This article discusses the question of dieties’ life-sized statues in the Bronze Age Levant and Mesopotamia. Since well-preserved statues are rare, one must approach the issue through remnants. Here, I discuss evidence for a life-sized statue of a god from an Early Bronze Age I temple at Megiddo, Israel, dated to ca. 3500 BC. The relevant evidence includes an extraordinary copper spearhead and graffiti featuring, among other things, a warrior god with a large spear and a thunderbolt. I suggest that the spearhead is a remnant of the temple’s life-size statue and that the graffiti sheds light on cultic activities that took place in the temple. The deity in question is likely to be the earliest manifestation of a warrior god better known later from Canaanite Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible.

During the 2025 season of excavations at Tel Lachish, a partially preserved inscription was found in an unambiguous 12th-century BCE archaeological context associated with the site’s last Late Bronze Age settlement. The inscription consists of six letters written in red ink on the shoulder of a ceramic jar. Although the potsherd is horizontally broken, at the mid-height of the inscription, the surviving parts of the letters allow one to read the personal name Bʻlšlṭ. This name is built on the root šlṭ, which hitherto has been widely considered a much later (Persian period) loan from Aramaic. Furthermore, the inscription was written in the standardized Linear Canaanite script displaying cursive features, apparently by a person accustomed to writing with a stylus and ink.