BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Did King Ahab Worship Yahweh?

Discovered temples complicate biblical story

Stela of the Canaanite god Baal holding mace overhead and a (thunderbolt?) spear. Credit: TYalaA via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

How many temples existed in ancient Israel? Most people think the answer is simple: one. According to the Bible, Jerusalem (in the Southern Kingdom of Judah) housed Yahweh’s one legitimate temple, and rival shrines represented apostasy. King Ahab’s capital at Samaria (in the Northern kingdom of Israel), for example, is remembered as a center of Baal worship under Queen Jezebel, synonymous with idolatry.

Archaeology, however, paints a more complicated picture. Over the past several decades, excavations have uncovered temples at sites such as Arad, Tel Moza, Dan, and elsewhere. A recent study by Filip Čapek (Charles University, Prague) argues that the biblical texts themselves may preserve subtle clues that even more temples existed—including, perhaps, temples dedicated to Yahweh.

During the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE), temples were common in the southern Levant, with roughly 20 having been excavated to date. By the Iron Age (c. 1200–586 BCE), they became noticeably fewer in number and more modest. For many years, scholars attributed this decline to the emergence of Israelite religion, arguing that early Israel rejected elaborate temple institutions in favor of a more egalitarian society.

Čapek disagrees. He joins a number of scholars who argue that the reduction in temples was part of a much broader regional transformation that followed the Bronze Age collapse (c. 1200 BCE). Populations declined, cities contracted, economies weakened, and public architecture became less monumental across the Levant, not just in Israel and Judah.

Being so much smaller, Iron Age temples may appear fewer in number because they are simply harder to identify in the archaeological record. Also, smaller structures are more vulnerable to destruction and erosion over time. For Israel and Judah, this matters because the reduced visibility of temples does not necessarily reflect the religious revolution presented in the Bible, where worship was centralized in Jerusalem.

Archaeological discoveries demonstrate that temple worship did persist through the Iron Age, just to a lesser extent than the opulence seen in the Late Bronze Age. The temple at Arad in Judah is well known, while the discovery of the large temple complex at Tel Moza, only a few miles northwest of Jerusalem, dramatically challenges long-held assumptions that Jerusalem was the kingdom’s only significant Yahwistic sanctuary. Other sites, including Dan, Hazor, and Megiddo, also preserve evidence of cultic architecture or sacred precincts.

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Čapek suggests that archaeology has been constrained by a “biblical trap” where audiences read the archaeological record through the lens of the Hebrew Bible’s later theology. Biblical authors emphasize Jerusalem as the exclusive center of legitimate worship, making it easy to assume that few other temples existed, or that they were considered non-Yahwistic.

Samaria provides the most colorful example. It was the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. In the biblical narrative, Samaria is remembered as being saturated with Baal worship under King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Stories in 1 and 2 Kings present Ahab as the archetypal apostate king who abandoned Yahweh in favor of Baal.

Drawing on textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible alongside the Greek Septuagint (the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), Čapek highlights some textual divergences that seem to preserve earlier interpretive layers. This work invites us to ask: What if the Bible’s emphasis on Baal worship in Samaria was propaganda?

The repeated references to Baal—especially in passages describing Ahab’s reign—and differences between the Hebrew and Greek versions of 1 Kings 16 suggest that the story of Ahab’s religious policies underwent substantial editorial revision, which obscured the Omride dynasty’s Yahwistic background. 1 Kings 16’s textual variants seem to reveal later Judean efforts to obscure the uncomfortable truth that the Omride dynasty practiced Yahwism too.

For Čapek, later biblical authors made it look like Baal dominated Samaria in order to hide the fact that the Omrides were fundamentally Yahwistic. Samaria may have housed one or more temples dedicated to Yahweh, or at least participated in forms of Yahwistic worship that are no longer directly visible in the Bible. This reading dramatically overturns the biblical portrait of Ahab as Israel’s quintessential bad guy.

Čapek detects another editorial strategy. In addition to recasting Yahwistic temples outside of Jerusalem as non-Yahwistic, biblical writers sometimes seem to have remained silent about them, too. Sites such as Arad, Beersheba, and Tel Moza receive little or no explicit acknowledgment in the Bible, despite archaeological evidence suggesting significant cultic activity took place there. This silence, alongside the occasional renaming of cult sites (e.g., Moza as Obed-Edom), may reflect active processes of memory construction rather than simple omission.

Not every proposal in the study will persuade every reader. Some of its textual reconstructions remain hypothetical, and archaeology continues to uncover new evidence that may support or challenge these ideas. Yet this is precisely what makes biblical archaeology so exciting. Archaeology and biblical texts illuminate different aspects of history. Here, archaeology reveals where temples once stood, and the Bible may reveal how later communities wanted those temples—and the memories attached to them—to be received (or forgotten). This complexity invites us to read the Bible more deeply, not only as a witness to ancient religion, but as a record of later communities wrestling with how to understand the past.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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