A conundrum is found in an archeological site in Mopsuestia, in Asia Minor. There, in a fourth- to fifth-century CE basilica building oriented east to west, is a stunning mosaic of Noah’s ark, so labeled in Greek, and a series of mosaics depicting the Samson story found in the book of Judges 14–16, with fragments of quotes from the Greek translation of the biblical text. There is really only one difficulty with this site, which is otherwise a beautiful example of Roman mosaic art applied to biblical motifs: we do not know whether the building is a church or a synagogue. Scholars disagree on its role. As you might guess, Jewish archeologists identify the site as a synagogue, while Christian scholars assume it is a church.
Beit Alpha synagogue
Another site that all agree is a church—indeed, it is still in use as such—is in Madaba, in modern Jordan. On the floor of the church, roped off so that tourists and parishioners do not step on it, is a mosaic map of the world that dates to the mid-sixth century CE. It is the oldest map of the Holy Land in existence. Like most maps, it has captions that identify countries, but in the case of Madaba, the map identifies biblical sites and local ancient churches. At the center of the map—that is to say, the center of the cartographer’s universe—is Jerusalem, identified in Greek as the “Holy City.” Because the map is oriented with West on top, above Jerusalem sits the Mediterranean Sea, boats and all. Here is the section of the map depicting Jerusalem. You can see its columned cardo running left to right (south to north) across the city.
Madaba map, Jordan
Let’s turn now from the busy passage of the living along Jerusalem’s cardo on the Madaba map to the equally busy precincts of the dead. I want to take a look at the art in the Jewish catacombs of Rome and of Beit She’arim in the Galilee. The menorah is ubiquitous as a symbol in these burial settings, much as it is in almost every other Jewish site. But the Jews also employed non-Jewish, even pagan, symbols in these Jewish burial places. Among the pagan symbols found is art depicting the myth of Zeus disguised as a swan raping or seducing Leda—something one would not expect in either pagan or Jewish sarcophagi, but there they are. There is a fragment of a Leda sarcophagus from the Jewish catacomb at Beit She’arim, a burial site actually containing tombs of rabbis known to us from the Talmud! We also have mentioned a pagan Leda sarcophagus, now in the Naples Museum, and seen an image of Leda and the swan from Heraclion. Still, one must ask why Leda and the swan are in a cemetery at all, and especially in a Jewish setting? In reply to this reasonable question, I translate the Yiddish expression “Geh vays”: go figure.
In addition to the swan image in the Beth She’arim catacomb, a seahorse monster like the one I spoke about that is on the cover of a sarcophagus from the Naples Museum appears in a fresco in the Roman Jewish catacomb at Vigna Randanini.
When featured on the pagan tomb, it could reasonably be assumed to represent a nereid riding the Cetus seahorse monster of Greco-Roman mythology. But the animal is virtually the same in the Jewish catacomb, only absent the mermaid riding on its back. In fact, the lone Cetus also appears in the Christian catacombs in the same neighborhood of Rome as the Jewish Vigna Randanini catacomb. In the St. Callisto and in the Priscilla Christian catacombs, the Cetus is none other than the big fish swallowing Jonah!
Jewish catacomb Fig. 1 at Vigna Randanini, Rome
For Christians, both the fish and Jonah are symbols of resurrection; the fish took Jonah down to Sheol (the underworld) but then delivered him to dry land after three days and nights. For Christians this prefigures Jesus’s death and resurrection. But the Cetus in the Jewish catacomb, however, depicts neither Jonah nor a nereid. We might take the hint from the Christian catacombs and suggest that in the Jewish catacombs, too, the Cetus is a symbol of resurrection. What complicates this identification is the appearance of a Cetus seahorse monster on the base of the Menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus. Something fishy is going on here, as this might be the last place one would expect to find such an image. Most interpreters of the Menorah on the Arch assume the base was decorated by pagan Romans and is not an actual depiction of the base of the Menorah that stood in the Jerusalem Temple. I suspect that in virtually all Jewish settings, the seahorse was simply meant to depict just another creature of the deep, much as the fresco artist also depicted birds or palm trees. It’s best to avoid the temptation to overinterpret.
