used to construct a retaining wall belonging to the Str. III rampart, even before further work was done in the area in Str. II. Thus, the stratum in which the altar originally was used is unknown; however, in my opinion, it is more logical that it was Str. IV or earlier, rather than Str. III, as Finkelstein and Silberman suggest (Zevit 2002: 171 dates the altar to Str. IV or Str. III). The altar may well have already have been dispersed around the site in secondary locations before some of its stones were reused again in tertiary contexts in the rampart, in the building west of the gate, and in the repair of the storehouse wall in Str. II. The dispersal of the altar blocks indicates that the former sanctuary or bamah was not decommissioned in the same way as the shrine at Arad; it was not buried intact. Instead, its components were pulled apart and reused in subsequent secular contexts. The only way to maintain a parallel burial would be to date its closure prior to Str. II and probably prior to Str. III and then to postulate its inadvertent uncovering as the builders of Str. II searched inside the city walls for stones to reuse in the foundations of the new buildings. At Ekron, a section of the stone foundation of the outer eastern wall of the Iron II temple complex was robbed out by later Hellenistic or Roman builders and used to construct a villa, demonstrating that such recycling practices were used in antiquity. Logic forces the further conclusion that the finding of a temple complex or an altar in a walled bamah did not deter the builders of Str. II from breaking up the

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former sacred structure(s) and reusing its/their stones in other ways. If an association with Hezekiah’s cult reforms as proposed by Finkelstein and Silberman is to be maintained, then why was the cultic area at this settlement handled with so much less respect than the one at Arad, being dismantled and dispersed rather than buried intact? The proposal that Sennacherib destroyed Str. II in 701 BCE remains possible but not proven. The site might have changed hands without attack or destruction as part of a general surrender by Hezekiah after the capture of Lachish. It is more likely, however, that Sennacherib’s army destroyed Str. III, which shares the same pottery repertoire as Str II. E.A. Knauf has proposed that Str. II was built by Manasseh and was destroyed by the Arab sheikh Asuhili some time close to 679 BCE (2003: 180, 191), which could have been one of the reasons Esarhaddon punished him during his campaign in 679 BCE. This suggestion is also consistent with the pottery evidence. The beginning and end of Str. II is not able to be neatly tied to Hezekiah’s reign on the basis of the archaeological evidence. In addition, it can be remarked that only a single lmlk stamp has been found so far, in Str. II, and it was on a jar type that was not typically used elsewhere in connection with these stamp seals (Aharoni 1973a: 76-77). Since some 350 examples were found in the 701 destruction of Str. III at Lachish, the lack of such seals is surprising if Str. II were built by Hezekiah after 721 and before 701 BCE, as suggested by Finkelstein and Silberman. Stratum II has the widest exposure at the site. So, either Str. III should be associated with the reign of Hezekiah, in which case the lack of lmlk-stamped jars can be attributed for the time being to the very limited exposure of this stratum to date, or else one has to suggest a reason why lmlk-stamped jars would not have been used by Hezekiah at Beer-sheba and only to a limited degree at Arad. C. Lachish Finkelstein and Silberman add a possible sanctuary at Lachish to the usual list of cultic sites allegedly decommissioned during Hezekiah’s religious forms. A pile of restorable cultic objects, including an altar, two cult stands with bowls and two without, and various vessels like chalices, jugs, juglets, bowls and lamps, was found about 8 m west of the western side of the Str. I Persian-Hellenistic solar shrine. Aharoni had originally associated these finds with the badly preserved remains of a small broadroom sanctuary with benches along its walls, Building 49, which had belonged to Str. V and was destroyed by fire at the end of the tenth

