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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
KOSHER OLIVE OIL IN ANTIQUITY
I hope that it may be thought appropriate to offer to Geza Vermes, who
has dedicated much of his scholarly life to the elucidation of the varied
nature of Judaism and the attitudes of Jews towards their tradition in
late antiquity, a study of a religious development which both originated
and came to an end in this period.
The problem to be tackled may be stated quite succinctly. In the hel-
lenistic period some Jews objected to using oil produced by non-Jews.
Some time in the third century CE the rabbinic patriarch and his court
decreed that the ban on gentile oil was no longer to be enforced, and
their decision seems to have been generally followed, if not immediately
then at least within a few generations. No ancient text gives an adequate
explanation either of the original prohibition or of the later relaxation.
My purpose is to investigate the underlying religious attitudes which
might account for both developments.
1
Olive oil was an item of considerable importance in the economy of
the land of Israel. Oil was one of the three staple products of the land
(Deut. 11.14; 2 Kings 18.32). Of the many varieties of oil, olive oil was
among the most expensive, but it was widely used for cosmetics (Eccl.
9.78), for medicine (Isa. 1.6), and as a fuel for lamps (cf. R. Tarfon in
m. Shabb. 2.2, on the Sabbath lights). It was of course a ubiquitous ingredi-
ent in food. Josephus made special mention of the productivity of olive
trees in the hills of Galilee (B.J. 2.592). The concern of the inhabitants
to ensure their supply of olive oil is illustrated by nds of oil presses
on Mount Hermon some way above the height at which olive trees
ourish.
2
Whether olives actually grew at such a height in antiquity or
were transported raw to the upland settlements for processing is unclear.
In either case the importance attributed to the product is striking.
3
1
The only work specically devoted to this topic is S.B. Hoenig, Oil and Pagan
Delement, JQR 61 (1970/71), pp. 6375.
2
Cf. S. Dar, The History of the Hermon Settlements, PEQ 120 (1988), p. 37.
3
Apart from the greater ease in the transport of olives rather than oil, it may be that
people preferred to process their own oil to prevent adulteration by inferior olives or
other substances.
188 chapter sixteen
In this reliance on olive oil the Jews of Palestine shared in the general
culture of the Mediterranean region. By the time of the early Roman
empire olive cultivation was almost universally found in lowland coastal
regions, and the long-distance trade in high quality luxury oil was
equalled in bulk and distribution only by the trade in wine.
4
When Jews decided in the Hellenistic and early Roman imperial pe-
riod not to use gentile olive oil, they were, then, deliberately turning
their backs on some of the more widely traded goods in their society.
But it may be that by the time such trade had fully evolved in the last
centuries BCE, Jews could already justify the taboo to themselves by
claiming reliance on ancient tradition, for the rst evidence for a prohi-
bition on the use of gentile oil may date back to before 281 BCE.
According to Josephus (Ant. 12.119120), Seleucus Nicator, who ruled
from 312 to 281 BCE, gave special privileges to the Jews as follows.
xo yop 2riruxo o Nixtep rv oi rxtior aoiroiv rv tp `Ao xo tp xte
2up xo rv outp tp gtpoaoiri `Avtior aoiitro outo \eor xo
toi rvoixioOrioiv iootou oargvr Moxroooiv xo 'Eiigoiv, e t[v
aoiitrov toutgv rti xo vuv oiorvriv trx\piov or touto to `Iouooou
[ ouiorvou oiioui rio p[oOoi iovriv epiorvov ti aopo
tev yuvooipev ri rioou ti[v opyupiov rxriruorv o tou o\ou tev`
Avtiorev rv t vuv aoir iuooi apooipourvou, Mouxiovo [yrev ev
totr t[ 2upo rt\pgorv.
Seleucus Nicator granted them citizenship in the cities which he founded
in Asia and Lower Syria and in his capital, Antioch, itself, and declared
them to have equal privileges with the Macedonians and Greeks who were
settled in these cities, so that this citizenship of theirs remains to this day;
and the proof of this is the fact that he gave orders that those Jews who
were unwilling to use foreign oil should receive a xed sum of money
from the gymnasiarchs to pay for their own kind of oil; and, when in
the present war the people of Antioch proposed to revoke this privilege,
Mucianus, who was then governor of Syria, maintained it.
If Josephus is to be trusted, at least some Jews in Asia Minor and/or
Syria were unwilling to use foreign oil before 281 BCE. How many
4
On the olive trade of the early Roman empire, see in general D.P.S. Peacock and
D.F. Williams, Amphorae and the Roman Economy: an Introductory Guide, London and New
York, 1986. For the economic importance of this trade, see D.J. Mattingly, Oil for
Export? A Comparison of Libyan, Spanish and Tunisian Olive Oil Production in the
Roman Empire, JRA 1 (1988), 3356, but note that there has been more study of the
trade in this period in the Western Mediterranean than in the Levant. For olive oil
production in Roman Palestine, see the articles and bibliographies in M. Heltzer and
D. Eitam, eds., Olive Oil in Antiquity: Israel and Neighbouring Countries from the Neolithic to the
Early Arab Period, Haifa, 1987.
kosher olive oil in antiquity 189
Jews followed this line is not clear: to `Iouooou [ ouiorvou may
mean the Jews who did not want or, more probably, those Jewsi.e.
only somewho did not want. It is quite likely on general grounds
that Josephus ascribed the grant of this privilege to an earlier period
than was the case, and that in fact a later Seleucid monarch, such as
Antiochus III, who ruled from 223 to 187 BCE, was responsible,
5
but
in any case it seems certain that the custom was well established in the
Hellenistic period.
Whenever the taboo started, two things about it are established from
this passage. First, Jews kept up the habit in the late sixties CE during
the First Revolt, when Mucianus as governor of Syria permitted them
to maintain their privilege. Second, the complaint expressed about un-
kosher oil was that it was foreign, allophulon, and Josephus could take
it for granted that the reasonableness of this objection was sufciently
self-evident not to need spelling out to his readers, most of whom would
be gentile.
Josephus reason for taking the taboo so much for granted was prob-
ably simply that it was part of his own lifestyle, for the only other con-
text in which the ban on gentile oil is mentioned in his writings involved
an incident in his own career. The incident was described by Josephus
twice, with interesting divergences between the two accounts.
First, at BJ 2.591592, Josephus included the following passage in his
attack on his long-standing rival, John of Gischala.
rarito ouvOr oxgv[v aovoupyottgv, e opo uittoivto avtr oi xoto
t[v 2upov `Iouooioi rio p[oOoi [ oi` oouiev ryxrripiorv, arariv
outoi ra rOopov rpt\ooto. ouvevourvo or tou Tupou voooto,
o trooopo `Attixo ouvotoi, trooopo oopri, t[ out[ raapooxrv
ti[ [ioopiov. ouog or t[ Ioiiioo rioioopou iioto xo totr
ruopgxuo, ri oaovovto rioaraev aoi xo ovo oaripov ti ai[Oo
ouv[yrv pgtev, oi ruOre rp[to xoto tou t[v rpyooov aopooovto.
He next contrived to play a very crafty trick: with the avowed object of
protecting all the Jews of Syria from the use of oil not supplied by their
own countrymen, he sought and obtained permission to deliver it to them
at the frontier. He then bought up that commodity, paying Tyrian coin of
the value of four Attic drachms for four amphorae and proceeded to sell
half an amphora at the same price. As Galilee is a special home of the
olive and the crop had been plentiful, John, enjoying a monopoly, by send-
ing large quantities to districts in want of it, amassed an immense sum of
5
See R. Marcus, ed., Josephus: Works, vol. VII, Appendix c, The early Seleucid Rul-
ers and the Jews, Cambridge, Mass., 1943, repr. 1966, pp. 73742.
190 chapter sixteen
money, which he forthwith employed against the man who had brought
him his gains.
However tendentious and exaggerated the attack, Josephus must have
assumed that it would at least sound plausible to Jewish readers. The
oil supplied [ oi` oouiev in this passage is the equivalent of the
oiiouiov rioiov in the passage from Antiquities rst quoted.
When Josephus returned to the same incident in his later account in
the Vita (746), he gave a slightly different version of the same events.
xo orutrpov `Ievvg rariorrprv aovoupyov rg yop `Iouooou to
t[v 4iiaaou Koiopriov xotoixouvto, ouyxrxiriorvou xoto apootoy[v
tou ooiire uao Mooou tou t[v ouvootrov oioixouvto, araorvoi apo
outov aopoxoiouvto, rario[ oux rouoiv rioiov poovtoi xoOopov,
aoigorvov apovoiov ruaopov outoi toutou aopooriv, [ oi` ovyxgv
Eiigvix pervoi to voio aopooveoiv. touto o` ou ua` ruorro
riryrv `Ievg, oi` oiopoxrporiov or ovrpettgv. yiveoxev yop aopo rv
rxrvoi xoto t[v Koiopriov to ouo roto opo[ io aeiourvou,
rv or toi Iioioi to oyoo\xovto roto opoev troopev, aov to
rioiov oov \v rxri oiraroto, ioev rouoov xo aop` rou to ooxriv
ou yop rxev rartpraov, oiio oio oov tov oao tou ai\Oou, [ xeiuev
xotoiruoOrgv ua` outev. ouyep\oovto ouv ou airotev pgtev o
`Ievvg rx t[ xoxoupyo toutg ruaopgor.
This knavish trick John followed up with a second. He stated that the
Jewish inhabitants of Caesarea Philippi, having, by the kings order, been
shut up by Modius, his viceroy, and having no pure oil with which to
anoint themselves, had sent a request to him to see that they were sup-
plied with this commodity, lest they should be driven to violate their legal
ordinances by resort to Grecian oil. Johns motive in making this assertion
was not piety, but proteering of the most barefaced description; for he
knew that at Caesarea two pints were sold for one drachm, whereas at
Gischala eighty pints could be had for four drachms. So he sent off all
the oil in the place, having ostensibly obtained my authority to do so. My
permission I gave reluctantly, from fear of being stoned by the mob if I
withheld it. Thus, having gained my consent, John by this sharp practice
made an enormous prot.
The story as a whole is more plausible in this version. Only the Jews
of Caesarea Philippi are involved, and it is easier to imagine economic
interchange of this sort in the middle of a war if it took place between
the rebels in Galilee and the subjects of the Jewish, if pro-Roman, king
Agrippa II, than to credit the claim in B.J. that John traded with all the
Jews in Syria, a province rmly controlled by the Roman enemy. In
this case the kosher oil, described as pure (xoOopov), is contrasted to a
specic form of gentile oil, namely Grecian oil (riigvixov). It is asserted
kosher olive oil in antiquity 191
that the concern of the Jews in Caesarea Philippi was over the use of
such oil for anointing themselves (if, as I think preferable, the minority
manuscript reading poovtoi is read rather than p\oovtoi). Again,
it is signicant that Josephus took it for granted that his readers would
appreciate the issues at stakeunlike his earlier works, Josephus Vita
was aimed primarily at a Jewish audience. For such readers the state-
ment that Jews using Grecian oil would transgress the laws (to voio
aopooveoiv) would sound like a straightforward statement that such
behaviour involved breaking the Torah.
If such an attitude was so standard among Jews at the end of the
rst century CE, some explanation needs to be found for the remark-
able statement dropped into the Mishnah tractate Abodah Zarah (2.6),
redacted a little over a century later.
These things of gentiles are forbidden, but it is not prohibited to derive
any benet from them: milk that a gentile milked but no Israelite watched
him, and their bread and their oilRabbi and his court permitted the
oilboiled or preserved vegetables into which it is their custom to put
wine or vinegar, and hashed, pickled sh, and brine in which no sh is
distinguishable (with no sticklebacks oating in it), and the nless sh, and
drops of asafoetida, and lumpy salt. Behold, these are forbidden, but it is
not prohibited to have any benet from them.
Rabbi and his court permitted the oil. The clause looks like a later
insertion into a list of the forbidden food of idolaters. It does not t its
present context either in its meaning or in its grammar. In the Babylo-
nian Talmud (b. Abodah Zarah 37a) it is in one place assumed that it was
not R. Judah I but his grandson, R. Judah Nesiah, who took the lenient
decision described. Since the Mishnah was compiled by R. Judah I, the
lack of editing to incorporate the words into the surrounding texts ts
well into the tradition that the reform took place two generations after
his time. However, both Talmuds also referred the reform at other places
to R. Judah I.
6
Perhaps in the case of a controversial decision which re-
6
See b. Abodah Zarah 36a and y. Abodah Zarah 2.8, 41d, both cited below. H. Albeck,
Shisha Sidrei Mishnah, Seder Nezikin, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1953, p. 331, asserts simply
that the Mishnah refers to R. Judah Nesiah.
192 chapter sixteen
lied on the authority of the issuing court and which elicited opposition
(as the gemara attests [see below]), both patriarchs felt impelled to issue
decrees, just as Roman emperors sometimes reissued laws when they
were not widely observed.
The Mishnah text itself gave absolutely no explanation either for the
original ban or for its lifting. This is not unusual for halakhic decisions
recorded in tannaitic texts, but this particular case rather puzzled the
amoraim, as can be seen from an examination of the discussion of the
point in the Babylonian Talmud. The most relevant part of the text, to
be found at b. Abodah Zarah 35b36a, reads as follows.
1
2
3
4
5
. . .
Section 1: And their oil. As regards oil Rab said: Daniel decreed against
its use; but Samuel said: The residue from their unclean vessels renders it
kosher olive oil in antiquity 193
prohibited. Is this to say that people generally are concerned to eat their
food in a state of ritual purity!Rather the residue from their prohibited
vessels renders it prohibited.
Section 2: Samuel said to Rab: According to my explanation that the
residue from their prohibited vessels renders it prohibited, it is quite right
that when R. Isaac b. Samuel b. Martha came he related that R. Sim-
lai expounded in Nisibis: As regards oil R. Judah and his Court took a
vote and declared it permitted, holding the opinion that [when the for-
bidden element] imparts a worsened avour [the mixture] is permitted.
But according to your statement that Daniel decreed against it, [can it be
thought that] Daniel made a decree and R. Judah the Prince then came
and annulled it? For have we not learned: A Court is unable to annul the
decisions of another Court, unless it is superior to it in wisdom and nu-
merical strength!
Section 3: Rab replied to him: You quote Simlai of Lud; but the inhabit-
ants of Lud are different because they are neglectful. [Samuel] said to
him: Shall I send for him? [Rab] thereupon grew alarmed and said: If [R.
Judah and his Court] have not made proper research, shall we not do so?
Surely it is written, But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not
dele himself with the kings meat nor with the wine of his drinkingthe
verse speaks of two drinkings, the drinking of wine and the drinking of
oil! Rab was of the opinion that Daniel purposed in his own heart and
decided similarly for all Israel; whereas Samuel was of the opinion that he
purposed in his own heart but did not decide similarly for all Israel.
Section 4: But did Daniel decree against oil? Behold Bali declared that
Abimi the Nabatean said in the name of Rab: Their bread, oil, wine and
daughters are all included in the eighteen things! Should you argue that
Daniel came and made the decree but it was not accepted, and then the
disciples of Hillel and Shammai came and made the decree and it was
accepted; in that case what was the purpose of Rabs testimony?But
Daniel decreed against the use of the oil in a city, and [the disciples] came
and decreed against its use even in a eld.
Section 5: How, then, was it possible for R. Judah the Prince to permit
[what was forbidden by] the ordinance of the disciples of Shammai and
Hillel, seeing that we have learned: A court is unable to annul the deci-
sions of another Court, unless it is superior to it in wisdom and numeri-
cal strength! Furthermore, Rabbah b. Bar Hanah has said in the name
of R. Johanan: In all matters a Court can annul the decisions of another
Court except the eighteen things, for even were Elijah and his Court to
come we must not listen to him!R. Mesharsheya said: The reason is be-
cause their prohibition has spread among the large majority of Israelites,
but the prohibition concerning oil did not so spread.
The amoraim were concerned to establish whether the original in-
terdiction was a precaution against contamination by vessels rendered
194 chapter sixteen
unkosher by other ingredients or was the result of a decree issued either
by Daniel (relying on the pleonastic wine of his drinking in Daniel
1.8, which they took to include oil as a second forbidden beverage after
wine) or by the Houses of Hillel and Shammai as one of the eighteen
decisions of the disciples at the start of the great revolt against Rome.
The main rabbis cited, Samuel and Rab, taught in the second quarter
of the third century or later and, since they appear to respond to it, pre-
sumably after the lifting of the ban by R. Judah Nesiah. Two reasons are
given in this passage for that lifting. According to R. Simlai, as quoted
by R. Isaac b. Samuel b. Martha, R. Judah held that the forbidden ele-
ment in the oil imparts a worse avour, and therefore the oil is permit-
ted. The second opinion is put forward in the name of R. Mesharsheya,
that the ban was in any case not in general accepted by Jews.
Discussion of the various opinions put forward by the sages in this
passage may be further complicated by noting a variant reading of line
3, which is to be found in the early commentaries.
7
These texts, which
read instead of , imply in the light of
t. Abodah Zarah 4(5).8 that Samuels opinion was that it was not the dis-
charge of the impure or forbidden vessels in which oil was stored that
made it unt, but that they were deled through the gentile habit of
sprinkling olives with wine or vinegar to facilitate the removal of the
pits. This understanding of the Mishnahs prohibition brings the ban on
oil into the same category as the vegetables which are mentioned next
in the text, since they too are prohibited because sprinkled with wine or
vinegar. However, no reference is made to such sprinkling in the ban on
gentile milk and bread, which appear immediately before the ban on oil
in the Mishnah text.
Reference to the discussion of the same Mishnah in the Yerushalmi
( y. Abodah Zarah 2.9, 41d) produces more opinions but no greater clarity
on any of these issues.
1
2
7
For the rest of this paragraph, see Z.A. Steinfeld, Concerning the Prohibition
against Gentile Oil, Tarbiz 49 (1980), pp. 26477.
kosher olive oil in antiquity 195
3
4
5
6
7
1: Who forbade the oil? Rab Judah said, Daniel forbade it: And Daniel
resolved, etc.
2: And who permitted it? Rabbi and his court. In three settings R. Judah
the patriarch is referred to as our rabbi, in the context of writs of di-
vorce, oil, and [producing an abortion in the shape of a] sandal. In con-
sequence they referred to his court as the court that permitted anointing
[with oil]. Any court that gave a lenient ruling in three matters is called a
permissive court.
3: Said R. Judan, Rabbis court differed from him in the matter of the
writ of divorce. What is [the issue]? That [the woman] is permitted to
[re]marry. R. Haggai said, She is permitted to marry. R. Yose said, She
is forbidden to marry.
4: R. Aha, R. Tanhum bar Hiyya in the name of R. Haninah, and some
say it in the name of R. Joshua b. Levi: Because they were going up to the
Royal Mountain and being put to death on it.
5: Isaac bar Samuel bar Marta went down to Nisibis. He found Simlai,
the southerner, sitting and expounding: Rabbi and his court permitted
oil. He said [the rule before] Samuel, but Rab did not accept the rule for
himself or eat. He said to him, Samuel ate. If you do not do the same,
I shall decree concerning you that you are a rebellious elder. [Rab]
replied to him, When I was still there [in the Land], I know that Simlai,
196 chapter sixteen
the southerner, rejected. [Samuel] said to him, Did [Simlai] say this in
his own name? Did he not say it in the name of R. Judah Nesiah? Samuel
nagged him about the matter until he too ate.
6: R. Yohanan raised the question: And have we not learned in the Mish-
nah that a court has not got the power to nullify the opinion of another
court unless it is greater than it in wisdom and in numbers? Now how is it
possible that Rabbi and his court should permit what Daniel and his col-
leagues had prohibited?
7: R. Yohanan is consistent with his opinion expressed elsewhere. For
R. Yohanan said, I have received it as a tradition from R. Eleazar of
the school of R. Sadoq that any decree a court should issue, and which
the majority of the community should not accept upon itself, is no de-
cree. They looked into the matter and found in the decree against oil and
they did not nd that the majority of the community had accepted upon
itself.
The view ascribed in the Babylonian Talmud to Rab, that the ban was
initiated by Daniel, was here attributed to his pupil R. Judah bar Ezekiel
( . end of third century). No mention was made of any discussion by the
Houses of Hillel and Shammai. Some modern scholars have assumed
that the obscure statement given by R. Aha and (?) R. Tanhum bar
Hiyya in the name of R. Haninah or R. Joshua b. Levi, the last named
being an amora contemporary with R. Judah Nesiah, that something
happened because they were going up to the Mountain of the King
and being killed (on this account? on the mountain?) was given as an
explanation of the acceptance of Daniels prohibition, on the grounds
that Jews thus avoided the gentiles who inhabited the mountain.
8
But
this is not the only possible interpretation of the phrase, for other schol-
ars have supposed that, on the contrary, it was intended to explain the
lifting of the ban, on the grounds that the mountain was farmed by Jews
and was therefore the best place to get pure oil.
9
It also seems to me pos-
sible that neither of these hypotheses is correct and that the statement
8
Cf. J. Neusner, The Talmud of the Land of Israel: a Preliminary Translation and Explanation,
vol. 33, Abodah Zarah, Chicago, 1982, p. 99. In favor of this interpretation, note that in
the parallel version of this passage in y. Shabb. 1.5, 3d section 4 is placed immediately
after section 1.
9
Cf. A. Oppenheimer, The Am Ha-aretz: a Study in the Social History of the Jewish Peo-
ple in the Hellenistic-Roman Period, trans. I.H. Levine, Leiden, 1977, p. 65. G. Alon, The
Jews in their Land in their Talmudic Age (70640 CE), trans. G. Levi, vol. II, Jerusalem,
1984, p. 736, also understood the text in this way and suggested that the enthusiasm of
R. Simlai of Lod for the lifting of the ban was occasioned by the greater threat to safety
in the south than in Galilee, since the royal mountain is to be located in the Judaean
hill country.
kosher olive oil in antiquity 197
may have referred not to oil at all, but to the issue raised in the imme-
diately preceding discussion in the talmudic text, which concerned the
remarriage of a widow whose husband had given her a writ of divorce
to become valid if he did not return within twelve months but had died
within that period.
These diverse explanations by the amoraim of the ban on gentile oil
seem to me irreconcilable and the distinction proposed anonymously in
the Babylonian Talmud passage (Section 4) between decrees valid in a
city and those valid in a eld strikes me as a counsel of desperation by an
editor or editors determined to resolve discord whenever possible. Such
irreconcilability is not altogether uncommon in rabbinic texts. More
signicant is the weakness of each of the amoraic opinions when they
are examined individually. Such weakness can only be demonstrated by
looking at each opinion in some detail.
Following the order in the Babylonian Talmud, I shall start with the
views of Rab, who ascribed the ban both to Daniel and to the eighteen
decisions of the Houses of Hillel and Shammai. Neither notion is very
convincing. Rabs exegesis of Daniel 1.8 was hardly the obvious reading
of the biblical text and seems to have been unknown to earlier commen-
tators on the passage. Thus Josephus described Daniel and his friends as
determined to stay vegetarian but prepared to eat any non-animal food
provided to them (AJ 10.190194).