There are still more pagan motifs in the Jewish catacomb at Vigna Randanini. On the arched dome of one of the catacomb chambers, we find what the late scholar of ancient Roman Judaism Harry Leon described as the winged goddess of victory, Nike, crowning a youth holding the palm frond of victory.
Jewish catacomb Fig. 2
Jewish catacomb Fig. 3
Angelic winged putti regularly appear in Roman funerary and other art. The Vigna Randanini Jewish catacomb shares this apparently pagan motif. Above is another fresco from that catacomb.
It is true that there were angelic figures called cherubs on the Ark of the Covenant that the Israelites carried with them in the desert. But sometimes a cherubic character means no more than the cloying little angels you might find on a Hallmark card. I suspect that the frequency of pagan images in the Roman Jewish catacombs shows us the ease with which that Jewish community assimilated the art of their neighbors. Yet for all of the artistic overlap, Jews did not adopt Roman or Christian burial customs in any wholesale fashion. The Jewish community had its own unique law and traditions for burial and mourning.
We visited the border town of Dura earlier in this book. The wall paintings of the Dura synagogue are the oldest pictorial art in the Jewish world. Dura was a Roman military installation at the far eastern end of the empire, on the bank of the Euphrates River. It served as a bulwark against the Sasanian-Parthians to the east. The synagogue of Dura originated as a private home that followed a fairly common Jewish practice when it was converted into the synagogue. The building was renovated in 244 CE, at which time the spectacular wall paintings that adorn it most likely were added to the decor. When the Parthian Empire warred against Rome in the mid-third century, Dura took the brunt of the attack. The east side of Dura was protected by the Euphrates itself. The citizens of the town shored up its walls on the west side, where the assault took place. They piled dirt up to buttress the town walls and did the same in the buildings that abutted those walls. The synagogue of Dura-Europos was among those buildings, and through this act of fortification the amazing wall paintings of the Dura synagogue were preserved. The town of Dura was overrun in 256 CE, left desolate by the Parthians, and only uncovered again in the early twentieth century.
Very few walls of art painted in Late Antiquity have been preserved. The problem of preservation is one of basic physics. Frescoes and wall paintings were painted on upright walls. Mosaic “carpets,” on the other hand, were laid upon floors. Walls fall down over time, while the mosaics, already on the ground, are more likely to be preserved for archeologists to uncover. Some of the few sites that have yielded wall paintings or frescoes from the period were similarly covered over and left abandoned for centuries. Pompeii and Herculaneum were both inundated by ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.
The rabbis refer to the making of both frescoes and mosaics. For example, in commenting on the verse (Gen. 1:31) “God saw all that God had made and behold, it was very good,” a fifth-century Galilean commentary on Genesis by the rabbis observes:
Rabbi Yonatan said, “This is like a king who married off his daughter and made her a marriage-apartment, which he plastered, and then paneled or painted. When he saw it, it pleased him . . .”
Elsewhere, the same Midrash likens God creating the universe to
a human king who builds a palace. He does not build it of his own knowledge, but rather the knowledge of an artisan. And the artisan does not build it out of his own knowledge, but rather uses parchment scrolls and sketch books to know how to lay down the mosaics.
In 1996, near
Ben Gurion Airport, in Israel, in the town of Lod, or what had been ancient Diospolis (city of Zeus), archeologists uncovered an early fourth-century CE mosaic floor measuring approximately twenty-five feet by fifty feet. Recently, another, similar mosaic measuring thirty-six feet by forty-two feet was discovered near the Lod site while the archeologists were digging the foundations of a museum to display the earlier find! The well-preserved floor from the 1996 discovery, replete with tiled pictures of animals, was displayed in 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as an example of “Roman influence on local mosaic art.”
Even at the far eastern edge of the empire, Rome’s power is palpable. The wall paintings of the synagogue at Dura-Europos reflect Roman influence. The biblical characters in the Dura paintings by and large are shown in Roman dress. The very style of painting is Roman. In the mid-third century, in the exact era when rabbinic traditions traveled from Roman Palestine to the newly formed rabbinic academies in Sasanian-Parthian Babylonia, we find midrashic interpretations of biblical scenes among the panels of paintings on the walls of the synagogue at Dura.