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century (1975a: 26-32, pls. 3-6, 60). After re-examining the evidence, D. Ussishkin has shown that the various walls and lime floor that Aharoni had linked to form his temple belonged to four different stratigraphic phases because of their varying founding levels and orientations and that there was no trace of a destruction by fire in any of them. The four walls would all belong to Str. IV, however, and it is possible that the slight differences in founding depths resulted from differing levels of effort put into digging the foundation trenches for the four walls and also the use of different sized stones in the foundation walls. It may be that some or all were used simultaneously to form a single structure or feature. Ussishkin thinks the cultic stands and altar were lying on the lime floor, which constituted the earliest phase, but needs to assume that the elevations Aharoni took were top levels and not bottom levels to account for the 20 cm difference in height (2003: 210); this is possible, but the photograph does not seem to show them lying on the lime floor (2003: Fig. 5). It is difficult to tell definitively, however, because of the lighting; the entire area is in a shadow. Since the objects lay roughly in a circular lay-out, Ussishkin surmised that they had been placed in a pit that had gone unnoticed during excavation. In addition, he noted that the pit was located within the northeastern confines of the later walled, paved courtyard that had been added to the adjoining Palace Fort in Str. III, when Palace C had been erected. Thus, he concluded that the pit and the vessels buried in it had been earlier than Str. III and likely dated to Str. IV (ninth–early eighth century BCE). They were subsequently covered over by the Str. III fill underlying the courtyard (2003: 210-11). Typologically, the cultic items are difficult to date, though the lamps should have been good indicators (Zimhoni 1997: 62). Ussishkin (2003: 211) concludes his analysis by proposing that the objects had belonged to a sanctuary and were ‘dumped or buried in it’ when the building fell into disuse (in Str. IV). Building on Ussishkin’s analysis, Finkelstein and Silberman point out that the vessels in the probable pit could equally have been buried in Str. III as in Str. IV, when the palace was being constructed. This then leads them to propose that the shrine in which they had been used was dismantled shortly before work on Palace C began. The vessels could have been buried right before the palace fill was amassed, with full knowledge that the fill would have sealed the objects under the courtyard floor of the palace/fort permanently (2006: 272-73). This then allows them to associate the vessels with the decommissioning of sanctuaries in

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Hezekiah’s cult centralization in the early years of the king’s reign. The location of the dismantled shrine is unknown but the vessels do not lie within its confines. It is important to determine whether the altar and cult stand were sitting directly on top of the lime floor or had bottom levels 20 cm higher than the lime floor. In the latter case, it makes more sense to argue that they had, indeed, been buried in an undetected pit dug in Str. IV, as Ussishkin has suggested. Why the pit was dug in that particular location is not certain but need not imply that it lay within the confines of a Str. IV temple or shrine that was no longer wanted. It was a favissa. It might be noteworthy that another pit located some 12 to 15 m away (pit 136) was filled with broken and whole masseboth (Aharoni 1975a: 31; Holladay 1987: 254). However, if the cultic objects were sitting on top of the lime floor, then another scenario is more likely: they had been buried in situ, on purpose, as was done at Arad and at Tel Kitan, as part of the decommissioning of a sacred site. The lime floor lay below three other phases of Str. IV containing various walls and had the negative imprint of a robbed-out adjoining wall that lay at a different orientation to the later walls; it, like the adjoining surface, could well have belonged to Str. V. It is noteworthy that, in the photographs, the area where the robbed-out wall would have been located still has some pottery vessels in situ, even though the cultic vessels from the immediately adjoining area to the east have all been removed (Ussishkin 2003: Fig. 4; Aharoni 1975a: pl 6.1). Yet, the area containing the pots also seems to be some centimeters higher than the lime surface to the east. This observation raises the possibility that these vessels also were part of the contents of the favissa and that the entire lot was deposited when the stone foundations from the robbed-out wall were found and removed by ancient engineers/builders. The walls belonging to the three later phases do not appear to have been part of a ‘sleeper’ boxlike system built to give invisible support to the Str. III courtyard as had been used in the Str. V/Str. IV podium, although this would need further investigation before being ruled out. If they are not part of the under-structure of the Str. III podium extension and palace, they logically represent building activities in Str. IV. In either instance, however, the temple where the objects had been used would have been closed/decommissioned well before the reign of Hezekiah (c. 925 BCE by Shishak if associated with Str V and probably sometime before c. 750 BCE if part of Str. IV—although, in this case, the temple could have