As for the ascription of the decree to the eighteen decisions of the
Houses in 66 CE, the link was not mentioned in the discussion of oil
in the Jerusalem Talmud or in the earliest extant rabbinic lists of the
components of the decrees. In the Mishnah (m. Shabb. 1.4) the precise
contents of the decrees were not spelled out and the whole discussion in
b. Shabb. 13b17b presupposes great uncertainty as to what they were.
In y. Shabb. 1.5, 3c, the list of eighteen things ascribed to R. Shimon bar
Yohai ( . mid second century) did not include oil, although oil was in-
cluded in an anonymous baraita in the same passage.
10
But in any case
it is hard to reconcile an origin of the custom in 66 with Josephus
assertion that the taboo was already long-standing in Antioch by that
time, and it can be reckoned most unlikely that Josephus would have
mentioned the custom with apparent approval if it had originated in a
10
On the decrees, see the recent discussion of the tradition in I. Ben-Shalom, The
Shammai School and its Place in the Political and Social History of Eretz Israel in the
First Century AD, Ph.D. thesis Tel Aviv, 1980, pp. 56298 (in Heb.).
198 chapter sixteen
t of anti-Roman zealotry. It is worth noting that the Jews of Syria and/
or Caesarea Philippi who observed the taboos in 67 CE were presum-
ably not strongly anti-Roman since they had not gone south to join their
compatriots in revolt. ( Josephus stated [Vita 74] that the Jews had been
shut up in Caesarea Philippi by Modius, Agrippa IIs viceroy, but if John
of Gischalas kosher oil could get in, presumably Jews could get out.)
Attempts have been made in the past to circumvent this problem of
an apparent conict between the evidence in Josephus and the evidence
in the Talmud by distinguishing the ban described by Josephus from
that ascribed to the Houses.
11
Thus, as Hoenig pointed out, the prohibi-
tion to which Josephus referred was observed in the diaspora and is not
explicitly attested in Judaea, where the Houses issued their decree. Hoe-
nig claimed that this is best explained if the diaspora ban was observed
only as a way of avoiding idolatry, and the xenophobic decree of the
Houses was therefore something new and specically Judaean. The idea
is not impossible but, although oil was indeed one ingredient in pagan
ritual, this fact is not given as a reason for avoiding gentile oil in any an-
cient text. It may be added in support of Hoenig that Josephus seems to
have envisaged a taboo on the use of gentile oil as an ointment whereas
the rabbinic texts include oil in the list of forbidden foods but, again, I
am not sure how much can be made of this. It may be assumed that any
substance considered unt as ointment was a fortiori reckoned unsuitable
as food. (The only reason I can nd to doubt this is the testimony of
Josephus [B.J. 2.123], that Essenes, who may well have used oil of some
kind in their food, refused to put any oil on their bodies, reckoning it as
a delement [x\iioo]. But the case was not strictly parallel, for Essenes
simply wished to keep their skin dry.) In any case the contrast betwen
oil as food and oil as ointment may be spurious, for the word used to
designate oil in one place (Section 2) in the Jerusalem Talmud passage
quoted above was , i.e. anointing.
Rather more convincing than Rabs ascription of the ban to a de-
cree at one time or another is the explanation for the ban put forward
according to the Babylonian Talmud by Mar Samuel, that the oil was
in some way contaminated by gentiles additives. This view ts in with
11
Hoenig, Oil, passim. G. Alon, Jews, Judaism and the Classical World, trans. I. Abra-
hams, Jerusalem, 1977, pp. 15657, suggested that the eighteen decrees (including the
ban on oil) were a reinforcement of non-biblical halakhot about gentile food which were
not sufciently observed in some circles. This is possible, but there is no rst-century
evidence for such failure to observe the taboo on oil.
kosher olive oil in antiquity 199
Josephus description of Jewish oil as pure (Vita 74), and, as Samuel
is made to point out in the Talmudic passage (Section 2), it did at least
make sense of the reason for lifting the ban attributed to R. Judah by
R. Simlai, that when the forbidden element in a mixture imparts a wors-
ened avour the mixture is permitted.
But that reason itself has an air of improvization. The residue or
sprinkling believed to make oil forbidden consisted probably of gentile
wine suspected of use in libations, although it cannot be shown that
other contaminants were not also envisaged. If residue is read, it is
possible that an amphora or other container once used for wine and re-
used for oil might impart a taste to the oil; if it was resinated wine, the
taste of the oil might be rather unpleasant, so that the alleged reason
for lifting the ban would also make sense. However, there is not much
evidence for such re-use of amphorae or other vessels, for reasons which
are clear enough: if the wine residue made the oil taste worse, gen-
tiles will only have re-used vessels when no more appropriate container
was available. Since the quantity of pottery produced throughout the
Roman empire was vast, this was surely a rare occurrence, and it is hard
to imagine that suspicion of such delement was the main reason for
the banning of gentile oil. Similar arguments apply to the sprinkling of
olives with wine or vinegar by gentiles, if is read rather than (see
above). The practice certainly occurred, for it is explicitly described at
t. Abodah Zarah 4(5).8. But it can surely be assumed that, unless the gen-
tiles concerned were very foolish, the custom was not believed to impart
a worse taste to the oil.
It seems to me best to stop looking for biblical proof texts or specic
occasions for the ban and to accept instead that the confusion of the
amoraic sources may have reected a genuine lack of considered rea-
sons for the prohibition. That is to say, the widespread custom among
Jews of avoiding gentile oil may have been based neither on biblical exe-
gesis nor on a decision by an accepted authority but on a pervasive reli-
gious instinct which was all the more powerful for its lack of rationale.
The instinct to avoid gentile foodstuffs of various common kinds was
a novel phenomenon among Jews of the late Persian or early Hellenistic
period. It had no explicit connection with a concern for levitical purity.
Since it occurred after the composition of most of the holy books even-
tually reckoned canonical, the phenomenon was hardly attested in bib-
lical texts which could be used as justication for the custom. The late
books in which the practice is assumed (e.g. Judith 10.5; 12.14; Tobit
1.1011) were not included in sacred scripture, apart from the book of
200 chapter sixteen
Daniel.
12
It is a plausible hypothesis (which by its very nature can neither
be proved nor disproved) that this extension of food taboos to separate
not just holy from profane but, more specically, Jew from gentile, is
best explained by social and cultural changes in the lives of Jews in this
period rather than the development of novel religious theories.
If this is correct, it may be misleading to describe intertestamental
Judaism as did the amoraim, as if it consisted essentially in a number
of competing systems of halakhah which differed either because of the
decrees of competing religious authorities or because of their divergent
methods of interpreting the Bible. Biblical interpretation was undoubt-
edly one generating force in religious innovation. But in many cases
where a biblical text was cited in support of particular behaviour, the
impetus for that behaviour was already present in the form of custom or
instinctive attitude. Whether such custom counted as part of the Torah
for any set of Jews was perhaps only a matter of terminology. It might
also depend on the audience addressed: some of the unexpected items
in Josephus list of the Jewish laws in C. Ap. 2.190219, such as the Jew-
ish ban on taking spoils from the corpses of their enemies (212), might
be seen by some Jews as custom rather than law, but it suited Josephus
apologetic when writing for gentiles to include such philanthropic be-
haviour within the law.
13
If the taboo depended on instinct rather than biblical interpretation
or a religious authority, why and how was it successfully abolished? It
cannot be said that the reasons given in the rabbinic sources themselves
for the decision by R. Judah and his court are very convincing. The view
attributed to R. Judah by R. Simlai, that mixture with a forbidden sub-
stance did not invalidate oil because it left a bad taste, has been discussed
above and found not impossible but rather implausible. Little can be
achieved by expatiating on the strange reference, also discussed above,
to death on the Kings Mountain. It is hard to know how much credence
to give to the claim of R. Mesharsheya that the ban was easily lifted be-
cause it was not observed by the majority of Israel; since Mesharsheya
spoke in the name R. Samuel b. Abba, who in turn quoted R. Yohanan,
the younger contemporary of R. Judah Nesiah, he himself probably
taught a considerable time after R. Judah and may not have preserved
12
Note that among the gentile foodstuffs avoided by Judith was gentile oil ( Judith
10.5).
13
See G. Vermes, A Summary of the Law by Flavius Josephus, NT 24 (1982), pp.
289303.
kosher olive oil in antiquity 201
accurate traditions about religious attitudes which prevailed long before
his birth. It is difcult to explain why Jews should have dropped the
traditional aversion to gentile oil which had apparently been so keenly
felt in Josephus day. It may be worth pointing out that, according to the
Jerusalem Talmud passage quoted above (Section 7), Yohanan taught
not that the nasis lifting of the ban was justied but that it was unnec-
essary, because any decree which the majority of Jews ignore is not a
decree, and this was the case with Daniels prohibition of gentile oil.
If adoption of any one of the amoraic opinions is not satisfactory,
the only way to account both for R. Judahs action and for the diver-
sity of rabbinic opinion about it is to construct a plausible model into
which the disparate evidence can be seen to t. Various more or less
fanciful pictures can be imagined. It is not impossible, for example, that
R. Judah issued a deliberate challenge to his contemporaries deep re-
ligious feelings in order to demonstrate his authority by imposing his
will; some evidence survives of a power struggle between the nasi and
the sages in his day and the issue of gentile oil might have been a trial of
strength.
14
More plausible is an economic motive, although quite what
it would be is hard to envisage: the Jews in Galilee for whom R. Judah
Nesiah is most likely to have legislated in the mid-third century inhab-
ited one of the more favoured olive producing regions of the Near East
and, whatever other goods they may have lacked, it is implausible that
Jewish olive oil was a scarce commodity. If there were other, more com-
plex, economic reasons for lifting the ban, no evidence of their nature
survives.
15
It seems to me that a more plausible model may be constructed by
trying to explain rabbinic legislation about gentile oil against the back-
ground of a general picture of the development of Jewish law in the
Hellenistic and early Roman periods. There are good reasons to sup-
pose that much of the law enshrined in the Mishnah was not originally
14
On the relationship of the nasi to the rabbis, see L.I. Levine, The Jewish Patriarch
(Nasi) in Third Century Palestine, ANRW II (Principat) 19, part 2 (1979), pp. 67880.
15
Cf. M. Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, AD 132212, Totowa, NJ, 1983,
p. 276, with a brief discussion of other possible (but hypothetical) economic arguments,
such as the possibility that high quality Galilean oil might be exported at a sufciently
high price to pay for imports of low grade foreign (gentile) oil, while leaving a surplus for
other purchases. S. Applebaum, Judea as a Roman province: the countryside as a politi-
cal and economic factor, ANRW II (Principal) 8 (1977), p. 373 n. 84, puts forward an
ingenious argument that the ban was lifted to benet middlemen who purchased olives
for resale. The Jews who would benet most might be those in the Diaspora, but there
no evidence that a third-century nasi would legislate with them primarily in mind.
202 chapter sixteen
enacted by rabbis but existed before 70 CE in the form of customary
law. Thus the marriage, divorce and contract law in use in the early sec-
ond century in the Dead Sea area had much in common with the law
presupposed by the Mishnah.
16
This does not require (though it does
not preclude) the origin of that law having been in rabbinical schools
but it is more likely that the Mishnah consists to a large extent of the
rationalization of an existing legal system. Such rationalization involved
deduction following a series of rules, some of which were at some time
codied as the thirteen middoth of R. Ishmael (Sifra Lev. 1). Whenever
possible a rule was to be derived from an existing rule or directly from
a biblical text.
In most cases a rationale of current behaviour could be found but not
all existing custom could pass the rabbis logical test. The hypothesis I
wish to propose is that R. Judah could nd no such valid arguments for
the ban on gentile olive oil, and that he therefore decided that it should
be abolished.
How plausible is this reconstruction of events? It cannot of course
be proved, but the curious data from Josephus and the rabbinic texts
discussed in this paper can all, I think, be accounted for more or less
satisfactorily if it is taken as correct. It may be assumed that the tradi-
tion mooted after R. Judahs decision by Rab, that the ban was one of
the eighteen decisions of the Houses in 66 CE, was not accepted by (or
known to?) the patriarch since, as Rabbah b. Bar Hanah stated in the
name of R. Yohanan in the Babylonian Talmud passage (Section 5),
it was not permitted to overthrow such decisions and R. Judah would
therefore have been courting unnecessary trouble by doing so. It may
further be assumed that, if he was aware of Rabs other suggestion that
the prohibition derived from Daniel 1.8, he found it unreasonably far-
fetchedaccording to Rab in the extract quoted above from the Baby-
lonian Talmud (Section 3), of course, he was ignorant of the Daniel
proof text because he had failed to undertake proper research.
To sum up. What I suggest is that, since no reason for the ban could
be found by extension of existing halakhah or by biblical exegesis,
R. Judah was forced to surmise an explanation of the taboo. All he
could come up with was the supposition that contamination from the
vessels or gentile sprinkling habits must have been the issue. But such
16
See P. Benoit, J.T. Milik and R. de Vaux, Les Grottes de Murabba{at (Discoveries in the
Judaean Desert, vol. II), Oxford, 1960.
kosher olive oil in antiquity 203
an explanation seemed to him patently unsatisfactory. His only possible
reaction was to lift the ban.
If this hypothesis is accepted, the whole saga may bear a lesson of
somewhat wider signicance. Codication may sometimes have implied
leniency. If so, the general picture derived both from the rabbinic tra-
dition itself and from the hostile depiction of Judaism in some early
Christian texts may usefully be adjusted. According to that picture, hal-
akhah was a system that constantly increased the burden of the law by
seeking new ramications for its effective imposition. But in some cases
at the start of rabbinic codication in the tannaitic and early amoraic
period the same processes of legalism may have had an opposite effect.
If my suggestion is correct, it was precisely the rationalization of the
halakhah that eventually abolished the concept of gentile olive oil as
unkosher. At any rate, since soon after the time of R. Judah Nesiah, all
Jews, it seems, have used such oil with a good conscience.
17
17
I am grateful to participants at the Symposium on Jewish Food, held in Yarnton
in June 1989, and to the members of the regular Yarnton discussion group in October
1989, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE JEWISH IMAGE OF GOD IN LATE ANTIQUITY*
The signicance of the depiction of the sun god as the central gure
of the zodiac mosaics found in many Palestinian synagogues of late
antiquity has been long debated. The most artistically sophisticated
of these depictions, that found in the Hammat Tiberias mosaic, vari-
ously dated between the beginning and the end of the fourth century
CE,
1
was only one example of a common motif which appears also
in a less impressive form at Naaran and in near-caricature in the
sixth-century synagogue at Beth Alpha, while the synagogue mosaic
at Sepphoris simply illustrated the shining sun.
2
Both inscriptions and
the distinctively Jewish iconography of the other mosaic oors in
the synagogues demonstrate that the buildings in question served a
religious purpose for Jews.
3
So what, in the mind of the artist ( Jew
or gentile) or the commissioning patron or patrons or community,
was the function of the apparently pagan image situated so as to
confront Jews at their feet as they worshipped?
Over the years various suggestions have been made. An early
hypothesis that the synagogue decoration reected the taste of non-
Jewish, perhaps imperial, patrons has come to seem less attractive
* I am grateful for comments on this paper from Jas Elsner and the editors of
this volume, and to participants in seminars on this subject in Oxford, London and
Southampton as well as in New York.
1
M. Dothan, Hammat Tiberias: Early Synagogues and the Hellenistic and Roman Remains
( Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1983). On the date, see M. Goodman, The
Roman State and the Jewish Patriarch in the Third Century, in Galilee in Late
Antiquity (ed. L.I. Levine; Jerusalem and New York: Jewish Theological Seminary,
1992), 130, n. 11, and J. Magness, Archaeological Testimonies: Helios and the
Zodiac Cycle in Ancient Palestinian Synagogues, in Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power
of the Past (Albright Centennial Volume) (ed. W.G. Dever and S. Gitin; Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 36389.
2
Z. Weiss and E. Netzer, Promise and Redemption: A Synagogue Mosaic from Sepphoris
( Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1996).
3
For the inscriptions from Hammat Tiberias, see Dothan, Hammat Tiberias, 5262;
on the common Jewish symbols (lulavim, shofar, etc.) found in the other mosaics,
see E.R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Graeco-Roman Period (13 vols.; New York:
Pantheon Books, 19531968).
206 cn.r+rn sr\rx+rrx
as the wide extent of the phenomenon has come to be realized.
4
Nor does the ascription of such motifs to deviant, non-rabbinic Jews
carry much weight since the discovery that the Hammat Tiberias
mosaic was dedicated by, among others, a member of the household
of the patriarch.
5
Claims that the zodiacs were primarily intended
as calendrical reminders of the passing months are possible in the
general sense that they may celebrate the order inherent in Gods
universe,
6
but as strict calendars their use is questionable in the
light of the inaccuracies of the Beth Alpha mosaicist, who failed to
correlate the signs correctly with the seasons;
7
but in any case, the
hypothesis fails to explain the depiction of the sun god in human
form, presumably a deliberate choice at Hammat Tiberias, Naaran
and Beth Alpha since the Sepphoris mosaicist took a dierent path
and showed the sun as a shining orb.
8
The assertion by Morton
Smith that the sun god depicted a great angel, important for the
liturgy,
9
based on the image of Helios as a celestial gure in the
mystical treatise Sefer Harazim, has the merit of connecting the visual
to the literary remains from late antiquity but raises the dicult
question, so far unanswered, of the reason why Jews might depict
this angel as so central a gure in their iconography.
My suggestion in this paper is that all previous discussions of these
mosaics have shied away unnecessarily from the interpretation that the
divine gure depicted in the center of a Jewish place of worship may
have been intended to represent the God of the Jews. In the context
4
See the discussion in E.L. Sukenik, Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece
(London: Milford, 1934), 6263.
5
For this argument, see Goodenough, Jewish Symbols; on the inscription by Severus,
see Dothan, Hammat Tiberias, 5760. The view that the mosaic is non-rabbinic
is also proposed by L.I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity
( Jerusalem and New York: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and Jewish Theological Seminary,
1989), 17881.
6
Calendrical argument in Dothan, Hammat Tiberias, 49; S. Fine, This Holy Place:
On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Graeco-Roman Period (Christianity and Judaism
in Antiquity Series 11; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 124,
2001 (with extensive bibliography). For the more general interpretation and wide
discussion, see G. Foerster, Representations of the Zodiac in Ancient Synagogues,
ErIsr 18 (1985): 38091; idem, The Zodiac in the Ancient Synagogue and its Place
in Jewish Thought and Literature, ErIsr 19 (1987): 22534 (both in Hebrew).
7
Cf. G. Stemberger, Die Bedeutung des Tierkreises auf Mosaikbden sptantiker
Synagogen, Kairos 17 (1975): 2356.
8
Weiss and Netzer, Promise and Redemption, 3536.
9
M. Smith, Helios in Palestine, ErIsr 16 (1982): 199*214*, esp. p. 210*.
+nr rvisn iv.or or oor ix r.+r .x+iti+v 207
of any other religious cult place in the Roman world archaeologists
would have taken for granted that the god depicted in a shrine was
likely to be the (or a) god worshipped in that shrine. My intention
in this study is not to give a full interpretation of the images of the
sun god in synagogues, which can be achieved only by analyzing
their role within the zodiacs and the role of the zodiacs themselves,
but to elucidate one possible way that Jews in late antiquity might
have understood them when confronted by them as they prayed.
Standard interpretations of the sun god image in synagogues
derive their timidity from the ambiguous and contradictory Jewish
traditions as to whether God has any form and, if so, whether
that form is anthropomorphic.
10
The contradictions go back to the
Bible, where Pentateuchal passages which presumed that God can
be seen by humans, including the Revelation on Mt. Sinai (Exod.
24: 910; cf. 33:1723), co-existed with assertions that God has
no form that humans can see or imagine (Deut. 4:1224) without
any attempt having been made in the biblical period to conate or
clarify these conicting images.
11
Nonetheless, among those biblical
passages which do presuppose a specic divine form, the predomi-
nant image is anthropomorphic on the basis of the statement in
Genesis 1:2628 that God made man in his likeness; most vivid of
these in the imagination of later interpreters of the biblical text was
the human gure on a chariot which appeared to Ezekiel as the
appearance of the semblance of the presence of the Lord (Ezekiel
1:26). On the other hand, signicant for the present discussion is
10
For general bibliography on this topic, see A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic
Doctrine of God (2 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 19271937); M. Smith,
The Image of God, BJRL 40 (1958): 473512; idem, On the Shape of God,
in Religions in Antiquity. Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (ed. J. Neusner,
Leiden: Brill, 1968), 31526; C.C. Rowland, The Visions of God in Apocalyptic
Literature, JSJ 10 (1979) 13754; J. Neusner, The Incarnation of God: The Character of
Divinity in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); P. Schfer, The Hidden
and Manifest God (transl. A. Pomerance; Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992); H. Eilberg-Schwartz, ed., People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied
Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); D. Stern, Imitatio
Hominis: Anthropomorphism and the Character(s) of God in Rabbinic Literature,
Prooftexts 12 (1992): 15174; A. Goshen-Gottstein, The Body as Image of God in
Rabbinic Literature, HTR 87 (1994): 17195; E.R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that
Shines (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1994), chap. 1; S.D. Moore, Gigantic
God; Yahwehs Body, JSOT 70 (1996): 87115; D.H. Aaron, Shedding Light on
Gods Body in Rabbinic Midrashim, HTR 90 (1997): 299314.
11
Cf. J. Barr, The Image of God, BJRL 51 (19681969): 1126.
208 cn.r+rn sr\rx+rrx
the evidence that some Jews, with or without the approval of their
brethren, thought of the divine form as being like the sun (cf. 2
Kgs 23:11; Ezek 8:16),
12
and of God as subsisting in re (Exod 3:2;
Deut 4:1112, 14; Dan 7:9).
If the biblical text permitted varied and contradictory views on
this issue, there are good grounds to expect similar variety and
contradiction in post-biblical Judaism, both because all later Judaism
was based to a greater or lesser extent on biblical interpretation and
this is particularly likely to be true of a theological issue such as the
imagining of the divine form, and because post-biblical Judaism was
particularly variegated at least up to the destruction of the Temple in
70 CE and probably far beyond.
13
In addition, extensive speculation,
for which there is much evidence, about the surroundings of God in
the heavenly realm, and especially about the roles and hierarchies
of angels,
14
may have encouraged the speculation about the divine
gure at its centre to be found eventually in the Shiur Komah texts.
Some Jewish writers in late antiquity reasserted the notion that
God has no image of any kind. In the rst century CE Josephus
claimed that it is impious to conjecture the form and magnitude
of God, which cannot be described, depicted or imagined (C.Ap.
2.1902), having stated (not wholly plausibly) in the passage immedi-
ately preceding that all Jews agree about the nature of God (2.181).
This extreme view was found also in the rather hamsted eorts of
Aristobulus in the second century BCE to use allegory to demon-
strate that it is not necessary to take literally the biblical references
to the hands, arms, face and feet of God (ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev.
8.10) and in the arguments of Philo in the rst century CE that
because God is unlike anything else he must be without body or
12
Cf. J.G. Taylor, Yahweh and the Sun (Sheeld: JSOT Press, 1993), with critique
by S. A. Wiggins, JSOT 71 (1996): 86106, with reply by Taylor.
