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Mobile People, Mobile God: Mobile Societies, Monotheism, and the Effects of Ecological Landscapes on the Development of Ancient Religions

Lecture 16: Saul, Samuel, David, Solomon

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Israelite Temples
Despite the concentration of settlement and temple-building activity in the Levantine region or the scriptural narratives regarding Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, it is clear that there is no more archaeological certainty regarding the presence of Israelite temples in the Levant than among the ancient Iranians in Central Asia. Archaeologist Amihai Mazar, in Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, describes the situation of temple building prior to Solomon's Temple: “The archaeological evidence for Israelite religious practices during the period of the Judges is meager.”¹ Archaeological architect George Roy Haslam Wright, to whom I deferred with regard to including Solomon's Temple in the dataset presented, reminds us that even Solomon's Temple is evidenced only in “ancient literary sources; various passages in the Bible principally...”² It is beyond the scope of this paper to negotiate the historicity of the Hebrew Bible, but it is sufficient to acknowledge that so far as the archaeological record is concerned with the sites which have been tenuously linked with Israelite religious culture are 'few and far between'. Wright summarizes the state of archaeological evidence regarding Israelite temples:
Archaeology has supplied one piece of solid evidence. A temple was built in the important Judaean fortress of Arad on the Negev border. This is the most clearly established, in fact perhaps the only clearly established, Israelite temple since there is sufficient correspondence with biblical prescriptions to indicate that it should be dedicated to the Yahweh cult...What can be said is what has been universally observed in these various discussions. The Arad Temple, except for the presence of a debir and the East orientation, has no connection with the plan of the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem. Instead it is interesting to note that it derives ultimately from the aboriginal temple type, the Breitraum village-house plan, which was the ruling form, indeed virtually the sole form in Chalcolithic—EB times and gave the basis of temple design until well on into the second millennium.³
Wright's observation both confirms the presence of a temple which can be linked to Israelite religion and suggests that its building was an adaptation of temple architecture native to surrounding (non-Israelite) settlements. This is an important observation which requires additional examination in order to understand the situation of temple building culture in Israelite religion.
Wright's comments on the Arad temple (9^th century BCE) offer not just a description but, in explanation of the potentially complicated origins of this temple, acknowledgment of the circumstances which would make this site unique in Israelite culture. The rarity of Israelite temples (within the given parameters) clearly necessitates consideration of and explanation for any which might be identified from within the archaeological record. It is clear that regarding temple-building activities the Israelites were not prolific, but Wright's observations on both Arad and Solomon's Temple suggest that temple-building was not completely foreign to Israelite culture. An important question is whether or not these temples derived from a native practice of temple-based worship among the Israelites or are the innovative product of assimilated temple-building culture which we have evidenced as prolific across the Levantine region. In considering the narratives around Solomon's Temple and its position with the Hebrew Bible, we can understand the potential for temple-building culture to have been developed as innovation and assimilation rather than stemming naturally from a practice already present within the established religion of the Israelites.
The connection of the first Temple of Israel to the burgeoning monarchy in the scriptural narrative appears evidence of innovation, as both are changes which mark the monarchic era apart in the Hebrew Bible. Wright describes the intersection of these religious and political shift with regard to the city of Jerusalem: “So far as can be judged from these sources Solomon's Temple was designed to serve the needs of a newly constituted political regime with a rather unusual religious sanction...Whatever the regional origin of the cult may have been it was not from Jerusalem, the connection with Jerusalem being avowedly one of political history.”⁴ This is important to understanding that Solomon's Temple is inextricably linked to the political situation of Jerusalem – just as temple-building culture in Mesopotamia developed (according to Van de Mieroop), in part, as a result of political or civic functions on the part of religious buildings. In his recorded Hebrew Bible course at Harvard University, biblical historian Shaye J. D. Cohen (roughly transcribed from the video) extrapolates on this interconnection to explain the division of the monarchy:
Northern tribes break off because they don't like the monarchy; they don't like this dynastic monarchy; and they probably don't like the temple. Because building a temple, a fancy-shmancy building, as Solomon does, this represents, also, an innovation. In the wilderness we have a memory of this tent, this portable tent shrine, when the Israelites come to the land of Canaan, or when their Israelite identity emerges, they have various local shrines, including the ark at one shrine in Shiloh...But it doesn't occur to anybody to build a fancy building. The king, however, becomes king and then immediately wants to build a building. So I don't know which one you're rejecting first, but you wind up rejecting both. The northern tribes see both of these as innovations: 'we don't want dynastic monarchy and we don't want a temple.' And the Judean monarchy has both. In the eyes of the narrator of Kings, that's what makes the Judean monarchy legitimate—it has the one and only legitimate temple and it has the one and only legitimate royal line. But in the eyes of the northern Israelites, apparently, these two very points are the ones that make it illegitimate, that make it: innovations, new, untraditional...And the northern tribes break off.⁵
Here, Cohen makes an unmistakable link between the interconnected innovations of dynastic monarchy, temple-building activity, and the breaking off of the Northern Israelites. His comments highlight the very real probability that not all Israelites would have been happy with change to traditional forms of either religious worship or governance. Whether the historical reality of Cohen's assessment is accurate or not, it is reasonable to assume that the institutionalization of innovative political and religious changes would not have been popularly assimilated without question.
The explanation as to why the Israelite religion might not have developed a native temple-building culture is identical to that applied to the ancient Iranians: theirs was a mobile society. Biblical scholar Menahem Haran explains: “Temples make their appearance in Israel's life only after the settlement in Canaan.”⁶ Like many scholars, Haran points to the biblical narratives of the Patriarchs as identifying earliest Israelite society as mobile: “Temples, however, are still beyond the ken of the Patriarchs, as is also priesthood, since in semi-nomadic societies both temples and priesthood usually have no place.”⁷ In his footnote he continues plainly: “This is the straightforward reason for the absence of temples in the Genesis stories and in the social background of the Patriarchs. That the society of the Patriarchs still lives under nomadic or semi-nomadic conditions.”⁸

¹ Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 348.
² Wright, Ancient Building in South Syria and Palestine, 254.
³ Ibid., 252–253.
⁴ Ibid., 254.
⁵ Shaye J.D. Cohen and Harvard University, Lecture 16: Saul, Samuel, David, Solomon, Podcast Audio, The Hebrew Bible, accessed November 20, 2015, https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/the-hebrew-bible/id819616149?ign-mpt=uo%3D8 Timestamp: 44:05-45:35.
⁶ Menahem. Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel: An Inquiry into the Character of Cult Phenomena and the Historical Setting of the Priestly School (Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press, 1977), 17–18.
⁷ Ibid., 17.
⁸ Ibid. fn: 7.