The Tell Mevorakh Serpent

From a Late Bronze Age Sanctuary

A bronze snake provides the only clue to the cult that was practiced in the sanctuary at Tell Mevorakh, a small mound about three miles northeast of Caesarea. About 8 inches long, the snake resembles the bronze snakes found in contemporaneous sanctuaries at Timna and Hazor. Dated from the 15th to 13th centuries B.C.E., the sanctuary measures about 30 by 15 feet and exhibits an east-west orientation. Because the sanctuary and its courtyards occupied nearly the whole site in the Late Bronze Age, excavator Ephraim Stern interpreted it as a wayside sanctuary, the first of its kind found in Israel.