13
On the extent of variety in late Second Temple Judaism, see M. Goodman,
Josephus and Variety in First-Century Judaism, in Israel Academy of Sciences and
Humanities. Proceedings; Volume VII, No; 6 ( Jerusalem: 2000) 20113 [Chapter 3
above]; on continued variety after 70 CE, M. Goodman, Sadducees and Essenes
after 70 CE, in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of
Michael D. Goulder (ed. S.E. Porter, P. Joyce and D. Orton; Leiden: Brill, 1994),
34756 [Chapter 13 above].
14
Cf. I Enoch 82:1420; C.A. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrice (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1985); M.J. Davidson, Angels at Qumran (Sheeld: JSOT Press,
1992); 3 Enoch 18.
+nr rvisn iv.or or oor ix r.+r .x+iti+v 209
form (Philo, Spec. 2.176).
15
In later antiquity rabbinic texts generally
used periphrases such as divine presence to refer to God
16
and in
particular the targumim applied circumlocutions to avoid translating
some of the blatant anthropomorphisms in the biblical texts from
which they derived.
17
On the other hand, the embarrassment about anthropomorphisms
sometimes displayed by the targumists was by no means consistent,
18
and sometimes Jews talked freely about God as having a human
form. One of the accusations made by Justin Martyr against the
teachers of the Jew Trypho was, according to the Dialogue he pub-
lished, their penchant for taking the human image of God literally
(Dial. 114). Justins claim was doubtless polemical, but there is also
evidence in early rabbinic literature for such literalness.
19
Attempts
have been made to distinguish anthropomorphic schools and their
opponents within early rabbinic texts, but without clear results:
20
a
great variety of human images of God were adopted in rabbinic
literature of all kinds.
21
At some time in the Hellenistic period Ezekiel
the Tragedian had envisaged God as an impressive king seated
on a throne (ed. Jacobson, lines 6872), a picture reected also in
I Enoch 14:1822, but according to y. Yoma 5:2 end, R. Abbahu
interpreted as God the old man dressed in white whom the High
Priest Simon the Just used to see in the Holy of Holies. Most refer-
ences to the human form of God are vague about gender, but there
is no doubt that he is generally envisaged as male,
22
and speculation
on his physique reaches its peak in the images of a bearded youth
of unimaginable proportions and strength on which dwell the Shiur
15
Cf. H.A. Wolfson, Philo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 2:97.
16
Cf. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine, 1:54107; M.E. Lodahl, Shekhinah/
Spirit: Divine Presence in Jewish and Christian Religion (New York: Paulist Press, 1992).
17
C. McCarthy, The Treatment of Biblical Anthropomorphisms in the
Pentateuchal Targums, in Back to the Sources (ed. K.J. Cathcart and J.F. Healey;
Dublin: Glendale, 1989), 4566.
18
See the arguments of M.L. Klein, Anthropomorphisms and Anthropopathisms in the
Targumim of the Pentateuch ( Jerusalem: Makor, 1982).
19
Cf. Marmorstein, Old Rabbinic Doctrine, 2:4856.
20
See Goshen-Gottstein, Body as Image, 17172.
21
See Marmorstein, Old Rabbinic Doctrine, 2:2393 on anthropomorphism in the
Aggadah.
22
On the texts as vague in this respect, cf. H. Eilberg-Schwartz, Gods Phallus
and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); on the male
image, cf. 'Abot R. Nat. A, 12 (God as circumcised); Neusner, Incarnation, 168.
210 cn.r+rn sr\rx+rrx
Komah texts, from 3 Enoch 48A to the medieval recensions of these
texts preserved by the mystics.
23
At the same time the biblical notion that the divine form subsists
in re ourished throughout the late Second Temple period down
into late antiquity. Thus 1 Enoch 14:1822 described the surrounds
of the divine throne as like the shining sun, with rivers of burning
re owing from beneath it, and the raiment of God as brighter
than the sun. According to Sif. Deut. 49, because God is re, it
is impossible to go up to the heavens to join him.
24
On the basis
of such passages it seems hard to avoid concluding that Josephuss
strange depiction of the Essenes as oering prayers to the sun was
not as peculiar to ordinary Jews as is sometimes imagined. According
to Josephus, B.J. 2.128129, before the sun is up, [the Essenes] oer
to him certain prayers . . . as though entreating him to rise. That
they are meant to be treating the sun as divine seems reinforced by
a slightly later passage (2.14849), which describes how the Essenes
cover their excrement to avoid oending the rays of the deity.
The claim that these Essenes were deviant Jews like those opposed
in Deut 4:1524; 17:3; I Kgs 21:3; Jer 8:2, 19:13, and elsewhere
founders on the strong approval of them as pious Jews voiced by
Josephus.
25
Morton Smiths suggestion that they revered the sun
like an angel, not God encounters the simple objection that the
sun is described by Josephus at B.J. 2.148 not as an angel but as
the godit is true that angels are sometimes called gods in the
Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but such ambiguity is not likely
in Josephuss Greek.
Enough has been said to show that Jews in late antiquity were
quite capable of imagining God both in human form and as the
sun, but it is quite another step to demonstrate that any Jews might
23
For these texts, see M.S. Cohen, Shiur Qomah: Texts and Recensions (TSAJ 9;
Tbingen: Mohr, 1985). Discussions of date and signicance in M.S. Cohen, Shi"ur
Qomah: Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism (Lanham: University
Press of America, 1983), 6667; D.J. Halperin, The Face of the Chariot (TSAJ 16;
Tbingen: Mohr, 1988), 362; Schfer, Hidden and Manifest God, 78. In general,
see J. Maier, Die Sonne im religisen Denken des antiken Judentums, ANRW
2:19/1 (1979): 346412.
24
Cf. Wolfson, Through a Speculum, 4344, on the Shekhina as light; Goshen-
Gottstein, Body as Image, passim; D.H. Aaron, Shedding Light, 31213
(despite numerous disagreements with Goshen-Gottstein, no question that within
the vast array of rabbinic materials one can nd imagery that posits Gods body
as light).
25
So Smith, Helios in Palestine, 204*.
+nr rvisn iv.or or oor ix r.+r .x+iti+v 211
produce a physical object to illustrate such images. The prohibition
on making images of God of any kind had a strong biblical base (cf.
Exod 20:23; Lev 19:4; Deut 27:15, etc.) and was evidently generally
observed by Jews both in biblical times
26
and down to the end of
the Second Temple period, when Josephus asserted that all mate-
rial is unworthy for an image of Him, however expensive, and all
artistic skill is useless for thinking about his representation (C.Ap.
2.191). In so far as any physical object could be said to embody the
divinity it was the scroll of the Torah, which was carried in Tituss
triumph through the streets of Rome at the end of the procession
of cult objects from the Temple as a symbol of the Jewish God
( Josephus, B.J. 7.150). That Jews had no physical image of their
God was well known to pagans, who generally viewed it as a bizarre
trait (Hecataeus, ap. Diodorus 40.3.4; Livy, ap. Scholia in Lucanum
2.593; Strabo, Geog. 16.2.35; Cassius Dio 37.17.2), but occasionally
as admirable (Varro, ap. Augustine, Civ. 4.31), and they interpreted
Jewish reverence for Torah scrolls as equivalent to their own piety
towards their own cult statues.
27
However, Jewish reluctance to depict the divine in any physical
medium was in part a product of a general reluctance to use physi-
cal images of almost any kind: Josephus explained the uprising in
Jerusalem in 4 BCE when Herod set up an eagle image above the
entrance to the Temple by stating that it was contrary to ancestral
laws, because it is unlawful to have in the sanctuary an image or
bust of any living thing ( Josephus, B.J. 1.64855), and he claims
to have persuaded the people of Tiberias to destroy the palace of
Herod Antipas on the grounds that it contained gures of living
creatures (Vita 65). This attitude evidently changed during the follow-
ing centuries, when two-dimensional representations of human and
animal gures became common in Jewish buildings, both in mosaics
like those under discussion here and in the rather earlier complex
narrative pictures of Bible stories found in the Dura Europos syna-
gogue of the mid third century CE.
28
The simultaneous avoidance
26
See R.S. Hendel, The Social Origins of the Aniconic Tradition in Early
Israel, CBQ 50 (1988): 36582.
27
See M. Goodman, Sacred Scripture and Deling the Hands, JTS 41 (1990):
99107 [Chapter 6 above].
28
For the Dura paintings, see C.H. Kraeling, The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final
Report VIII, Part I. The Synagogue (New Haven and London: Yale University Press
and Oxford University Press, 1956).
212 cn.r+rn sr\rx+rrx
of three-dimensional art is almost certainly signicant, demonstrating
an ability among Jews as among Christians to distinguish between
images made for worship and those made for decoration.
29
Once Jews accepted in principle the notion that they could depict
some images in two dimensions, could they envisage depicting God?
The answer is equivocal. In a number of narrative pictures from Dura
Europos and in some of the mosaic depictions of the binding of Isaac
the right hand of God can be clearly seen emerging from the sky.
30
Here is a physical equivalent to the literary depictions of the divine
as anthropomorphic, even if the size of the divine handsmuch
larger than those of humansare (not surprisingly) not as gigantic
as the dimensions of Gods hands should have been according to
the Shiur Komah texts, but the restriction of the representation to the
divine hand may have been intended precisely to avoid depiction of
the rest of the divine image.
So who was the sun god on the synagogue mosaics meant to
represent? An image of God as a human gure and as a bright
sun-like re pervades Jewish literature both in the period when the
mosaics were commissioned and before. God on his chariot would
bring to the mind of any late-antique Jew the intensely mystical and
powerful images in the rst chapter of Ezekiel.
31
It was standard in
rabbinic parlance to refer to God by his location in the heavens
when making vows, oerings, prayers and oaths.
32
Pagans sometimes
thought that the Jewish God was to be identied with the heavens
(Hecateus, ap Diodorus 40.3.4; Strabo, Geog. 16.2.35),
33
although at
other times they might suggest that he was really Jupiter (Varro,
ap. Augustine, Cons. 1.22.30 [Werhrich])a sky god, of courseor,
as the third century antiquarian Cornelius Labeo asserted from the
Clarian Oracle of Apollo (ap. Macrobius, Sat. 1.18.1920), the name
29
See S. Stern, Figurative Art and Halakha in the MishnaicTalmudic Period,
Zion 61 (1996): 397419 (Hebrew); idem, Pagan Images in Late Antique Palestinian
Synagogues, in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (eds. S. Mitchell, and G. Greatrex;
London and Swansea: Duckworth and Classical Press of Wales, 2000), 24152.
30
Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, 1:2468; 10:107; 1804; examples in 3: gs. 602,
638, 1039.
31
Cf. Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, passim.
32
So Marmorstein, Old Rabbinic Doctrine, 2:1057.
33
Cf. M. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (3 vols.; Jerusalem:
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 19741984), ad loc.
+nr rvisn iv.or or oor ix r.+r .x+iti+v 213
Iao (often ascribed to the Jewish God) is actually to be identied
with Liber (i.e. Dionysus), Hades, and Zeus, and all of them in turn
are to be identied with the sun.
I do not for a moment wish to leave an impression that the prob-
lem is simply solved by all this. After all, other pagan texts in the
second and third centuries CE reveal their awareness of the Jewish
belief that their God has no image at all (Numenius of Apamaea,
ap. Origen, Cels. 1.15; Cassius Dio 37.17.2). There is good rabbinic
evidence that too literal a worship of the sun as divine would incur
the hostility of at least some fellow Jews: according to t. Ber. 6 (7):6,
if one says a blessing over the sun, this is heterodoxy (another
way). Much is to be said for the seeming paradox that Jews could
indulge boldly in human and solar images of the divine precisely
because they took it as axiomatic that God does not in fact possess
a physical form of any kind.
34
If the images on the mosaics were
reminders of the God worshipped in the synagogues, rather than cult
objects for worship in themselves, it would be unsurprising if a Jew
could walk over the mosaic without scruples. There is no evidence
that any pagan polytheists who depicted Olympian or other gods on
a mosaic oor, a common practice, ever felt concerned about sacri-
lege. It is unlikely that these mosaics were ever the central focus in
liturgy, since nothing suggests that worshippers looked down at their
feet when praying, so the depiction of the sun-god as a much smaller
gure in the synagogue mosaics than in contemporary pagan zodiacs
is irrelevant for determining the meaning of the gure depicted for
either the artist or the commissioning patron.
Up to now I have tried to explain these images to be found in
the later Roman synagogues in terms of internal developments within
Judaism, but it would be quite wrong to ignore the impact of the
wider religious changes in the contemporary world which encouraged
the owering of this specic iconography at this specic time. The
image of the sun at Hammat Tiberias is quite clearly the image of
Sol Invictus and Helios as found widespread in imperial religious
propaganda in the third and fourth centuries CE.
35
That the sun
34
Cf. Stern, Anthropomorphism and the Character(s) of God, 152: all anthro-
pomorphic statements are to be understood guratively precisely because it is
assumed as axiomatic that the Rabbis could never have believed that God actually
possesses a human, let alone a corporeal, form.
35
So Dothan, Hammat Tiberias, 42. These imperial images, found especially on
214 cn.r+rn sr\rx+rrx
became the symbol of monotheism within late-antique paganism of
the fourth century is well attested, most coherently in the emperor
Julians Hymn to King Helios,
36
but what has been less often noted
until recently is the way that Christians certainly, and Jews prob-
ably, latched on to this identication to give legitimacy to their own
forms of monotheism.
In a useful article on the cult of the highest god Theos Hypsistos,
Stephen Mitchell has suggested how pagan worshippers of this divinity
identied him (or very occasionally her) with the God of the Jews,
and later the Christians.
37
Mitchell argues that this identication
was accepted by many Jews: Philo used the term Hypsistos to denote
the Jewish God (Legat. 278), as did Josephus when quoting a decree
by Augustus in favor of the Jews ( Josephus, A.J. 16.163). Closer to
the time of the Hammat Tiberias mosaic, according to John Lydus,
De Mens. 4.53, the emperor Julian still described the Temple to be
rebuilt in Jerusalem as the shrine of Theos Hypsistos. Any Jew who
recognised pagan worshippers of the highest god as god fearers could
very easily adopt some of the religious mentality of these pagan
monotheists.
38
One characteristic of the cult of Theos Hypsistos was its lack
of iconography: references to the god tend to abstractions, and
anthropomorphic images are strikingly rare in the context of stan-
dard Graeco-Roman customs.
39
Also highly unusual was the mode
of worship by devotees, who used prayer rather than sacrice and
practised their cult in open sanctuaries facing the east, gazing up at
heaven and the sun. The essence of the divinity was encapsulated in
an oracle of Apollo of which a copy was engraved in an inscription
at Oenoanda in Asia Minor:
Born of itself, untaught, without a mother, unshakeable, not contained
in a name, known by many names, dwelling in re, this is god . . . Aether
coins, are much closer to the images found in the synagogues than the images of
local solar deities in Syria for which, despite Tacitus, Hist. 3.245, there is much
less evidence than is often supposed, cf. H. Seyrig, Le culte du Soleil en Syrie
lpoque romaine, Syria 48 (1971): 33773; F. Millar, The Roman Near East, 31
BCAD 337 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 522.
36
See P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 1819.
37
S. Mitchell, The Cult of Theos Hypsistos, in Athanassiadi and Frede, Pagan
Monotheism, 81148.
38
Mitchell, Theos Hypsistos, 11015.
39
Mitchell, Theos Hypsistos, 101.
+nr rvisn iv.or or oor ix r.+r .x+iti+v 215
40
Text cited from Mitchell, Theos Hypsistos, 86.
41
Mitchell, Theos Hypsistos, 120.
42
Text cited from Mitchell, Theos Hypsistos, 95.
43
On Constantine and the sun-god, see M. Wallra, Christus Verus Sol: Sonnenverehrung
und Christentum in der Sptantike ( JAC Erg. Bd. 32; Mnster, Aschendor, 2001).
44
P.C. Finney, The Invisible God: the Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
45
Finney, Invisible God, 279.
46
D.T. Rice, The Beginnings of Christian Art (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957),
26.
is god who sees all, on whom you should gaze and pray at dawn,
looking towards the sunrise.
40
This, so Mitchell argues, is the cult adopted by the father whose
decision to worship nothing but the clouds and the spirit of heaven
would, according to Juvenal (Sat. 14.96106), in time lead to his
son becoming Jewish.
41
Crucial for present purposes is the extensive
evidence from both literary descriptions and from inscriptions of
prayers to the rising and setting sun, and the major role in worship
of lamps and re. The best source from the fourth century comes
from Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 18.5, in the funeral oration for his
father: writing about his fathers early errors he stated of the group
to which he belonged in his youth that
its followers reject the idols and sacrices of the former [i.e. pagans]
and worship re and lamplight; they revere the Sabbath and are
scrupulous not to touch certain foods, but have nothing to do with
circumcision. To the humble they are called Hypsistarians, and the
Pantokrator is the only god they worship.
42
Here the connection between the Pantokrator and re seems clear.
But in any case the identication of solar worship with monothe-
istic belief was so widespread in the fourth century as to need little
demonstration to anyone at the time. It can be plausibly argued that
Constantines notorious continued adherence to the sun-god after his
conversion to Christianity is best understood as his identication of
the sun-god with the Highest God worshipped by Christians.
43
At the same time the commonly expressed reluctance of Christians
in the rst three centuries to depict God
44
a reluctance which
coexisted (as with Jews) with many visual metaphors of the divine in
literary texts,
45
some of them also apparently portrayed physically in
images of the good shepherd and such like
46
gave way during the
216 cn.r+rn sr\rx+rrx
fourth century to a new iconography. In this iconography, Christ was
portrayed no longer only as a human gure within a depiction of a
Gospel narrative
47
but at times as a grand image of an enthroned
monarch.
48
This occurred precisely during the period of armation,
after the Counsel of Nicaea, that the Christ portrayed was to be
treated not as human but as an integral element in the three-fold
divinity worshipped by Christians.
Christians adopted much of their iconography from pagan types,
to some of which they gave new meaning, while some seems to have
been treated simply as decoration.
49
So, for instance, the mausoleum
of Constantines daughter, built in the 320s, combined originally
Dionysiac imagery with sacred scenes from both Old and New
Testaments.
50
But treating the image of the sun as purely decorative
rather than signicant does not seem to have been an option.
At least by 427 CE some Christians seem to have come to state
openly that some of their pictures were images of the divine, for
a law of that year (Cod. Just. 1.8) forbade the placing of Christs
image on the ground because it was seen as sacrilege. The issue of
the same law reveals, of course, that oor mosaics depicting Christ
must have existed. It seems likely that this is precisely what is to be
found in the late fourth-century mosaic from Hinton St. Mary in
Dorset, in which a head almost certainly of Christ, embellished with
the Chi-Rho, was depicted alongside some strikingly pagan scenes.
51
The emperors in 427 CE may not have approved of the practice,
but other Christians must have found reasonable the notion of put-
ting an image of the divine on the oor of a sacred building.
So too, I suggest, did the Jews of Tiberias. At a time when the
identication of the Highest God with the sun was made by both
47
Finney, Invisible God, 221, on depictions of Jesus as a magus; but note (293)
that one of the most striking characteristics of early Christian art is the rarity of
even such images of Jesus.
48
R. Milburn, Early Christian Art and Architecture (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988),
217 (St. Pudenziana); 224 (St. George at Salonika). This view, once unquestioned,
has been strongly contested by T. Mathews, The Clash of Gods (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), but still seems to me broadly correct; see the review of
Matthews by Peter Brown in Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 499502.
49
Finney, Invisible God, chapter 6.
50
See H. Stern, Les mosaques de lglise de Sainte-Constance Rome, DOP
12 (1958): 159218.
51
See J.M.C. Toynbee, A New Roman Mosaic Pavement found in Dorset,
JRS 54 (1964): 714.
+nr rvisn iv.or or oor ix r.+r .x+iti+v 217
pagans and Christians, the notion that the Jews who chose to com-
mission the same image for their synagogue at Hammat Tiberias
can have done so without awareness of its iconographie import is
deeply implausible. It seems to me much more likely that their
choice demonstrated their condent conviction that the God to
whom both pagans and Christians paid greatest observance was the
God of Israel.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SACRED SPACE IN DIASPORA JUDAISM
Many if not all diaspora Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman periods
shared the reverence felt by their Palestinian co-religionists for the
Temple in Jerusalem.
1
It is highly likely, though not strictly provable,
that they also espoused explicitly or implicitly the belief to be found
in a variety of Palestinian Jewish texts that the world is divided into a
series of concentric circles in which the sanctity of places diminished
with distance from the Temple. The most sacred place on earth
according to this view was the Holy of Holies, into which no-one
could enter except the High Priest, whose own access was permitted
only once a year after elaborate precautions to avoid sacrilegious
pollution. Next in sanctity came the court of the priests, then the
courts of Israel, of women, and of gentiles. Even less sacred than
any of these courts were the regions of Jerusalem which lay outside
the Temple precincts. Jerusalem, the holy city, was more sacred
than the rest of the land of Israel, but Israel had greater sanctity
than the diaspora.
2
The theological explanation of this preeminence
of the Jerusalem Temple as sacred place was straightforward. It was
in the Holy of Holies that the divinity specially dwelt: the emptiness
of the innermost shrine signied not the absence of the deity but
the inability of humans to portray him. When the Romans suc-
ceeded in capturing the Temple they did so only because its divine
resident left the building to its fate. A voice was heard in the sky
above Jerusalem proclaiming We are departing from this place
( Jos. B.J. 6.300).
Whether diaspora Jews who espoused such notions might be
expected to feel constantly or even occasionally concerned at their
1
See E.P. Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (1990), 283308.
2
See J.N. Lightstone, Society, the Sacred and Scripture in Ancient Judaism: a sociology
of knowledge (1988), 36. On the protection of sacred space from pollution, note Acts
21.2829 and CIJ II 1400 on the prevention of gentiles penetrating too far into
the Temple.
220 cn.r+rn rion+rrx
distance from the centre of holiness is dubious,
3
but it does seem hard
to imagine such Jews positing with conviction that any place in their
own vicinity could be holy in the same way that the Temple was. I
intend in this paper to discuss how it came about that, despite this
strong disincentive, some Jews in some places at some times appar-
ently came to see their synagogues in precisely this way.
4
The main function of synagogues in antiquity was as a meeting
place where Jews could be taught the Torah: as Philo put it (Leg.
156), Jews have houses of prayer for training themselves on the
sabbath in their ancestral philosophy. Josephus believed that regular
weekly reading of the Law was so integral a part of Judaism that it
must have been instituted by Moses (C.Ap. 2.175). But neither writer
implied that such a role rendered the site of this activity sacred.
The Torah could be read almost anywhere. So, for example, Ezras
legendary public reading of the Law to all the people is said by
Nehemiah to have taken place in the street before the water-gate
(Nehemiah 8.12).
