“Truly Ephraim is a dear child of mine” (Jer. 31:18). What is the meaning of “Ephraim” in this verse? Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said, Palatini. Rabbi Yehoshua b. Nehemiah said, Eugenestatos.
Palatini are the court officials, those of the palace. The second term, eugenestatos, means “very well-born,” like the English term eugenic. The Greek word meaning “very well-born” might equally well be translated as “nobility.” For each of the rabbis quoted above, to be called “Ephraim” was to have very high status in the Greek-speaking Roman East.
Sometimes rabbis found themselves in Roman courts, and not always as unbiased observers. I imagine this was no more welcome to the Jews of the Roman Empire than it would be for a member of a racial or ethnic minority today to find himself or herself in the clutches of the legal system.
In a third-century companion text to the Mishnah we read:
The story is told that Rabbi Eliezer was once arrested for heresy and they took him to the tribunal [bema] for judgment. The governor [hegemon] asked him, “Was a grey-hair like you involved in such idle matters?”
Rabbi Eliezer replied, “I put my faith in the Judge.”
Now that hegemon thought that he was referring to himself, while Rabbi Eliezer was referring to his Father in Heaven. So he said, “Since you have put your faith in me, I shall do so for you. . . . Dismissed [dimissus]; you are released.”
When he was released from the tribunal he remained troubled that he had been arrested for heresy. . . . Rabbi Aqiba asked him, “Perhaps one of the heretics said something that pleased you?”
Rabbi Eliezer replied, “By Heavens, you have reminded me! Once I was walking on the main street [istrata] of Sepphoris and Jacob of Sikhnin quoted a heretical teaching of Jesus son of the Panther [pantiri], and it pleased me. That is why I was arrested, for I transgressed the words of Torah to “keep its ways far from you.” (Prov. 5:8)
This late-first-century rabbi was arrested on suspicion of being Christian at the time when Christianity was still a proscribed religion in the Roman Empire. Hauled up to the tribunal, the governor serving as judge seeks to entrap him. Rabbi Eliezer’s wily yet evasive answer is sufficient for the judge to dismiss the case. At the very same time, the younger Pliny served as the Roman emperor’s representative in Asia Minor. He wrote to the emperor Trajan,
I have never been present at a trial of Christians. . . . I am not sure . . . whether a pardon ought to be granted to anyone who retracts his belief. . . . I have asked them in person if they are Christians . . . if they persist I order them to be led away for execution.
These were the stakes that Rabbi Eliezer faced. Note the incidence of Greek and Latin terminology in this rabbinic account: bema, hegemon, dimissus, istrata, pantiri. The happy term dimissus, the one Latin word among all the Greek, comes straight from Roman court pronouncements.
A brief word also is in order on the crude rabbinic nickname for Jesus, who is called here “son of the Panther.” This is a double slur, as it denies both the virgin birth and the paternity of Joseph, while it imagines Jesus’s parent as a Roman soldier or local tough. The nickname “Panther” is known from Roman graffiti and is a term akin to a 1950s American nickname such as “Duke” or “Rocky.” Local Greek slang was used by the rabbis when they wanted to take a cheap shot at Christianity.
Another rabbinic narrative offers “a detailed and faithful portrayal of the procedure in the criminal court.” For this portrayal, as well as the story of Rabbi Eliezer we have just discussed, I follow my teacher Saul Lieberman.
In the fifth-century Galilean Midrash Pesikta DeRav Kahana (24:10), we read:
“For My plans are not your plans, nor are My ways your ways, proclaims the Lord” (Isa. 55:8). This is like the case of a robber [lystes] who is tortured by the interrogator [questionarius]. First he reads his deposition [elogium]; then he whips him; then he gives him the hook [khamos]; then he pronounces the sentence [periculum]; and then he is taken for execution.