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continued in use since the objects alone would have been deposited in the Str IV favissa). The scenario proposed by Finkelstein and Silberman provides a parallel to their understanding of what happened at Beer-sheba but not to the facts of the buried temple at Arad. Why would the shrine at Lachish have been torn down while the one at Arad was buried intact? Why were the cultic vessels not buried within the sacred ground of the sanctuary complex? Why assume the sanctuary in which they had been used had been destroyed; why not view the collection as having been deliberately buried in a favissa because they had been broken or ritually contaminated in some way? The circumstances surrounding the dating and deposition of these cultic vessels are sufficiently unclear that they cannot be used to support the historicity of Hezekiah’s purported cultic reform. The possibility has been raised that the reliefs at Nineveh depicting soldiers carrying censers and a chair/throne as booty from Lachish indicate that a shrine or temple was still operative there in 701 BCE (see, e.g., Naaman 1995: 193; 1999: 404, 408; Fried 2002: 445). Valiant efforts have been made to square this scene with the reported cultic centralization in the Bible; incense offerings were still okay even if animal sacrifice was no longer possible (e.g. Borowski 1995: 152). As argued above, however, the presence of the chair/throne and weapons raises the likelihood that these objects were taken from the large palace complex on-site rather than from the temple, including the incense stands. If the chair and censers were used in the cult, however, they provide evidence that would contradict the biblical claim for having closed down cultic operations outside of Jerusalem prior to 701 BCE, as usually assumed. The reliability of the biblical text can only be maintained in this instance if one moves the reforms after 701 BCE or argues that the objects belonged to a temple or a shrine vs. a bamah, since only bamot were ‘turned aside’. The latter argument would require the structure at Arad to be identified as a bamah vs. a temple or shrine by those who would maintain the traditional view that the complex was buried as part of Hezekiah’s centralization. III. Concluding Analysis The biblical tradition in 2 Kings 18 does not provide a date for Hezekiah’s putative centralization. The Assyrian texts tell us about Hezekiah’s loss of 46 fortified settlements and their daughters in 701 BCE, modifying

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the claim in the biblical account that in Hezekiah’s fourteenth year, Sennacherib ‘went up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them’ (2 Kgs 18.13). The Assyrian count might not be reliable either, but both accounts suggest that Sennacherib mounted an extensive attack against Judah. It is likely that after 701 BCE, the territory of the kingdom of Judah was probably limited to the immediate environs of Jerusalem. This situation, which resulted in the temporary ‘centralization’ of the cult of Yahweh in Jerusalem, is most likely what prompted the author or a subsequent editor of Kings to credit Hezekiah with a voluntary cultic centralization that followed the call in Torah for a single place where Yahweh would choose to place his name to dwell. He was more interested in Jerusalem’s central role during the latter part of Hezekiah’s reign than in how or why it had gained that status. He had a preconceived theological answer for the latter and so had no need to concern himself with the historical details. His likely view that Hezekiah had been a ‘good’ king favoured by Yahweh because he had enjoyed a long reign would have been an additional contributing factor to his selection of this particular king to credit with a cultic centralization that was consistent with the call for a single sanctuary within Deuteronomistic theology. It is now widely recognized that the reported centralization, whether historical or not, was not meant to portray the removal of Assyrian gods and cults as an act of political rebellion by Hezekiah. While this view was once common (e.g. Oestreicher 1923: 54-56; Todd 1956: 291; Rowley 1962: 425; Bright 1972: 279; McKay 1973: 5-12; Rosenbaum 1979: 3738), it is now acknowledged that the symbols and cultic centres that were shut down involved the worship of native northwest Semitic deities (e.g. Reviv 1979: 194; Evans 1980: 161-62) and, apart from the reference to Nehushtan, represent stereotypical Deuteronomistic phraseology and concerns (e.g. Cogan 1974: 40-41,72; Conrad 1979: 28-29, 31; Spieckermann 1982: 170-75; Gonçalves 1986: 74-76, 87; Handy 1988; Naaman 1995: 181-84; Swanson 2002: 462; for the bamot, Barrick 1974). In a slight variation, B. Halpern has argued that the closed facilities (high places and shrines) were those belonging to the rural vs. the state cult and the goal was to sever the people’s traditional ties to the ancestors and the land and build them instead with the central authority (1991: 27). There was no closing down of outlying sanctuaries in Judah in order to prevent the capture of the cultic installations with their statues, gold, silver, and divine tribute offerings by the enemy, as some scholars have