The second main function of synagogues, as the site of communal
prayer, might seem more likely to cast a holy aura upon the build-
ing or place where it occurred. That such communal worship was a
central feature of synagogue ritual, at least in parts of the diaspora,
seems fairly certain from the standard term proseuche used for syna-
gogues in Egypt in the Hellenistic period. But in Israel certainly,
and in the diaspora probably, prayer did not require a designated
building to be ecacious, so there was no reason for such a building
when it existed to be reckoned sacred.
5
Rather less directly, the permanent presence in synagogues of
Torah scrolls might perhaps be expected to import a special aura
into such buildings if I am right to argue, as I have done elsewhere,
that Jews sometimes treated such scrolls as sacred objects analogous
to pagan idols.
6
Pagans could certainly treat Jews scrolls in this
3
Sanders, Jewish Law, 258271.
4
For a more extensive treatment of other aspects of the notion of sanctity in
diaspora Judaism, see the interesting study by J.N. Lightstone, The Commerce of the
Sacred (1984).
5
See M. Hengel, Proseuche und Synagoge, in Tradition und Glaube: Festgabe
fr K.G. Kuhn (1971), 157184. Cf. the term eujion in CPJ 432. On liturgy, see
J. Heinemann, Prayer in the Talmud (1977).
6
M. Goodman, Sacred scripture and deling the hands , Journal of Theological
Studies 41 (1990), 99107 [Chapter 6 above].
s.cnrr sr.cr ix ri.sron. tr.isv 221
way: thus the soldier who deliberately destroyed a scroll in Judaea
in the fties CE was publicly executed by the Roman governor
Cumanus for the sacrilege ( Jos. B.J. 2.228231), and the author of
the Letter of Aristeas (which narrated in romantic form the origin of
the Septuagint) invented for his readers a striking vignette in which
Ptolemy Philadelphus greeted the arrival of the scrolls and translators
from Jerusalem by bowing down seven times before the copies of the
Torah. Similar Jewish attitudes are harder to documentunsurpris-
ingly given Jewish aversion to anything smacking of idolatrybut it
seems to me possible that the strange notion in rabbinic texts that
scrolls of scripture when correctly written on parchment dele the
hands reects the same attitude (cf. m. Yadaim 4:6). In the late fourth
century John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch, was aware of, but did
not share the notion that sacred books might sanctify the building
that housed them. He told a story in one of his bitter sermons
against the Jews about a Christian woman who had been forced
into a synagogue by another Christian in order to take a business
oath; John remarked grumpily that some Christians assumed wrongly
that synagogues are appropriate places for such proceedings because
of the presence of sacred books (Adv. Judaeos 1.3.3). Nothing quite
so explicit can be found in Jewish sources although various rabbinic
texts do imply that it is indeed from the scrolls that sanctity ows
(e.g. m. Megillah 3.1).
If, despite the centrality in their world-view of the Jerusalem
Temple, sanctity thus could be ascribed to synagogue buildings by
diaspora Jews, that need not imply that sanctity was so ascribed. I
intend in the pages which follow to examine the evidence for such
ascriptions. Since it is reasonable to expect that the destruction of
the Temple in Jerusalem might have made some dierence in this
regard, I have chosen to present rst the evidence for the period
before 70 CE and then the material for late antiquity, although in
fact far less dierence emerges than might be predicted. Only when
the evidence has been weighed will I turn to discuss the dicult
issue of why diaspora Jews espoused the attitudes revealed.
From the period before 70 CE there is good evidence of impres-
sive synagogue structures and ne decoration in diaspora synagogues.
So, according to a reference by the second-century tanna R. Judah
to a building apparently no longer extant, the great synagogue in
Alexandria, which was shaped in the form of a double stoa like a
basilica was a glory to Israel (t. Sukkah 4.6). According to Philo
222 cn.r+rn rion+rrx
(Leg. 133) synagogues in the same city were hung with shields, gilded
crowns and inscriptions. In the main Antioch synagogue, according
to Josephus (B.J. 7.45), costly oerings were similarly displayed. Such
expenditure on buildings need not imply a belief that the building
itself is sacred, but at least in the case of the Antioch synagogue
such an attitude was explicit, for Josephus (ibid.) described the place
as a hieron, a term usually applied only to temples such as that in
Jerusalem. This terminology was not just a quirk of Josephus Greek,
for Philo also at times implied the sanctity of synagogues by simi-
lar terms: in his description of the Essenes, Philo wrote that when
they gather they come together to sacred places which are called
synagogues (Q.o.p. 81).
Such terminology suggests that the distinction between the sanctity
of the Jerusalem Temple and that of synagogues was not always
precisely observed by Jews. Josephus (A.J. 14.260) told of the grant-
ing of a request by the city of Sardis to the local Jews in the rst
century BCE after the Jews had asked to be permitted to continue
to carry out sacrices (thusias) in their specially designated place in
the city; it is possible that this reference to sacricial cult reected
a misunderstanding of Jewish religious practice by the city authori-
ties, but, if so, it is worth noting that Josephus was not suciently
taken aback to comment. Nor did the Jewish historian comment on
the claim by Onias in the second century BCE that the building of
a new Temple for the Jews in Leontopolis in Egypt was desirable
because the multiplicity of hiera (temples) in Egypt was contrary to
Jewish customs and it was better to build just one naos (shrine) for
them; it is hard to see what the hiera to which he referred could have
been if they were not synagogues ( Jos. A.J. 13.667). Jews set up
inscriptions in their proseuchai in Egypt in which the buildings might
be designated as places of asylum (CIJ II 1449) and when gentiles
tried to set up statues in Egyptian synagogues this was treated by
Jews as sacrilege (Philo, Leg. 134).
All of which might seem to show beyond much doubt that some
Jews even before 70 CE saw their synagogues as sacred places. But a
story about an event in Caesarea Maritima in 66 CE may encourage
caution in jumping to such a conclusion. For this purpose Caesarea
may count as part of the diaspora, since the problem which arose
came from the position of Jews as a minority in a gentile commu-
nity in a fashion comparable to that in more strictly diaspora cities.
According to Josephus (B.J. 2.28591), the Jews of Caesarea tried
s.cnrr sr.cr ix ri.sron. tr.isv 223
to buy land near the synagogue. The gentile owner of the land
refused and some local youths compounded the Jews discomture
by sacricing a cock in the alleyway in front of the building in
mockery. Josephus recorded that this act was seen by the Jews as
a pollution (miasma) of the place, but their consequent actions were
curious. Rather than defend their holy site, as they did so bravely
in the Jerusalem Temple four years later, the Caesarean Jews took
up their scroll of the Torah and retreated with it to a safe place
some distance away. Their actions implied that for them it was not
to the place but to the object of public liturgy that prime sanctity
should be ascribed.
The evidence for the period after 70 CE is more extensive but
diers little in its ambiguous import. A straightforward attribution to
synagogues of the sanctity that the now defunct Jerusalem Temple
had once had might have been possible but does not seem to have
happened despite the celebrated comparison of synagogues to the
small sanctuary of Ezekiel 11.16 found in b. Megillah 29a. Some
rites previously conned to the Temple, such as the priestly blessing,
were now practised outside the Jerusalem sanctuary, but the rab-
binic texts which report this transfer do not presuppose any special
building or place for such practices.
7
The most important elements
of the Temple liturgy, libation and sacrice, ceased altogether. It is
worth recalling that Jewish hopes that the Temple would be rebuilt
were by no means unreasonable before Constantine. Restoration of
destroyed sanctuaries was normal custom in the pagan world and it
was quite possible that later emperors might drop the special hostility
to the Jewish cult which had been adopted by the Flavian dynasty
for the purposes of Roman political propaganda.
Thus rabbinic texts are ambivalent about the sanctity of syna-
gogues. On the one hand synagogues are denitely not templesso,
for instance, there is no evidence that there was ever a dedication
ceremony to mark the erection of new synagogue buildings. On the
other hand there are preserved in the Tosefta (t. Megillah 3(2):7) quite
strict rules for correct conduct in synagogues, and Mishnaic injunc-
tions in the names of R. Meir and R. Judah about the permitted
uses of money raised by selling a synagogue site presupposed that
such sites are at any rate special (m. Megillah 3:23); but it is of
7
See J. Neusner, A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai, 2nd ed. (1970), 205210.
224 cn.r+rn rion+rrx
course signicant that such a site could be sold. Such texts might in
theory apply only to rabbinic attitudes in the land of Israel, but the
anonymous baraita preserved in b. Shabbat 72b was presumably felt
relevant by the Mesopotamian sages who redacted the Babylonian
Talmud. According to this baraita, a Jew who bows down before
a pagan shrine in the mistaken belief that it is a synagogue is not
committing a sin. The signicant fact here is that paying such respect
to synagogues was apparently taken for granted.
Examination of the architectural forms of extant remains of
diaspora synagogues provides no clearer indication of the sacred or
profane status of such buildings in the eyes of local Jews who may or
may not have shared the attitudes to be found in rabbinic texts. The
most striking fact about such styles is their variety.
8
The hypothesis
that common elements, such as the Torah shrine and the meeting
hall, were the Jewish equivalents of the inner shrine and pronaos of a
pagan temple is plausible but unprovable.
9
Whether the huge basilica
in Sardis would have looked to a contemporary observer like a reli-
gious building depends somewhat on the date of the observation. If
Helga Botermann is right to suggest that it might have become a
synagogue only in the mid fourth century,
10
this transformation of
a secular building will have coincided with the establishment of the
basilica form as the most appropriate style of religious architecture
for Christian churches.
11
Alternatively, large basilica-type buildings
may have been found as meeting-places for Jews long before they
were adopted by Christians if the tradition that this was the shape
of the great Alexandrian synagogue was correctly transmitted in the
Tosefta (t. Sukkah 4:6; see above).
The clearest evidence that some Jews treated synagogues as sacred
space comes not from rabbinic discussions nor from the architecture
of the synagogue buildings, but from the inscriptions found within
those buildings. The adjective hagiotatos, most holy, was applied
to synagogues so regularly in inscriptions from the second or third
centuries CE and after that it appears to have become a clich.
8
See A.T. Kraabel, The diaspora synagogue: archaeological and epigraphic
evidence since Sukenik, ANRW II 19 (1979), 477510.
9
See G. Foerster in L.I. Levine, Ancient Synagogues Revealed (1981), 48.
10
H. Botermann, Die Synagoge von Sardes: Eine Synagoge aus dem 4. Jahr-
hundert?, Zeitschrift fr die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 81 (1990), 103121.
11
J.B. Ward-Perkins, Constantine and the origins of the Christian basilica, Papers
of the British School in Rome 22 (1954), 6990.
s.cnrr sr.cr ix ri.sron. tr.isv 225
The usage is geographically widespread: it is found in Macedonia
(Stobi), Asia Minor (Philadelphia and Hyllarima) and southern
Palestine (Gaza).
12
How literally to take such ascriptions of sanctity
is not entirely obvious from the Greek word alone. The meaning
of many solemn words was debased in the late-Roman world, and
hagios could be used as a polite epithet for bishops and even, in the
medieval period, for emperors.
13
However, a fth-century inscription
from the Decapolis city of Gerasa lends support to a more literal
reading. From this place comes an inscription on two pillars which
reads agio[tt] tp. Amn. Sel. Ernh t sunagvg (Lifshitz, no.
78). The inscription provides a useful link with a large number of
Aramaic texts from nearby synagogue sites in the land of Israel.
In these inscriptions the term atra kadisha appears as a standard
clich.
14
It is asking too much of coincidence not to see the Greek
hagiotatos topos as a direct equivalent. In that case it is likely that the
Greek term was intended on these inscriptions to convey the force
of the Aramaic kadisha, which retained its strong sense throughout
antiquity.
What emerges from all this is that synagogues sites could be treated
by diaspora Jews as holy but that attitudes varied. It seems clear
that rabbinic sages lacked any coherent rationale for their attitudes;
similarly and all the more so, it may be surmised, non-rabbinic Jews;
thus whatever prompted the reverence revealed in the inscriptions
was probably not legislation by any central authority. There is more
evidence of attributions of sanctity in the period after 70 CE than
in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, but that may reect
only the greater survival of diaspora inscriptions from the later era
than from the earlier; thus it may be unwarranted to try to explain
Jewish attitudes as a reaction to the destruction of the Jerusalem
Temple. The causes of the phenomena I have described are likely
to lie elsewhere, in more general, ill-dened religious instincts which
by their very nature allowed for the ambiguity I have noted but
also, precisely because such instincts often remained unstated, can-
not be proven.
12
B. Lifshitz, Donateurs et Fondateurs dans les Synagogues Juives (Cahiers de la Revue
Biblique, 7) (1967), nos. 10, 28, 32, 73a.
13
E.A. Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (1990), s.v.
giow.
14
J. Naveh, On Stone and Mosaic: the Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions from ancient
synagogues (1978), nos. 16, 26, 46, 60, 64, 65 (in Hebrew).
226 cn.r+rn rion+rrx
A number of such religious instincts, such as a human desire to
designate as sacred some place close enough to the locus of secular
activity for ordinary people to feel that sanctity is accessible to them,
can reasonably be postulated. But in this paper I want to pursue
just one of these possible explanations, both because it is generally
overlooked and because, if I am right, the type of explanation oered
may throw some light on the history of other aspects of diaspora
Judaism. The factor on which I shall concentrate is the likely eect
on diaspora Jews of the attitude to their synagogues espoused by
their gentile neighbours.
Comments about synagogues in extant Greek and Latin pagan
writings are rather sparsea fact which, as will become clear, I think
may be signicant.
15
Pagans were fascinated by such Jewish peculiari-
ties as the Sabbath and dietary laws, but Jewish houses of worship
apparently did not strike them as anything out of the ordinary. In
some cases this may have been because synagogues were just seen
as meeting places: Augustus decree on behalf of the Jews of Asia
protected the scrolls and money they kept in their sabbateion but not
the building itself ( Jos. A.J. 16.164). But more often the reason was
that synagogues looked to pagans like a Jewish equivalent of pagan
shrines. In the Hellenistic period the Seleucid kings donated gifts
to hang on the walls of the Antioch synagogue ( Jos. B.J. 7.44) and
the Ptolemaic kings awarded to at least one synagogue in Egypt the
right of asylum (CIJ II 1449). In a legal deposition of 218 BCE by
a gentile woman whose cloak had been stolen, the guardian of the
Jewish prayer-house ( proseuche) was described as a nakoros, a title usu-
ally reserved for the warden of a religious sanctuary (CPJ 129). In
the rst century CE anti-Jewish rioters in Alexandria attacked the
synagogues (Philo, Flacc. 413), an action which gentiles could see
as equivalent to desecration of a sanctuary: according to Josephus
(A.J. 19.3003, 305), when gentile youths in the land of Israel put
a statue of Gaius in the synagogue of Dora, the Roman senator
Petronius complained that by their behaviour they had prevented
the synagogue from existing, since the emperors statue would be
15
For a collection of the evidence and many interesting suggestions, see S.J.D.
Cohen, Pagan and Christian evidence on the ancient synagogue, in L.I. Levine,
ed., The Synagogue in Late Antiquity (1987), pp. 159181. My arguments were formu-
lated separately, but they may be seen as following on logically from the ideas on
pages 163165 of his article.
s.cnrr sr.cr ix ri.sron. tr.isv 227
better in his own shrine (naos) than in someone elses. When in the
early second century CE Tacitus wrote that Jews have no images in
their cities, nedum templis (Tac. Hist. 5.5.4), he may have intended to
refer to synagogues by the plural templa. The right of asylum granted
to an Egyptian synagogue by the Ptolemies (CIJ II 1449; see above)
was conrmed according to an addendum in Latin by a king and
queen (rex et regina); it is likely that the monarchs in question were
either the rulers of Palmyra in the mid third century CE or the last
Ptolemaic dynasts in the rst century BCE.
Christian writers from the third century onwards sometimes made
similar assumptions. Tertullian in the early third century wrote that
Jews pray by the sea shore on fast days, templis omissis (De Jejuniis 16,
PL II 1028). John Chrysostom described how Christians took oaths
in synagogues (see above) and how they sometimes slept overnight in
the synagogue of Matrona at Daphne in their search for health cures
(Adversus Iudaeos) 1.3, PG XL 8478.
16
In the sixth century Procopius
described how the ancient shrine (neos) of the Jews of Boreon in
North Africa was changed into a church by Justinian (De Aed. 6.2).
In accordance with this attitude Christian writers sometimes
assumed that synagogues were administered by priests like pagan
sanctuaries. Thus Epiphanius in the 370s told a story about events
under Con stantine in which it was presupposed that synagogues
were under the immediate control of archisynagogoi, priests (hiereis),
elders and hazzanim (Pan. 30.11.4). A similar assumption is found in
an imperial enactment of 330 CE by which Constantine released
from munera the hiereos and archisynagogos and all those others who
administer the synagogues (C.Th. 16.8.4). It is possible that these
priests were simply cohanim whose public prominence was ensured
simply by their role in the priestly blessing, but it is hard to see
why such a minor function would merit tax exemption. It seems to
me more likely that this is another aspect of Roman treatment of
synagogues as temples.
The same attitude explains the belief of emperors from the fth
century onwards that synagogue buildings could easily be converted
into churches. Thus Theodosius II laid down in 423 CE that Jewish
communities should be granted compensation when their synagogues
had been seized or ecclesiis vindicatae or indeed consecrated to the
16
See R.L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews (1983), 7980.
228 cn.r+rn rion+rrx
venerable mysteries (C.Th. 16.8.25). In 535 CE, in less liberal times,
Justinian decreed that we do not grant that their synagogues should
stand, but we wish them ad ecclesiarum guram . . . reformari (Novella 37);
the use of the word reformari suggests that some architectural changes
were deemed necessary.
In such legal stipulations by the state gentile attitudes to syna-
gogues are seen at their clearest. Thus in about 370 CE the emper-
ors Valentinian and Valens told the Master of the Oces that he
should warn soldiers who occupied synagogues of the Jewish law in
their search for lodging (hospitium) that they were required to vacate
such premises. The emperors argued that such hospitality should be
enjoyed in the houses of private people, not in places of religions
(religionum loca). This law, found in the Theodosian Code (C.Th. 7.8.2)
but repeated, therefore presumably still reckoned valid, in the sixth-
century Justinianic Code (C.J. 1.9.4), presupposed that the state had
a duty to protect synagogues as places sacred to Jews.
17
Evidence of
intermittent state hostility to synagogues, from the instructions issued
by Theodosius II to the patriarch Gamaliel to destroy all synagogues
in unoccupied places (C.Th. 16.8.22) to Justinians demand that all
synagogues be changed into churches (see above), does not show
that this assumption was not genuinely held, only that Christian
emperors wavered in their willingness to appease or provoke Jewish
religious susceptibilities.
The attitude of gentiles in the Roman empire to Jewish religious
buildings revealed a tendency I have noted elsewhere to understand
other societies and cultures in terms of their own.
18
Sacred space
was a concept of great power and importance in the religious life
of most inhabitants of the Roman world. The landscape was lit-
tered with altars to divinities. Each altar was reckoned more or less
sacrosanct and most public religious activity consisted in processions
to a sacred place or a dramatic ritual by a priest at such a place.
Gentiles who came to Jerusalem found it quite natural to oer
sacrices to the Jewish God in the Temple, and the obvious way to
express respect for Judaism in Rome in 139 BCE was, according to
17
On this text see A.M. Rabello, The legal condition of the Jews in the Roman
empire, ANRW II 13 (1980), 723; A. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation
(1987), no. 14.
18
M. Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judaea: the origins of the Jewish revolt against
Rome, AD 6670 (1987), 35.
s.cnrr sr.cr ix ri.sron. tr.isv 229
19
See E. Bickerman, The altars of gentiles, in Studies in Jewish and Christian
History, Vol. II (1980), 324346. Note the story reported in y. Megillah 1.13, 72b
about the Roman emperor Antoninus being helped by R. Judah haNasi to build
an altar.
20
Apart from the Jewish uses of the collocation hagios topos, the phrase appears very
occasionally in Christian inscriptions in reference to a church (e.g. R. Merkelbach,
ed., Die Inschriften von Assos (1976), number 33), but nowhere (so far as I can dis-
cover) in pagan inscriptions. But note the use of the phrase in the story recounted
by Plutarch (Camillus 31.3.7) about the attempts made by Roman senators to mol-
lify the people by pointing out the chorion hieron kai topon hagion which Romulus or
Numa had consecrated.
Valerius Maximus (1.3.2), to set up altars in honour of the foreign
deity.
19
For gentiles thus predisposed, synagogue ritual might seem
to t neatly into the standard pattern of temple rites, with chanting
by crowds of worshippers in a ne ornamented building, an object
extracted from an inner sanctum and carried in procession to a vis-
ible spot for a ritual act to be undertaken before it was returned to
its sanctum. Synagogues diered only in that the object concerned
was a scroll not an idol, and the act performed was a reading, not
a sacrice or libation. The term hagios topos, although not used in
the inscriptions set up in their shrines in the same formulaic way
it was used by Jews in synagogues, was quite intelligible to such
pagans, and bore the clear implication that the place in question
was sacred space.
20
For pagan polytheists respect for the sacred places of the cults of
other people was instinctive. The behaviour of Pliny the Younger
when governor of Bithynia and Pontus may illustrate. When the
inhabitants of a Bithynian city wanted to build on the site of a
temple of the Phrygian Great Mother, Pliny (Epp. 10.50) wrote to the
emperor Trajan to enquire whether he should prevent them. Trajan
replied that there was no restriction on such building in Roman
law, but what is signicant is the fact that Pliny felt it necessary
to ask. Polytheists knew that infringing the rights of any divinity is
a dangerous game. The ambivalence of Christian legislation about
synagogues was a product of the conict between this instinctive
pagan liberalism and the theologically motivated anti-Judaism which
pervades much of the rhetoric of the legislation by Roman emperors
of the fourth to sixth centuries CE.
A useful parallel to pagan attitudes to synagogues may be found in
pagan attitudes to Christian churches in the rst four centuries CE.
230 cn.r+rn rion+rrx
Christian liturgy in the early years did not require special sacred
places for its performance. Christians, much like Jews, met together
to eat in company, hear readings from the scriptures and listen to
sermons. For this purpose private houses suced. As congregations
grew such houses might be adapted, with enlarged interior rooms
or the erection of a platform for the clergy, and the house of the
Christians might become an impressive hall and a local landmark,
but before Constantine there was felt no need for a specically
religious architecture which might mark o churches from the secu-
lar world.
21
One result of this fact was a scarcity of comments in
pagan authors about churches, as about synagogues.
22
Nonetheless
the pagan philosopher Porphyry in the mid third century could refer
scornfully to the great buildings of the Christians which imitate
the construction of temples (Adv. Christianos, frag. 76). When the
pagan Roman aristocracy, led by the emperor, began from the time
of Constantine onwards to demonstrate, without much theological
understanding, their adhesion to the imperially favoured cult of
Christianity, they imported such pagan presuppositions into their
disposition of their wealth in favour of the new religion. Instead of
the erection of large public temples by which they had previously
demonstrated their allegiance to the pagan gods, Roman aristocrats
began to build the grand monumental basilica churches which
quite rapidly because common despite the inappropriateness of this
architectural form for Christian liturgy. Eusebius description of the
new church dedicated in Tyre by the young rich bishop Paulinus in
317 CE explicitly compared the building to the Jerusalem Temple
in the days of Zerubbabel (Eus. H.E. 10.4.336): this was Gods
house on earth (H.E. 10.4.12) and, like that of pagan temples, its
completion was celebrated with a great festival of dedication (H.E.
