Mount Ebal Altar Site

The Mount Ebal Altar Site, known in Arabic as el-Burnat, is an early Iron Age stone structure and enclosure on the northeastern slope of Mount Ebal, across the valley from Shechem. Its excavator, Adam Zertal, identified it as the altar Joshua built on Mount Ebal (Joshua 8:30-35). Most archaeologists accept it as an early Israelite cultic site, while its link to Joshua remains debated. Beneath the large structure lies an earlier, much smaller round installation, and that earlier phase is the one now proposed as Joshua's altar.

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The Site

The site lies on a ridge on the mountain's eastern side, by Zertal's account about 500 feet (150 m) below the summit. From it one can see eastern Samaria and the Wadi Far'ah, but not Shechem itself. Zertal found it on April 6, 1980, during his survey of the hill country of Manasseh for the University of Haifa. Of the twelve sites the survey recorded on Mount Ebal, it was the only one from the Iron Age.

The main structure is a rectangle of unhewn fieldstones about 30 by 23 feet (9 by 7 m), with no floor or entrance. A ramp about 23 feet (7 m) long rises to its top, and two paved courtyards lie beside it. Around it is an enclosure wall about 360 feet (110 m) long, which encloses an area of about one acre, and a larger outer enclosure covers about 3.5 acres. Both enclosures have been described as foot-shaped.

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Two Phases

Zertal excavated the site in eight seasons from 1982 to 1989 and distinguished two main phases. In the earlier phase, which he called Stratum II, a structure was built on leveled bedrock. In it was a circular stone installation about 6.5 feet (2 m) across, covered by a layer of ash and burnt animal bones, and a pit nearby held a stone chalice and other special finds. Zertal regarded this phase as cultic and dated its founding to about 1250 BC.

In the later phase, Stratum IB, the large rectangular structure was built over the round installation, and its interior was deliberately filled with layers of ash, animal bones and pottery. The bones were studied by Liora Kolska Horwitz: about 65 percent were sheep and goats, most of them burnt, 21 percent cattle and 10 percent fallow deer, with no pigs, horses or donkeys. Large collared-rim storage jars make up most of the pottery. Two Egyptian scarabs from the site were dated by Baruch Brandl to the later reign of Ramesses II, in the second half of the 13th century BC. Zertal dated this phase to about 1200-1140 BC, after which the site was deliberately covered with stones and abandoned. No radiocarbon dates exist, because the organic samples from his excavation have been lost. Zertal published a preliminary report in the journal Tel Aviv (1986-87) and a popular account in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1985, but died in 2015 before a final report appeared.

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Joshua's Altar?

Before Israel entered the land, Moses commanded that an altar of uncut stones be built on Mount Ebal, with the law written on plastered stones and the curses pronounced from the mountain (Deuteronomy 27:1-26). Joshua built the altar after the conquest of Ai, about 1406 BC, and read the law to all Israel standing in front of Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim (Joshua 8:30-35). Zertal pointed to the uncut stones, the ramp in place of steps (Exodus 20:25-26) and the burnt bones of animals used in sacrifice as signs that the large structure was an altar, and argued that it must be connected with this account.

On Zertal's own dates, neither phase reaches back to Joshua: the round installation begins about 1250 BC, and the large structure belongs to the following century, within the period of the judges. The Late Bronze Age pottery at the site is a small share, about 3 percent of the pottery Zertal found. In 2019 Scott Stripling of the Associates for Biblical Research led a project that wet-sifted about 30 percent of the soil Zertal had discarded. From that material and Zertal's finds, Stripling, Abigail Van Huss (who published then as Abigail Leavitt) and Pieter Gert van der Veen argued that the round installation is older than Zertal thought. They cite Late Bronze pottery, a stone chalice from the pit beside it, and a reassessment of the scarabs to the time of Thutmose III. In their view the large rectangular structure was built by Israelites in the time of the judges, after Joshua, while the round installation beneath it "meets the qualifications of Joshua's altar". Stripling places it in the late 15th century BC, which fits the conquest. The same sifting recovered a small folded piece of lead that Stripling's team reads as an inscribed curse, the Mount Ebal Curse Tablet, whose reading is disputed.

Ralph K. Hawkins, whose 2012 study is the fullest treatment of Zertal's results, concluded that the structure was either an altar or a raised platform for worship, a cultic pilgrimage site for the early Israelites, but that it could not be tied with certainty to Deuteronomy 27 or Joshua 8. He later wrote that the site "very likely lay behind" the account of Joshua 8:30-35.

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The Debate over the Structure

Not every archaeologist accepts that the structure was an altar. Aharon Kempinski argued in 1986 that the central building was a house later used as the base of an Iron Age I watchtower, and Anson Rainey dismissed the altar interpretation and followed Kempinski's view. Volkmar Fritz proposed a farmstead, and J. Alberto Soggin and Nadav Na'aman identified the site with the tower of Shechem in Judges 9:46-49. Most archaeologists, however, now accept it as a cultic site. As Aren Maeir summarized in 2013, "While most scholars have not accepted Zertal's suggestion connecting the site to Joshua's altar, the majority have accepted that what he has found is in fact an early Israelite cultic site." Amihai Mazar is among those who accept a cultic identification. Israel Finkelstein has allowed that there "may even be evidence for cultic activity" at the site, while rejecting any link to Joshua.