Institutions and practices

The temple typically occupied a dominating site in the city along with the palace. Like the palace, it had political, administrative, and economic functions, as well as its distinctive religious functions. The temple, or the temple and palace together, were often raised or walled off in a separate precinct or acropolis. The temple was the “house” of the god—often so in both name and form. It was also a storehouse for the god’s treasures and hence sometimes particularly thickly walled. The temple staff played a leading role in the life of the city.

In the early 3rd millennium bce the temples were built on the same plan as houses: a rectangle with the entrance on one of the long sides, with a small altar or a niche for the cult statue opposite the entrance. Sometimes there were benches around the three uninterrupted walls. An outer court contained the main altar, where the larger community could participate in worship. At the beginning of the 2nd millennium bce the house of the god was extended by the expansion of the niche into an additional room (“cella”) and of the entrance into a porch—the form later used by the Phoenician architects of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. There were also outdoor shrines, such as the “high place” at Gezer (near modern Ramla, Israel) with its row of standing stones and monumental stone basin (and surviving charred animal remains). Over the centuries there was an increasing variety of forms at different sites. At particular sites, however, the plans of temples often remained virtually identical, even after previous superstructures had been destroyed.

Typical temple furniture included the cult statue, standing stones, bowls and their stands, altars, and benches around the walls. Hazor, in the Jordan valley north of the Sea of Galilee, has yielded a 13th-century-bce statue of a male deity on a bull-shaped base. In another temple a set of cultic objects, also from the 13th century, was found behind a stone slab: a seated male figure and a group of standing stones, the central one of which has engraved on it a vertical pair of arms with hands outstretched toward a disk and crescent.

The palace too might have a chapel. The palace at Mari, on the Euphrates in eastern Syria, housed a statue of a goddess holding a vase from which she dispensed flowing (“living”) water; the water was channeled through the statue to the vase. Wall paintings in the palace depict the same image, as well as scenes of the king being presented to a god and making offerings to a god.

A common religious object, not confined to sacred places, is the “Astarte” figurine, depicting a nude woman, often with exaggerated breasts and genitalia, and sometimes holding a child. This was perhaps a fetish representing the mother goddess and used to stimulate conception, childbirth, or lactation.

The temple was staffed by cultic personnel (priests) under a “chief of priests,” and by practitioners of the various other skills required by the functions of the temple. These included singers and other musicians, diviners, scribes, and other specialists, depending on the size of the temple. The temple staff was sustained by some of the sacrifices, by supplies from the estates of the temple or palace, or by direct contributions imposed on the surrounding population. Its essential religious function was the care of the cult statue, the offering of sacrifices, and the performance of other rituals for the welfare of god, monarch, and community.

Typically the monarch and sometimes other members of the royal family played a leading role in the most significant cultic acts and festivals. A king of Sidon refers to himself as “priest of Astarte.” One text from a town near Ugarit concerns a sacrifice by the queen.

In tombs formed from subterranean caves beneath the western palace of Ebla during the second quarter of the 2nd millennium bce, skeletal remains and treasures suggest a cult of deceased monarchs. From Mari and Ugarit researchers have learned of a significant cult of former rulers (called “Healers” or “Shades” at Ugarit)—from putative or mythical figures to the most recently deceased—who supported the reigning monarch with divine blessings. The monarch’s expectations of life after death are expressed in an inscription on an 8th-century monumental effigy of the god Hadad from Zincirli (ancient Samʿal) in south-central Turkey. King Panammu directs that his future heir, when making sacrifice to Hadad, pray that Panammu’s soul may eat and drink with the god. Phoenician kings of Sidon later refer to a resting place with the Healers/Shades, and the same word is used by the Israelites to refer to all the dead.

People attempted to influence the gods through animal sacrifices, petitions, and vows (promises of gifts contingent on the deity’s response to a request for help). Sacrifice was central to the cult. Domestic animals were the main victims—cattle, sheep, and goats—and also birds. There is clear evidence for two types of sacrifice: simple gifts and whole burned offerings. There also is scattered evidence of human sacrifice, probably limited to situations of unusual extremity (contrast the account of the sacrifice of his eldest son by the king of Moab in 2 Kings 3:26–27 with the more abundant evidence of child sacrifice from Carthage and other Phoenician colonies in the west).

The will of the gods was discovered in various ways. Use of the Mesopotamian technique of liver divination (hepatoscopy) is evidenced by the discovery of clay liver models (sometimes inscribed with omens) at such sites as Ugarit and Hazor, as well as by abundant written testimony at sites closer to Mesopotamia, such as Mari. Ugarit also had a list of omens based on abnormal births. King Idrimi of Alalakh refers to divining by observation of the flight of released birds.

The correspondence from Mari abundantly testifies to the institution of prophecy—spontaneous pronouncements by cult personnel and occasionally others, delivering messages from the deity. By this means the deity disclosed his or her wishes or gave divine warnings or promises to the king. The Aramaean king Zakir records that he appealed to his god in desperation during a siege and that the god answered him through prophets with promises of deliverance—obviously fulfilled, since the king makes so much of this in his inscription. According to the Egyptian “Report of Wen-Amon,” a young man of Byblos went into a trance and resolved a diplomatic deadlock by announcing that the Egyptian envoy whom the local king had refused to see had indeed been sent by the Egyptian god Amon. Biblical narratives portray similar prophetic phenomena in Israel. The gods also revealed themselves through dreams, which again were carefully reported to the monarch by his officers at Mari.

According to later classical sources a central focus of Syrian religion was the rituals surrounding the myth of the dying god. The myth, according to these sources, variously draws on other Middle Eastern or Egyptian traditions but essentially tells of the deity’s death and subsequent sojourn in the underworld and of an accommodation reached between the queen of the underworld and the goddess associated with the god that allows him to return to earth for six months of the year. Associated rituals include the sacrifice of a male pig, mourning for the dead god in a funeral procession, cultivating “gardens” in small pots and baskets, and a threshing rite.