Beth Aven

Beth Aven ("house of wickedness" or "house of vanity") was a town or district in the hill country north of Jerusalem, named in the conquest and Saul narratives as a landmark near Bethel and Ai, and taken up by the prophet Hosea as a mocking substitute name for Bethel itself. The place is one of the standing puzzles of biblical geography: its position relative to Bethel, Ai and Michmash is stated three times, yet no site has won agreement among biblical archaeologists.

Biblical Account

When Joshua sent men from Jericho to reconnoitre Ai, the town is located "near Beth-aven, east of Bethel" (Joshua 7:2). The northern border of Benjamin climbed from the Jordan past the shoulder north of Jericho, went "up through the hill country westward," and "ends at the wilderness of Beth-aven" (Joshua 18:12), so the name also covered a stretch of rough country on the eastern slope of the hills. Early in Saul's reign, which began about 1050 BC, the Philistines "encamped in Michmash, to the east of Beth-aven" (1 Samuel 13:5), and after Jonathan's assault on their outpost "the battle passed beyond Beth-aven" (1 Samuel 14:23). These notices put Beth Aven east or northeast of Bethel and west of Michmash, and imply that it was occupied both at the conquest, beginning 1406 BC, and in the early monarchy.

Hosea, prophesying in the northern kingdom in the eighth century BC, uses the name three times with a different edge. He warns, "Enter not into Gilgal, nor go up to Beth-aven" (Hosea 4:15); he orders the alarm sounded "in Gibeah," "in Ramah" and "at Beth-aven" (Hosea 5:8); and he says the inhabitants of Samaria "tremble for the calf of Beth-aven" and its idolatrous priests mourn because its glory "has departed from them" (Hosea 10:5). The calf is most naturally the golden calf Jeroboam I set up at Bethel (1 Kings 12:28-29), so most interpreters take Hosea's Beth Aven as Bethel renamed: the "house of God" has become a "house of wickedness." Hosea 10:8 shortens the name further to "the high places of Aven," and Amos 5:5 plays on the same root when he says that "Bethel shall come to nothing" (Hebrew aven).

Geography and Identification

The name may have been a real toponym before Hosea turned it into a taunt; the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia suggests it may represent an original beth-on, "house of wealth," later reshaped into a term of reproach. Where the town stood is debated among biblical archaeologists. Bryant Wood's survey of the question lists eight candidates proposed since about 1870: Khirbet Haiyan, Deir Dibwan, Burj Beitin, Burqa, et-Tell, Tell Maryam, Khirbet Tell el-Askar and Beitin. W. F. Albright himself moved from Burqa (1924) to et-Tell (1939) to Deir Dibwan (1963); Zecharia Kallai favoured Tell Maryam and later Khirbet Tell el-Askar, and the ISBE reports Charles Wilson's proposal of a ruin west of Michmash. The Zondervan Encyclopedia notes the suggestion, cited from G. E. Wright, that Beth Aven was simply the original name of Ai. Each identification depends on where Bethel and Ai are placed: on the conventional view, Bethel is Beitin and Ai is et-Tell, which leaves Beth Aven to be found somewhere between them and Michmash. Wood, following David Livingston, argues instead that Bethel was at el-Bireh, that Joshua's Ai was Khirbet el-Maqatir, and that Beitin, which lies about a Roman mile north of el-Bireh, matching the distance the Bordeaux Pilgrim's itinerary of AD 333 gives from Bethel to a village it calls Bethar, was Beth Aven. This is a minority position and the identification remains unverified.

Archaeology

Because the site is unlocated, no excavation can be assigned to Beth Aven with confidence. The only candidate that has been dug at scale is Beitin, sounded by Albright in 1927 and excavated by Albright in 1934 and by James Kelso in 1954, 1957 and 1960. The excavators traced the north, west and south walls of a fortified site estimated at about 3.3 acres, with stone walls about 3.5 metres thick founded on bedrock, and reported abundant Late Bronze I and Iron Age I pottery, which Wood reads as fitting the conquest and Saul periods when Beth Aven appears in the text. Whether those remains belong to Bethel or to Beth Aven is exactly the question in dispute.

Theological Significance

Beth Aven matters less for its stones than for its name. Hosea took a border town's name and applied it to the royal sanctuary of the northern kingdom, so that every mention of Bethel's calf carried its own verdict: the place Jacob had called the house of God (Genesis 28:19) was now a house of nothing. Within a generation Samaria fell in 722 BC and the calf's glory departed as the prophet had said (Hosea 10:5).