Ritual immersion pool in a domestic context at Magdala: Photo Credit - Joseph Scales
Joseph Scales, “Religious Identity and Spatiality in Hasmonean and Herodian Galilee” (Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Birmingham, 2021).
During the 2nd century BCE, the Hasmonean kingdom began to expand beyond the confines of ancient Judea. The region known as “Galilee” appears to have been incorporated into the kingdom around 100 BCE. My dissertation argues that this incorporation generated various spatial arrangements in the region that enabled Jewish expression.
This thesis answers the following two questions: how did ancient Jews create meaningful spaces of religious activity in ancient Galilee, and how did those spaces in turn influence the constitution of ancient Judaism? These questions have been largely unexplored in scholarship. Only a few works have examined Galilee using spatial perspectives, and these have not incorporated archaeological evidence to any significant degree.[1] On the other side, archaeologists have conducted a great number of studies on the archaeology of Hellenistic and Early Roman Galilee, but have not engaged in spatial theory to any real extent.[2]
A number of ideas need to be unpacked prior to an analysis of the evidence. I first discuss the textual notion of Galilee as it appears in ancient texts between the 2nd century BCE and 1st century CE. This has been written on elsewhere thoroughly with regard to the gospels,[3] so I devoted a portion of the introduction to an examination of Galilee in First Maccabees, Judith, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Josephus. This discussion demonstrates the fluid notion of Galilee as a region, which changes over time and between these texts. As such, my thesis uses the nomenclature of “Galilee” to cover a geographical and mental region which was flexible. A second idea which needs unpacking is how we define Judaism in the ancient world. I raise a number of issues which arise from thinking about group identity, such as boundary establishment as well as maintenance and adaptation. Dimensions of gender and ethnicity are important in any account of identity. These dimensions are not exhaustive, but act as a starting point for thinking about the range of identities which Judaism might cover. I approach ancient Judaism from a number of perspectives. I identify a number of ancient sources as being insider witnesses to their own identity, while there are also some reported documents, such as the Roman Acta reported by Josephus, which offer some evidence for how Judaism was understood by outsiders. I also consider archaeology a means by which we can form an external perspective on aspects of ancient Judaism. Each of these perspectives offers its own strengths and weaknesses. My own use of “Judaism” as a term to mark out a group identity in antiquity delineates a singular entity. The core of this identity, however, could be vastly different between any two members of the group. While markers like the observance of the Sabbath or circumcision were integral aspects to some member’s self-identity, this was not the case for all self-identified Jews. I think of the boundaries of this group as being fluid, with Judaism itself an open conception which allows for difference and even uncertainty when reconstructing people’s lived experiences.
I further explore the language of religion and ritual, and ancient terminology related to this group. The third and final idea is spatial theory. These theories have been widely applied in biblical studies, but as mentioned before, have yet to be incorporated into a discussion of archaeological materials.
I split the thesis into three levels of spatial analysis: bodily, communal, and regional. The four chapters which follow the introduction are divided between communal and bodily space. Chapter 2 examines ritual, purity and bodily space from an archaeological perspective, while chapter 3 explores these themes from textual evidence. Likewise, chapter 4 considers the archaeological evidence of Jewish communal spaces in Galilee, with chapter 5 presenting a range of evidence from inscriptions and texts which concern such structures in antiquity. Chapter 6 then returns to the notion of “Galilee,” complementing the textual discussion in the introduction with the regional profile of Galilee from archaeology.
My first level of spatial analysis examined how bodily space was created in Galilee. This included an in-depth examination of what are commonly called miqva’ot or ritual immersion pools. I presented an account of their development and prevalence in Galilee. The results of this discussion suggested that the pools were likely not used solely by Jews, and that at present, we do not know quite how prevalent these pools were in Galilee. However, from the incorporation of the region into the Hasmonean kingdom, these pools did become one form of spatial expression, built to facilitate ritual purity conceptions. These artefacts are linked with stone vessels, which form a counterpart to the pools. While the pools remove impurity, stone vessels attempt to limit its spread. Stone vessels are known in a variety of forms, some which resemble clay tableware and others that are unique in style. This suggests that stone vessels were used sometimes in the place of ordinary ware, and other times for specific purposes different from more conventional vessels. Bodily space in Galilee was often related to purity concerns via these materials. On the one hand, we should be attentive to the relative scarcity of such artefacts: only a couple settlements in Galilee have revealed more than three immersion pools; only nine Galilean settlements have documented more than ten stone vessel fragments in the published reports. One the other hand, the regional perspective shows that compared to the surrounding regions on the Mediterranean coast, Samaria to the south, and the territories further north and east, that Galilean settlements were characterised in part by these artefacts.
