a piece of forbidden worship equipment that stood on or beside an altar at a shrine, most likely a small stand for burning incense
This word turns up only eight times, always in the plural, and always inside a list of shrine equipment that is about to be destroyed. Nobody in the Bible ever builds one, prays at one, or stops to say what it is. Readers only ever meet them being smashed, cut down, or swept away by a reforming king.
The one physical clue in the text comes in 2 Chronicles 34:4, where the objects are said to stand above the altars, and the king cuts them down off the top of them. That points to something small and mounted rather than a free-standing monument. The company they keep points the same way. They appear:
- beside the worship platforms (בָּמָה) and the lifeless idols (גִּלּוּל) in Leviticus 26:30
- beside the altars (מִזְבֵּחַ) and the wooden pole of the goddess Asherah (אֲשֵׁרָה) in Isaiah 17:8 and Isaiah 27:9
- among the broken altars and toppled idols of Ezekiel 6:4 and Ezekiel 6:6
What the object actually was is still argued. Older English Bibles guessed from the sound of the word, which resembles a Hebrew noun meaning heat, and by extension the sun, so they printed "sun images" or "sun pillars". Most modern versions follow a different clue: a matching Aramaic word shows up on small stone altars found at Palmyra, in Syria, so they print "incense altars". Neither rendering rests on anything the biblical writers themselves say about the object.
The safest picture for a reader is a fixture of pagan worship whose exact shape has been lost. Every writer who uses the word assumes the audience knows it on sight, which is why none of them describe it, and why the guessing has gone on for so long.
Disputed
What object the term denotes: a small incense altar or stand set on or beside the main altar, or an upright pillar connected with solar worship.
- majorityA small incense altar or cultic stand, placed on or beside the main altar. The reading rests on the Aramaic ḥmnʾ, attested in cultic inscriptions and on small stone altars from Palmyra and the Nabataean sphere, and on the notice in 2 Chronicles 34:4 that the objects stood above the altars.; HALOT, s.v. חַמָּן; DCH, s.v. חַמָּן; W. F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1942); Kjeld Nielsen, Incense in Ancient Israel, VTSup 38 (Leiden: Brill, 1986)
- minorityAn upright pillar associated with the sun, the noun being derived from חַמָּה "heat, sun". This derivation produced the traditional glosses "sun-pillar" and "sun images" carried by the older English versions.; BDB, s.v. חַמָּן; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. חַמָּן