This gruesome description is an all-too-accurate account of testimony under torture in the Roman court system. Again, the rabbinic accounting is chock-full of the Greek terms heard in the Roman courts in the East. The deposition from the original arrest record is entered into testimony, and if the defendant continues to proclaim innocence, he is tortured. First comes the flogging of the defendant’s back, then the hook in his mouth. The Roman historian Tacitus offers proof of this horrific procedure when he writes that Emperor Tiberius was dragged to the Tiber River by the hook in his mouth and dumped into the river to drown. The same fate was meted out to Emperor Commodus: “The people and the senate demanded that his body be dragged with the hook and cast into the Tiber,” according to the testimony of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. We are left with little doubt that the rabbinic description is not a fiction but an actual horror.
The Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 32a) promotes the spiritual value of confession of sins, especially before death. When they think of confession under that type of mortal duress, they compare it to a Roman court:
Our Rabbis taught: if one falls sick and his life is in danger, he is told, “Make confession, for all who are sentenced to death make confession.” When a man goes out into the street, let him imagine that he is given in charge of an officer [strateitos]; when he has a headache, let him imagine that he is put in irons [kollarion]; when he takes to bed, let him imagine that he ascended the scaffold [Lat. gradum] to be punished. For whoever ascends the scaffold to be punished, if he has great advocates [parakletos] he is saved, but if not he is not saved. And these are man’s advocates: repentance and good deeds.
In the course of the fourth century CE, Christians went from being a persecuted minority to ruling the empire and doing so with vigor. By the fifth century, Christian Roman rulers had legislated against and subsequently persecuted those Christians whom the Catholic Church deemed to be heretics. It would not be long before imperial legislation turned toward what it saw as the problem of the Jews. Technically, this move is beyond the purview of this book, as we are more concerned about the relationships of the Jews with pagan Rome; and I am trying to avoid writing about Jewish-Christian relations. But because the Roman law codes, like rabbinic compendia of law, contain a long historical record, I will close this chapter with a brief look at how Roman law codes influenced the lives of Jews through legislation on synagogues in the Roman Empire.
Two constitutions from the Theodosian code, most likely promulgated in 420 and 423 CE, concern the Jewish community. The first echoes Pliny’s concerns about Christians but this time applied to the Jewish communities of the empire.
No one shall be accused and punished for merely being a Jew if they are innocent of any other crime. Nor should any religion execute him if he is but exposed to insult. Their synagogues and homes shall not be burnt nor wrongfully damaged without reason . . . just as we provide this law for all the Jews, we offer the opinion that this warning should be given lest the Jews themselves grow insolent; and elated by their security commit some act against the reverence of Christianity.
This is an example of how one hand gives while the other takes away. The wording of this law indicates that by 420 there were mob actions against Jewish communities in the East, resulting in the torching of synagogues and beating of Jews. The law prohibited these actions, “without reason,” which unfortunately left a very wide loophole. Further, it warned the Jewish community not to get too uppity, given the thinness of this cover of imperial protection.
The two-edged nature of this law was made even clearer in the subsequent law, issued two and a half years later. It directly concerned the synagogues that had been damaged or destroyed in Christian mob riots against some Jewish communities.
In the future none of the synagogues of the Jews shall be seized or put on fire. If there are some synagogues that were seized or given over to churches or consecrated to the ancient mysteries in
a recent undertaking after the law [of 420, above] was passed; they shall be given new places in exchange on which to build, to the measure of the synagogues taken. . . . No synagogue shall be constructed from now on, and the old ones shall remain in their current condition.
This constitution marks the descent into Byzantine Christendom and what would become the ongoing degradation of Judaism and Jewish institutions throughout the Middle Ages. While synagogues that were burned were, in theory, guaranteed replacement according to the architectural footprint of the previous building, it was ruled that other synagogues remain in the state in which they existed and not be improved or repaired. Further, new building of synagogues was expressly forbidden.