This chapter (chp. 3) is followed by a wider examination of Jewish literature circulating around the late Second Temple period which related to purity conceptions. I present purity and impurity as being bodily properties. While some impurities are generated from the human body, others are transmitted to the body by external entities. I argue that purity conceptions were important as boundary markers, both around the boundaries of an individual’s body, but also social relations between people. Conceptions around proper purification procedures probably differed a great deal; we are aware of different rulings preserved amongst the documents of the Qumran library, for instance. Galilee presents a unique case, where we expect that Jews there engaged in a similar culture of purity observance to most Jews around the ancient world, but they went perhaps further, sharing also in a material culture of purity also known from Jerusalem and Judea more broadly. It could be argued that the removal of impurity in everyday life, which in the Torah had related almost entirely to the protection of cultic spaces, represents a shift towards a developing conception of the body as a space of ritual enactment.
These chapters form my analysis of bodily space, and the subsequent two chapters move on to discuss communal space. The first of these (chp. 4) examines the archaeological evidence of purpose-built Jewish communal structures in Galilee which were in use before the end of the First Jewish War. Such structures are commonly termed “synagogues,” although I think that this labelling somewhat predetermines scholars’ approaches toward them. Rather than examine these facilities in terms of what evidence is available, scholars tend to synthesise what we know about these buildings along with a plethora of textual evidence for a range of meeting places in ancient Judaism. In Galilee, there are currently nine structures that have been suggested to have originated during 1st century CE. However, most of these either lack clear dating or the interpretations of the remains are highly speculative. Only the three structures at Gamla and Magdala are clearly dated and can be distinguished as communal buildings. Each site was a large settlement, settled or expanded by the Hasmonean dynasty, and according to Josephus, also were filled with anti-Roman sentiment during the revolt period. Two buildings in Gamla and Magdala appear similar to later synagogue arrangements; a large hall lined with benches and columns. Both of these structures are located on the edge of their respective settlements, possess some adjoining rooms, with at least one of these possessing benches, and both structures were repurposed during the revolt period, incorporated into defensive walls and housing refugees. A further important point is that these structures were only used by a minority at any given point. While the larger of the Gamla structures could potentially hold around 10 to 15% of the settlement’s population, the Magdala structure would hold perhaps as little as 1%. This kind of exclusion may also influence how we understand the relationship between settlements and the communal centres within them.
Chapter 5 examined the textual evidence of Jewish communal structures. This incorporated the inscriptional and papyrological evidence from around the eastern Mediterranean, from Ptolemaic Egypt to the northern coast of the Black Sea. There was not only a diversity in the terms used for such structures, but also a great deal of different activities which are reported to have taken place in them. I argue that we should not assume that every such practice was conducted in all structures. For example, it might be thought that in all buildings, texts were read. However, outside of the 1st century CE works in New Testament, Josephus and Philo, only a single inscription attests to the law being read aloud (the Theodotus inscription from Jerusalem). It might be reasonable to suppose that this practice was widespread, but we should be aware that the evidence is not extensive prior to the 1st century CE. Other kinds of practices are even less well attested. Communal space appeared to be dependent on community needs, and during the first three hundred years of purpose-built structural development in diasporic Judaism, varied considerably in terms of their design and purposes.
Chapter 6 returns once again to the question of what Galilee meant as a region. The focus of this examination is on the widespread archaeological materials which characterise and distinguish the territory from the surrounding territories. The previously discussed stone vessels and ritual immersion pools are part of this, but from the beginning of the 1st century BCE, Galilee began to move towards the use of locally-made ceramic ware, the use of Hasmonean coinage, and the use of Jerusalem-made oil lamps (or copies of ones in this style). Galilean identity was expressed using some innovative artefacts which helped individuals and communities to observe particular practices. There was a general ethos of purification observance and communal gatherings in purpose-built structures which connected and bound Galilee as a region.
[1] These works are well developed but are principally engaged in using spatial theory to interrogate texts rather than archaeology: Halvor Moxnes, Putting Jesus in His Place: A Radical Vision of Household and Kingdom (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003); John M. Vonder Bruegge, Mapping Galilee in Josephus, Luke, and John: Critical Geography and the Construction of an Ancient Space, AJEC/AGJU 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Karen J. Wenell, Jesus and Land: Sacred and Social Space in Second Temple Judaism, LNTS 334 (London: T&T Clark, 2007).
[2] For example: Mordechai Aviam, Jews, Pagans and Christians in the Galilee: 25 Years of Archaeological Excavations and Surveys, Hellenistic to Byzantine Periods, Land of Galilee 1 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004); Andrea M. Berlin, “Household Judaism,” in Galilee in the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods. Volume 1: Life, Culture, and Society, eds. David A. Fiensy and James Riley Strange (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 208–215; Rick Bonnie, Being Jewish in Galilee, 100–200 CE: An Archaeological Study, SEMA 11 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019); Mark A. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus, SNTSMS 134 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Uzi Leibner, Settlement and History in Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Galilee: An Archaeological Survey of the Eastern Galilee, TSAJ 127 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009); Jonathan L. Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-Examination of the Evidence (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000).
[3] Vonder Bruegge, Mapping Galilee.
Joseph Scales recently defended his PhD in Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the connection between ancient Galilean perceptions of space and religious identity by drawing on literary and archaeological evidence from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. His twitter handle is @josephdscales.