"Northern Israel: Hazor and the Ashteroth pole"

(Read Joshua 11:10 and Judges 4:2)

Wednesday March the 17th we left for a day-long trip up to northern Israel stopping first at Tel Hazor. The archeological remains at Hazor are extensive and some of the ruins date back to 350 BC. Hazor is mentioned in the Old Testament as the place from which King Jenin came down to the Jezreel plains and harassed the Hebrew people and for which crisis Deborah was raised up by God. The Hebrew general Barak (means lightning) on Deborah’s ordered defeated the commander Sisera near Mount Tabor.

Centuries later King Solomon used this same site to establish a garrison of cavalry with extensive stables, the remains of which are seen today. The Majority of the cut stone seen in the excavations today may be from King Jeroboam II and his time of prosperity.

The city sat up on the side of a hill with a great view back down towards the Sea of Galilee and west. I remember being a bit overwhelmed by all the ruins as they all seemed to be waist high walls of rock, and because we had so much to see that day, we didn’t really spend a lot of time there. Our guide did want to point out the Old Testament connections and also show us an Ashtoreth pole of some kind. It was clearly phallic, hewn out of stone and only 2-2 .5 feet high. I think we were stuck by how small the pole was, but clearly there were many kinds of Ashtoreth poles over the years.

It seems silly to me that humans would worship a 2 foot tall phallic shaped stone, but I REALLY am coming to believe that much of what I watched on TV was just as bad. Perhaps what I watched was not as obviously pagan as a phallic symbol is, but it is just as pagan.

LORD help me tear down the things in my life that would raise themselves above You.