Tell Halif
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Tell Halif
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In fact, even the best of the treatments of ancient Israelite religion still attempt to write a "true" (or "historically accurate") rendering of the phenomenon. But because the data sets (Biblical text, archaeology, epigraphic material) from which the evidence for the construction of the religion of ancient Israel is drawn are often "contradictory," there is the tendency to discard one set in the favor of the other, subsume one to the dominant, or to harmonize the variants. That is because, I believe, those scholars work under the rule of historiography; i.e., they believe they must write an "accurate" (by which is meant: what really happened) accounting of the religion of ancient Israel. And because a proper histiographic rendering cannot hold mutually exclusive claims in the same construction, there appears that tendency to rectify the data, select/deselect information, harmonize into a logical whole, usually at the expense of the "heterodox" religion. There is, I believe, a way to interpret the artifacts that permits positive evaluation.
Older syntheses of the religion of ancient Israel tended to dismiss the pillar figurine as a mark of Cannanite influence (i.e., not true Yahwism) or as indicator of a syncretism (i.e., a falsified Yahwism.) Typically no additional treatment or discussion was needed since the issue had been decided and dismissed.
More recent treatments of the religion of ancient Israel have acknowledged that the orthodoxy represented by the Bible is not necessarily the same as the religion practiced by ancient Israelites. See the exhaustive attempt to treat all of the relevant and available material, both epigraphic, archaeological, and textual/Biblical, in P.D. Miller's The Religion of Ancient Israel. Yet even in this excellent publication, which has made very significant contributions to the understanding of ancient Israel's religious practices, the tendency persists to include such evidence as the pillar figurine, incense stands, etc. into the religion of Yahwism, rather than as indication of a religious phenomenon that ought to be evaluated in its own right and not made a subsumed feature of Yahwism. Fairly consistently Miller refers to the use of objects such as the pillar figurine found in the archaeological record as part of a heterodox-Yahwism or as non-orthodox-Yahwism (though at one point he suggests that the evidence might be interpreted as practicing a religious expression "alongside" Yahwism, implying that a religious expression need not be considered only as somehow a part of Yahwism.) While these terms reflect perhaps the orthodox stances of the Biblical prophets, naming them so fails to consider the practice in itself, and that in part because of the assumed, though generally not exhibited, presence of Yahweh among the artifacts considered heterodox-Yahwism. I.e., in order to hold that the Halif cultic artifacts are ingredients of a "heterodox-Yahwism," something definitively Yahwist must be identified among the cultic artifacts; nothing recovered in the "shrine room" or in the entire house qualifies.
There must be an approach that is neither hostile to the data, nor omits the data from full consideration, nor harmonizes/subsumes it with another ideology. I argue here that the archaeological evidence will not support the estimation of syncretism, nor the attempts to include the pillar figurine/`Asherah into the official religion, albeit as heterodox-Yahwism. Other models--"multi-religions" being the more applicable one--serve to explain the archaeological evidence in light of the orthodox Biblical views. As seen in other cultures the way people deal with a reality that has numerous faces is to approach that reality from several directions, each independent of the others. The archaeological evidence supports, I believe, a "reading" of the religious artifacts in this way.
Miller, Patrick D. 2000. The Religion of Ancient Israel. Library of Ancient Israel. D. Knight, Editor. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
