The Practice of Canaanite Cult: The Middle and Late Bronze Ages.

• Author: Hallote, Rachel

The Practice of Canaanite Cult: The Middle and Late Bronze Ages. By MATTHEW SUSNOW. Agypten und Altes Testament, vol. 106. Munster: ZAPHON, 2021. Pp. 374, illus. [euro]112.

This hefty volume by Matthew Susnow focuses on temple cults in Canaan in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. The author's goal is to uncover the specific practices and rituals that might have taken place in temples in the southern Levant. He finds that while practices likely varied, they were not random, but rather developed based on diverse economic, social, and other factors.

Besides introductory and concluding chapters, Susnow divides his text into three main sections. The first two, "Cultic Architecture in the Southern Levant" and "Activities in Canaanite Temples," are data-driven. while the third, "Between Praxis and Ideology," is more speculative.

Within "Cultic Architecture," Susnow defines several broad categories of temples and examines each in turn. These include open-air cultic structures, Migdal temples in urban settings, and a catch-all category of less clearly defined cultic structures. He organizes the sub-chapters in this section according to these temple forms and within that by the sites where each is found. in spite of his definition of what constitutes the southern Levant, it is rather jarring to encounter the open-air cultic site at Byblos sandwiched between discussions of the open-air sites at Nahariyya and Megiddo. The same is true for the presentation of the Ugarit Migdal temple in the middle of a discussion of the Migdal temples in Canaan proper.

In "Activities in Canaanite Temples" Susnow devotes an individual subchapter to each of many specific temples, such as Hazor's Orthostat Temple, Hazor's Area C Stelae Temple, the Lachish Fosse Temple, as well as the temples at Tel Mevorakh and at Nahariyya, and includes a single, comprehensive chapter for eight other southern Levantine cultic sites among which he includes both Sidon and Tel el-Dab'a.

There are two themes that run through the volume. The first is that Canaanite religion was constantly shifting and was therefore able to adapt to changing circumstances and situations. Susnow sees this reflected in the various forms of temple architecture found at different sites in different time periods. His second theme and main focus concerns temple ritual. Susnow does spatial analyses of artifacts found in cultic buildings to see what specific rituals were practiced in each part of each temple. The results...