Professor Gary Rendsburg of Rutgers University noted that although Abraham built altars at Shechem in and between Bethel and Ai in , only in does the text report Abraham actually making a sacrifice — the ram that he found caught in the thicket that he sacrificed in lieu of Isaac. Rendsburg argued that the message would have been clear to Israelites living in Solomon's time that even though altars stood throughout the countryside, and some may even have been as old as Abraham, the only place where Abraham actually sacrificed was the mount of the Lord — Jerusalem — and that was why only the Jerusalem Temple was approved for sacrifices to God. Rendsburg concluded that royal scribes living in Jerusalem during the reigns of David and Solomon in the tenth century BCE were responsible for Genesis; their ultimate goal was to justify the monarchy in general, and the kingship of David and Solomon in particular; and Genesis thus appears as a piece of political propaganda.