Research Article The sceptres of life-sized divine statues from Canaanite Lachish and Hazor Yosef Garfinkel * * Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (✉ garfinkel@mail.huji.ac.il ) Despite the investigation of hundreds of ancient tem- ples across the Near East, life-sized statues of divine figures are rare and none have been found in the Canaanite Levant. In this article, contextual and iconographic analyses are used to argue for the inter- pretation of objects from Canaanite temples at Tel Lachish and Hazor, Israel, as sceptres associated with life-sized statues. This represents the first evi- dence for life-sized divine figures in the region. In turn, this identification may assist in the recognition of similar objects from elsewhere in the Levant and beyond, and stimulate discussion of the power embodied by these statues. Keywords: Levant, Israel, Canaanite religion, sceptres, statues, iconography Introduction The existence of life-sized divine statues in the ancient Near East is well documented by his- torical sources and artistic representation. Yet no example of such a statue has survived intact in the Levant, despite the archaeological investigation of more than one hundred temples in the region. Indeed, across the Near East as a whole, including Iran, Mesopotamia and Ana- tolia, from the fourth millennium BC to the middle of the first millennium BC, the life-sized statue of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar from Mari in eastern Syria stands out as a rare example of a life-sized statue of a divine entity (Parrot 1959:5–11, pls IV–VI). Now, a com- bination of contextual and iconographic analyses allows us to argue that a Canaanite temple at Tel Lachish in Israel also contained the remnant of such a life-sized divine statue, the first example to be identified in the region. Furthermore, these analyses enable us to identify a second such remnant, previously uncovered at Hazor in Israel. Numerous Mesopotamian texts report that life-sized divine statues stood in the most secluded part of the temple: the cella, or the Holy of Holies (Dick 1999; Bahrani 2003; Received: 1 April 2019; Revised: 11 August 2019; Accepted: 21 August 2019 © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2020 Antiquity 2020 Vol. 94 (375): 669–685 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.44 669