Table Of ContentOL OF THEOLOGY AT CLAREM
“ii
ERIN DARBY
a Interpreting
Judean Pillar Figurines
Forschungen
zum Alten lestament 2. Reihe
69
ea LEO
Mohr Siebeck
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Forschungen zum Alten Testament
2. Reihe
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69
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|G OO
| 1 JEL Erin Darby
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Interpreting Judean Pillar
Figurines
Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual
Mohr Siebeck
PHOVIVYy Liviary
CLAREMONT
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
Claremont, CA
Erin Darsy, born 1978; studied Hebrew Bible ‘and Near Eastern archaeology, Duke Univer-
sity in Durham, North Carolina; since 2012 Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Univer-
sity of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee.
ISBN 978-3-16-152492-9
ISSN 1611-4914 (Forschungen zum Alten Testament, 2. Reihe)
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliogra-
phie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2014 by Mohr Siebeck, Tiibingen, Germany. www.mohr.de
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by
copyright law) without the publisher’s written permissionTh.i s applies particularly to reproduc-
tions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems.
The book was printed by Laupp & Gobel in Nehren on non-aging paper and bound by Buch-
binderei Nadele in Nehren.
Printed in Germany.
Preface
This book grew out of my long-standing interest in the religious practices of
ancient Israelite females and builds upon the work of pioneers in that field,
such as (but not limited to) Phyllis Trible, Phyllis Bird, Susan Ackermann,
and Carol Meyers. As often happens, the deeper I dug into the subject of
Judean Pillar Figurines (JPFs) the more diversified my research became, and
as conversation partners grew to include other archaeologists, experts on Near
Eastern figurine rituals, and figurine specialists in other regions and time
periods the present volume also expanded in size and depth. The result is a
book that uses a breadth of data to probe as deeply as possible one particular
problem — the interpretation of JPF ritual in the eighth through sixth centuries
BCE: ;
In its current manifestation, this book is meant to accomplish several goals.
First, it updates and sometimes corrects a large section of material published
in Raz Kletter’s 1996 book, Judean Pillar-Figurines and the Archaeology of
Asherah. Kletter’s book remains the most comprehensive catalogue of figu-
rines in Israel and has had a significant impact on subsequent literature. That
having been said, interpreters, particularly non-archaeologists, often oversim-
plify Kletter’s archaeological data or depend solely on his conclusions.
Kletter’s study differs from the older examinations of James Pritchard or Tom
Holland in many ways, most importantly by emphasizing the existence of a
Judean style; but his conclusions remain fairly consistent with previous
studies in supporting the association between the figurines, a goddess (in this
case Asherah), and females.
The end result is that, for a variety of reasons, Kletter’s seminal work has
not changed the method of interpretation used by the majority of scholars and
lay people who connect the figurines with Israelite religion, monotheism, and
women’s practice. This is, in fact, the second major goal of the present work.
By emphasizing how figurines are interpreted, including the problems that
plague archaeological data, this book attempts to demonstrate two simple
points: the interpretation of material culture is difficult; and many interpre-
trations of the figurines, even those that claim to be based upon archaeologi-
cal data, cannot be substantiated through the data currently available.
Of course, the most important goal of this book is to understand the func-
tions, users, producers, iconography, and larger socio-political contexts of
VI Preface
JPFs, particularly those from Jersualeth. To that end, the project includes an
in-depth archaeological analysis of figurines found on the southeastern hill of
Jerusalem, including their stratigraphic contexts, architectural contexts, the
other objects found with the figurines, and the figurines’ petrographic make-
up. This analysis is complemented by a study of figurines from elsewhere in
the city and figurines in five key sites surrounding Jerusalem. This archaeo-
logical data is then compared in a more general way with data from the rest of
Judah, venturing, when occasion warrents, into iconograpic materials from
northern Israel, Philistia, Phoenicia, the Transjordan, Cyprus, Egypt, and
Mesopotamia.
