The professor studying the figures believes they may have been used at pilgrimage centers to form a kind of metaphysical connection between God and Man, "a contact between earth and heaven, the core of the religious experience." Dr. Yosef Garfinkel, a veteran archeologist from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has proposed a fascinating theory which suggests that a series of three small clay figurines recently discovered at the archeological sites of Khirbet Qeiyafa and Moza, and two similar antiquities previously put on display at the Israel Museum, may in fact be depictions of Yahweh, the God of the Israelites written about in the Hebrew Bible. In an article in the Biblical Archeology Review published on Friday, Dr. Garfinkel specified that the figures, believed to have been created between the tenth and ninth centuries BCE, a thousand years before the birth of Christ, may have served as representations of God in religious ceremonies. "During our excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, only