The walls are covered from top to bottom with this art—a stunning display of what art historians call horror vacui, the tendency of certain artists to avoid leaving any empty space on their canvases or walls. This has given us all the more art to enjoy and interpret, although it does lead me to wonder if the busy walls of the synagogue at Dura might have induced feelings of claustrophobia among the worshippers. Here, I will focus on the Hellenizing aspects of these paintings rather than their artistic interpretations of Scripture.
During the 1920s and ’30s, archeologist Clark Hopkins excavated the Dura synagogue, the church, and temples to traditional Roman gods, as well as to eastern gods such as Mithra. Images abounded, even those of the Zoroastrian religion of the Parthian/Persian Sasanians, Rome’s enemies to the east. In the synagogue paintings of Dura-Europos, the majority of the biblical characters, including all of the “Jewish” characters, wear Roman garb. But certain eastern types, such as King Ahashverosh, are depicted in eastern clothing. Ahashverosh was king of the Persians and the Medes, and he is shown wearing a Phrygian cap and eastern clothing. He is sitting on the throne in the picture below. Next to him sits Queen Esther, his Jewish wife, bedecked with a Roman-style tiara of a city skyline—perhaps of Jerusalem. Such crowns were well known in the art of the period, and we have depictions of both women and of Tyche, the tutelary Greek goddess of given city, wearing tiaras that depict their cities.
Queen Esther is not the only woman depicted on the Dura synagogue walls. There is an entire cycle of paintings dedicated to the life of Moses. Prominent among the panels is the scene of Pharaoh’s daughter lifting baby Moses out of the Nile. Appropriately for the Nile, if not a synagogue wall, the princess is naked, but for her bangles. The Esther cycle of paintings and the Pharaoh’s daughter painting are on either side of the Torah shrine, or seat of Moses, which is the focal point of the Dura synagogue.
At Dura even the synagogue ceiling was covered with art. The tiles there included donor inscriptions in Aramaic, portraits—perhaps of the donors—and depictions of animals from Greco-Roman myth, such as the centaur and the now-familiar Cetus. The large portraits that are above the “seat of Moses” to either side, which would have been the central visual focus for congregants, are wearing distinctly Roman garb. Moses at the burning bush (see illustration labeled Moses at Dura) wears a Greco-Roman undergarment, the chiton, over which is draped the himation, a rectangular cloth adorned with a stripe ending in a notch. The stripes on the garments, called clavi, are associated with Roman patrician and military officers’ garb. Note in the Moses at Dura figure below that at God’s command Moses has removed his shoes (Ex. 3:5), which seem to be a shepherd’s soft boots. See as well that God’s hand appears in the painting (mysteriously more visible in the color plate), not unlike the hand of God in the Beit Alpha mosaic of the Binding of Isaac. This painting of Moses in Greco-Roman garb typifies the depictions of the principal Jewish males throughout most of the Dura synagogue panels. Ritual fringes for their four-cornered garments (see Num. 15:38) are absent in the Dura paintings, even though rabbinic interpretation of the biblical law might lead us to expect the male characters’ clothing to be adorned with them. Perhaps the artists reasoned that biblical figures might not yet have known the law of the Torah. Or perhaps the Dura artists knew the story of the rabbinical student who had that odd adventure when his fringes smacked him, by Aphrodite!
Ahashverosh and Esther in Dura synagogue
Dura synagogue long wall
In any case, to the right of the “seat of Moses” in the Dura sanctuary is a painting of the prophet Samuel anointing David as the new King of Israel (I Sam. 16:11–13). David stands among his brothers, each in Greek himation with clavi stripes, including the garment of the prophet Samuel. David himself is wearing a gown of royal blue or, better, imperial purple, lacking clavi. In Rome, equestrians wore thin stripes. Senators wore broader stripes. But only the emperor could have an entire garment of purple. Roman convention indicates David’s royal status.