While in some ways the archaeological section is the centerpiece of the
book, it is embedded within a much larger investigation that includes ancient
Near Eastern figurine ritual texts, texts in the Hebrew Bible describing clay
objects and idols, comparative iconography from the Late Bronze Age
through the Iron IJ, and an examination of healing and protective rituals
disseminated throughout the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Mediterranean.
The breadth of the material allows me to take into account all of the relevant
data that might be brought to bear on the figurines’ interpretation. This
breadth is also necessary because many of the more problematic assumptions
made by modern interpreters are challenged by these sources, such as the
insistence that figurines represent high deities, the assumed connection
between depictions of females and actual ancient women, and suppositions
about what constituted an ‘idol’ or a ‘god’ in the ancient Near East.
Given the scope of this study, the book has benefitted from an extra two
years of research since it was initially completed as my dissertation at Duke
University in September of 2011. While the core of the study remains the
same, I have been able to update much of the secondary literature, add new
archaeological data, revise the text and tables, in some cases significantly,
and rework some of the material, particularly in Chapter 10. As a result, I
hope that the book puts to rest some of the oft-repeated but unsupported
interpretations of the figurines, and, more importantly, spurs new conversa-
tions and questions about one of ancient Israel’s most common ritual objects.
July, 2014 Erin Darby
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the support of a number of
people to whom I find myself greatly indebted. First of all, I wish to express
my deepest gratitude to my husband and colleague, Robert, whose constant
support and encouragement has been both inestimable and indispensible. I
would also like to thank our little scholar in residence, Madeleine, who slept
through the night allowing me to write and exhibited patience beyond her
years as I updated, revised, and finalized the manuscript over the past year.
In the last several years I have come to know a number of scholars who
have proven to be integral to this project’s inception and completion. In
particular I would like to acknowledge my cohort at Duke University, Aman-
da Mbuvi, Sean Burt, Chad Eggleston, Bennie Reynolds III, and Joshua Vis,
as well as the late David Knauert, who will be sorely missed. I would also like
to thank my colleagues Michael Press, Erin Averett, David Ben Shlomo,
Izaak de Hulster, Raz Kletter, Gloria London, and Margreet Steiner for their
openness in sharing research and their feedback on my work. In addition, Tina
Shepardson and Gilya Schmidt have kindly offered their guidance throughout
the last year as I learned to juggle completing this project with my new
responsibilities as an assistant professor.
Of course, this book owes a great deal to Carol Meyers, whose meticulous
attention to detail is directly responsible for whatever future contributions the
study may make. I would also like to thank my students at Duke University,
Duke Divinity School, and the University of Tennessee for their interest in
my project and their contributions to my scholarship. Finally, I would like to
express my gratitude to the editors of FAT II and the staff at Mohr Siebeck,
especially Hermann Spieckermann and Henning Ziebritzki for accepting the
manuscript, my project manager, Dominika Zgolik, for guiding me through
the wonderful word of formatting, and Mark Smith, whose careful considera-
tion of the original manuscript undoubtedly improved the final product.
Additionaly, this book would not have been possible without the participa-
tion of a number of academic institutions and archaeological projects. Iw ould
like to thank the board of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological
Research for awarding me a fellowship to complete the archaeological por-
tions of the project. I would also like to thank Duke University for granting
me travel funds for work at the American Center of Oriental Research in
Vill Acknowledgements
Amman, Jordan and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute
in Nicosia, Cyprus. Furthermore, I wish to recognize the individuals and
institutions who have given me access to unpublished materials including,
Alon de Groot, Nurit Feig, Zvi Greenhut, and Uzi Dahari with the Israel
Antiquities Authority, Raz Kletter with the Moza excavations and the Ramat
Rahel Archaeological Project, Eilat Mazar with the City of David excava-
tions, Oded Lipschitz and Yuval Goren with the Ramat Rahel Archaeological
Project, Seymor Gitin with the Tel Miqne-Ekron Excavation and Publication
Project, Lynn Swartz Dodd with the Tell al-Judaidah Publication Project,
Shimon Gibson with the Mount Zion excavations, Régine Hunziger-Rodewald
with the Franco-German Figurines Project, Theodore Lewis, the Badé Muse-
um of Biblical Archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, and the Muse-
um of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