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suggested (Cogan 1974: 20-21; Spieckermann 1982: 325-30; Handy 1988; Lowery 1991: 151). This view includes two practical considerations. First, the removal of the deity statues or representations to Jerusalem would have prevented their use by Assyrians in case of capture as propaganda, claiming that the native gods had abandoned Judah in favour of the Assyrians. Cogan (1974: 9-21) and Spieckermann (1982: 325-30) have shown how, on their military campaigns, the Assyrians carried into battle idols recently captured from defeated nations en route. By analogy, then, statues of Yahweh would have been placed in every outlying sanctuary in Judah in addition to the main one in the temple in Jerusalem, because otherwise, there would not have been any concern for the Assyrians’ ability to parade Yahweh visibly alongside the other idols. Since most biblical scholars assume the cult was aniconic in Judah, they should logically reject this proposal. For those of us who have no trouble accepting the presence of statues of Yahweh in sanctuaries throughout Judah, however, the proposed idea is logical but not ultimately plausible. Such measures would have been counterproductive under the circumstances; to deprive regions of their divine support in the face of impending disaster would not have been a wise move. The removal of Yahweh from such sanctuaries would have symbolized his lack of power to defend these areas of his territory. For an ancient Judahite, military defeat was seen to have come about for one of two reasons: (1) the enemy’s deity was stronger than the native deity, or (2) the native deity had allowed the defeat as punishment for some sort of wrong-doing. The removal of gods to Jerusalem would not have altered either of these options. Secondly, this view implies that having the wealth from the various sanctuaries gathered in the main sanctuary would have given the king the necessary funds to pay off the Assyrians in case of defeat, in the case of saving his own life or sparing the sacking of the royal city (Handy 1988: 113-14). The latter point is well-taken but would not have necessitated the closure of sanctuaries throughout the land to effectuate; any precious donations being held in outlying temples and shrines could have been moved to Jerusalem in anticipation of an Assyrian attack. Lowery’s alternate suggestion that the closure of the outlying sanctuaries was done to limit the amount of tithes collected and, therefore, available as tribute to Assyria is naïve (1991: 151-57). Centralization would not have ‘shut off the tax flow from the outlying areas to the royal treasuries to Nineveh [sic]’ (1991: 157); in fact, it would have facilitated the concentration of

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goods and silver equivalents in Jerusalem while making the people bear the costs of the transporting of their taxes to the royal treasuries in Jerusalem. An unsuccessful rebellion would have guaranteed the imposition of higher tribute rates by the Assyrian overlord, and the payment of the total amount was mandatory, regardless of how it was secured. Hezekiah would have been harming his own chances of remaining as a vassal king and of not being deposed had he implemented the plan as envisioned by Lowery. He would have been familiar enough with Assyrian policy to know that, had his rebellion not succeeded, he would have run a real risk of not being able to pay the increased annual tribute regardless of how or where he collected taxes. The second corollary is similar to another economic explanation offered for the closing of the outlying sanctuaries: to prepare for rebellion and have sufficient supplies in place to withstand the inevitable Assyrian reprisal, Hezekiah closed down rural sanctuaries where taxes used to be paid in order to eliminate skimming by local priests (by implication, Claburn 1973: 15-17; Evans 1980: 162; Borowski 1995: 149, 153). This strategy would also have allowed the king to stockpile the necessary precious metal as well in case he needed to pay Sennacherib a ‘gift’ or was assessed a heavy ‘tribute’ after defeat. The same objections voiced above apply to this proposal. By closing down the sanctuaries, the king would have sent the message to his own people that Yahweh no longer owned or controlled the countryside. He could have accomplished the two proposed objectives more effectively by leaving the sanctuaries open but requiring the people to deliver their taxes directly to Jerusalem and by moving existing surpluses and treasures from the sanctuaries into Jerusalem. Neither was there a closure of sanctuaries to ensure the loyalty of outlying areas more closely during the anticipated Assyrian attack by keeping their god(s) in Jerusalem, thereby giving it the status of ‘an exclusive politico-religious center’ (Weinfeld 1964: 205-206; Reviv 1979: 194; Gonçalves 1986: 88; Smith 1990: 148; Ahlström 1982a: 66; 1993: 703). The latter argument is based on analogy with Nabonidus’s move of various gods from their home sanctuaries to Babylon at the time of the restoration of the cult of Sin. Weinfeld’s underlying motivation for Nabonidus’s action is hypothetical rather than factual; no reason for the action is provided in contemporaneous Neo-Babylonian sources. The analogy is superficial; Nabonidus’s action was not knowingly done in the

