The range of religious beliefs and practices, including polytheism, the worship of Ba'al and of Yahweh, and the archaeological evidence for popular religion, including the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions 'Yahweh and his Asherah' and household figurines; the roles of priests and prophets; and the roles and importance of religious places, including the Jerusalem Temple (Solomon's Temple), the northern royal shrines at Bethel and Dan (the golden calves), and the high places (bamot)

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain the RANGE of religious belief and practice in Israel from Solomon to the fall of Samaria, not a single unified "Israelite religion": polytheism, the worship of Ba'al alongside Yahweh, and the archaeological evidence for popular religion, including the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions ("Yahweh and his Asherah") and household figurines; the roles of priests and prophets in enforcing, contesting and legitimising royal religious policy; and the roles and importance of religious places, including the Jerusalem Temple built by Solomon, the northern royal shrines Jeroboam I set up at Bethel and Dan (the golden calves), and the widespread local high places (bamot). A genuinely strong answer treats "the emergence of monotheism" as a live scholarly debate, not a settled fact: for most of this period Israelite religion was polytheistic or, at best, henotheistic (worshipping one god as supreme without denying the existence of others), and exclusive monotheism is a later development that the biblical Deuteronomistic History is itself arguing FOR, against a polytheistic reality, rather than simply describing.

The answer

The religious landscape: polytheism, Ba'al, and Yahweh

Israel from Solomon (c. 970-931 BC) to the fall of Samaria (722 BC) sat within a Canaanite religious world it never fully separated from. Yahweh was Israel's national god, invoked by kings and credited with victories and covenant, but the god El (the old head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name and titles Yahweh partly absorbed) and the storm-and-fertility god Ba'al (a title meaning "lord," used across the Levant for various local gods, most famously the weather god Ba'al-Hadad) remained live options for ordinary worship throughout the period, alongside the goddess Asherah. This range is exactly what the dot point means by "the range of religious beliefs and practices": not a tidy sequence from paganism to pure monotheism, but several traditions worshipped simultaneously, by different people, in different places, for different reasons.

Ba'al, Jezebel, and the crisis under the Omride dynasty

The clearest case of state-level polytheism in Israel comes a century after Solomon, under the Omride dynasty. Ahab (c. 874-853 BC) married Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal (also called Ithobaal I), king of the Sidonians, a marriage alliance with the Phoenician coast. 1 Kings 16:31-33 records that Ahab did not merely tolerate his wife's religion privately: he built an actual temple to Ba'al in his own capital, Samaria, set up an altar inside it, and made an Asherah pole, formalising a rival state cult at the heart of the kingdom. 1 Kings 18:19 goes further, recording that 450 prophets of Ba'al and 400 prophets of Asherah ate at Jezebel's own table, a royal household directly funding a religious establishment to rival Yahweh's.

The most famous response is Elijah's contest on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). Each side builds an altar and calls on their god to send fire; only Yahweh answers, and Elijah has the defeated prophets of Ba'al killed at the brook Kishon. The story is a deliberate polemic against Ba'al's own specialist function: Ba'al was worshipped above all as a storm and rain god, so a preceding three-year drought (1 Kings 17-18) and Yahweh's eventual sending of rain (1 Kings 18:41-45) directly attacks Ba'al on his own turf, arguing Yahweh, not Ba'al, controls the sky. Whatever its exact historicity, the narrative only makes sense against a real background in which many Israelites, not just the royal court, saw Ba'al as a credible source of rain and fertility.

This crisis ends around 841 BC, when Jehu leads a violent coup that kills Ahab's son Joram, Jezebel, and King Ahaziah of Judah, then destroys the temple of Ba'al in Samaria, turning it into a latrine (2 Kings 9-10). The coup is independently attested: the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, an Assyrian monument, depicts "Jehu, son of Omri" bowing and presenting tribute, dated to Shalmaneser's eighteenth year, c. 841 BC. Jehu was not literally descended from Omri; Assyrian scribes simply used "House of Omri" as a standing label for the kingdom of Israel, a useful reminder that even a contemporary, non-biblical source needs its own conventions decoded before it can be used as evidence.

The golden calves at Bethel and Dan: a Yahwistic debate

When Solomon's kingdom split around 931 BC, Jeroboam I, first king of the newly independent north, faced an immediate religious problem: the one legitimate Temple was in Jerusalem, in rival territory. 1 Kings 12:26-27 gives his own stated reasoning: if his people kept travelling south to sacrifice, their loyalty would drift back to the house of David. His solution, per 1 Kings 12:28-29, was to make two golden calves, declare "Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt," and set one at Bethel and the other at Dan, the southern and northern edges of his kingdom.

