Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

CENTER OF THE LAND

An epithet for the holy temples of the Samaritans and the Israelites, on Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Zion respectively, which each group considered its sacred place as the earth’s (spiritual) “center” (Heb. ṭabbûr hāʾāreṣ; Judg. 9:37; Ezek. 38:12). The LXX translation “navel” (Gk. omphalós; cf. Lat. umbilicus) suggests a connection with ancient Near Eastern mythology wherein the temple serves as the bond between heaven and earth. This motif either came through the Ugaritic literature via Canaanite mythology of the cosmic mountain (i.e., Mt. Zion) or was attached to the biblical text through the LXX translation during the Hellenistic period. However, Jewish talmudic and midrashic literature understood the expression to mean that Jerusalem was the point from which the world was created (b. Yoma 54b; Tanhuma Kedoshim 10).

Bibliography. E. Burrows, “Some Cosmological Patterns in Babylonian Religion,” in The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World, ed. S. H. Hooke (London, 1935), 43-70; S. Terrien, “The Omphalos Myth and Hebrew Religion,” VT 20 (1970): 315-38; A. J. Wensinck, “The Ideas of the Western Semites Concerning the Navel of the Earth,” in Studies of A. J. Wensinck (New York, 1978), 43-70.

J. Randall Price

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

CENTER OF THE LAND

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)