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face of impending Persian invasion; the Persian propagandists have used it as a convenient reason for his rejection by his native gods in favour of Cyrus and in so doing have given the possible impression that the transfer of the gods was done shortly before Cyrus’s selection by Marduk to punish Nabonidus’s action. But then, neither was Hezekiah’s action done on the eve of Sennacherib’s invasion, if one assumes it was performed in his first regnal year, as the Chronicler claims. The author of Kings puts Sennacherib’s invasion in Hezekiah’s fourteenth regnal year. More importantly, there was no reported destruction or closure of the sanctuaries of the Babylonian deities while they were away, so the proposed analogy with Hezekiah’s actions is not a tight parallel. As in the previous example, the removal of deities in an actual time of crisis would probably have been interpreted by the locals as a wholesale abandonment of the city to the enemy even before the battle—an open invitation to them to enter and take over. If Weinfeld’s analogy is to be maintained, it would make more sense to argue that in both cases, the native gods from the various settlements in the territory of the kingdom were temporarily gathered at the royal city and traditional religious capital in order to confirm the kingship and leadership of Sin and Yahweh, respectively. But such a move would not have led to the decommissioning of their home sanctuaries while they were away, so once again, the analogy does not work. Halpern offers a variation on the above understanding. He thinks Hezekiah was concerned that the rural population would have easily defected to the enemy and so decided to move them forcefully from their local villages and farmsteads into forts and garrisons located in the countryside. He thus accepts the first premise, but not the second. Following the traditional dates Aharoni gave to the sanctuaries at Arad and Lachish, which ruled out their closing down by Hezekiah, he argues against a centralization of the official cult, which he thinks remained operative in forts and garrisons in the countryside. It was popular, traditional shrines and high places that were eliminated by Hezekiah, in order to bind the population more closely to the official cult and to establish loyalty to the crown’s policies and the defence of the realm (1991: 26-27; 1996: 314-18). Halpern’s first proposal is likely but for different reasons than he has given. One would have expected a monarch planning rebellion to mobilize conscripts and beef up defences in the likely event of reprisal. Landed Judahites would have owed military and corvée duty to the king on an annual basis and certainly would have been liable to call-up when

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invasion threatened, so the movement of rural populations into forts and garrisons to become soldiers in the face of imminent hostility would have been routine. In fact, during times of war or threatened invasions, it is likely that entire families would have voluntarily abandoned unprotected farmsteads and villages and taken temporary refuge inside the closest walled settlement (Ahlström 1982b: 136) without royal coercion. Hezekiah should have had no reason to worry about defection on this occasion. The second proposal concerning the closing of rural high places and ancestral shrines, however, does not follow as a logical corollary of the first point. There would have been no need to antagonize or alienate the rural citizenry by closing local ‘unofficial’ places of worship while they took refuge in walled government facilities. Nothing would have been gained; to the contrary, such actions would have shaken the people’s confidence in their king as their protector and given a reason for them to defect to the enemy instead of fighting on Hezekiah’s behalf. From a religious perspective, cult centralization would not have made sense under the monarchy (contra e.g. Nicholson 1963: 384-86; McKay 1973: 17-18; Albertz 1992: I, 180). To deprive the national god of his outlying sanctuaries would have been tantamount to eliminating his claims to those lands, which his physical presence in sacred spaces would have symbolized (Ahlström 1993: 703). Yahweh Sabaoth was conceived of as a national deity, not a universal deity; it was only with the emergence of Yahweh Elohim, after the loss of the monarchy, that Yahweh lost his specific ties to his former kingdoms of Israel and Judah; it is at this time that the Deuteronomistic legislation envisioning a single temple would make ideological sense. It is only after the severing of the ties between Yahweh Sabaoth and monarchic ideology in both kingdoms that the conception of this deity could be reshaped in the new empire environment. Bibliography Aharoni, Yohanan 1968 ‘Arad: Its Inscriptions and Temple’, BA 31: 20-32. 1973a ‘The Fortifications’, in Aharoni (ed.) 1973: 9-12. 1973b ‘The Hebrew Inscriptions’, in Aharoni (ed.) 1973: 71-78. 1974 ‘The Horned Altar of Beer-sheba’, BA 37: 2-6. 1975a Investigations at Lachish: The Sanctuary and Residency (Lachish V) (Publications of the Institute of Archaeology, 4; Tel Aviv: Gateway Publishers for Institute of Archaeology).

