Jordan: Bronze Age Temple Discovered

In Jordan archaeologists have come across a remarkable find: a temple from the Late Bronze Age, 3,500 years ago. This is important because very few structures from this era have survived intact to any real degree. This should, then, tell us some important things about the people and their religious worship.

According to The Daily Star:

According to the excavators, the smooth stones of the niche are unlike any other stones at the site and probably represented deities in the ancient world. The large central stone likely indicates the main deity of the temple, while the four other stones suggest associated, but minor deities, perhaps the children of the main god. ... The major deity of the region at that time was a god named Il (or El). It is the same word as the Arabic word for God, Allah. To an ancient, Il was the father of the gods, but, stress the excavators, "we do not know for certain who the standing stones represent or the beliefs associated with them." ... Archaeologists thought the building itself, which has been excavated for several years, was a palace because of the size of the walls and number of rooms. They only came across the top of a rounded standing stone two weeks ago, and only last week they excavated the entire cultic or votive niche and all the other standing stones and unearthed the ceramic vessels in it.

This was the time of the earliest developments of religious beliefs that would eventually lead into Judaism — and, hence, both Christianity and Islam. Thus, whatever this find tells us about Late Bronze Age religion will also tell us something about religion today.

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