The Deuteronomistic Historian treats this as flat idolatry, deliberately echoing the golden calf Aaron makes at Sinai in Exodus 32, and repeats "the sin of Jeroboam" as a standing verdict against every northern king who follows. Many historians read the calves differently. In wider Near Eastern iconography, a bull commonly served as the throne or pedestal-animal of a storm god, an image linked to both the Canaanite god El and to Ba'al-Hadad; on this reading, Jeroboam's calves were meant as a visible support for the invisible Yahweh standing upon them, much like the cherubim throne in Jerusalem's own Temple, rather than images of a separate calf-god. Either reading matters for the exam: whether the calves were a genuine break with Yahwism or a Yahwistic shrine dressed in older Canaanite visual language, the episode shows how thoroughly Canaanite religious imagery was woven into Israelite state religion, and how a later, stricter standard of aniconism (rejecting any divine image at all) has been projected backward onto the tenth century BC by the biblical authors.

Archaeological evidence for popular religion: Kuntillet Ajrud and household worship

The single most important body of evidence for what ordinary Israelites actually believed, independent of the Bible's own polemic, is archaeological. At Kuntillet Ajrud, a remote way-station excavated by Ze'ev Meshel in the Sinai in the mid-1970s and dated archaeologically to around 800 BC, painted storage jars (pithoi) carry Hebrew inscriptions invoking a blessing "by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" and "by Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah." A broadly similar formula, blessing an individual "by Yahweh...and his Asherah," appears independently in a tomb inscription discovered at Khirbet el-Qom, near Hebron, and published by William Dever. Scholars still dispute exactly what "Asherah" means here: a goddess acting as Yahweh's consort, or a wooden cultic pole-symbol associated with Yahweh's worship (the noun is used both ways elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible). Either reading shows the same thing: at an everyday, non-royal level, Yahweh worship was not narrowly exclusive.

Material culture points the same way. The Taanach cult stand, a four-tiered ceramic object excavated at Tel Taanach in the Jezreel Valley and dated to around the tenth century BC, close to Solomon's own reign, carries registers decorated with lions, sphinxes and a stylised sacred tree. Historians including Ruth Hestrin have argued the tree motif functions as a symbol for Asherah, appearing on the same object as imagery linked to a male storm or sky god, evidence of the same divine pairing reaching back to the very start of this module's period. Small clay female figurines, with a pillar-shaped lower body and exaggerated breasts (often called Judean pillar figurines where they are best documented, in eighth and seventh-century BC Judahite households, though related Iron Age figurine traditions occur across the highlands, including Israelite territory) are commonly interpreted as domestic objects invoking fertility, protection or an Asherah-related presence in the home, rather than temple cult objects, showing religion at the household level operated on its own terms, separately from anything a king or Temple priest controlled. (Flag for verification: the precise regional distribution of pillar figurines within the northern kingdom, as opposed to Judah, should be checked against the latest excavation reports before being stated as settled.)

The roles of priests and prophets

Priests and prophets performed different, sometimes opposed, functions in Israelite religious life. Priests administered sacrifice, maintained ritual purity, and staffed fixed shrines. Solomon secured his own priesthood early: 1 Kings 2:26-27 and 2:35 record him removing Abiathar, who had backed a rival claimant to the throne, and installing Zadok as sole high priest in Jerusalem, founding a Zadokite line the biblical tradition treats as legitimate. Jeroboam had to build an equivalent priesthood from nothing: 1 Kings 12:31 records him appointing priests "from all sorts of people, who were not Levites" to staff Bethel and Dan, and 12:32-33 records him instituting a new autumn festival "of his own devising," deliberately imitating Judah's festival calendar. The Deuteronomistic Historian treats this non-Levitical priesthood and invented festival as further proof of Jeroboam's illegitimacy, a judgement worth noting as bias rather than neutral fact.

Prophets, by contrast, claimed to speak Yahweh's own word directly, and could both make and break kings. Ahijah of Shiloh first legitimises Jeroboam's rise, tearing his own garment into twelve pieces to symbolise the ten tribes Jeroboam will rule (1 Kings 11:29-39), then later condemns him and predicts his dynasty's destruction (1 Kings 14), showing prophecy could cut both ways. In the north, a member of "the sons of the prophets," acting on Elisha's instruction, anoints Jehu and commissions him to destroy the house of Ahab (2 Kings 9:1-10), directly linking prophetic authority to the violent end of the Ba'al-tolerant Omride dynasty. By the eighth century BC, Amos and Hosea represent a different kind of prophet again, independent critics rather than court or cult officials, warning that Israel's religious corruption, alongside its social injustice, would bring national disaster. Amos 7:10-17 preserves a direct clash between the two roles: Amaziah, priest of Bethel, reports Amos to King Jeroboam II and orders him to flee and prophesy in Judah instead, a vivid, named example of priest and prophet in open conflict over who controlled religious authority at a royal shrine.

