High place

High places (Hebrew: במות, romanized: bamoṯ, singular במה bamā) are simple hilltop installations with instruments of religion: platforms, altars, standing stones, and cairns are common.

Along with open courtyard shrines and sacred trees or groves, they were some of the most often-seen public places of piety in the ancient Near East.

[6] The culture of ancient Israelite sites was extremely similar to that of other Canaanite sites, with the most significant difference being the worship of Yahweh, so in spite of late Biblical references to Ur, it is probable that the Israelite federation evolved in situ in Canaan, rather than by conquest of a foreign nation, and inherited the cultural concept of high places from indigenous ancestors.

The prophets of the 8th century BCE assail the popular religion as corrupt and licentious and as fostering the monstrous delusion that immoral men can buy the favour of God by worship, but they make no distinction in this respect between the high places of Israel and the temple in Jerusalem.

[2] In the prophets of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, the word bamot connotes "seat of heathenish or idolatrous worship"; and the historians of the period apply the term in this opprobrious sense not only to places sacred to other gods but to the old holy places of Yahweh in the cities and villages of Judah, which, in their view, had been illegitimate since the building of Solomon's temple, and therefore not valid centers for the worship of Yahweh; even the most pious kings of Judah are censured in the Books of Kings for tolerating their existence.

The Jewish military colonists in Elephantine in the 5th century BCE had their altar of Yahweh beside the highway; the Jews in Egypt in the Ptolemaic period had, besides many local sanctuaries, one greater temple at Leontopolis, with a priesthood whose claim to "valid orders" was much better than that of the High Priests in Jerusalem, and the legitimacy of whose worship is admitted even by the Palestinian rabbis.

It traditionally had its origin from the platform erected in the Temple in Jerusalem at which the king would read the Torah during the Hakhel ceremony every seven years at the Feast of Tabernacles (Deuteronomy 31:10–13).