Summary: The unique history of a standing stone discovered in Israel points to Hezekiah’s religious reforms highlighted in the Bible.
He [Hezekiah] removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (it was called Nehushtan). – 2 Kings 18:4 (ESV)
The Story of a 2,700-Year-Old Massebah in Judah
Archaeologists have unearthed a large massebah in the remains of a house from the site of Tel ‘Eton in Israel. They believe it gives important new evidence for King Hezekiah of Judah’s war on idols spoken of in the Bible.
Standing stones, also known as masseboth (singular: massebah) in Hebrew, were enigmatic stones from the Bronze and Iron Ages that were set up to commemorate significant events (often related to covenants) and had religious significance. They were often put in highly visible locations and could have different functions such as boundary markers or victory stela. Researchers think they may have represented the presence of God or pagan gods (or sometimes even revered ancestors) to the people who erected them.
Many scholars have been skeptical that the religious reforms attributed to Hezekiah actually happened. However, this newly published find opens up a new category of evidence that joins previous finds that point to the accuracy of the Bible.
A Private Shrine in a Mansion
The excavations took place over a ten-year period at Tel ‘Eton, about twenty miles southeast of Ashkelon in the Shephelah – the transitional region of gentle hills running about 6-9 miles in width between the hill country of Juduh and the Coastal Plain. There, archaeologists uncovered a structure dubbed “Building 101.” It has been interpreted as a “governor’s residency” because of its grand four-room layout and evidence that it housed at least three or four nuclear families.
Inside the mansion’s largest and innermost room, a standing stone was discovered measuring about 4.6 feet (1.4 meters) in height and weighing 1,650 pounds (750 kilograms). The discovery was profiled recently in a study published in the Hebrew University’s peer-reviewed Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, by its author, Prof. Avraham Faust of Bar-Ilan University’s Department of General History.
At first the excavators did not realize what they were dealing with, thinking a layer of stones was only rubble from a wall. However, as stones were cleared away a massive stone slab was encountered. The stone was much too heavy to lift, and they even considered breaking it apart before realizing that it was a massebah (standing stone).
It became clear that a stone platform had been constructed within the walls and that the massebah had been intentionally laid horizontally within the platform, which was built around it. However, this was not the standing stone’s original position.
The function of the stone as a massebah, and the story of its location were determined by studying the building and the structures within it more closely. The standing stone was found in the largest room of the residence, located directly across from the entrance. The largest rooms in the ancient world were typically the most important, and the stone was positioned so that one could see it as they passed through the entrance, or even from the courtyard outside. This means the inner room provided the stone with some security and privacy (most of the room was not visible from the entrance) at the same time that the stone itself was somewhat conspicuous.
The great stone’s initial position is obvious once one tries to lift it up. Standing stones set up in rooms of homes from the same and surrounding periods, that were interpreted as “cultic rooms,” have previously been discovered in Israel.
At some point this massebah was laid down to be embedded in, or even concealed by, the platform. The platform did not stretch across the entire room, but only on its southwestern end, and its smaller unworked stones differ markedly from the massebah. As part of the platform, the large stone did not appear to serve any architectural or practical purpose.
Prof. Faust writes, “We would like to propose that the massebah—the standing stone—served as the house’s religious focus from the time of its construction until it was taken down.”
The building’s original construction was dated to the early 10th century BC and its destruction (apparently by the Assyrian army) to either 712 or 701 BC – the era of King Hezekiah. The reality of Hezekiah’s reforms is a controversial subject, but Prof. Faust believes this contributes to the debate by providing evidence from a new type of source – religious practices in a private home. This kind of evidence is rarely identified because scholars tend to focus on major public structures. Additionally, when cultic practices in private homes were abandoned, any trace could easily be hidden by removing small ritual objects. It is unusual for private homes to be so luxurious as to have a large standing stone inside, as the governor’s residence did.
Hezekiah’s Reforms
The history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah is a litany of sin and covenant breaking, as the prophets repeated their calls for the people of Israel to turn back to God and away from their practice of violence, injustice, and idol worship.
