FRIENDS OF ñ WEBINARS
Holier than Thou? The Temples at Tel Moza and Reflections of Ritual Practices in Ancient Judah
Friends of ñ present the first webinar of the 2025-2026 season on September 10, 2025, at 12:30 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Shua Kisilevitz. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.
The recent discovery of not one, but a succession of two temples from the First Temple period at Tel Moza—just 7 km from Jerusalem—has reignited debate about how religion took shape in ancient Judah and the wider region. The revelations at Tel Moza are especially intriguing when set against the backdrop of traditional scholarship, which was both heavily guided by biblical texts and paradigms and hampered by the rarity of confirmed temple remains in Judah.
At Tel Moza, excavations revealed a cultic precinct containing a modest early shrine that was later replaced by a monumental “long-room” temple whose plan, scale, and decoration closely echo the Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple. Indeed, the similarities between the temples at Tel Moza and Jerusalem, and the proximity between the two, sharpen questions of cultic centralization, reform, and practice, and they suggest that Jerusalem’s temple was neither the only one in Judah nor necessarily the “first.”
Because such temple evidence is so scarce in Judah, the Tel Moza finds are unusually revealing. They include altars, offering tables, standing stones, sacrificial remains, and cultic paraphernalia that were found in sealed, well-documented contexts that reflect continuous rebuilding and refurbishing of the temples. Altogether, these discoveries provide a rare glimpse into how worship was actually practiced and how traditions formed over centuries. In this lecture, Dr. Kisilevitz will trace the development of the two Tel Moza temples and the rituals practiced there, setting them alongside biblical descriptions and regional parallels. Through plans, objects, and visual reconstructions, she will show how the patterns at Tel Moza likely reflect broader traditions that shaped religious life in Jerusalem and across the southern Levant.
Shua Kisilevitz is Assistant Director of the Albright Institute and a research fellow at Tel Aviv University.
She received her B.A.and M.A. in Archaeology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Tel Aviv University. She has participated in excavations across Israel and has directed excavations at 15 sites in the region of Jerusalem and Judea. Since 2012, she has spearheaded the research and publication of the Iron Age site at Tel Moza, and she is co-director of the Tel Moza Expedition Project. Dr. Kisilevitz specializes in the archaeology of religion and ritual of the southern Levant in the Iron Age.