10.3.1). In 431 CE the emperor Theodosius, granting to churches
rights of sanctuary, unselfconsciously referred to them as temples
of the Great God (C.Th. 9.45.4).
23
21
See now L.M. White, Building Gods House in the Roman World: architectural adapta-
tion among pagans, Jews and Christians (1990).
22
On pagan views of Christianity in general, see R.L. Wilken, The Christians as
the Romans Saw Them (1984).
23
See now White, Building Gods House, chapter 2 and passim. White argues
(p. 136) that the church at Tyre was not a basilica but an elaborate hall with
basilica-type features.
s.cnrr sr.cr ix ri.sron. tr.isv 231
At this crucial stage in the argument, when I want to suggest
the possible eect of such gentile perceptions of synagogues on the
attitudes to their religious buildings of Jews themselves, I must con-
fess that evidence fails. Nonetheless, some connection may plausibly
be posited. It is quite possible that Jews rst elected to imitate the
customs and architecture of others and to see their buildings as holy,
and that only then did pagans come to ascribe sanctity to Jewish
synagogues. But it seems to me no less conceivable that the line of
causation went in the opposite direction. If gentiles tended to assume
that synagogues were sacred places, Jews might feel it wise to concur:
on the most cynical level, this pagan attitude evidently helped to
protect the synagogue site and to win exemption from liturgies for
synagogue ocials. More insidiously, if gentile neighbours treated the
synagogue building as sacred it might become natural for Jews to
copy their reverence even when they did not have any formal, legal
reason within the Jewish religious system for such an attitude.
If there is any truth in this, it may be worth pondering simi-
lar factors in other aspects of Jewish history in the diaspora. It is
inherently unlikely that diaspora Jews developed social or religious
institu tions entirely regardless of comments made by their gentile
compatriots. But, since it is also inherently unlikely that Jews would
explicitly ascribe changes in their society to their reactions to such
comments, the demonstration of the causal link between the develop-
ment of diaspora Jewish customs and outsiders views about those
customs will always be formidable.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JEWS AND JUDAISM IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
DIASPORA IN THE LATE
-
ROMAN PERIOD:
THE LIMITATIONS OF EVIDENCE
Modern interpretations of the nature of Judaism in the Mediterranean
diaspora in the late-Roman period have been based mainly on the
evaluation of archeological and epigraphic data. Such interpreta-
tions are mostly quite possible, but all involve eisegesis and (often
undeclared) assumptions which are here systematically questioned.
In particular, evidence customarily used to reconstruct a picture of
a liberal diaspora Judaism is scrutinized to see how much of it in
fact may have been produced by pagan polytheists who revered the
Jewish God. The evidence from Sardis is treated as a test case. In
the nal section a decrease in the variety within Judaism, and a
decline in the numbers of pagan polytheists worshipping the Jewish
God, are postulated for the period after 388 CE, when Roman
emperors began to attack pagan shrines and to give state support
to the Jewish patriarchs.
No one doubts that the population of the Mediterranean core of
the Roman Empire at its height, from the rst to the fth century
CE, contained a large proportion of Jews. Estimates of their number
vary quite widely,
1
but that they constituted a group of sucient
size to exercise considerable inuence over Mediterranean society is
generally agreed. What elicits much less agreement is the nature of
their Judaism in the centuries which followed the destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE.
It will be evident from the title of this article that I believe it to
be helpful to study diaspora Judaism in this period separately from
the religion of Jews in the land of Israel. This separation is desirable
despite the similar geographical and economic constraints on Jewish
communities in all parts of the Mediterranean world, despite the
1
Cf. S.W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952) vol. 1, 167171, 370372.
234 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
comparative ease of transport between such communities in the rst
century CE because of the pax Romana and extensive inter-regional
trade,
2
and despite the common obeisance of all Mediterranean
Jews to the same Torah by which God bound Israel in covenant
on Mount Sinai.
3
Despite all this, the special role of Israel as a holy
land necessarily inuenced religious behaviour, and may well have
caused the religious outlook of Jews who lived there to be dierent
from that of diaspora Jews. In Jews religious geography, the centre
of the world, the core of purity, lay in the Holy of Holies in the
Temple in Jerusalem. The rest of the world was relegated to spheres
of decreasing purity in a series of concentric circles, from the Temple
to the city of Jerusalem to the boundaries of the land of Israel and
thence to the diaspora.
4
The probability that diaspora Judaism in the Mediterranean world
diered from that of Jews in the homeland is strengthened by the fact
that most evidence about Judaism in this period happens to derive
either from the land of Israel or from the Jews of Mesopotamia
who, since they lived outside the Roman empire, had little contact
with the western diaspora. This same fact means that disagreement
about the nature of Judaism in the Mediterranean diaspora begins
from uncertainty about how much, if at all, to rely on the rabbinic
evidence from late antiquity: some scholars assume that all Jews fol-
lowed rabbinic norms until proved otherwise, others that none did
until shown to have done so.
5
Both views are possible, but I should confess that my own preference
is for skepticism about the applicability of rabbinic evidence outside
the immediate circles for which it was composed.
6
The preservation
2
Cf. K. Hopkins, Taxes and trade in the Roman Empire (200 BCAD 400),
Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980) 101125.
3
E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: a Comparison of Patterns of Religion,
(London: SCM, 1977); Idem, Judaism: Practice and Belief: 63 BCE66 CE (London:
SCM, 1992).
4
Cf. M. Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt Against
Rome, AD 6670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 106.
5
Contrast the assumption by Schiman, Who was a Jew? (New York: Ktav, 1985),
that rabbinic discussions in the land of Israel were capable of bringing about the
split between Judaism and Christianity to the assertion by Kraabel, Impact of
the Discovery of the Sardis Synagogue in Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times, ed.
G.M.A. Hanfmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) 178193,
that rabbis had no inuence at all in Asia Minor.
6
Cf. M. Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, AD 132212 (Totowa, N.J.:
Rowman and Allanheld, 1983) 514.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 235
of so much rabbinic literature by Jews of later generations encour-
ages the impression that the rabbis predominated in Jewish society
of the time when the literature was composed, but it is in principle
not justied to take the survival of material as evidence of its origi-
nal importance. Rabbinic texts from late antiquity are extant only
because their contents interested enough Jews through the medieval
to the early modern period for them to be continuously copied
and eventually printed. In contrast, Jewish texts written in Greek
were totally ignored by the later rabbinic tradition, which operated
primarily in Hebrew and Aramaic. Thus it is entirely possible that
diaspora Jews composed just as many literary works in Greek after 70
CE as before that date, but that all such literature has disappeared
simply because the religious traditions which eventually triumphed
had no interest in their preservation: on the one hand, the rabbis,
who only preserved writing in Semitic languages, and on the other,
the Christian Church, which treasured and appropriated Jewish texts
written in Greek before c. 100 CE but which treated later Jewish
compositions as the product of an alien faith.
7
The possibility of a misleading bias in the preservation of the
evidence is not the only factor which complicates the use of rabbinic
texts. The rabbis took it for granted that their view of the world
was normative for all Israel, but such a view can quite well persist
regardless of reality. It is entirely possible, even if in the nal analysis
unprovable, that, even within the communities in which they oper-
ated, the rabbis were sometimes met with indierence.
8
If rabbinic
literature can be used only with care to reconstruct the religious
outlook of Jews in the land of Israel where it was composed, it
will be all the more dicult to use it to understand the Judaism of
Alexandria, Antioch, Sardis, Rome.
For some scholars the non-rabbinic nature of (some) diaspora
Judaism in late antiquity is simply taken for granted,
9
and over the
past few decades many attempts have been made to construct a pic-
ture of an alternative Judaism based on dierent kinds of evidence.
10
7
Cf. G. Vermes and M. Goodman, La literature juive intertestamentaire
la lumire dun sicle de recherches et de dcouvertes in Etudes sur le Judaisme
Hellnistique, eds. R. Kuntzmann and J. Schlosser (Paris: Editions du CERF, 1984)
1939.
8
M. Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, 93111.
9
E.g. A.T. Kraabel, Impact of the Discovery of the Sardis Synagogue, 178.
10
E.g. E.R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 19531968); Kraabel, idem, 18890.
236 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
Such attempts are encouraged by the abundance of non-rabbinic
material found in the diaspora. So, for instance, in the corpus of
Jewish inscriptions from the diaspora the proportional increase in
documents dated after 70 CE is quite striking,
11
and not simply part
of any general increase in epigraphic evidence in the late-Roman
period. Archeological evidence is similarly much more abundant than
in earlier times, especially from excavations of buildings at Dura-
Europos, Sardis and elsewhere, and from investigation of Jewish
catacombs at Rome.
12
These material remains are supplemented by
a considerable corpus of comments about Jews by pagan and (more
especially) Christian writers.
13
Of these, the most illuminating are
often the Roman laws about Jews, which repay close study.
14
This non-rabbinic evidence has been used in the past to produce
dramatically disparate pictures of diaspora Judaism. In earlier genera-
tions the standard stereotype, molded perhaps by a Christian per-
spective and the assumption that right-thinking Jews ought really to
have joined the Church, portrayed diaspora Judaism as the religion
of small, embattled groups who adopted syncretistic ideas in order to
ingratiate themselves with their gentile neighbours.
15
A more recent
stereotype reverses many of these judgments. It is now commonly
claimed that diaspora Judaism was the religion of prosperous, self-
condent, outgoing people, who were fully accepted as Jews by their
gentile neighbours, unconcerned by surrounding idolatry, uninclined
to syncretise, and keen to proselytise.
16
It is worth stressing that this revised picture is almost entirely, and
quite overtly, dependent on analysis of archeological evidence and
11
J.B. Frey, Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum (vol. 1, rev. New York: Ktav, 1975;
vol. 2 Rome: Pontico Istituto di archaeologia christiana, 1936).
12
E. Schrer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, vol. 3.1, rev.
and eds. G. Vermes, F. Millar and M. Goodman (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark,
1986) 1176.
13
M. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. ( Jerusalem: Israel
Academy of the Sciences, 197486); J. Juster, Les Juifs dans lEmpire romain: leur condi-
tion juridique, conomique et sociale, 2 vols. (Paris: Geuthner, 1914) 1: 4376.
14
A. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University,
1987).
15
Cf. the critique in A.T. Kraabel, The Disappearance of the God-Fearer,
Numen 28: 113126 (1982).
16
P.R. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 237
inscriptions, and especially the material from Sardis.
17
It is claimed,
for instance, that the size of the Sardis synagogue, its position at
the centre of the city, and the presence in it of inscriptions set up
by gentile Godworshippers show the important role of Jews in the
civic community and the acceptance of that role by their gentile
neighbours.
18
Such an interpretation is of course possible, but it
is hardly necessary. The great synagogue of Alexandria was also
huge, according to Tosefta Sukkah 4:6, but this fact can hardly
have signied good relations with the local Greeks since the Jews
and Greeks of Alexandria were more or less openly hostile to each
other throughout the rst and early second centuries CE.
19
It is quite
possible that in both Alexandria and Sardis the erection of a large,
prominent synagogue may have signied bravado by an embattled
minority in a hostile environment. Similarly, gentile Godworshippers
who gave money to Jewish institutions may have done so for a vari-
ety of reasons, without approving of either Judaism or Jews: so, for
instance, if Jews were indeed rich and powerful, it might have seemed
sensible for a gentile politician to donate money to their synagogue,
regardless of his real view about them or their religion.
20
From the
point of view of a polytheist, the term theosebes (God-worshipper)
was suciently anodyne for any pagan to accept it as a title.
I raise these other possible interpretations not to advocate them
but simply to show the vulnerability of archeological and epigraphic
material of this kind to imaginative exegesis. In the rest of this
paper I intend to sketch more fully the limitations of the evidence
for Judaism in the Mediterranean diaspora in the period, with an
epilogue to suggest why and how the radical uncertainty which I
shall advocate in interpreting the remains from earlier periods may
be inappropriate in the fth century CE and after.
Radical uncertainty in interpreting Jewish-type material down to
c. 390 CE is based on two factors which in principle bear no rela-
tion to each other. First, there may have been much variety within
17
Kraabel, The Disappearance of the God-Fearer ; Idem, Impact of the
Discovery of the Sardis Synagogue.
18
Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 57.
19
V.A. Tcherikover, A. Fuks and M. Stern, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 195764) 1: 4893.
20
J. Murphy-OConnor, Lots of God-Fearers? Theosebeis in the Aphrodisias
Inscription, Revue Biblique 99/2 (1992) 418424.
238 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
diaspora Judaism, to the extent that it may be more accurate to
talk of Judaisms in the plural.
21
Second, and even allowing for great
variety and for dierent denitions of who was a Jew, some material
commonly ascribed to Jews and Judaism may not reect Jews of
any kind, by any denition in antiquity or today. The rst issue has
been much discussed, and I shall consider it here only briey. The
second issue, which I believe is undeservedly overlooked in much of
the scholarly literature, I shall tackle at greater length.
V.nir+v ix Di.sron. Jtr.isv
Any individual type of Judaism consists of a single religious system,
encompassing most aspects of life. Unlike most other ancient cults,
Judaism could be contrasted in antiquity not just to other religions
but to other cultures in the broad sense: the rst use of the term
ioudaismos (2 Macc. 2:21) specically compared Judaism to Hellenism,
and both gentile and Jewish Greek writers sometimes described the
Jewish way of life as a philosophy.
22
Thus, when they viewed their
own lifestyles from within their systems, Jewish writers tended to
assume that there was only one Judaism. So, for example, to the
rabbis Jewish identity was dened in rabbinic terms, in what Sacha
Stern has described as a solipsistic sense of Jewishness, to the extent
that only adult male rabbinic Jews were thought of as fully part of
Israel, and the Judaism of women and children, let alone proselytes
and slaves, was left ill-dened.
23
It is notoriously unwise to rely on a groups self-depiction to
produce an accurate picture of that group, but in the study of the
late-antique diaspora the non-Jewish evidence, plentiful though it is,
is not entirely helpful in balancing out the picture. Greek and Latin
pagans after the early second century CE seem largely to have fallen
into literary clichs when writing about Jews,
24
and little that they
21
Cf. for the rst century, J. Neusner, W.S. Green and E.S. Frerichs, Judaisms
and their Messiahs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
22
J.G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Towards Judaism in Pagan and
Christian Antiquity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
23
Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings, Unpublished D. Phil. Thesis,
Oxford University.
24
Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism; idem, The Jews in Greek
and Latin Literature in The Jewish People in the First Century, eds. S. Safrai and M.
Stern (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1976) vol. 2, 11011159.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 239
wrote sheds any light on the Jews of their own day; in any case,
they lacked any interest in dierentiating between one sort of Jew
and another, simply lumping them all together as one despicable
superstitio.
25
The evidence of Christian authors about Jews is almost equally
unsatisfactory, but for rather dierent reasons.
26
In the early Church
the term Jew was generally applied to one of three groups: either
to the Israel of the Old Testament (usually on occasions when they
disobeyed divine commands, since the positive aspects of Israels
heritage were appropriated by the Christians themselves);
27
or to the
Pharisees who opposed Jesus according to the Gospels narrative,
with whom Jews as a whole were often identied;
28
or to Christian
literalists, since in the internal debate within the early Church about
the correct way to interpret the Old Testament, those who took
the biblical commands to apply to themselves were readily attacked
by their opponents as Jews.
29
Since in all these cases the terms
Jews and Judaism were more or less terms of abuse, there was
no incentive to distinguish between one kind of Jew and another.
Those Christians like Hippolytus (c. 170c. 236 CE) who referred
to the dierent sects of Judaism culled their information from earlier
sources, which normally described the Judaism of the land of Israel
before 70 CE.
30
But despite this lack of direct evidence for diversity in the Judaism
of the late-Roman diaspora, there remain good grounds for believing
variety to be probable. First is the direct evidence of Josephus that
one and the same individual could claim the perfect unity of Judaism
25
Cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5.8.23; Ann. 2.85.
26
Cf. in general M. Taylor, The Jews in the Writings of the Early Church
Fathers (150312): Men of Straw or Formidable Rivals? Unpublished D. Phil.
Thesis, Oxford University, 1992.
27
Cf. M. Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations Between Christians and Jews in
the Roman Empire (135425) (Oxford: Littman Library, 1986).
28
R. Reuther, Faith and Fratricide: the theological roots of anti-semitism (New York:
Seabury Press, 1974).
29
D.P. Efroymson, Tertullians Anti-Judaism and its role in his theology,
Unpublished PhD Thesis, Temple University, 1976.
30
Miriam Taylor, The Jews in the Writings of the Early Church Fathers
(150312), points out that Simon, Verus Israel, may be wrong to assume that
because Christian writers came up against real Jews, they therefore described them
as they really were. It is almost as easy to impose a stereotype on real people as
on imaginary ones.
240 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
while also being aware of considerable variety. Thus Josephus wrote
in Contra Apionem 2.179180, a work composed in Rome in the nine-
ties CE, that one remarkable fact about Jews was their unity on all
matters of theology and worship: one God, one Law, one Temple.
Nor was this a passing remark, since Jewish unity constituted an
important element of his proof in Contra Apionem of the superiority
of Jews over Greeks, whose cults, myths and beliefs he characterized
as hopelessly jumbled. But the same Josephus could write in three
other works about the three (or sometimes four) distinctive philoso-
phies of the Jews (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and the Fourth
Philosophy), whose tenets he was at pains to delineate.
31
It appears
that for Josephus these two opinions, which he proered as part
of two dierent arguments, were quite easily correlated. Variety
within Judaism presumably lay in his eyes on a dierent level from
its unity: all Jews accepted the one Torah, even if they disagreed
about its signicance.
If someone like Josephus could write about diversity within Judaism
in his histories of the land of Israel before 70 CE, it is clearly at
least possible that such diversity continued in the late-Roman dias-
pora. When Josephus was writing he was living in the diaspora in
Rome and after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, but he
wrote about the varied philosophies of Judaism not as a past but as
a present fact. The factors which had encouraged a diaspora Jew in
the mid-rst century like Philo of Alexandria to evolve his curious
blend of Platonic philosophy and allegorical exegesis of the Bible
32
were just as potent after the destruction of the Temple as before;
indeed, since Philonic types of theology were to become popular
among some Christians during the late-Roman period, it was evidently
possible for Jews also to continue thinking in such ways.
So far as is known, no authority existed within diaspora Judaism
to impose rules of practice and belief. Such a role has often been
claimed for the rabbinic patriarch (nasi ) in the land of Israel whose
formal jurisdiction under the auspices of the state over Jews through-
out the Roman empire I shall discuss in the epilogue (below).
33
But
31
B.J. 2.119166; A.J. 18.1125; Vita 1012.
32
Cf. S. Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979).
33
Cf. L.I. Levine, The Jewish Patriarch (Nasi ) in third century Palestine, Aufsteig
und Niedergang der rmischen Welt 19/2 (1979) 64988.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 241
I believe not only that the evidence that he had any such authority
before the late fourth century is not compelling,
34
but also that there
are positive reasons to deny that he had such a role at any earlier
date: rst, it was contrary to normal Roman practice in the high
empire for a single spokesman to be appointed or recognized either
for an ethnic group such as Spaniards or Gauls, or for a religious
movement such as Mithraists or Isiacs; secondly, the fact that the
third-century Christian writer Origen referred to the nasi by the title
ethnarch,
35
whereas fourth-century Roman sources consistently call
him patriarch, suggests that the nasi in his time was not a Roman
ocial at all, since the Roman state was normally very careful and
precise in the conferring of titles.
36
If there was no authority to impose uniformity, there was also no
incentive to suppress variety. Opinions might vary wildly between
one community and another on crucial questions of Jewish status
such as the validity of conversions and the status of the ospring
of mixed marriages,
37
let alone less public aspects of Judaism, from
domestic liturgy and behaviour to philosophical speculation on the
hidden meanings of Torah. After 70 CE there did not even exist any
more the Temple as the symbolic focus of unity to which all Jews
could show their solidarity by contributing their annual oerings, as
the Jews of Asia Minor had done in the mid rst century BCE.
38
Nor was there any more a high priest to act as ruler and leader of
the nation, as Josephus had claimed he should.
39
It would be reasonable to expect Judaism in the Mediterranean
diaspora to have become more varied after 70 CE, not less.
34
The only extant inscription from the diaspora which may show the rabbinic
patriarch exercising some authority in the diaspora is a text from Stobi in Macedonia,
of the second or third century CE. Cf. M. Hengel, Die Synagogeninschrift von
Stobi, Zeitschrift fr die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 57 (1966) 14583, but the huge
ne payable to the patriarch according to the inscription would have been unen-
forceable (cf. Schrer, History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, 3:67).
35
Ep. Ad Africanum 20 (14).
36
Cf. M. Goodman, The Roman State and the Jewish Patriarch in the Third
Century in Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. L.I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological
Seminary, 1992) 127139.
37
Cf. M. Goodman, Identity and Authority in Ancient Judaism Judaism 39
(1990) 192201 [Chapter 2 above].
38
Cf. Cicero. Flac. 66.
39
C.Ap. 2.193194; cf. A.J. 20.251.
242 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
Jrvs, xox-Jrvs .xr Jrvisn r\irrxcr
Whatever their divergences, one common denominator for all Jews
was that each thought of himself or herself as belonging within
a system dened as Judaism. Outsiders may have been uncertain
whether any particular individual should be considered a Jew, but
the individual himself would always know whether he was bound
by the covenant between God and Israel.
This was not just a matter of theological logic. I have argued in
detail elsewhere
40
that when the emperor Nerva in 96 CE reformed
the collection of the scus Judaicus, the special poll tax imposed by
the Roman state on all Jews within the empire after the Judean
revolt of 6670 CE, he exempted Jewish apostates, thereby ensuring
that the selection of those liable to the tax should be by religious
self-denition: those who professed Judaism (whether native-born
or proselytes) were required to pay two denarii a year towards the
temple of Jupiter on the Capitol in Rome. In return for this tax,
self-professed Jews were exempted from the normal requirement to
take part in the pagan ceremonials of the state.
If this theory is correct, in practice any Jew will have been
quite clear about the distinction between himself and the gentiles.
Conversely, non-Jews who were interested in worshipping the Jewish
God would be entirely clear that their devotion to this divinity did
not in itself make them into Jews unless they also wished to embrace
the (or a) whole system of Judaism (including exclusive monotheism)
and, as a corollary, to pay the scus Judaicus to Rome.
The best evidence up to now that some polytheistic gentiles
were indeed interested in worshipping the Jewish God has emerged
only comparatively recently, with the publication in 1987 of a long
inscription from Aphrodisias in Caria, in modern Turkey.
41
This
inscription, tentatively dated by its editors to the early third century
CE,
42
contains a long list of names of donors to a Jewish institution
whose precise nature is obscure. The names on side A and at the
40
M. Goodman, Nerva, the scus Judaicus and Jewish Identity Journal of Roman
Studies 79 (1989) 4044.