And the people of Israel did secretly against the LORD their God things that were not right. They built for themselves high places in all their towns, from watchtower to fortified city… Yet the LORD warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, “Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the Law that I commanded your fathers, and that I sent to you by my servants the prophets”… Judah also did not keep the commandments of the LORD their God, but walked in the customs that Israel had introduced. – 2 Kings 17:9, 13, 19
This account fits well with the presence of a standing stone in the mansion at Tel ‘Eton.
The kings often led the people in their rebellion against God. The northern kingdom of Israel had 19 kings in its history, while Judah had 20. All 19 of Israel’s kings are said to have done evil in the sight of the Lord. In Judah, 12 of its kings did evil, 2 had mixed designations, and only 6 did right in the eyes of the Lord.
The Bible says King Hezekiah trusted God more than any of the other kings. He reigned at the time of Israel’s fall to the Assyrian Empire. When he rose to the throne at the age of 25, Hezekiah cleansed the Temple in Jerusalem and held a Passover feast – both had been previously neglected (2 Chronicles chapters 29 & 30).
In 2 Kings 18:4 it says Hezekiah “…removed the high places and broke the pillars [massebah] and cut down the Asherah.” The book of 2 Chronicles adds more detail.
Now when all this was finished, all Israel who were present went out to the cities of Judah and broke in pieces the pillars and cut down the Asherim and broke down the high places and the altars throughout all Judah and Benjamin, and in Ephraim and Manasseh, until they had destroyed them all… – 2 Chronicles 31:1
These reforms were even acknowledged by the Assyrian representatives (in a somewhat confused way) when they threatened Judah.
But if you say to me, “We trust in the LORD our God,” is it not he whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed, saying to Judah and to Jerusalem, “You shall worship before this altar in Jerusalem”? – 2 Kings 18:22
It may be that many standing stones in Israel were part of the practice of worshipping Israel’s God YHWH along with other pagan gods simultaneously. Hezekiah, following the commands of God through Moses, had ordered not only that the idols be destroyed but that worship be centralized at Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
The massebah at Tel ‘Eton was not smashed, but intentionally laid in the midst of the stone platform. Prof. Faust interprets this as an “honorable” interment by the owners of the shrine who needed to comply with King Hezekiah’s orders, but did not wish to destroy their standing stone. This half-measure would also seem to fit well with the cultural dynamics that the Bible reports at the time. We know that after Hezekiah his son, King Menasseh, returned to idolatry in an even bigger way than his forefathers had, and most of Judah followed him.
The study notes that the reasons behind the burial of religious objects has been documented to fit into a wide spectrum of motives. At times it was an act of reverence for an object, usually after its use was ended. This was sometimes in the form of a “favissa” or ritual burial in a pit or cellar within sacred temples.
On the other end of the spectrum, religious objects that were seen as profane were often destroyed and buried, sometimes after desecrating the sacred space. This was seen at the Tell Lachish gate shrine from the same general period, and also attributed to Hezekiah’s reforms. The shrine was destroyed and a toilet installed over the top of it. Soil samples show that the toilet was never used, so it is seen by many as a symbol of desecration and mockery of a site that was seen as a pagan affront to true Biblical religion.
Prof. Faust suggests that in the middle of the spectrum are events where desecration is officially commanded but some people still respect and even revere the old objects. Therefore they follow the orders, but in a manner that cares for the objects and avoids defiling them if possible.
Prof. Faust writes, “While the standing stone was cancelled, it was not removed, and there are no signs of intentional defilement (the stone could have been broken into small pieces and thrown away). Although it was not standing anymore, the inhabitants of the house built a platform around it, concealing it and perhaps even preventing people from unintentionally walking on it… It appears that the inhabitants of Building 101 abided by the new religious norms but were not happy to desecrate an element that was the focus of their household worship for so long. They, therefore, dismantled the massebah and incorporated it into the new platform.”
Building 101 met a fiery end at a time when the Assyrian army was ravaging Judah late in the eighth century BC, during the reign of Hezekiah. This may have been when Sennacherib boasted of shutting Hezekiah up in Jerusalem like a caged bird. We don’t know exactly how much sooner the massebah was removed from its standing position, but it generally fits with the time of Hezekiah’s war on idolatry.