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‘Excavations at Tel Beer-sheba: Preliminary Report of the Fifth and Sixth Seasons, 1973–1974’, TA 2: 146-68. Aharoni, Y. (ed.) 1973 Beersheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-sheba 1969–1971 Seasons (Publications of the Institute of Archaeology, 2; Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology). Ahlström, Gösta W. 1982a Royal Administration and National Religion in Ancient Palestine (SHANE, 1; Leiden: E.J. Brill). 1982b ‘Where did the Israelites Live?’, JNES 41: 133-38. 1993 The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander’s Conquest (JSOTSup, 146; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Albertz, Rainer 1992 A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period (2 vols.; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press). Bae, Hee-Sook 2005 Vereinte Suche nach JHWH: Die Hiskianische und Josianische Reform in der Chronik (BZAW, 355; Berlin: W. de Gruyter). Barrick, W. Boyd 1974 ‘On the Removal of the “High-Places” in 1–2 Kings’, Bib 55: 257-59. Ben Zvi, Ehud 2003 ‘Malleability and its Limits: Sennacherib’s Campaign against Judah as a CaseStudy’, in Grabbe (ed.) 2003: 73-105. Blenkinsopp, Joseph 2006 ‘Hezekiah and the Babylonian Delegation: a Critical Reading of Isaiah 39.1-8’, in Y. Amit et al. (eds.), Essays on Ancient Israel in its Ancient Near Eastern Context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 107-22. Borowski, Oded 1995 ‘Hezekiah’s Reforms and the Revolt against Assyria’, BA 58.3: 148-55. Bright, John 1972 A History of Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 2nd edn). Bunimovitz, Shlomo, and Lederman, Zvi 2003 ‘The Final Destruction of Beth Shemesh and the Pax Assyriaca in the Judean Shephelah’, TA 30: 3-26. Claburn, W. Eugene 1973 ‘The Fiscal Basis of Josiah’s Reforms’, JBL 92: 11-22. Cogan, Morton 1974 Imperialism and Religion: Assyria, Judah and Israel in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries B.C.E. (SBLMS, 19; Missoula, MT: SBL Scholars Press). Conrad, Diethelm 1979 ‘Einige (archäologische) Miszellen zur Kultgeschichte Judas in der Königzeit’, in A.H.J. Gunneweg and O. Kaiser (eds.), Textgemäss: Aufsätze und Beiträge. zur Hermeneutik des Alten Testaments. Festschrift für Ernst Würthwein zum 70. Geburtstag (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht): 28-32. Dalley, Stephanie 1998 ‘Yaba, Atalya and the Foreign Policy of Late Assyrian Kings’, State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 12: 83-98. 2004 ‘Recent Evidence from Assyrian Sources for Judaean History from Uzziah to Manasseh’, JSOT 28: 387-401.

