Ezekiel6chapter 6

A high place was a real installation, not a vague idea. Excavators have uncovered them at Dan, Arad, Megiddo and elsewhere: a raised platform, a stone altar for burnt offerings, standing stones, sometimes a small roofed room, set on a ridge or under a spreading tree. Ordinary Israelites used them for generations; they were the local parish church, and the fact that they were local is exactly what made them hard to give up.

The furniture of these shrines gets named. Incense stands — small pillar-like altars for burning aromatic gum — have been found by the dozen. Standing stones marked a god's presence. A carved wooden pole represented Asherah, the mother goddess of Canaanite religion. Josiah had smashed all of this a generation earlier; within twenty years it was back.

Ravines and watercourses matter to the geography of the threat. The Judean hill country is cut by steep wadis, and a fugitive's instinct is to go down into them. God says the dead will lie there too — in front of the very altars where they burned their offerings, with their bones scattered around the incense stands.

Behind the wording is an old and blunt idea: a shrine was defiled by human bones. Josiah had cleared the high places by burning bones on their altars. Now the bones will be those of the worshippers themselves.