High Place at the Gate
At the base of the 9th-century gate’s northern tower one finds a well preserved cultic installation (bamah) consisting of a stepped niche leading up to a smooth basalt basin, behind which once stood a basalt stele roughly three feet in height and carved with an image of a bull-headed figure armed with a dagger. The bull’s crescent-shaped horns cradle the moon in the traditional association of these two auspicious symbols. The stele, which most likely represented the Moon, chief deity and divine protector of the city, was discovered in 1997 by this writer’s excavation team. It had been smashed into five pieces, which were recovered from the exact positions where, it appeared, each fragment had originally fallen over 2,700 years ago. The stele has since been completely restored and is now on permanent display in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Two perforated tripodal vessels of a type somewhat common in the region were recovered in situ from inside the basin.
Directly across from this cultic installation, at the corner of the southern tower, there is another niche believed to have served a cultic function. The niche sits atop a high ledge, about 1.5 m high, which is too high to have served as a bench and, unlike the bamah to the right, is not accessed by steps, which calls to mind the divine directive for building altars to Yahweh (Exod. 20:26). Perhaps this altar served visiting or resident Israelites. A low bench runs along the base of the towers, perhaps reserved for elders who judged the city’s legal and religious matters.
Finally, two aniconic basalt steles, slightly more than three feet in height, flank the threshold of the city. Their upper portions had been forcefully lopped off during Tiglath-Pileser’s III’s 8th-century BCE campaign, but were recovered and replaced by the excavation team. Five additional basalt steles, similar in size, have been found at various points around the gate complex. The question that often arises over whether these steles served a civic or religious function is probably artificial in that such a clear distinction likely would not have been made.