Word: altare
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...Altar, Sacred...
...legal documents, and lists were perhaps written from before this. But the history of the Israelites in the Holy Land began hundreds of years earlier, and the first scribes relied upon oral traditions that had passed down from generation to generation. The tradition of a sacred area, with an altar and a sacred oak, in the city of Shochem begins in Genesis and reappears from time to time in the Old Testament down to the book of Judges...
...Genesis 12, the Lord commands Abraham to go into the land of Canaan "unto the place of Shochem, unto the oak of Moreh" (sacred oak). There, the Lord appears and promises the land to the descendents of Abraham, and Abraham then builds an altar unto the Lord...
Deuteronomy 37 relates the farewell of Moses to his people, who are preparing to leave for the land in Jordan promised them by the Lord. Moses commands the people, when they arrive there, to build an altar to the Lord on Mount Ebal, which flanks Shechem, and also to erect on the site plastered stones inscribed with the laws of the covenant...
...addition, when the area was filled about 1600 B.C. and a temple built there, its altar and sacred pillar were carefully placed directly over that same spot where the earlier shrine had stood. At this level the archaeologists also found traces of the great processional road leading from the lower city to the temple...