Biblical Archaeology Review

For the sources and attitudes of various Biblical writers towards sacred trees, altars and standing stones, see the judicious treatment by Elizabeth C. LaRocca-Pitts, Of Wood and Stone: The Significance of Israelite Cultic Items in the Bible and Its Interpreters (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2001; Harvard Semitic Museum Monographs 61), pp. 161–249. For an excellent guide to the sources of the Pentateuch, see Table A.1 in Theodore Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).

Wright, Shechem, fig. 28.

Wright, Shechem, figs. 10 and 72.

The Austro-German excavators who dug parts of these buildings thought, as I do, that Wall 5703 was part of the building above it. See Wright, Shechem, p. 96.

Campbell, Shechem III, p. 177.

This (mis)interpretation was based in part on William F. Albright’s linking a tripartite building form, having three parallel narrow long rooms, with store-houses (Hebrew, miskeánôt), which he likened in form to “modern American farm granaries.” Albright, Tell Beit Mirsim III: The Iron Age (New Haven, CT: American Schools of Oriental Research), pp. 22–24.

Wright, Shechem, pp. 87–102; Robert J. Bull, “A Re-examination of the Shechem Temple,” Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 23 (1960), pp. 110–119. For the latest strata descriptions and their dates, see Campbell, Shechem III, pp. 8–9.

G.R.H. Wright, “Fluted Columns in the Bronze Age Temple of Baal-Berith at Shechem,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly vol. 97 (1965), pp. 66–84.

An even larger Migdal Temple has been excavated at Pella (in modern Jordan) during the past decade by a team sponsored by the University of Sydney, Australia. The Pella temple is 78 feet wide and 105 feet long. It was first built in 1650 B.C.E., at about the same time as Shechem Temple 1; it was rebuilt on a smaller scale in about 1350 B.C.E. and once again about 900 B.C.E. and destroyed a century later.