times before a permanent singular Temple at Jerusalem was erected) and forcibly removed their priests to Jerusalem, where they occupied an inferior rank in the temple ministry. In the prophets of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, the word bamot connotes "seat of heathenish or idolatrous worship"; and the historians of the period apply the term in this opprobrious sense not only to places sacred to other gods but to the old holy places of Yahweh in the cities and villages of Judah, which, in their view, had been illegitimate since the building of Solomon's temple, and therefore not valid centers for the worship of Yahweh; even the most pious kings of Judah are censured in the Books of Kings for tolerating their existence. The reaction that followed the death of Josiah (608 BCE) restored the old altars of Yahweh; they survived the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE, and it is probable that after its restoration (520–516 BCE) they only slowly disappeared, in consequence partly of the natural predominance of Jerusalem in the little territory of Judaea, partly of the gradual establishment of the supremacy of the written law over custom and tradition in the Persian period. The rule of the Law of Moses that sacrifice can be offered to Yahweh only at the Temple in Jerusalem was never fully established in fact. The Jewish military colonists in Elephantine in the 5th century BCE had their altar of Yahweh beside the highway; the Jews in Egypt in the Ptolemaic period had, besides many local sanctuaries, one greater temple at Leontopolis, with a priesthood whose claim to "valid orders" was much better than that of the High Priests in Jerusalem, and the legitimacy of whose worship is admitted even by the Palestinian rabbis. Modern Judaism In Jewish synagogues, the "High Place" (bimah; see also bema) is the elevated platform from which the Torah is read. It traditionally had its origin from the platform erected in the Temple in Jerusalem at which the king would read the Torah during the Hakhel ceremony every seven years at the Feast of Tabernacles (). The bimah is located in the center of Orthodox synagogues, and in the front of Reform synagogues. Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism In the Eastern Orthodox Church and Eastern Catholic Churches the High Place is the name used for the location of the cathedra (episcopal throne), set in the