41
J. Reynolds and R. Tannenbaum, Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias, Cambridge
Philological Society, supplementary volume, 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological
Society, 1987).
42
Ibid., 1922.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 243
43
A, lines 13, 17, 22.
44
B, line 34.
45
B, lines 3438.
46
Cf. Reynolds and Tannenbaum, Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias, 58.
47
A, line 1.
48
Cf. Acts of the Apostles 10:2, 22; 13:16, 26.
49
E.g. F. Siegert, Gottersfrchtigen und Sympathisanten, Journal for the Study
of Judaism 4 (1973) 10964.
50
Cf. critique by Kraabel, The Disappearance of the God-Fearer .
51
Reynolds and Tannenbaum, Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias, 88.
top of side B of the list are most distinctively Jewish and include
three individuals specically designated as proselytos.
43
In contrast, on
side B, under a separate heading entitled and these [are] the god-
reverers,
44
are found fty-three non-Jewish names, of whom the rst
nine are described as bouleutes, city councillor.
45
It is clear that these latter individuals were gentiles honoured by
the Jewish community in Aphrodisias. It is likely that they were
polytheists, since all city councillors could normally expect to take
part in civic cults, unless, like Jews, they were specically exempt.
46
It
is also likely that the appearance of their names on the list reected
their interest in Judaism and not just in Jews in their locality: the
inscription starts with an invocation to the helping God (theos boethos),
47
and their designation as God-reverers (theosebeis) suggests that they
were devoted in some way to the Jewish God.
Over the past twenty years or so the problem of these pious
gentiles, usually designated as Godfearers
48
has attracted a huge
literature,
49
but I believe that more can and should be said. Most
scholars have been primarily interested in the role of Godfearers
in the Acts of the Apostles as the recipients of Christian mission
in the interlude between the rejection of the Gospel by the Jews
and the full-blooded mission to the gentiles.
50
The scholars who have
approached the topic primarily through the epigraphic evidence,
including the Aphrodisias inscription, have tended to portray such
gentiles from the Jewish point of view, describing them as on the
fringes of Judaism, of but not in.
51
I do not doubt that ancient Christians and Jews may indeed have
taken such a view of gentiles, but I wonder whether these depic-
tions also reect the self-perception of the gentiles themselves. City
councillors in Aphrodisias who became Godfearers did so voluntarily,
presumably because they found religious meaning in the act. They
244 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
could have become full proselytes and part of the covenant if they
had wanted to do so, as the open designation of individuals as pros-
elytes at Aphrodisias shows,
52
but since they chose not to, it may
be that worshipping the Jewish God as a gentile had a meaning for
them as polytheists quite dierent from that experienced by those
who entered the exclusive covenant of Judaism.
For a pagan polytheist there were many reasons to worship the
Jewish God. The main reasons, as with any deity, lay in his power:
he was the Lord of the Universe, the highest god (theos hypsistos).
53
A deitys power could be divined from his activity in the world: as
Josephus put it, in a curious reversal of the arguments of later theolo-
gians, only God could have created the irregularities of the heavenly
bodies.
54
The aura of the divinity was not necessarily diminished by
the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, for pagans could
presumably accept (if they wished to) the claim addressed to them
by Josephus that the outcome of the Jewish revolt had been Gods
will,
55
since it was through Gods support alone that the Romans
held their empire.
56
The lack of a single cult centre might even have
been a positive attraction to polytheists, who devoted themselves in
increasing numbers in the high Roman empire to divinities such as
Isis, Mithras or Jupiter Dolichenus, who had been displaced from
their actual or alleged place of origin;
57
it may be that lack of local
roots made more plausible each gods claims to universal signicance.
It is likely also that knowledge of the existence of Jewish commu-
nities throughout much of the Empire, full of initiates devoted to
God to such an extent that his laws shaped their entire lives, would
encourage interested polytheists to believe that this must be a divinity
worth cultivation. Large public temples dedicated by non-initiates to
divinities like Isis to whom initiates were also known to be devoted
are found in many cities in the Roman empire.
58
52
If there was indeed a prohibition by the Roman state on conversion to Judaism,
it seems to have been blatantly ignored by some, cf. ibid., 4344.
53
Cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 12744, 16364.
54
A.J. 1.155156.
55
Cf. B.J. 6.250.
56
B.J. 2.390.
57
Cf. M.J. Vermaseren, Mithras, the Secret God (London: Chatto and Windus,
1963).
58
Cf. R.E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World (London: Thames and Hudson,
1971).
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 245
How would such a polytheist convinced of Gods power normally
be expected to worship? It can be said immediately that it would
not be at all obvious to carry out part, but not all, of the lifestyle
of a full Jewish initiate, as in the standard picture of Godfearers as
gentiles who chose to follow an arbitrary selection of some of the
injunctions of the Torah.
59
Of course, a polytheist might behave in
such a way, perhaps keeping the sabbath but not the dietary laws
or the requirement to circumcise sons,
60
but if such behaviour was
intended to mark devotion to the Jewish God, rather than just
imitation of attractive Jewish customs, it suggests an individual on
the way to becoming a Jew
61
rather than a pagan polytheist simply
honouring a powerful divinity. At any rate, for most pagans there
might seem to be no religious advantage in listening to synagogue
services run by Jews: they might hope to derive some philosophical
insights from readings from the Bible,
62
but it would not be very
uplifting to listen to catalogues of legal injunctions which, as non-
Jews, they believed did not apply to them.
The standard way for ancient polytheists to worship a divinity
was through oerings on altars. This form of worship, hallowed
by antiquity, was still widespread and popular in the second and
third centuries CE, as numerous inscriptions attest.
63
Among such
inscriptions are some which are more plausibly ascribed to gentiles
devoted to the Jewish God. An inscription on a small altar from
Pamphylia dated to the rst or second century CE and published in
1992 reads: For the truthful god who is not made with hands (in
fulllment of ) a vow;
64
since the most striking aspect of the Jewish
God in the eyes of outsiders was the remarkable fact that he has
no image, it is most likely that the inscription was addressed to him.
Similarly, an altar of the second century CE from Pergamon, with
an inscription which reads at the top: God, Lord, who is One for
ever, and on the bottom: Zopyros [dedicated] to the Lord the
59
E.g. Siegert, Gottersfrchtigen und Sympathisanten; Reynolds and Tannen-
baum, Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias, 65.
60
Cf. Juvenal, Satires 14.9699.
61
Cf. Juvenal, Satires 14.96106.
62
Cf. J.G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism, 7576.
63
R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century
AD to the Conversion of Constantine (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986) 6972.
64
P.W. van der Horst, A New Altar of a Godfearer, JJS 43 (1992) 3237.
246 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
altar and the support with the lamp, is most plausibly ascribed to
a pagan worshipper of the Jewish God.
65
The general attitude of Jews to such gentiles worship can only
be suggested through the logic of a somewhat complex argument, as
follows. There is good evidence in Palestinian rabbinic texts, from
the Tosefta
66
and Sifra,
67
both probably redacted in the third century
CE, to the Jerusalem Talmud,
68
redacted probably in the late fourth
century, that some rabbis sometimes assumed that gentiles (unlike
Jews) were permitted to make oerings to God outside Jerusalem;
the debate in the Jerusalem Talmud text was only over whether Jews
should allow themselves to help gentiles to do this. Such approval
by rabbis quoted in these texts is particularly signicant because in
these same texts can also be found strong disapproval of gentiles
worship of other gods; the prohibition of alien worship (avodah zarah)
was a consistent element in the so-called Noachide laws considered
by the rabbis to be incumbent on all humans, gentiles as much as
Jews, and rst attested in the Tosefta.
69
Unlike these rabbis, some
Jews in the diaspora apparently did not object to the pagan practices
of gentile God-worshippers, for they honoured gentile city-council-
lors who almost certainly took part in civic cults,
70
so it will have
been comparatively easy for them to accept the much less obviously
objectionable practices of gentiles who made oerings not to idols
but to the Jewish God.
If gentiles did regularly make such oerings, what would one
expect the archeological evidence to look like from the buildings
in which they worshipped? First, and most obvious, there could be
no cult statue: pagans knew that what distinguished the Jewish God
from other deities was the lack of any image.
71
To indicate the
65
B. Lifshitz, Donateurs et fondateurs dans les synagogues juives, Cahiers de la Revue
Biblique, supplementary volume 7 (Paris: Gabalda, 1967) no. 12; cf. E. Bickerman,
The Altars of Gentiles in idem, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, part 2 (Leiden:
Brill, 1980) 34142.
66
Zevakhim 13:1, which refers even to Samaritans.
67
83c., ed. Weiss.
68
y. Megillah 1.13, 72b (ed. Krotoschin).
69
Avodah Zarah 8:4; cf. D. Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism: A Historical
and Constructive Study of the Noachide Laws (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen,
1983) 34, 10748.
70
See sup.
71
Cf. Varro, apud Augustine, De Civitate Dei 4.31.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 247
Jewishness of the divinity, therefore, one might expect characteristic
Jewish iconography on mosaics or wall paintings: as the reliefs on
the Arch of Titus in Rome demonstrate, pagans were aware of such
Jewish images as the candelabrum (menorah) and incense shovels of the
Jerusalem Temple. One might also expect to nd in the shrines of
such gentiles fragments of Hebrew words and letters, since, regard-
less of its incomprehensibility, the divinitys special language might
be thought to have an intrinsic power, as can be seen from the use
of Hebrew in non-Jewish magical papyri. In all other respects the
building might be expected to look like any other pagan templea
fact, however, of dubious advantage in identication, since such
temples varied greatly in plan from one place to another and from
one shrine to another.
Such gentile worshippers would not necessarily have any collective
name for themselves, any more than (for example) worshippers of
Apollo or Jupiter Dolichenus did. Since they were not Jews (or, as
they might think of it, initiates of the Jewish God), their worship
of the divinity formed only one part of their religious lives, let alone
their political and social identity; Jews, Christians, Mithraists and
Isiaci were unusual in ancient religious history in their adoption of
a group name to describe themselves.
72
Nor did such gentiles neces-
sarily espouse common myths or uniform rituals: each shrine might
quite well follow its own local rules, as was common in ancient
paganism.
73
This variation and anonymity will, of course, make such gentiles
dicult to identify in the surviving evidence from late antiquity.
Nonetheless, it is not just an entirely theoretical hypothesis that such
people may have existed, nor that they may have set up altars and
special buildings.
In 407 CE the emperors Theodosius, Arcadius and Honorius
issued a law against a new crime of superstition, which has claimed
the unheard name of heaven-worshippers (caelicolae),
74
ordering that
72
Cf. J.A. North, The Development of Religious Pluralism in The Jews among
Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, eds. J. Lieu, J. North and T. Rajak (London:
Routledge, 1992) 17493.
73
Cf. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World, 64101.
74
The assertion by the emperor in each reference to the caelicolae that he has
never heard of them before (cf. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 256)
may show only his ignorance or their adoption of a new name, and not necessarily
that they were a new religious phenomenon.
248 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
their buildings (aedicia), which contain meetings of some new dogma,
should be vindicated to the churches, i.e. conscated.
75
The evidence
about the caelicolae, found in this law, in another similar law issued
in 409 CE, and in a few remarks by Latin patristic writers,
76
is
strangely ignored in the standard modern discussions of Godfearers,
77
but it seems very likely that the term describes individuals of the
same type as those called theosebeis (God-worshippers) in Greek. In
the law of 409 CE the emperors moved straight from condemning
the caelicolae to condemning those who dare to convert Christians
to Judaism.
78
The caelicolae were included in the heading of a title
of the Theodosian Code along with Jews and Samaritans; despite
this link with Jews, they seem to have been pagan polytheists.
79
The
term caelicolae (heaven-worshippers) seems to be a direct analogue
to the Hebrew yir "ei shamayim (heaven-fearers) used in rabbinic texts
of the third to fth century CE to refer to gentiles who respect the
Jewish God.
80
At any rate, if the caelicolae were indeed pagans who
revered the Jewish God, the most signicant datum to emerge from
the Roman legal texts is the fact that they possessed buildings for
worship,
81
in which case modern scholars might be thought to have
every reason to hunt for evidence of such buildings in the archeo-
logical remains of the late-Roman period.
75
Codex Justinianus 1.9.12.
76
Cf. Juster, Les Juifs dans lEmpire romain, vol. 1, 175, n. 3.
77
E.g. Siebert, Gottersfrchtigen und Sympathisanten; contrast Linder, The Jews
in Roman Imperial Legislation.
78
Codex Theodosianus 16.8.19.
79
Linder (The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation I, 257) takes the caelicolae to be
Christian renegades, oddly translating nisi ad. . . . venerationem . . . Christianam conversi
fuerint as unless they return to . . . the Christian veneration. This interpretation
seems to go back to Juster (Les Juifs dans lEmpire romain, vol. 1, 175, n. 3). Juster
was (rightly) keen to counter claims by previous scholars that caelicolae were Jews,
but he did so by a misinterpretation of Codex Theodosianus 16.5.43. He took quamvis
Christianos esse se simulent (although they pretend that they are Christians) at the
end of that decree to refer to all previously mentioned groups, which included the
caelicolae. But this is not plausible, since another group mentioned previously in
the same law were the gentiles (pagans), who by denition did not claim to be
Christian. The words at the end of the decree (pretend to be Christians) most
obviously refer to the group mentioned in the nal sentence of the law, immediately
preceding this phrasethat is, the Donatists, who were indeed a Christian heresy.
The Christian writer Philastrius (Haer. 15, CSEL 38, 67) thought that the caelicolae
were Jews, who worshipped with sacrices the goddess Caelestis, who personied
the heavens.
80
Reynolds and Tannenbaum, Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias, 5253.
81
Codex Theodosianus 16.8.19.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 249
It is time to make explicit the relevance of such questions to the
study of Jews and Judaism in the late-Roman diaspora. How much
evidence customarily ascribed by scholars to Jews and used to recon-
struct Judaisms might actually reect gentiles of this kind, who may
have worshipped the Jewish God without any contact at all with
Jews? I stress the word might. My aim is not to estimate the most
plausible explanation of the surviving archeological and epigraphic
evidence, but to illustrate the fragility of the scholarly assumptions
which lie behind attempts to describe diaspora Judaism in the Medi-
terranean region. I shall concentrate on just one, celebrated, case
study: the late-Roman synagogue at Sardis.
Possinrr Rr-ix+rnrnr+.+ioxs or +nr E\irrxcr
It will be recalled that the modern re-evaluation of diaspora, and
especially Asia Minor, Judaism has been based to a considerable extent
on the alleged implications of the huge building at Sardis which the
excavators identied as a synagogue (see above). The building is a
large basilica built originally in the early Roman period as part of
the gymnasium complex in the centre of the city. The basilica was
identied as a synagogue in its later phases on account of the dis-
covery of fragmentary Hebrew inscriptions and the iconography of its
decoration.
82
Numerous mosaic depictions of candelabra (menorot) were
discovered, and fragments of one actual, stone menorah. The mosaics
included pictures of a rams horn (shofar) and other objects which
have been discovered in a number of synagogue sites in the land of
Israel.
83
There were also two small fragments of Hebrew inscriptions,
one beyond clear decipherment, one reading shalom (peace).
Since the building has been rmly decreed by the excavators in
1962 to be a synagogue on the basis of these nds, when the rst
inscriptions came to be published in 1964 the framework was already
taken for granted.
84
The mosaic inscription of a certain Aurelius
82
Cf. D.G. Mitten, The Synagogue in Report of the Fifth Campaign at Sardis
(1962), Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 179 (1963) 40.
83
L.I. Levine, The Synagogue in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: American Schools of
Oriental Research, 1987) 185.
84
L. Robert, Nouvelles inscriptions de Sardes (Paris: Librarie dAmrique et dOrient,
1964) 37.
250 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
Olympios from the tribe of the Leontii,
85
unique among Jewish
inscriptions according to its editor,
86
was nonetheless presumed to
be Jewish simply because is was known to come from what was
believe to be a synagogue. A rough grato incised on the neck of
a jar found in a shop outside the building to the south, with the
name Jacob and four other letters (prou), was reconstructed to
read Jacob the elder and ascribed to a councillor of the Jewish
community mainly because a Jewish community could be expected
to have such ocials and because a shop next to a prominent Jewish
public building was likely to be owned by a Jew.
87
All such interpretations may be entirely correct, but it may be
worthwhile to consider briey other, quite dierent, ways of explain-
ing the same evidence. What factors might encourage the belief
that the Sardis building might not have been a Jewish synagogue
at all, but might rather have housed a cult of gentile, polytheist
God-worshippers?
Negative reasons to suggest that the building might not have been
a synagogue are easily enumerated. First, it is many times bigger
than any other synagogue yet identied.
88
Secondly, its size might
seem to militate against its usefulness as a synagogue where the main
focus of ritual was to hear the Law read and explained: in a throng
of over a thousand people, the reader might sometimes be hard to
hear. Third, the plan of the building is unparalleled among ancient
synagogues.
89
Fourth, the huge marble table in the centre of the hall
is unique in Jewish buildings and the edice lacks the stone benches
standard in synagogues elsewhere.
90
Fifth, at least one donor to the
building came from outside Sardis (from nearby Hypaepa),
91
which
was odd for a communal synagogue intended for the use of Jews
who lived close enough to come regularly to hear the Law read.
Sixth, and in contrast to donors names in synagogues elsewhere, the
85
Ibid., no. 6.
86
Ibid., 46.
87
Ibid., 57, on no. 22.
88
A.R. Seager, The Synagogue and the Jewish Community: The Building
in Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times, ed. G.M.A. Hanfmann (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983) 177.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
91
Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 46.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 251
mosaic inscriptions in Sardis do not apparently stress rank, honour
and prestige within the Jewish community; instead, they emphasize
civic status, and in particular, for those who could boast it, the rank
of bouleutes, city councillor.
92
None of the inscriptions refers to Jews,
Israel, Hebrews, synagogues, or anything else specically Jewish.
Positive reasons to suggest that the building might have been a
place for God-worshippers to reverence the Jewish God are rather less
numerous, but not negligible. First is the designation on the mosaics
of six donors as theosebeis, God-worshippers;
93
none has a Jewish
name and, in the light of the proximity of Sardis to Aphrodisias,
it is much more plausible that the theosebeis here, as at Aphrodisias,
were gentiles.
94
The Jewish iconography (such as the shofar) will then
have been taken over by these non-Jews as symbolic representations
of their cult of the Jewish God. Such appropriation of the images
of other faiths was common in late antiquity: Christians sometimes
used Jewish images,
95
just as Jews sometimes used pagan symbols,
96
so it should not surprise if the pagans who revered the Jewish God
borrowed Jewish motifs.
Whoever the worshippers were in the building in its last phase,
they seem to have kept a scroll of the law, or something similar,
in the formal niche designated by the archeologists as the Torah
shrine. The evidence lies in the discovery around the niche of a
marble inscription with the word nomophylakion (guarding-place of
[the] law?),
97
and in the probable depiction of Torah scrolls in the
form of two stylized spirals.
98
Such appurtenances of worship might
seem too obviously appropriate to Jewish synagogue liturgy for any
other explanation to be worth considering, but in fact even Torah
scrolls might have a function in pagan worship. There is good evi-
dence that non-Jews sometimes treated Jews veneration for their
scrolls as the direct equivalent of pagan veneration of idols:
99
when
92
Robert, Nouvelles inscriptions de Sardes, 5457.
93
Ibid., 3945; Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 15859.
94
Cf. ibid., 159.
95
Cf. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, vol. 2, 13.
96
Ibid., passim.
97
Kraabel, Impact of the Discovery of the Sardis Synagogue, 189.
98
Y. Shiloh, Torah Scrolls and the Menorah Plaque from Sardis, Israel Exploration
Journal 18 (1968) 5457.
99
Cf. M. Goodman, Sacred Scripture and deling the hands , Journal of
Theological Studies 41 (1990) 99107 [Chapter 6 above].
252 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
a soldier burnt a Torah scroll in rst-century CE Judea, the Roman
governor had him publicly executed,
100
and in the triumph held by
Titus and Vespasian in Rome to celebrate the suppression of the
Jewish revolt, the procession of booty contained, after the impressive
loot from the Temple itself, a scroll of the Jewish law.
101
It would be
easy for pagans to imagine that the scroll of the law embodied the
divinityand for those who worshipped the divinity to keep, in a
wall oriented towards Jerusalem, a special copy of the scroll as the
central focus of their worship, even if they did not actually read it,
let alone understand the meaning of its contents.
Nor need the presence of a Hebrew inscription in the building
signify that this was a synagogue: a word like shalom
102
is just the
sort of word non-Jews enthusiastic about the Jewish God might
employ as a sort of talisman (see above).
If I push possibilities to their limit, I could even argue that the
presence among the inscriptions of two characteristically Jewish names
(out of thirty altogether), like a certain Samoe, priest and wise teacher
(sophodidaskalos),
103
does not necessarily bear any signicance for the
nature of the building as a whole. Jewish names appear in pagan
contexts elsewhere, like those in an ephebe list from a gymnasium
in Cyrene in the early rst century CE.
104
It would not be particu-
larly strange if some Jews (albeit, in the eyes of some rabbis, bad
ones)
105
decided to show public support for a pagan shrine erected in
honour of the Jewish God, just as some Jews nowadays will attend
Christian services, making mental reservations during elements of the
liturgy incompatible with Jewish theologyand just as some pagans
in ancient times made oerings in synagogues (see above).
It will be recalled that my aim in discussing the Sardis build-
ing was only to push the possible explanation of the evidence to
100
B.J. 2.229231.
101
Ibid., 7.150.
102
Seager, The Synagogue and the Jewish Community: The Building, 171.
103
G.M.A. Hanfmann and J.B. Bloom, Samoe, Priest and Teacher of Wisdom
Eretz-Israel 19 (1987) 10*14*.
104
G. Lderitz, Corpus jdischer Zeugnisse aus der Cyrenaika, Beihefte zum Tbinger
Atlas des vorderen Orients, Reihe B. nr. 53 (Weisbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert,
1983) no. 7; cf. T. Rajak, Jews and Christians as Groups in a Pagan World
in To See Ourselves as Others See Us: Christians, Jews, Others in Late Antiquity, eds.
J. Neusner and E.S. Frerichs (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985) 247261.
105
Cf. y. Megillah 1.13, 72b (ed. Krotoschin).
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 253
the limit of reasonablenessto see what might have been, and not
to suggest what is more plausible. To balance the picture, and to
avoid misleading readers, I should make it clear that the hypothesis
I have just outlined is no more probable than the traditional sug-
gestion that the building was a synagogue, and that some factors
are dicult to explain on this view just as they are if the traditional
view is taken.
So, for example, if the building was used by pagan polytheists, the
emphasis by many donors on their enjoyment of the citizenship of
Sardis
106
is strange since it might be thought an attribute local pagans
could take for granted. Again, the apparently deliberate hiding of
the image of other deities when an ancient stone on which images
of Cybele and Artemis were carved was re-used in the oor of the
forecourt would be an odd thing for polytheists to do.
