The Beersheba Horned Altar

Found in Pieces, in a Wall

Tel Be'er Sheva, the Iron Age town mound east of the modern city, was excavated from 1969 to 1976 by the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University under Y. Aharoni, with the final season directed by Z. Herzog. In 1973 the excavators noticed that some of the dressed ashlar blocks built into the wall of a Stratum II pillared storehouse were not ordinary building stone. Reassembled, they made a large four-horned altar. Three of its four horns were recovered; the fourth was reconstructed. Further blocks came from the fill of the rampart outside the gate.

Y. Aharoni published it in The Biblical Archaeologist in 1974 as "The Horned Altar of Beer-sheba." It is a burnt-offering altar of the type the Old Testament describes repeatedly — the horns are the projections a fugitive grabs in 1 Kings 1 and 2 — and Aharoni observed that its measurements come out at about five cubits square, the dimensions Exodus 27:1 gives. One detail worth noting rather than smoothing: the stones are hewn, and Exodus 20:25 forbids a stone altar built of cut stones. The altar is what it is, and what it is does not perfectly match the law it was presumably built under.

One thing was not found, and its absence matters. No sanctuary building has ever been located at Beersheba. Aharoni argued a temple existed; Y. Yadin located it elsewhere, and Z. Herzog, A. F. Rainey and S. Moshkovitz answered him in a 1977 paper whose title is precisely "The Stratigraphy at Beer-sheba and the Location of the Sanctuary." The altar proves there was sacrifice here. It does not prove there was a temple, and nobody has found one.

Hezekiah, Josiah, or Neither

Somebody took this altar apart. The stones were not broken up — they were carefully dismantled and reused as good masonry — and they went into a building of the next stratum. That means the dismantling happened before Stratum II was built, and Stratum II was destroyed, on the majority reading, by Sennacherib in 701 BC. That sequence is what makes the argument interesting, because 2 Kings 18:4 says Hezekiah removed the high places and broke the pillars, and 2 Chronicles 31:1 says the same thing about the whole country.

Y. Aharoni read it that way, and connected it to Hezekiah's reform. Z. Herzog has argued the same on the refined stratigraphy — the cult installations were dismantled one phase before the destruction associated with the 701 campaign — and A. F. Rainey, O. Borowski and others have agreed. A. Faust adds a point about method that is easy to miss and hard to unsee: the stones could have been smashed, and they were not. This was a dismantling, not a desecration, which reads more like an official decommissioning than a mob.

Y. Yadin disagreed in 1976 and put it in Josiah's reign instead, in an article titled "Beer-sheba: The High Place Destroyed by King Josiah," connecting it to 2 Kings 23:8 and its high places of the gates — which requires dating the relevant remains more than a century later than the excavators did. And a substantial group of scholars rejects the whole framing: N. Na'aman has argued that no archaeological evidence of the kind of intentional destruction Kings describes has actually been found, and D. Edelman and L. S. Fried have made related cases. Herzog's own conclusion cuts across the grain in an interesting way — he holds that the archaeology supports Hezekiah's reform and that it is Josiah's whose historicity should be doubted.

What the Stones Can Carry

It is worth naming exactly what is and is not established. A monumental horned altar stood at Beersheba and was taken down in an orderly way before the town's next phase. That is not in dispute. Everything after it is inference: which king ordered it, whether a king ordered it at all, and whether a single dismantled altar in one Negev town can stand for a national reform described in two biblical books.

The app's position is that the reform narratives in Kings and Chronicles are reliable accounts of things that happened. That is a theological and historical judgement about the texts, and the Beersheba altar is consistent with it — a striking, physical, contemporary instance of exactly the kind of act they describe. It is not the proof of it. A reader who is told that this altar demonstrates Hezekiah's reform and then meets N. Na'aman's argument in a university library will rightly feel they were handled, and the argument is not hard to meet: it is in print, by a serious scholar, and it has not been answered to everyone's satisfaction.

Beersheba is also worth knowing about for a second reason, which the reform debate tends to crowd out. Amos names it twice as a place people travelled to in order to worship, alongside Bethel and Gilgal, and he condemns the practice. The altar is what he was talking about. The town where Abraham planted a tamarisk and called on the name of the LORD, and where Isaac built an altar, had by the eighth century become a destination the prophets told people to stay away from.

Scripture references

• Genesis 21:33 — Abraham plants a tamarisk at Beersheba and calls on the name of the LORD
• Genesis 26:23-25 — Isaac builds an altar at Beersheba
• 2 Kings 18:4 — Hezekiah removes the high places and breaks the pillars
• 2 Kings 23:8 — Josiah defiles the high places from Geba to Beersheba, and the high places of the gates
• 2 Chronicles 31:1 — The pillars broken and the high places pulled down throughout Judah
• Amos 5:5 — "don't seek Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and don't pass to Beersheba"
• Amos 8:14 — Those who swear by "the way of Beersheba"

Sources

• Holding institutionIsrael Nature and Parks Authority: Tel Beer Sheva National Park — Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which manages the site · The managing authority's own page for the excavated town, one of the three Biblical Tels inscribed by UNESCO in 2005. The altar itself is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and a replica stands on site; no inventory number is given here because none could be verified from the holding institutionSupports: The site today, and where the altar is now
• ScholarshipY. Aharoni, "The Horned Altar of Beer-sheba" — Yohanan Aharoni, Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University — the excavator's own publication · The Biblical Archaeologist 37:1 (1974), 2-6. The first publication of the altar and of the connection to Hezekiah's reform · paywalledSupports: The find, its reconstruction, and Aharoni's Hezekiah reading
• ScholarshipY. Yadin, "Beer-sheba: The High Place Destroyed by King Josiah" — Yigael Yadin · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 222 (April 1976), 5-17. The counter-case for Josiah rather than Hezekiah · paywalledSupports: The Josiah reading
• ScholarshipZ. Herzog, A. F. Rainey and S. Moshkovitz, "The Stratigraphy at Beer-sheba and the Location of the Sanctuary" — Ze'ev Herzog, Anson F. Rainey and Shmuel Moshkovitz · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 225 (February 1977), 49-58. The excavators' stratigraphic reply to Yadin, and the reason the sanctuary's location is an open question rather than a settled one · paywalledSupports: The dispute over the stratigraphy and over whether a sanctuary building existed
• ScholarshipD. R. Moulis, "Hezekiah's Cultic Reforms according to the Archaeological Evidence" — Dominik Rafael Moulis, Charles University, Prague · In F. Capek and O. Lipschits (eds.), The Last Century in the History of Judah (SBL Press, 2019), 167-183. Freely readable, and the clearest survey of what the Beersheba altar's find context actually was: found in 1973, dismantled, its ashlars reused in a Stratum II pillared building, three horns intactSupports: The find context, the strata, and the state of the reform debate
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Tel Be'er Sheva

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Tel Be'er Sheva
• D. R. Moulis, "Hezekiah's Cultic Reforms according to the Archaeological Evidence" (open PDF)

Reflect

Whoever took this altar down did it carefully, and then used its stones to build something ordinary. What in your life has been dismantled rather than destroyed, and what got built with the pieces?