Because I kvetched in our previous chapter about archeologists making a fuss about the presence of benches in predestruction synagogues, I am honor-bound to point out that the Dura synagogue indeed did have a row of benches around its perimeter. Maybe benches really do make a synagogue!
At Dura we find inscriptions in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—languages that we now expect among Greco-Roman Jews. There are also inscriptions and graffiti in Middle Persian and Parthian at Dura-Europos. Given the locale of the synagogue, this is not all that surprising. Merchants, traders, caravaneers, and others were part of the Jewish community. But while Greek points to an eastern Roman identity, we see that at the far border, Jews straddled Aramaic, Greek, and Persian/Parthian identity. They lived comfortably among their neighbors, at home in Sasanian Parthia, or, as they might say, Jewish Babylonia. At the same time, the Jews of Dura-Europos bore their Roman citizenship proudly, ultimately dying for it when the town and its synagogue fell to the Parthian besiegers.
Moses at Dura
During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, European art historians, particularly German-speaking ones, spoke derisively of the Jews as “an artless people.” Their pun depicted Jews as awkward bumpkins and asserted that the cultural output of the Jews did not include pictorial art. As we saw when we read about Rabbi Gamaliel and Aphrodite, there is almost no evidence of pictorial art from before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. It is not surprising that when pictorial art finally was embraced, the Jews turned to the surrounding culture for models and guidance. I have shepherded you through the explosion of Jewish art from Dura in the third century CE up to the Islamic conquest—art that belies the old canard of narrow-minded art historians. Hardly an “artless people,” the Jews embraced Roman artistic principles with open arms across the entire breadth of the empire. The genius of Jewish artistic imagination was the genius of Rome.
Chapter X
From Temple Cult to Roman Culture
We’ve traveled the Roman Empire visiting its Jewish communities. One abiding feature of the Judaism I have been showing you was, and remains, its steadfast loyalty to the Torah as a means of identifying with God’s covenantal community. This focus on Torah as a text to be studied by everyone was something new. It marked a turn away from the priestly sacrificial cult of the Jerusalem Temple and their exclusive pretensions to control of the sacred text. Further, the destruction of the Temple brought an end to the animal sacrifices that are so central to the Torah’s narrative.
The turn to Torah study instead of sacrifice was one more manifestation of how Hellenism reshaped Judaism in the late Second Temple period. This shift was the rabbis’ way to move the power center of Judaism to their own focus on textual interpretation in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction. The latest of the books in
cluded in the Bible already begin to show traces of this Hellenistic bookish culture. It is not mere chance that the book of Ecclesiastes (12:9–12) closes by musing: “Because Ecclesiastes was a sage . . . he expounded many parables [Hebrew: meshalim, Greek: parabole] . . . writing words of truth: . . . There is no end to the making of many books.”
Mind you, the Bible does not say Ecclesiastes was a professor who was required to publish or perish. Rather, he is described as a sage. In Hebrew that’s the same word the rabbis use to describe themselves, while in Greek the term is sophos, as in philo-sopher, or sophist. Writing parables and truth: these are the earmarks of Greco-Roman culture, a culture of many books.
“Many books” comes with the need to teach disciples how to interpret the canon of texts that defines the community. Even the simple idea of books and disciples was a turn away from the earlier emphasis on the dynastic kings and cultic priesthood of biblical Israelite religion. The philosophical schools of the Greeks and even the rhetorical schools of the Romans were based upon discipleship, and it was this model that the rabbis chose. The Greco-Roman educational enterprise of paideia, cultural instruction with its focus on Homer and other canonical texts, led directly to the rabbinic enterprise of Scriptural interpretation and then to the dialectical consideration of the rabbis’ Mishnah.
At the moment that the Greco-Roman world turned from its belief in the efficacy of animal sacrifices—even as they continued to be offered—the latest books of the Bible and the rabbis, too, prepared to approach God a different way. No longer was God’s banquet meal the sweet savor of animal sacrifices. After 70 CE, the rabbis imagined the covenantal meal as a very different kind of banquet. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, arguably the founder of rabbinic Judaism, is reported to have taught his disciples:
Aphrodite and the Rabbis Page 20