Archeological remains reveal that this law was, fortunately, not enforced, as a building boom of synagogues took place throughout the Galilee and also in Asia Minor. To state what now should be expected, these Jewish buildings were designed and erected very much to the norms and influences of local Greco-Roman architecture. Let’s take a look.
Note
* There are 2,711 folios in the standard printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud. That yields 5,422 print pages.
Chapter VIII
History Where It Happened
My wife loves New York City architecture, old and new. One year as a Hanukkah gift I bought her an architectural guide of the city, arranged by neighborhood. She has systematically walked her way through Manhattan, block by block. The practice has given her lots of exercise and a real appreciation for the built beauties of the city. In this chapter I’d like to take a similar stroll with you, touring the Roman Empire of the early centuries CE, observing the ruins of ancient Jewish buildings—their common features and the things that make one stand apart from another. I’ll report what my wife and I have seen as we have visited these archeological sites together over the years, and even share a photo or two along the way.
Far and away, the best place to begin is at the greatest Jewish building ever. The Second Temple in Jerusalem was one of the “wonders of the Roman world,” a magnificent structure built by King Herod, beginning in the first century BCE. A client-king of the Roman emperor Augustus, Herod was an Idumean convert to Judaism. The Greek name for the territory that was biblical Edom—Idumea—was Esau’s old province, which the rabbis identified with Rome. Herod himself was thoroughly Hellenized and thoroughly bonkers. Herod was obsessed with building magnificent Greco-Roman architecture throughout his small kingdom in the Land of Israel. And in fits of paranoia, he murdered members of his immediate family. This gave rise to the chreia attributed to Emperor Augustus about Herod’s Jewish piety in not eating pork, which ends with the punch line, “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.”
Herod spared no expense at remodeling the Second Temple, essentially rebuilding it as a classical Greco-Roman shrine. He widened the esplanade upon which it stood, adding colonnades, arches, and endless gilt, perhaps to assuage his own guilt over murdering his family. Among the Jerusalem Temple features worthy of notice—beyond the kitschy gold overlays—were the monumental ceremonial eastern gates made of Corinthian bronze. Imported from Alexandria by ship, the Nicanor gates, like the rest of the Temple, are lost to us forever. Just how amazing were the Nicanor gates? The Babylonian Talmud (Yoma 38a) reports that
Miracles were wrought for the Nicanor gates. . . . They say that when Nicanor went to bring the gates from Alexandria, a storm arose upon his return and threatened to drown the gates. They took one of the gates and threw it overboard to lighten the load, but the sea continued to storm. When they went to throw the matching gate overboard, Nicanor wrapped himself around it and said, “Then throw me in with it!” The sea immediately became calm.
He nonetheless was troubled about the one gate that had been lost. But when they came to port at Acco, there it was bobbing next to the boat! Some say a sea creature swallowed it and then spat it out onto dry land . . .
When they changed all the gates of the Temple to gold, they kept the Nicanor gates untouched because of the miracle . . . but there are those who say it was because the bronze shined like gold in any case.
I assume that Mr. Nicanor was the donor of the miraculous gates. Let’s give him extra credit for attentive stewardship of his naming gift. In addition to these magnificent gates, Herod’s Temple featured secret passageways for the priests, grand stairways for the Levites to array themselves upon for their choral singing, and arches to buttress the entire architectural assemblage. Below is a photo of what is now called “Robinson’s arch,” the scant remnants of such a buttress. Note the detail of the immense ashlars—stones that are trimmed or embossed around the edges. This was a featured style of Herod’s stonecutters and is still visible at the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, in Jerusalem. The Wall, as it is now called, was part of the retaining wall holding up the enlarged plaza where Herod’s Temple stood. That plaza is referred to as the Temple Mount, or, for Muslims: Haram al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary.
