Sir Charles Warren documented Qasr Antar in 1869 while surveying Hermon's temples for the Palestine Exploration Fund, and a Greek-inscribed limestone stele from the site entered the British Museum as object 1903,0422.1. The Museum's reading is a temple admission rule: by order of the god, those who do not take the oath may not proceed, probably an oath before celebrating the mysteries, with the god identified as Baal Hermon of Judges 3:3. Julien Aliquot's survey of the Hermon sanctuaries dates the summit remains, like the other twenty-odd Hermon temples, to the Roman period, and states flatly that neither text nor artifact proves an earlier cult up there.
The story that made the summit famous is 1 Enoch 6: in the days of Jared, two hundred watchers under Shemihazah descend on Mount Hermon and bind themselves with mutual oaths and curses before taking human wives. Later Jewish tradition, collected in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, derives the mountain's very name from herem, the anathema they swore there. Clermont-Ganneau called Hermon the mountain of the oath, and Eusebius's Onomasticon records that the nations still revered it as a sanctuary in his day.
George Nickelsburg, in his Hermeneia commentary on 1 Enoch, rendered the stele without the Greek negative: according to the command of the greatest and holy god, those who take an oath proceed from here, and proposed the inscription might reflect cultic activity informed by traditions from 1 Enoch. On that reading the stone becomes the watcher stone, a physical echo of the angelic oath, and 2025 internet coverage presented it exactly that way. Critics answer that the stone says not, that greatest and holy god is standard Hellenized language for the local Baal or Hadad, and that the entire connection hangs on omitting a two-letter word.
Who was swearing oaths on the summit, and to which god?