107
If the latter
behaviour took place in the fth century, it could be argued that it
marked a change of use of the building from pagan shrine to Jewish
synagogue (below), along perhaps with the (undatable) decapitation
of the eagles that anked the marble table,
108
but I do not wish to
press the issue, since I hope that in any case the methodological
points I wish to make are suciently clear: the Sardis building, with
its distinctive iconography and large number of donor inscriptions,
might in the third and fourth century CE have housed a Jewish
synagogue, in which case the Judaism of those who worshipped there
may have been of a distinctive type, but it also might have housed a
cult of non-Jews who revered the Jewish God without any intention
of entering the fold of Judaism.
Explicitly Jewish identication in the epigraphical and archeological
material from the late-Roman Mediterranean diaspora is much rarer
than one would like. So, for instance, of the eighty-ve inscriptions
from the diaspora included in Lifshitzs collection of donors and
founders in synagogues,
109
only twenty-four contain any clearly Jewish
reference, such as Jew, synagogue, or Hebrew, although the
surmise that they were indeed set up by Jews is much stronger in
some cases than in others.
106
Robert, Nouvelles inscriptions de Sardes, 5556.
107
Seager, The Synagogue and the Jewish Community: The Building, 176.
108
Ibid., 170.
109
Lifshitz, Donateurs et fondateurs dans les synagogues juives.
254 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
In the light of all this, it is worth asking what, if historians totally
lacked the benet of evidence from literary texts, they would deduce
about Judaism from archeology and inscriptions. I doubt if they would
ever discover that Judaism was distinguished from most other ancient
religions by being a system, or a number of systems, with a complex
mythology based on the covenant and revelation on Mount Sinai. It
would be clear that there were indeed religious groups who identied
themselves as Jews and set up communal buildings and hierarchies,
110
but I suspect that few scholars would guess the sig nicance of this
fact: if they operated by analogy, I suspect that they would (probably
quite wrongly) interpret hierarchical titles as evidence of grades of
initiation like those in Mithraism, so that Father of the synagogue
could be seen as parallel to the Mithraic pater.
111
Not much else could be deduced about Judaism from the vast
majority of Jewish sites and inscriptions.
112
The nature of Jewish
religious beliefs would surely be totally obscure from the iconogra-
phy of menoroth, lions, incense shovels, birds, lulavim, and so on.
113
I
doubt if we would even be able to recognize lulavim (palm branches)
for what they are, or to distinguish the signicant elements of the
iconography (menoroth, lulavim) from the (probably) purely decorative
(lions and birds); only with literary knowledge can such distinctions
be made, and even then the signicance of incense shovels remains
obscure.
None of the archeological and epigraphic evidence gives any hint
of the really distinctive traits of Judaism as it appears in late-antique
Jewish and Christian sources: the centrality of a written scripture,
and its proclamation and explanation in public assemblies. To deduce
that, we would need more inscriptions arming the status of liturgical
readers, which are curiously rare. Nothing in the iconography would
give a clue to the main Jewish identity markers as we know them
from elsewhere: shabbat, kashrut (dietary laws), and circumcision.
110
Schrer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 3:87107.
111
Cf. Vermaseren, Mithras, the Secret God; Schrer, The History of the Jewish People
in the Age of Jesus Christ, 3:101, n. 51.
112
The great exception is the synagogue at Dura-Europos, with its remarkable
frescoes, to which there is no parallel elsewhere ( J. Gutmann, The Dura-Europos
Synagogue; a Re-evaluation [Chambersburg, PA: American Academy of Religion and
the Society of Biblical Literature, 1973]).
113
Cf. Levine, The Synagogue in Late Antiquity.
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 255
Inevitably, then, all interpretation of such archeological and epi-
graphic material carries with it a great burden of assumptions derived
from the literary evidence which survives from antiquity through the
Christian Church and rabbinic Judaism. The hope that archeological
evidence can act as an objective, untainted corrective to those literary
traditions is therefore in many cases over-optimistic.
Erirootr: Tnr Exr or Uxcrn+.ix+v
Even for the most skeptical historian, the radical uncertainty I have
been advocating in the study of Mediterranean Judaism will no longer
seem even marginally plausible by the medieval period. By (say) the
tenth century CE no one would seriously suggest that Jewish-type
evidence is likely to have derived from pagan God-worshippers, nor
that non-rabbinic Judaism was widespread in the region, apart from
among those Jews like the Karaites who self-consciously broke away
from the rabbinic mainstream. It is worth asking from what date,
and for what reason, this increased certainty in the interpretation
of Jewish-type material becomes overwhelmingly plausible. I suggest,
tentatively, a fairly precise date: the late fourth century CE. If that
date is correct, it will have been brought about by a specic agent,
the Roman state, and, as often in Jewish history, change will have
come about because of actions not by Jews, but by outsidersin this
case, the militantly Christian emperors of Rome and Constantinople
from the time of Theodosius the Great.
All Roman emperors were Christian from the conversion of
Constantine in 312 CE, with only a very brief interlude under Julian
the Apostate in 361363 CE, but the earliest Christian emperors,
whatever their personal predilections, made no attempt to impose
their faith upon their subjects. In the late 380s CE this liberal stance
was to change quite dramatically. Theodosius the Great, impelled
by personal conscience and zealous Christian clerics, began the sys-
tematic closure of pagan temples.
114
By the end of the century most
temples in the main cities of the Roman empire were either deserted
114
N.Q. King, The Emperor Theodosius and the Establishment of Christianity (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1960).
256 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
or converted into churches, and paganism, though not eradicated,
was conned to the countryside.
115
Thus by the fth century it is very unlikely that a large public
building in a major city would be a pagan shrine, even to the Jewish
God, and whatever the Sardis building was in its earlier stages, it
is most likely that by the fth century the Jewish motifs found on
the mosaic oors do indeed show it to have been a synagogue. The
attitude of Theodosius and his successors to the erection, repair and
preservation of synagogues was not exactly favourable, but it was
much more ambivalent than their thoroughgoing hostility to pagan
temples.
116
Furthermore, if in the fth century the building was a synagogue,
it is likely that by that time the Jews who worshipped there had
come under the inuence of the rabbis of the land of Israel. There
is evidence in the Roman legal codes that from the 380s until at
least the 420s the Jewish nasi (patriarch) in Palestine was accorded by
the Roman state power and authority over the Jews throughout the
empire. By this period, Roman emperors took for granted the backing
of the Roman state for the patriarchs collection of funds from the
diaspora.
117
They assumed that he had the right to excommunicate
deviants from Jewish communities,
118
which presumably implied the
right to dene what is deviant. Finally, and of most signicance for
the Sardis building, they took for granted his power to found and
dismantle synagogues throughout the empire.
119
The patriarch by
no means represented all rabbis, since the talmudic sources reveal
conict between individual nesiim and individual rabbis over questions
of authority and halacha during many generations,
120
but he did at
least come from within the same type of Judaism that the rabbis
115
J. Gecken, The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism (Amsterdam and Oxford:
North-Holland, 1978).
116
B.S. Bachrach, The Jewish community of the Later Roman Empire as seen
in the Codex Theodosianus in To See Ourselves as Others See Us: Christians, Jews,
Others in Late Antiquity, 399421.
117
Cf. Codex Theodosianus 16.8.17.
118
Ibid., 16.8.8.
119
Cf. ibid., 16.8.22.
120
L.I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity ( Jerusalem and
New York: Yad Izhak ben Zvi and Jewish Theological Seminary, 1989).
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 257
espoused.
121
After all, the foundation document of rabbinic Judaism,
the Mishnah, had been codied by R. Judah ha-Nasi, patriarch at the
end of the second century CE and the beginning of the third, and
it was descent from him that gave later patriarchs their authority.
It is possible, then, to end on a reassuring note. Whatever the
nature of the building in Sardis in which gentile God-worshippers
dedicated their mosaic inscriptions in the mid-fourth century or
earlier, it seems likely that the individual called Samoe, priest and
wise teacher, whose name was inserted into the oor of the hall in
the late fth century
122
was a rabbinic Jew,
123
and that the building
which he honoured was a synagogue. There is, after all, something
that can be asserted about Jews and Judaism in the Mediterranean
diaspora in the late-Roman period.
Pos+scnir+
I am grateful to the editors of this volume and to the Mediterranean
Institute of the University of Malta for the opportunity to republish
here this article, which originally appeared in Journal of Mediterranean
Studies in 1994. The central thesis of the article, that students of the
religious history of late antiquity need to allow for the possibility that
Jewish iconography on archaeological remains may reect the activi-
ties not of Jews but of gentile worshippers of the Jewish God, has
been cast in a new light by more recent studies. As a result, I think
that the hypothesis presented so tentatively in the early 1990s can
reasonably be presented now with slightly more condence, although
I must stress that my purpose in elaborating the hypothesis is still
only to stimulate consideration of what might be possible rather than
to describe what was certainly the case.
In this brief discussion of relevant scholarship since 1994, two major
advances in the presentation of the primary epigraphic evidence take
121
Cf. I. Gafni, Sta and LegislatorOn New Types of Leadership in the
Talmudic Era in Palestine and Babylonia in Priesthood and Monarchy (In Hebrew)
eds. I. Gafni and G. Motzkin ( Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1987) 7992.
122
Hanfmann and Bloom, Samoe, Priest and Teacher of Wisdom.
123
Trebilco ( Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 50) argued that the fact that Samoe
was not called a rabbi in the inscription may be evidence that he (and Jews in
Sardis in general) was not under rabbinic inuence, but I am not persuaded by
this argument from silence.
258 cn.r+rn xixr+rrx
pride of place. First is the full publication of the inscriptions from
the Sardis synagogue.
124
The helpful commentaries on the dossiers,
completed in 1994, reect the state of the debate in the early 1990s.
Second is the brilliant reconsideration of the Aphrodisias Godfearers
stele by Angelos Chaniotis,
125
in which he proposes a date in the
second half of the fourth century or in the fth century for the texts
on both the inscribed faces.
This redating of the Aphrodisias texts, from the early third century
to the mid fourth at earliest, coincides with a trend to redate on
archaeological grounds the alteration of the Sardis gymnasium basilica
into a religious building and the period of its use for that purpose:
126
the debate continues, but it is fair to say that all reinvestigation of
the archaeological record has so far pushed the date of the buildings
use well away from the second century date originally favoured into
the fourth century or later.
Other studies have mapped out a plausible historical context for the
interpenetration of religious iconography, ideas and memberships, in
which neutral religious phrases and ambiguous images were prudently
favoured by public gures in the way they presented themselves to
their fellow citizens and to the state.
127
Jas Elsner has emphasised the
use by both Jews and Christians of a common iconography shared
also with their pagan contemporaries, stressing that the dierences
between religious groups will generally have lain less in the images
they employed than in the meanings they gave to those images.
128
Some scholars have even claimed that religious boundaries were
so uid that Judaism and Christianity were indistinguishable as
124
J.H. Kroll, The Greek inscriptions of the Sardis Synagogue, HTR 94.1
(2001) 1127; Frank Moore Cross, The Hebrew Inscriptions from Sardis, HTR
95.1 (2002).
125
A. Chaniotis, The Jews of Aphrodisias: New Evidence and Old Problems,
Scripta Classica Israelica 22 (2002).
126
H. Botermann, Die Synagoge von Sardes, Zeitschrift fr Neutestamentliche Wissen-
schaft 81 (1990); M. Bonz, Diering Approaches to Religious Benefaction: the Late
Third-Century Acquisition of the Sardis Synagogue, HTR 86.2 (1993) 139.
127
For example, see R.R.R. Smith, The Statue Monument of Oecumenius:
A New Portrait of a Late Antique Governor From Aphrodisias, Journal of Roman
Studies 92 (2002).
128
J. Elsner, Archaeologies and Agendas: Reections on Late Antique Jewish
Art and Early Christian Art, Journal of Roman Studies 93 (2003).
rvs .xr tr.isv ix +nr vrri+rnn.xr.x ri.sron. 259
separate religions until the fourth century,
129
a rather extreme view
which itself may not suciently distinguish between ancient attitudes
to group identity and the dierent issue of the problems faced by
modern scholars in assigning a text or artefact to one such group
or another.
130
What now seems generally agreed is the signicance
of the fourth century, after the edict of toleration of Christianity
in 313 CE, as a tolerant religious arena, in which it was possible
for an individual both to cross religious divides and to seek wider
ecumenical acceptability by adoption of ambiguous language.
131
Of particular importance for study of the use of Jewish symbols
has been the remarkable investigation by Stephen Mitchell of the
cult of theos hypsistos (the highest god).
132
Mitchell suggests that
the abundant epigraphic material referring to this god from all over
the eastern Mediterranean world in the Roman imperial period
should be attributed to a specic pagan cult, which he characterizes
as an aspect of pagan monotheism. Not all have been persuaded that
highest god should always be understood as designating the divinity
worshipped rather than as an adjective applied to another god,
133
but even a modied form of Mitchells thesis would render it plau-
sible both that Jews could easily identify their God with the divinity
worshipped by such pagans (cf. Ps. Aristeas 16) and (importantly for
the present study) that such pagans could identify their highest god
with the God of the Jews. The former possibility I have explored
at some length in a discussion of the image of the sun god in the
synagogue mosaics in late-Roman Palestine.
134
The latter possibility
would t well with the suggestion in the current study about the role
of the godfearers in the synagogue in late-Roman Sardis.
129
Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism
(Standford, CA: Standford University Press, 1999).
130
Martin Goodman, Modelling the Parting of the Ways, in The Ways that
Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, eds. A.H. Becker
and A.Y. Reed (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 2003) 11929 [Chapter 15 above].
131
Cf. Chaniotis, The Jews of Aphrodisias, 218, 2245, 2312.
132
The Cult of Theos Hypsistos between Pagans, Jews and Christians, in Pagan
Monotheism in Late Antiquity, eds. P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede (Oxford: Clarendon
Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
133
Cf., for example, Chaniotis, The Jews of Aphrodisias, 224, n. 49.
134
Martin Goodman, The Jewish Image of God in Late Antiquity, in Jewish
Culture and Society Under the Christian Roman Empire, eds. Richard Kalmin and Seth
Schwartz (Leuven: Peeters, 2003) [Chapter 17 above].
Abbahu, R. 209
Abraham 114
Achior 94
Acts of the Apostles 45, 86, 101,
124, 129, 243
Adiabene 24, 95, 107
Conversion of royal family of
Adiabene 92, 150
Aelia Capitolina 55
Agrippa I 4849, 145
Agrippa II 66, 103, 190, 198
Aha, R. 195196
Akedah 212
Akiba, R. 77
Alexander Jannaeus 41
Alexander the Alabarch 64
Alexander the Great 16
Alexandria 28, 37, 48, 59, 151, 226,
235, 237
Alexandrian Jews 63, 235, 237
Synagogue in Alexandria 149, 152,
221
Allegro, John 10
Altars 53, 108, 151
Ammei ha-arez 23
Ammi, R. 156
Ammonite 94
Ananias 95, 112
Ananus b. Ananus 128, 133, 147
Androgynos 172
Angels 208, 210
Annas 130
Antioch 23, 30, 74, 92, 150, 188,
197, 235
Antiochene Jews 23, 97, 222, 226,
235
Antiochus Epiphanes 92
Antiochus III 189
Antoninus Pius 25
Aphrodisias 31, 242244, 251, 258
Apocrypha 9
Apollo 247
Aquila 77, 96
Arcadius 247
Arch of Titus 247
Aristobulus 96, 208
Artapanus 95, 112, 114
Artemis 61, 253
Asclepius 61
Asia Minor 11, 24, 52, 61, 63, 188,
214, 225
Jews of Asia Minor 226, 241, 249
Atheism 150
Augustus 54, 656, 214, 226
Aurelius Olympios 249
Babatha 8283
Babylonia 5253, 62, 101
Babylonian Jews 6264
Babylonian Talmud 14, 156, 170,
192, 196198, 202, 224
Bacchus, cult of 109
Bannus 35, 141, 164
Baptism 97, 107
Baptistai 155
Bar Kochba see Simon bar Kosiba
Bar Kochba war 4, 7, 25, 54, 82
Barr, James 13
Barton, John 7071
Batanaea 65
Baumgarten, Albert 162
Ben Sira 8688
Benjamin, tribe of 149
Beth Alpha 8, 11, 205206
Beth Shammai 33
Beth Shearim 8
Bickerman, Elias 16
Bithynia 229
Boccabello, Jeremy 176
Boethus 65
Boethusians 125, 156
Boreon 227
Botermann, Helga 224
Boyarin, Daniel 176
Bchler, Adolf 15
Caesarea Maritima 65, 97, 148,
222
Caesarean Jews 2223
Caesarea Philippi 190191, 198
Caiaphas 130
Cairo Geniza 6, 14, 82
Calendar 40, 50, 168, 170, 206
Cambridge 176
INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS
262 ixrrx or x.vrs .xr stnrc+s
Caria 31
Cassius Dio 98, 109
Celibacy 138, 143
Celsus 179
Cfar Sakhnin 168
Chaniotis, Angelos 258
Charax Spasinou 112
Charity 106, 112
Charles, R.H. 9
Chi-Rho 216
Christ, portrayal of 183, 212, 216
Christians 5556, 77, 139
Christianity 47, 69, 91
Circumcision 22, 25, 2829, 47,
9495, 97, 102108, 149, 215, 245,
255
Citizenship 27
Clarian Oracle of Apollo 212
Codex 77
Cohen, Shaye 156, 159, 162,
165166, 170
Community Rule 143
Constantine 18, 170, 215216, 223,
227, 230, 255
Constantinople 255
Cornelius Labeo 212
Council of Jamnia 70
Council of Nicaea 216
Cowley Lecturership in Post-biblical
Hebrew 2
Cowley, Sir Arthur 6