The Controversy
Previously, several sites such as the Tel Lachish gate shrine showed evidence of the end of unsanctioned or pagan worship. But these were all at temples or official places of worship and didn’t necessarily point to changes in the daily life of people. An altar was dismantled with its stones being embedded in another building at Beersheba, and altars at Arad were “cancelled by careful construction” before the spaces either went out of use or were destroyed by the same Assyrian invasion that consumed Tel ‘Eton.
According to the study, what makes the Tel ‘Eton massebah remarkable is that it shows signs of Hezekiah’s reforms from an entirely new source that has been understudied – a private residence.
However, there is a strong cadre of skeptical scholars that doubts that Hezekiah’s reforms ever occurred or that they transformed religious practices in Judah. This group receives a lot of press coverage and therefore is quite influential. They claim the physical evidence for Hezekiah’s reforms is inconclusive and look to internal evidence within the Biblical text to propose that the account of Hezekiah’s reforms reflects a later ideological perspective that was inserted into the text to serve a theological agenda.
Some evidence offered for this view include the brevity of the Biblical descriptions, Hezekiah’s standing as a “good” king, and the similarity of this account with that of Josiah who reigned almost a century later and also warred against idols. These hardly seem like weighty objections, and if one looks at the similarities of accounts, the strong distinctives should also be considered.
The hotly debated topic is connected to the work of higher criticism, which uses “clues” in the Biblical text to postulate theories showing that the Bible was merely a man-made document. One such idea was the Documentary Hypothesis, which matured in the 19th century and attempted to explain the development of the first books of the Bible not as the writings of Moses (as the Bible claims) but as the product of multiple authors centuries after Moses who held different theological views and produced numerous contradictions and errors. Discoveries of other ancient Near Eastern texts have since shown the Documentary Hypothesis to be baseless, but it is still widely accepted.
The general opinion among archaeologists is that Israel’s early history from the patriarchs to the Exodus and the early kings does not fit the archaeological record. Therefore doubt is cast on the entire Bible. A major reason for this is the issue of looking for evidence in the wrong time periods, as profiled in our Patterns of Evidence films.
Many scholars have developed deep presuppositions that the Bible is unreliable and they are automatically suspicious of any of its claims. They consider it guilty until proven innocent, when they don’t treat other ancient historical documents in the same way. So be careful when seeing arguments that supposedly discount the Biblical account and remember that two scholars can look at the same evidence and draw very different conclusions based on their worldview.
Several alternate scenarios to Hezekiah’s reforms are offered by skeptical scholars, including that these unsanctioned religious sites may have all been ended by Assyria’s invasion which destroyed everything except Jerusalem, leaving the official centralized place of worship as the only site remaining. This view is held despite the evidence that some of these sites clearly ended their unofficial worship well before the Assyrian invasion. Also, not every site outside of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Assyrians.
The study emphasized, “While one can argue against this scenario in individual cases, they cannot be construed as negative evidence since …there is not a single known (excavated) temple or cultic building that continued uninterruptedly from the 8th to the 7th century BCE. Hence, the limited evidence does not reflect the lack of evidence but is indicative of the nature of the cult [that it was unsanctioned and put out of use] and the scarcity of temples at the time.”
Conclusion
While Prof. Faust does not claim there is absolute proof that the stone was decommissioned as a direct result of Hezekiah’s reforms, he argues that the pattern of intentional and systematic changes in the late 8th century BC shows a coordinating hand that fits the Bible’s account.
The finds at Tel ‘Eton may not be smashed idols, but they do seem to show a household god abandoned and respectfully laid down to be hidden in a stone platform. This further shows that the commands to eliminate local pagan worship and centralize religious activity in Jerusalem affected both public and domestic practices. The evidence is speaking louder than the skeptical voices ever could. Keep thinking!
TOP PHOTO: Composite Aerial Photo of Building 101 at Tel ‘Eton. A more recent Persion foundation is visible around the exterior. (credit: Sky View and Griffin Aerial Imaging, edited by Yair Sapir/Bar-Ilan University, open access)
