Are we to "grab hold of the horns of the altar"?
Tackling folk religion
If you’ve grown up in a Pentecostal church (or maybe even just in church in the South), you’ve probably heard someone talk about “grabbing hold of the horns of the altar” when describing the need for serious, fervent, intercessory prayer for a dire situation—a severe illness, a wayward child who has left the faith, an accident that left someone gravely injured, and so forth. The mental image is grabbing hold and not letting go until God provides the desired breakthrough.
This is one of those phrases I say sounds “Bible-y,” because there are episodes in the Bible of people literally going into the temple and grabbing hold of the horns of the great altar where the burnt offerings were made.
In the NIV translation, the phrase “horns of the altar” appears in 15 verses. Ten of those (one of them in Exodus, eight in Leviticus, and one in Ezekiel) have to do with instructions regarding the presentation of sacrifices, where some of the blood of the sacrificial animal was to be dabbed or smeared on the horns of the altar of burnt offering or the altar of incense inside the Holy Place.
One verse (Amos 3:14) talks about God smashing the unauthorized altar at Bethel in the northern kingdom of Israel, breaking off its horns.
Another verse, Psalm 118:27, talks about a procession of worshipers making their way to the temple, “up to the horns of the altar” (the altar in the outer court, where sacrifices were burned, was the furthest a non-priest could go into the tabernacle/temple).
That leaves three verses that talk about a person going into the temple court and grabbing hold of the horns of the altar:
1 Kings 1:50
1 Kings 1:51
1 Kings 2:28
These last three verses cover two incidents, both occurring after Solomon has ascended to the throne of Israel.
First Kings 1:50-51 is about Adonijah, Solomon’s half-brother who tried to have himself anointed king when it was obvious that David’s death was near. David had not publicly announced which of his sons was to succeed him on the throne, so Adonijah—who was born to David and Haggith in Hebron, where David ruled for the first seven years of his reign before moving to Jerusalem and assuming rule over all the twelve tribes, and was thus older than Solomon and could presume that made him next in line to the throne, as his elder brothers Amnon and Absalom were already dead—decided he would have himself anointed and proclaimed king. Some of David’s close advisers, and even the priest Abiathar, went along with Adonijah’s plan. When Bathsheba, Solomon’s mother, heard about this, she went to David and reminded him he had promised her that their son Solomon would be king. (Read all of 1 Kings chapter one if you want a great story of palace intrigue.)
Adonijah, in a panic because he knows he could be executed for sedition and treason, runs into the tabernacle (the temple building was not yet built, as Solomon was just beginning to reign) and grabs hold of the horns of the altar, refusing to let go until Solomon promises not to kill him for his actions.
Andrew Rillera, in his book Lamb of the Free, points out that human blood on the altar or in the temple defiles the sacred space, contaminating it. The God of Israel deplored human sacrifice, so human blood was not to come into contact with the holy objects of the sanctuary.1 Adonijah is hoping that Solomon will not kill him at the altar, causing it to be desecrated and in need of purification before the regular daily sacrifices can resume.
Solomon promises not to have Adonijah executed. But later, Adonijah asks that Abishag, the Shunammite young woman who kept David warm during his final days, be given to him as a wife. Solomon sees this as another attempt by his half-brother to establish a claim to power, and orders him put to death (1 Kings 2:23-25).
In 1 Kings 2:28, we find Joab, one of David’s generals who had supported Adonijah’s bid to the throne, upon hearing that Adonijah ended up being executed, fleeing to the tent of the Lord and grabbing hold of the altar’s horns, seeking protection just as Adonijah had done earlier, obviously hoping for the same outcome.
29 King Solomon was told that Joab had fled to the tent of the Lord and was beside the altar. Then Solomon ordered Benaiah son of Jehoiada, “Go, strike him down!”
30 So Benaiah entered the tent of the Lord and said to Joab, “The king says, ‘Come out!’”
But he answered, “No, I will die here.”
Benaiah reported to the king, “This is how Joab answered me.”
31 Then the king commanded Benaiah, “Do as he says. Strike him down and bury him…
The text doesn’t say whether Benaiah and his men pulled Joab away from the altar before killing him, or went ahead and struck him down while he was clinging to the altar. In either case, grabbing hold of the altar’s horns didn’t save him.
Just because something is “Bible-y,” using language taken from the Scriptures, doesn’t mean the practice itself is biblical in the sense that it is a model to be followed.
So, in conclusion, nowhere does the Bible use language about “grabbing hold of the horns of the altar” to describe personal prayer to God in intercession. That’s a connotation someone somewhere across the ages of church history has assigned to the phrase.2 But the Bible does not prescribe this as a preferred practice.
And as we have shown, in the two instances in the Bible where someone ran into the court of the tent of the Lord and grabbed hold of the altar as a means of seeking protection, they weren’t really seeking for God to answer their prayer, but rather seeking to avoid the consequences of their own actions, using the altar as a protective measure against justice executed by the king.
Andrew Remington Rillera, Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understanding of Jesus’s Death, pp. 11-12/