Religious places: the Jerusalem Temple, the northern shrines, and the high places

Three kinds of site organised Israelite worship. The Jerusalem Temple, built by Solomon and described in detail in 1 Kings 6-8, was a tripartite building: an entrance porch (ulam), a main hall (hekhal), and an inner sanctuary (debir, the "Holy of Holies") housing the Ark of the Covenant beneath two large carved cherubim, flanked outside by two freestanding bronze pillars named Jachin and Boaz and a great bronze basin known as the "Sea." No excavation of the Temple Mount itself has ever taken place, for reasons of religious and political sensitivity, so all direct evidence for Solomon's Temple is textual; historians instead argue from comparative Near Eastern temple architecture, most influentially the Iron Age temple at Ain Dara in northern Syria, whose tripartite plan and interior proportions John Monson has argued are strikingly close to the biblical description, though it remains an architectural PARALLEL, not physical proof of Solomon's own building. The scale of Solomon's building programme is itself contested: Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman's "low chronology" argues that the monumental architecture once attributed to Solomon more plausibly belongs to the ninth-century Omride kingdom, while archaeologists including Amihai Mazar defend a version of the traditional dating; either way, this is a live historiographical debate, not settled fact.

The northern shrines at Bethel and Dan functioned as Israel's own royal sanctuaries, set up by Jeroboam I specifically to rival Jerusalem. Excavations at Tel Dan, led by Avraham Biran, uncovered a large stepped platform (a monumental bamah, or "high place") together with later masonry additions, physical evidence for a substantial cult installation at the site across the Israelite period. Bethel's precise correlation with a modern site is more contested; most archaeologists still identify it with the village of Beitin, though the identification has occasionally been questioned, a reminder that even a shrine named plainly in the text is not always straightforward to pin to the ground. Beyond these two royal sites, the "high places" (bamot) were small, often hilltop, open-air shrines scattered across both kingdoms, used for sacrifice and incense long before and after Jeroboam. Kings repeats a near-formulaic verdict on king after king: "the high places were not removed; the people still sacrificed and burned incense on the high places," and 2 Kings 17:9-11 makes the bamot part of its explicit explanation for Samaria's fall, a strong sign of just how ordinary and persistent local worship at these sites really was.

Israelite religion at a glance

How to read a source on this topic

Section II sources on Israelite religion typically draw on the Book of Kings, the prophetic books Amos and Hosea, or archaeological and epigraphic evidence such as the Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom inscriptions, the Taanach cult stand, or the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. Four reading habits matter.

First, separate genres. Kings is a compiled, edited national history with a clear theological argument to make; Amos and Hosea are prophetic oracles, immediate and polemical rather than narrative; an inscription like Kuntillet Ajrud is casual, everyday epigraphy, not a royal proclamation; a monument like the Black Obelisk is a foreign king's own self-glorifying record. Each genre distorts in a different direction.

Second, watch the anachronism trap on monotheism. Do not assume the strict, later ideal that "there is no other god" (fully expressed only in exilic prophecy such as Isaiah 45:5) was already the reality, or even the aspiration, of most Israelites from Solomon to 722 BC. The whole reason Kings condemns Ba'al and Asherah worship so repeatedly is that it was common, not rare.

Third, corroborate written sources against archaeology wherever possible. Kings' condemnation of Asherah worship as sin is directly complicated by the Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom inscriptions, which show ordinary Israelites invoking Yahweh and his Asherah together without apparent anxiety, a textbook case of a later polemical text needing to be checked against contemporary material evidence.

Fourth, weigh ambiguity carefully. The golden calves' exact meaning (idol or Yahweh-pedestal), the exact referent of "Asherah" (goddess or symbol), and Bethel's precise archaeological location are all genuinely unresolved. An answer that notices the ambiguity and states the debate scores higher than one that fills the gap with a confident guess.

Historians on Israelite religious ideology and practice

The central disagreement is between historians who read the biblical picture of an embattled, largely exclusive Yahwism as broadly accurate and those who read Israelite religion as considerably more plural. Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel) traces a gradual convergence in which the god El merged with Yahweh, arguing Israel moved from polytheism through monolatry toward monotheism only very slowly, across centuries. William G. Dever (Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel) argues from the Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom inscriptions that Asherah functioned as a genuine consort figure for Yahweh in popular, lived religion, not a misunderstood symbol. Ziony Zevit (The Religions of Ancient Israel) deliberately writes of Israelite religion in the plural, emphasising real household and regional diversity rather than one coherent national system. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (The Bible Unearthed) apply a sceptical "low chronology" to the united monarchy, questioning whether a tenth-century Jerusalem under Solomon had the administrative reach to enforce any single state religion at all, and reassign much major building activity to the later, ninth-century Omride kingdom. Amihai Mazar offers a more moderate chronology, defending a version of the traditional dating while still treating Israelite religion as regionally varied. John Monson's comparative study of the Ain Dara temple in Syria remains the standard architectural parallel used to reconstruct what Solomon's Temple, never itself excavated, may have looked like.