Remnants of Robinson’s arch with detail of trimmed Herodian stone
There are other monuments of the Herodian era near the Temple Mount. The so-called Tomb of Absalom is to the east, nestled in the Kidron Valley between the Temple esplanade and the Mount of Olives. You can gaze down upon it from the churches there as you look toward the fabled Jerusalem skyline of al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. While the monument presumably is named after David’s rebellious son Absalom (2 Sam. 18:18), the tomb is replete with Ionic columns and a Doric frieze, and so most probably was built in the first century CE, a thousand years after biblical Absalom’s death.
Perhaps the most fascinating architectural works from this late Second Temple period are the building remains identified as synagogues. This is curious, since during this period the Jerusalem Temple was still standing, so one might expect it to have been the exclusive place of worship for the Jews. Yet the Babylonian Talmud (Ketubot 105a) reports that “there were 394 . . . synagogues in Jerusalem,” before the destruction. Until the archeologists unearthed their finds, historians had assumed this to be another Talmudic fantasy.
Although there are no actual synagogue remains from the Second Temple period in Jerusalem, archeologists discovered what they call Theodotus’s synagogue inscription. Here is an English translation from the original, which is inscribed not in Hebrew, but Greek:
Theodotus, [son] of Vettenus, priest and leader of the synagogue [archisynagogos], son of an archisynagogos, grandson of an archisynagogos, built the synagogue for the reading of the law and the teaching of the commandments, and the guest-chamber and the rooms and the water installations for lodging for those needing them from abroad, which his fathers, the elders and Simonides founded.
Note that the inscription does not say that it was a place of prayer. Presumably, prayer went along with sacrifice in the nearby Jerusalem Temple. Or maybe it was assumed that the synagogue was so obviously a place of prayer that this function need not be recorded in the dedicatory inscription.
While there are no physical remains of the Theodotus synagogue, there is archeological evidence of other predestruction synagogues outside of Jerusalem. Herodian, a fortress built by the mad king for whom it is named, is visible from Jerusalem and is less than a day’s walk away. One of the buildings within the fortress complex has been identified by archeologists as a first-century, predestruction synagogue. Even further south, near the shores of the Dead Sea, stands the famous mountain redoubt of Masada. It, too, presumably had a synagogue. The excavators of these and another site (Gamla, discussed below) identified the rectangular rooms, each with sets of columns and, most telling, benches that line the walls, as Second Temple–era synagogues.
Recently a synagogue was unearthed at Migdal/Magdala, in the north, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee—also dated to the Second Temple period. There, excavators discovered a large carved stone with a bas relief of a menorah and urns. This makes Migdal
the outlier among the other so-called Second Temple–era synagogues, as it also has partial frescoes on its walls and remnants of mosaic floors. None of the other synagogues from that early period have pictorial art or decoration. Like the other presumed synagogues, Migdal has benches lining the main room.
There is general agreement that the site at Gamla in the Galilee is also a synagogue from that early period. Josephus, writing in the late first century, describes the town as a center of the rebellion against Rome in 66–70 CE:
Gamla would not surrender, relying . . . upon the natural difficulties of its location. The high mountain descends in a ridge that rises in the middle like a hump and then descends again . . . so that it resembles a camel, from which it is named [Gamla=camel in Aramaic].
Although Josephus mentions the crowded city and its citadel-like defenses, he does not mention a synagogue. Indeed, with the notable exception of Migdal, aside from the benches lining the wall there is nothing that identifies this or any of these other first-century buildings as synagogues: no inscriptions, no art on the walls, no mosaics on the floors, none of the usual accoutrements of later synagogue buildings. So the question must be asked: do benches make a synagogue?
My Israeli colleague, archeologist-historian Lee Levine, in his book Ancient Synagogues Revealed, lists the “most frequently mentioned activities” associated with synagogues: prayer, study, meals, a repository for communal funds, court sessions, a guest house and residence for synagogue officials. Levine is clear that “benches were always a fixture in these buildings,” even though none of the undertakings just listed require Jews to be seated. Prayer and study were as often as not done in standing postures; and the other functions that synagogues served likewise did not demand fixed benches.
Aphrodite and the Rabbis Page 16