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Edelstein, Gershon, and Nurit Feig 1993 ‘Tel !Amal’, in E. Stern, (ed.), The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, IV (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society): 1447-50. Eisenberg, Emanuel 1993 ‘Kitan, Tel’, in E. Stern (ed.), The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, III (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society): 878-81. Evans, Carl D. 1980 ‘Judah’s Foreign Policy from Hezekiah to Josiah’, in C.D. Evans, W.W. Hallo, and J.B. White (eds.), Scripture in Context: Essays on the Comparative Method (Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series, 34; Pittsburgh: The Pickwick Press): 157-78. Fantalkin, Alexander 2004 ‘The Final Destruction of Beth Shemesh and the Pax Assyriaca in the Judahite Shephelah: An Alternative View’, TA 31: 245-61. Feig, Nurit 1983 ‘Note and News. Tel Amal, 1983’, IEJ 33: 264. 1986 ‘Notes and News. Tel Amal, 1986’, IEJ 36: 101. Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman 2006 ‘Temple and Dynasty: Hezekiah, the Remaking of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Pan-Israelite Ideology’, JSOT 30: 259-85. Fried, Lisbeth 2002 ‘The High Places (Bamôt in Hebrew) and the Reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah: An Archaeological Investigation’, JAOS 122: 437-65. Gallagher, W.R. 1999 Sennacherib’s Campaign to Judah: New Studies (SHANE, 18; Leiden: E.J. Brill). Gonçalves, Francolino J. 1986 L’expédition de Sennachérib en Palestine dans la literature hébraïque ancienne (Études bibliques NS, 7; Paris: Librairie Lecoffre). Grabbe, Lester L. (ed.) 2003 ‘Like a Bird in a Cage’: The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE (JSOTSup, 363; European Seminar in Historical Methodology, 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Halpern, Baruch 1991 ‘Jerusalem and the Lineages in the Seventh Century BCE: Kinship and the Rise of Individual Moral Liability’, in B. Halpern and D.W. Hobson (eds.), Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel (JSOTSup, 124; Sheffield: JSOT Press): 11-107. 1996 ‘Sybil, or the Two Nations? Archaism, Kinship, Alienation, and the Elite Redefinition of Traditional Culture in Judah’, in J.S. Cooper and G.M. Schwartz (eds.), The Study of the Ancient Near East in the Twenty-First Century: The William Foxwell Albright Centennial Conference (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 291-338. Handy, Lowell 1988 ‘Hezekiah’s Unlikely Reform’, ZAW 100: 111-15. Hardmeier, Christof 1990 Prophetie im Streit vor dem Untergang Judas. Erzählkommunikative Studien zur Entstehungssituation der Jesaja- und Jeremiaerzählungen in II Reg 18–20 und Jer 37–40 (BZAW, 187; Berlin: W. de Gruyter).

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Herzog, Ze’ev 1973 ‘The Storehouses’, in Aharoni (ed.) 1973: 23-30. 2002 ‘The Fortress at Tel Arad: An Interim Report’, Tel Aviv 29.1: 3-109. Herzog, Ze’ev, Anson F. Rainey, and S. Moshkovitz 1977 ‘The Stratigraphy at Beer-sheba and the Location of the Sanctuary’, BASOR 225: 49-58. Hoffmann, Hans-Detlef 1980 Reform und Reformen: Untersuchungen zu einen Grundthema der deuteronomistischen Geschichtsschreibung (ATANT, 66; Zürich: Theologischer Verlag). Holladay, John S. 1987 ‘Religion in Israel and Judah Under the Monarchy: An Explicitly Archaeological Approach’, in P.D. Miller, P.D. Hanson, and S.D. McBride (eds.), Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress Press): 249-99. Honor, Leo L. 1966 Sennacherib’s Invasion of Palestine: A Critical Source Study (Contributions to Oriental History and Philology, 12; New York: AMS Press [1926]). Knauf, Ernst Axel 2003 ‘Who Destroyed Beersheba II?’, in U. Hübner and E.A. Knauf (eds.), Kein Land für sich allein: Studien zum Kulturkontakt in Kanaan, Israel/Palästina und Ebirnari für Manfred Weippert zum 65 (OBO, 186; Freiburg: Universitätsverlag): 180-95. Laato, Antti 1995 ‘Assyrian Propaganda and the Falsification of History in the Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib’, VT 45: 198-226. Lapp, Paul W. 1964 ‘The 1963 Excavations at Taannek’, BASOR 173: 4-44. 1969 ‘The 1968 Excavations at Tell Taannek’, BASOR 195: 2-49. Levy, Shalom, and Gershon Edelstein 1972 ‘Cinq années de fouilles à Tel !Amal (Nir David)’, RB 79: 325-67. Loud, Gordon 1948 Megiddo II: Seasons of 1935–1939 (The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications, 62; Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Lowery, Richard H. 1991 The Reforming Kings: Cults and Society in First Temple Judah (JSOTSup, 120; Sheffield: JSOT Press). McKay, John W. 1973 Religion in Judah under the Assyrians 732–609 BC (SBT, 2/26; London: SCM Press). Maag, Victor 1956 ‘Erwägungen zur deuteronomischen Kultzentralization’, VT 6: 10-18. Mayer, Walter 2003 ‘Sennacherib’s Campaign of 701 BCE: The Assyrian View’, in Grabbe (ed.) 2003: 168-200. Millard, Alan R. 1985 ‘Sennacherib’s Attack on Hezekiah’, TynBul 36: 61-77. Münnich, M.M. 2004 ‘Hezekiah and Archaeology’, UF 36: 333-46.

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