Creation 167
Cumanus 74, 221
Cybele 253
Cyprus 55
Cyrene 55, 252
Damascus 92, 151
Damascus Rule 6
Daniel, book of 69, 192197, 2002
Daphne 228
Dead Sea Scrolls 7, 910, 14, 34,
38, 46, 76, 126, 137, 146, 157, 161,
169, 210
Dead Sea sectarians 33, 38, 40, 50, 89,
100, 125126, 137143, 157, 166
Decapolis 148, 171, 225
Deeds of sale 43
Delement 198199
Deling of the hands 7073, 7577,
80, 82, 221
Demetrius the Chronographer 95, 106
Destruction of the Second
Temple 52, 84, 123, 147, 157159,
161, 163, 178, 208, 221, 233, 240,
244
Diana 150
Diaspora
Centrality of the Jerusalem Temple
in the world-view of diaspora
Jews 645, 221
Judaism in the Diaspora 48, 512,
56, 623, 65, 67, 93, 97, 1001,
14552, 219231, 23347
Dietary Laws 47, 112, 142, 167, 187,
189190, 194, 198, 203, 215, 226,
245, 255
Dio Chrysostom 35, 139, 142
Dionysius of Halicarnassus 37
Dionysus 213, 216
Divine Name, the 8182
Domitian 2729, 54
Dora 227
Driver, Sir Godfrey 10
Dura-Europos 8, 11, 74, 211212, 236
Ebionites 185
Ecclesiastes 6972
Edom 104
Egyptian Jews 25, 55, 63, 65, 112,
222, 227
Eleazar 95, 196
Eleazar b. Dima, R. 167
Elephantine 6
Eliezer, R. 168
Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, R. 158
Elijah 193
Elsner, Jas 258
En el-Ghuweir 142
En Gedi 63, 154
Enoch 9
Ephesus 85, 150
Ephraim 36
Epictetus 29, 97, 107
Epicureans 167
Epiphanius 36, 153, 155, 160, 181,
227
Eschatology 40
Essenes 9, 33, 35, 38, 50, 102, 119,
135, 137139, 141143, 153162,
164, 171, 185, 198, 210, 222, 240
Esther, book of 69, 71
Eupolemus 95
Eusebius 180181, 230
Expulsion of Christians from
synagogues 145
Expulsion of the Jews from Rome in
139 BCE 108
ixrrx or x.vrs .xr stnrc+s 263
Ezekiel 207, 212
Ezekiel the Tragedian 95, 209
Ezra 41, 73, 85, 105, 220
Family 105
Feldman, Louis 47
First Revolt 189
First-century Jerusalem 123
First-century Judaea 140
Fiscus Judaicus 2528, 30, 54, 159,
227, 242
Flavian dynasty 54, 223
Form criticism 15
Formal Assyrian characters 76
Fourth Philosophy, the 35, 37, 45,
140141, 165, 240
Frey, Jean-Baptiste 8
Fuks, Alexander 6
Gaius Caligula 37, 48, 52, 226
Galilee 23, 44, 48, 158, 171, 187,
189190
Jews in Galilee 1112, 103, 155, 201
Gallio 152
Gamaliel, R. 45, 121, 170, 228
Gaster, Moses 9
Gauls 241
Gaza 225
Gehinnom 99100
Genesis Rabba 14
Genistai 155
Ger 101102
Gerasa 151, 225
Gerim gerurim 24
Gibeah 81
Gnostics 170, 185
God-fearers 24, 3032, 102, 113,
150, 214, 237, 243, 245246, 248,
250251, 253, 257259
Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew 2
Goodenough, Erwin 1011
Gospels 8486, 124, 129
Gospel of John 129
Gospel of Matthew 99, 102, 119, 132
Goulder, Michael 162
Graetz, Heinrich 70
Grammatikos 84
Greek Jewish literature 135
Gregory of Nazianzus 215
Hades 213
Hadrian 25, 55
Haireseis 3537, 45, 119, 125, 141,
153, 164
Hakhamim 35, 3841, 4345
Half-Jews 23, 30, 110
Hamiram 39, 72
Hammat Tiberias 12, 206, 2134
Mosaic at Hammat Tiberias 205
Synagogue at Hammat
Tiberias 217
Hananel 65
Harnack, Adolf 151
Hasidism 44
Hasmonaeans 94, 103, 146
Hasmonaean High Priests 21
Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2, 162
Hecataeus 211212
Hekhalot 12
Helios 206, 213
Hellenianoi 155
Hellenism 16
Hellenistic Jews 170, 187
Hengel, Martin 1617
Herod 41, 47, 49, 51, 623, 6567,
94, 100, 104, 211
Herodian dynasty 94
Herod Antipas 211
Herr, Moshe David 162
High priests 50, 65, 84, 123,
128130, 134, 147148, 209, 219
Hillel 22, 41, 193
House of 39, 72, 194, 1967
Hinton St. Mary 216
Hippolytus 119, 140, 239
Hoenig, S. 198
Holy of Holies 209, 219, 234
Homosexuality 106, 112
Honorius 247
Hyllarima 225
Hypaepa 250
Hypsistarians 215
Hypsistos 214
Hyrcanus 65
Iao 213
Identity 2133
Idolatry 30, 103, 111, 180, 221, 236,
251
Idumaeans 2223, 94, 104, 110
Image of God 20517
Interpretation of the Torah 1201
Irenaeus 169
Ishmael, R. 72, 202
Isiaci 241, 247
Isis 244
Ituraeans 22, 94
Izates 95, 107
264 ixrrx or x.vrs .xr stnrc+s
Jacob 104
Jacob of Cfar Sima 167
Jacobs, Louis 15
James, the brother of Jesus 12847
James, the brother of John 145
Jeremias, Joachim 17, 84
Jerusalem 8, 52, 5963, 65, 67, 80,
154
The Jerusalem Church 147
Jerusalem Talmud 12, 14, 194, 201,
246
Jesus 83, 93, 99100, 120, 128130,
141, 147, 178
Jesus b. Ananias 147
Jesus b. Phiabi 65
Jewish Christians 33, 35, 38, 50, 93,
147149, 152, 170, 180, 182, 185
Jewish law 44
Jews College, London 4, 15
Jezreel 11
John Chrysostom 221, 227
John Hyrcanus 43
John of Antioch 109, 130
John of Gischala 189190, 198
John the Baptist 35, 141
Jonathan the Sadducee 43
Joseph and Asenath 95, 105
Josephus 22, 3339, 4142, 4548,
52, 55, 6061, 63, 66, 77, 80, 85,
89, 9293, 9798, 100101, 103,
107, 109110, 114, 117120, 124,
126128, 132135, 137141, 151,
154155, 157158, 163165, 170,
187191, 197202, 208, 210211,
220, 223, 226, 239241, 244
Joshua ben Hananiah, R. 170
Joshua haGarsi, R. 156
Josiah 42
Jubilees, book of 9, 104
Judaea 445, 48, 5155, 59, 6367,
74, 79, 117, 119, 123, 138, 139,
148, 151, 153
Judaean Desert documents 4344,
82
Judah, R. 71, 221, 223
Judah haNasi, R. 12, 191, 193, 195,
199202, 257
Judah, kingdom of 36, 104
Judah Nesiah, R. 191, 194, 196,
200201, 203
Judaizing Christians 185
Judaizing Gnostics 185
Judaizing heresies 181
Julia Severa 113
Julian 56, 214, 255
Hymn to King Helios 214
Julius Caesar 24
Julius Paris 108
Jupiter 212
Jupiter Capitolinus 54
Jupiter Dolichenus 244, 247
Jupiter Sabazius 108
Justin Martyr 11, 36, 155, 156, 209
Justinian 227228
Justinianic Code 228
Kabbalah 12
Kahle, Paul 1314
Karaites 125, 135, 138, 161, 255
Kenyon, Sir Frederick 13
Ketubah 82
Leiman, Sidney 70
Leontii 250
Leontopolis 22, 52, 63, 108, 222
Levites 51, 86
Leviticus 142
Lewis, David 6
Libations 74, 199
Liber 213
Life after death 40, 164, 167
Livy 211
Luke 99
Lulavim 254
M. Ulpius Traianus 55
Ma'amad system 63
Maccabees 16, 104, 127
Maccabees, Fourth book of 106
Macedonia 225
Macedonians 188
Macrobius 212
Magic 185
Maimonides 57
Mar Samuel 198
Marcion 184
Marcionites 185
Marmorstein, Arthur 15
Marriage 104105, 110, 197, 202,
241
Adultery 106
Divorce documents 43
Get 83
Marriage contracts 43
Marriage customs 44
Married couple 83
Martyrdom 146, 151
Masoretes 13
ixrrx or x.vrs .xr stnrc+s 265
Matthew 100101
Mecca 51, 60
Megillot 71
Meir, R. 223
Menasseh 36
Menorah 247, 249, 254
Meristai 155
Mesharsheya, R. 71, 193194, 200
Mesopotamia 55
Jews of Mesopotamia 55, 234
Messiah 56
Messianism 40
Metilius 108
Middle Judaism 1
Midrashic exegesis 16
Mikveh 40
Minim 46, 76, 135, 156, 160, 163
173, 180, 184
Minuth 18, 166, 168, 170172
Minyan 157
Miqsat Maasei haTorah 50, 169
Mishnah 12, 21, 22, 44, 4749, 56,
71, 84, 158159, 166, 171172, 180,
192, 194, 196197, 201202, 257
Mission 934, 100, 104, 243
Christian mission 91, 95, 100, 114,
148, 150
Jewish mission 98, 103, 107, 109
Mitchell, Stephen 214215, 259
Mithras 244
Mithraism 254
Mithraists 241, 247
Modius 190, 198
Momigliano, Arnaldo 18
Moore, George Foot 15
Mosaics 2113, 216, 247, 249, 251,
256
Moses 41, 81, 89, 180181, 220
Mount Hermon 187
Mount Sinai 31, 81, 254
Mucianus 188189
Muslims 57
Mysticism 123, 210
Naaran 205206
Nabataeans 83, 103
Nasaraeans 155
Nashim 172
Nehemiah 220
Nepotianus 108
Nero 53
Nerva 26, 28, 5455, 242
New Testament 35, 8386, 101, 124
Nicanor 49
Nicolaus of Damascus 66
Nicomedia 61
Niddah 155
Nisibis 193, 195
Noachide Laws 31, 246
Numenius of Apamaea 213
Oenoanda 214
Offerings on altars 245
Oil 187, 189203
Omer offering 40
On the Sublime 96
Onias 222
Oracle of Apollo 214
Oral law 118
Oral Torah 42, 75, 85, 118
Origen 213, 241
Orpheus 106
Ossaeans 155
Paganism 734, 113, 1501, 171
Palmyra 63, 227
Pamphylia 245
Pantokrator 215
Paradosis 42
Paroikos 101
Parthian territory 6263
Parting of the ways 18, 175186
Passover 50, 61
Paul 39, 100, 119, 145, 148152,
169, 178
Pauls epistles 150
Pauls sufferings 148
Paulinus 230
Pella 103
Pentateuch 73, 7576, 81
Pentateuch scroll 88
Pentecost 61
Pergamum 61, 245
Persecution of early Christians 146
Perspiration 52
Peter 130, 145
Petronius 226
Pharisees 9, 17, 35, 3740, 423,
45, 50, 72, 75, 8485, 98102,
117121, 124, 129133, 138139,
141, 146, 155, 161162, 164, 166,
169, 239240
Perushim 39, 124
Pharos 75
Philadelphia 225
Philo 8, 13, 28, 3435, 37, 42, 45,
48, 52, 61, 67, 75, 85, 89, 92,
9697, 101102, 108, 110112, 114,
266 ixrrx or x.vrs .xr stnrc+s
118, 139, 141, 149, 161, 208, 214,
220, 222, 240
Philo the Elder 95
Phocylides 106
Phrygia 113
Phrygian Great Mother 229
Pilgrimage 22, 5962, 65, 67
Pinchas 40
Pionios 151
Piyyut 56
Platonism 185, 240
Pliny the Elder 35, 61, 67, 1389,
142, 154
Pliny the Younger 229
Pogroms 151
Polybius 37
Polycarp 151
Pompey 51, 63
Pontius Pilate 148
Pontus 229
Porphyry 230
Procopius 227
Proselytes 24, 2732, 9299, 105, 107
111, 114, 151, 238, 242,
244
Proselytizing 91, 113, 236
Proselytos 1002, 243
Psalms 73
Psalms Scroll 13
Pseudepigrapha 9, 69, 76
Pseudo-Aristeas 95, 106, 221
Pseudo-Hecataeus 49, 95, 106
Ptolemies 64, 2267
Ptolemy Philadelphus 221
Purity 17, 40, 143
Qumran 67, 13, 50, 76, 84, 88,
137138, 141, 157
Rab 1928
Rabbinic Judaism 12, 44, 47, 69,
1712, 182, 238, 255, 257
Rabbinic Jews 12, 171172, 182,
238
Rabbinic texts 34, 197, 202, 235
Rabin, Chaim 10
Red heifer 40, 50, 132, 147, 169
Redaction criticism 15
Renunciations of claim 43
Resurrection 130, 132133
Rome
Jews in Rome 52
Judaism in Rome 235
Rebuilding of the city of Rome 66
Roth, Cecil 10
Rowley, H.H. 10
Sabbath 47, 88, 96, 106, 132, 187,
215, 220, 226, 245, 255
Sacrice 47, 49, 5052, 74, 129,
134, 147, 157158, 214, 222223,
228229
Sadducees 9, 33, 356, 38, 40, 42,
45, 50, 7172, 118120, 123135,
138139, 141, 146, 153, 155157,
159161, 164, 166167, 169171,
185, 240
Samaritans 9, 25, 167, 248
Samuel, R. 71, 192194, 199
Sanders, Ed 17, 85, 88, 123, 132
Sardis 8, 11, 224, 233, 235237, 249,
251, 253
Synagogue in Sardis 237, 249250,
252, 256259
Saul 147
Schechter, Solomon 6
Scholem, Gershom 12
Schrer, Emil 4, 17
Schwartz, Daniel 162
Scrolls of Torah 80
Second tithe money 64
Sefer Harazim 206
Seleucids 86, 226
Charter for Jerusalem 86
Seleucus Nicator 188
Sepphoris 168, 205206
Septuagint 13, 75, 77, 79, 81, 92, 96,
101102, 105, 112, 221
Severus 12
Shammai 41, 72, 193
House of 72, 194, 1967
Shelomzion 41
Shimon b. Eliezer, R. 166
Shimon b. Shetah 41
Shimon bar Yohai, R. 197
Shiur Komah 208210, 212
Shofar 249, 251
Sibylline Oracles 956, 106
Sicarii 140
Sifra 246
Simon b. Gamaliel 45, 121
Simon bar Kosiba 556, 126
Simon b. Menasia, R. 71
Simon the Maccabee 108
Slaves 105
Smith, Morton 206, 210
Smith, Sir George Adam 17
Smyrna 151
ixrrx or x.vrs .xr stnrc+s 267
Soferim 89
Sol Invictus 213
Solar worship 205217
Song of Songs 6971
Sosthenes 152
Sotah 83
Spaniards 241
Sptjudentum 1
Stephen 145, 147
Stern, Menahem 6, 34, 47
Stern, Sacha 171, 238
Stobi 225
Strabo 103
Suetonius 2728
Swete, H.B. 13
Synagogues 24, 74, 97, 113, 149,
150, 205, 207, 213, 2204, 22730,
2513
Gentile perceptions of
synagogues 230
Synagogue authorities 152
Synagogue services 73
Synoptic gospels 8485, 129
Syrian Jews 63, 188190, 198
Syria Palaestina 56
Tabernacles 61
Tacitus 35, 98, 109, 152, 227
Talmud 1, 5, 21, 172, 180, 198
Tannaim 39, 44, 56, 166, 168171
Tannaitic law 43
Tarfon, R. 187
Targumim 14, 89, 209
Tarsus 100
Tcherikover, Victor 6
Te llin 81, 119, 156, 167
Teicher, J.L. 10
Temple in Jerusalem 47, 53, 5960,
6165, 67, 7274, 86, 88, 128129,
134, 157, 211, 219220, 228, 230,
247, 252
Temple cult 52, 154
Temple income 64
Temple inscription 22
Temple of Jupiter 26, 242
Temple of Pax 54
Temple of Rome and Augustus 65
Tertullian 227
Terumah 70
Testament of Abraham 106
Theodosian Code 228, 248
Theodosius I 247, 2556
Theodosius II 227228, 230
Theos Hypsistos 214
Therapeutae 35
Thucydides 37
Tiberias, Jews of 211, 216
Tiberius Julius Alexander 28, 149,
164
Timagenes 103
Titus 54, 80, 211, 252
Torah 49, 74, 76, 80, 85, 100, 183,
200, 211, 223, 234, 245
Torah shrine 251
Tosefta 22, 30, 47, 158, 171172,
223224, 246
Trajan 55, 61, 229
Trypho 155, 209
Tsadukim 124125
Tumtum 172
Two Powers in heaven 167168
Tyre 230
Uzzah 81
Valens 228
Valentinian 228
Valerius Maximus 98, 108, 229
Varro 211212
Vermes, Geza 10, 18, 137, 187
Vespasian 2627, 5355, 80, 252
Vitellius 103
Wisdom of Solomon 95, 106
Wissenschaft des Judentums 2, 4, 12
Yadin, Yigael 7
Yavneh, rabbis in 52, 154, 158159,
163, 165
Yeshua ben Pantera 167168
Yohanan, R. 46, 196, 200202
Yohanan b. Zakkai 22, 39, 52, 154,
163
Yose, R. 155156
Zadok 40, 125, 126, 128
Zealots 33, 35, 38, 138140
Zerubbabel 230
Zeus 213
Zodiac 8, 11, 205207, 213
Acts of the Apostles 243
2:911 67
2:11 101
2:4647 147
4:17 129
5:17 129
5:40 146
6:5 92, 101
6:9 67
6:914 147
7:5160 145
9:12 148
12:119 145
13:43 101
16:21 152
18:6 152
18:1213 152
18:17 152
19:2427 150
19:35 85
22:2526 149
23:78 132133
26:1011 147
Arrx.xrrn Porvnis+on
On the Jews 106
Anni.x
Dissertations
2.9.20 29, 107
Atots+ixr
Civ.
4.31 211
Cons.
1.22.30 212
Babylonian Talmud
Abodah Zarah
35b36a 192
Berachot
55a 81
Megillah
29a 223
7a 71
Nidd.
33b 155
Pesahim
96a 97
Sanhedrin
56a 31
91a 156, 160
97a 113
Shabbat
104a 81
108a 156
13b17b 197
14a 70
146a 111
72b 224
Temurah
14b 84
Baruch
1:1014 62
2 Baruch 158
72:4 111
82:3 111
Ben Sira
38.2439.11 86
38.3439.3 87
Cassius Dio
37.17.2 211, 213
57.18, 5a 98
67.14.13 27
69.12.12 55
2 Chronicles
34.13 86
Cicrno
De Prov. Cons.
5.10 26
Pro Flacco
28.66 102
28.6669 52, 62
CIJ 1449 222, 226, 227
Cod. Just.
1.8 216
INDEX OF ANCIENT LITERATURE
Cod. Theod.
1.9.4 228
7.8.2 228
9.45.4 230
16.8.4 227
16.8.22 228
16.8.25 228
2 Corinthians
7:1214 104
11:22 149
11:24 148
CPJ 129 226
Daniel 1:8 193, 197, 202
7:9 208
Dead Sea Scrolls
4QMMT 40, 125
CD 9.1016 38
Pesher Nahum 36
Deuteronomy
4:1112, 14 208
4:1224 207
4:1524 210
11:14 187
12:13 103
14:26 60
16:16 59
17:3 210
24:14 83
27:15 211
Dioronts
40.3.4 2112
Eccl. 9:78 187
1 Enoch
14:1822 20910
3 Enoch
48A 210
Erirn.xits
Pan.
19.5.67 153
20.3.12 155
30.11.4 227
Etsrnits
H.E. 181
10.3.1 230
10.4.12 230
10.4.336 230
Praep. ev.
8.10 208
9.18.1 114
9.27.4 112
Exodus
3:2 208
20:23 211
22:20 102
22:27 112
23:17 59
24: 910 207
25.1022 81
33:1723 207
34.27 89
Ezekiel
1.26 207
3.13 81
8.16 208
11.16 223
44.18 52
Ezekiel the Tragedian
6872 209
4 Ezra 52, 158
Genesis
1:2628 207
17:1213 95
Gnroonv or N.zi.xzts
Or. 18.5 215
Hirrorv+ts
Refutation of all Heresies
9.1828 140
9.28.3 119
Hon.cr
Satires
I.4.1423 98102
Isaiah 1.6 187
Jeremiah
8:2 210
15.16 81
19:13 210
270 ixrrx or .xcirx+ ri+rn.+tnr
Jerusalem Talmud
Abodah Zarah
2.8, 41d 194
Sanhedrin
29c 46
Shabb.
1.5, 3c 197
Yoma
5:2 209
John 9:22 145
Jonx Cnnvsos+ov
Adversus Iudaeos
1.3 2 27
1.3.3 221
Jonx Lvrts
De Mens.
4.53 214
Josrrnts
Against Apion 55, 117, 139
40, 158, 163,
164
1.3741 80
1.424 80
1.4756 140
1.199 49
2.102109 48, 55
2.104 51
2.165 85
2.175 220
2.17581 80
2.17980 240
2.17981 139, 163
2.179210 36
2.181 208
2.1847 85
2.1857 139
2.1902 208
2.190219 200
2.191 211
2.193199 55
2.210 93, 110
2.237 112
Antiquities 25, 37, 127,
164, 190, 191
1.17 77
1.161 114
1.167 114
4.203 63
4.207 112
10.51 42
10.190194 197
10.278 131
12.119120 188
12.142 86
1318 37
13.6273 52
13.667 222
13.171 140
13.172 131
13.173 131
13.2578 94
13.293 124
13.296 43
13.296297 120
13.297 42, 118, 132
13.298 41, 117, 127
13.319 94, 103
13.397 103
13.408 42, 11820
13.408 11820
14 151
14.185267 62
14.260 222
14.403 23, 110
15.30216 67
15.380 66
15.38090 66
15.385 66
15.41020 48
15.42131 66
16 151
16.15055 66
16.16078 62
16.163 214
16.164 226
17.2931 65
17.41 43, 117, 120
17.415 100
17.42 41
17.162 66
17.214 61
17.31213 64
18 37
18.4 45
18.11 140
18.1122 141
18.12 119, 121
18.13 131
18.15 41, 100, 117,
120, 129, 134
18.16 133
18.17 127, 129, 133
18.23 45, 140
18.814 98
ixrrx or .xcirx+ ri+rn.+tnr 271
18.121 103
18.259 37, 141
19.294 49
19.3003 226
19.305 226
20.1753 24
20.1796 150
20.345 113
20.3442 95
20.3448 92
20.389 107
20.44 95
20.100 28
20.115 74, 80
20.139 94
20.1867 51
20.199 128, 131,
1334
20.200a 147
20.21922 66
Jewish War 37, 117, 127,
164
1.110 1201
1.64855 211
2 37
2.108 140
2.119 140
2.11966 140
2.119161 35
2.123 198
2.128129 210
2.142 102
2.148 210
2.148149 210
2.162 120
2.164 131
2.1646 131
2.166 119, 133, 135
2.224 61
2.228231 221
2.22931 74, 80
2.284296 148
2.2856 97
2.28591 222
2.413 53
2.454 108
2.457498 148
2.463 104
2.480 151
2.55061 92
2.559561 148, 151
2.563 134
2.591592 189
2.592 187
3.4950 59
3.252 85
4.31921 131, 134
5.184227 48
5.201206 64
5.210 49
5.21213 49
6.127 52
6.23866 54
6.268 53
6.300 219
6.300309 147
6.42027 50
6.425 61
7.41 23
7.44 226
7.445 74
7.45 97, 150, 222
7.150 80, 211
7.15862 54
7.218 26, 54
7.42032 52
7.42036 22
Life 37, 127, 164,
191
10 35, 127, 140
1011 125, 141
1012 45
12 141
65 211
74 1989
746 190
113 104, 112
134 80
191 43, 120
1968 85
418 80
Jubilees
30.14 51
Judith
10.5 199
12.14 199
14.10 94
Jts+ix M.n+vn
Dialogue with Trypho
80:45 155
Jts+ixi.x
Novella 228
272 ixrrx or .xcirx+ ri+rn.+tnr
Jt\rx.r
Satires
14.96106 215
14.97102 2930
1 Kings
21:3 210
23:11 208
2 Kings
18.32 187
22.313 85
Leviticus
19:4 211
2 Maccabees
2:21 238
9:17 92
M.ivoxirrs
Guide of the Perplexed
3.32, 46 57
Mark
1:22 84
7:15 120
7:5 120
11:11 60
Matthew
3:7 132
7:29 84
15:13 120
17:10 84
22:2333 132
23:34 120
23:5 119
23:15 9899,
102
23:28 120
Mishnah
Abodah Zarah
2.6 191
Abot
1 41
5:21 80
6:9 86
Ber.
9:5 167
Bikkurim
3:3 60
Eduy.
5:3 72
Erub.
6:1 132
6:2 133
Hull.
2:9 167
Kelim
15:6 72, 88
Ketubot
4:12 44
Megillah
3.1 221
3:23 223
4:8 168
4:89 167
4:9 1678
Menah.
10:3 132
Nedarim
9:2 83
Nidd.
4:2 155
Parah
3:7 50, 132, 169
R.Sh.
2:1 168
Sanhedrin
10:13 171
Shabbat
1:4 197
2:2 187
Sheqalim
2:1 65
2:4 65
Sotah
9:15 170
Tohorot
4:7 86
Yadaim
3:5 70, 82
4:5 76
4:6 39, 75, 132,
221
Yoma
3:10 49, 158
N.nv.xirrs
Commentary on Lev.
1.9 57
Nehemiah
8.12 220
12.1213 85
Numbers
5.1131 83
ixrrx or .xcirx+ ri+rn.+tnr 273
Oniorx
C. Celsum
1.15 213
Philippians
3:5 149
Pniro
De Spec. Leg.
4.14950 42, 118
Flacc.
413 226
Leg.
133 221222
134 222
156 220
278 214
On Provid.
2, 64 67
On the Migration of
Abraham
89 97
On the Special Laws
1.51 102
1.53 112
1.56 49
1.69 61
1.74 49
1.156 49
2.448 112
2.176 209
4.178 111
On the Virtues
35 (187) 92
Q.o.p.
81 222
Questions and Answers on
Exodus
II 2 97, 102
II 5 112
Vita Mosis
2.412 75, 81
2.44 13
2.205 112
2.232 93
Pinkri rr R. Erirzrn
21 81
Prixv +nr Errrn
Natural History
5.14 154
5.17 67
Prixv +nr Yotxorn
Epp.
10.3334 61
10.50 229
10.96 151
Ponrnvnv
Adv. Christianos
Frag. 76 230
Pnocorits
De Aed.
6.2 227
Psrtro-Anis+r.s
16 112, 259
83120 62
9295 51
189 112
Pseudo-Pniro
LAB
26 51
2 Samuel
6:7 81
Scholia in Lucanum
2.593 211
Sefer Harazim 206
Srxrc.
On Superstition 26
Sibylline Oracles
III 565 112
IV 164 97
Sifra Lev.
1 202
Sifre Deut.
49 210
313 1134
S+n.no
Geog.
16.2.35 2112
Str+oxits
Domitian
12.2 27
274 ixrrx or .xcirx+ ri+rn.+tnr
T.ci+ts
Histories
5.5 23, 2930,
93, 104
5.5.4 227
5.5.5 49
5.8.1 47
T.notv Jox.+n.x
Deut. 32:3 81
Trn+trri.x
De Jejuniis
16 227
1 Thess.
2:1516 152
Tobit
1.1011 199
Tosefta 158
Abodah Zarah
4(5).8 1949
8(9).4 30
Ber.
6(7):6 213
6(7):21 (Lieb.) 167
Hull.
1:1 167
2:20 1689
2:223 167
2:24 168
Kel.B.M.
5:8 73
Ma"aser Sheni
1:12 60
Megillah
3(2):7 223
3(4):37 (Lieb.) 166
Nidd.
5:3 155
Sanh.
8:7 167
Shabb.
13(14):5 (Lieb.) 167
Sheqalim
2:3 64
Sukkah
4:6 221, 224, 237
Yad.
2:12 75
2:13 76
2:14 71
4:6 71
Tnvrno
Dialogue
114 209
V.rrnits M.xivts
1.3.2 229
ixrrx or .xcirx+ ri+rn.+tnr 275