I had good intentions about blogging while I was in Israel and Jordan. But since my access to the internet was only occasional and since we spent a good deal of time on-site, my intentions weren't fulfilled. So, now that I am home, I will be processing some of what I learned (I learned more than I ever could have imagined), as I also begin to look at the next stage of my current writing project on Revelation.
The main thing I learned while in Israel was that
Roman Judea/ Galilee was saturated with Roman influence. I expected Roman influence, as suggested in previous posts, yet I had no idea of how pervasive Hellenistic/ Roman culture was in ancient Judea. In graduate school, my instructors spent a significant amount of time trying to dispel the myth of an ancient Judaism that was hermetically sealed off from Hellenistic and later Roman influence. I've continued this refrain in my teaching, for example, highlighting the portions of 1 & 2 Maccabees which suggest that it was Jewish sects that embraced and promoted Hellenism (e.g. the gymnasium) rather than having it foisted upon them by Antiochus IV. Yet, I had never fully realized the number of temples dedicated to Hellenistic/ Roman deities in the region, nor had I realized all the ways that the upper classes (Herod in particular) seemed to emulate Hellenistic/ Roman trends. In other words, I think I have been holding on to the Jewish-Hellenistic/ Roman dichotomy more than I realized. It's not that the ancient forms of Judaism do not have some particularities. However, I think I'm seeing more clearly how these particularities can fit within the range of what it means to be Roman. In fact, I'm beginning to realize that my past notion of Roman-ness was not as nuanced as it could have been.
One of the things that struck me while visiting ancient sites was how marking something as Jewish had the effect of suggesting that something was religious. This was initially made clear at Massada, when we visited an area described as a "synagogue." While the term synagogue signifies to us a religious function, Jodi Magness (see above) pointed out to us that we really have no idea of whether or not the room served a religious purpose. The space does include a structure seemingly functioning as a genizah (some scroll fragments were found buried there). Other than this, there is nothing that suggests this was more or less than an assembly hall. It may have been used for religious functions, but also for political or other communal gatherings. To mark the space primarily as religious has a significance for us that might not have been present in the ancient world.
Similarly, I was curious about the labeling of mikvot as "ritual baths." Many of the sites we visited had these stepped baths which were used for immersion. Traditionally, these were used to rid oneself of ritual impurity. There is at least one extant mikvah by the Temple Mount and the cisterns from around the Temple suggest that there could have been many more. The homes in Herodian quarter in Jerusalem had numerous mikvot, since these homes were likely inhabited by priests or priestly families. Yet, in one of these homes, the mikvah was close to and looked similar to a bathing area, which included a seating area. This made me wonder why we describe the use of mikvot as ritualistic, which suggests a special significance, and not Roman baths. The importance and complexity of baths in Roman cities suggests that they were for more than hygiene and health, that they served important social and communal functions. Did they have functions that could be understood as "ritualistic" or "religious"? How do the functions of these baths relate to the functions of the mikvot? Clearly, I need to read Fagan's
Bathing in Public in the Roman World to start getting a sense of the issue. The point is, for me, how we mark supposedly Jewish things as "religious" in a way that we don't when it comes to non-Jewish things or spaces. Ultimately, it raises the question of what constitutes religion . . .
Instead of working on the next chapter of my Revelation writing project, yesterday afternoon I spent a fair amount of time labeling photos I took at Um er-Rasas (known in the ancient world as Kastrom Mefa'a) in Jordan. The site, a UNESCO heritage site, is interesting for a number reasons, including the fact that in a relatively small area 16 Byzantine churches have been uncovered. A number of these churches have incredible floor mosaics, including the Church of St. Stephen. There are a number of interesting things about the mosaics at St. Stephen, besides their detail. First, an inscription names the mosaicist. The mosaic includes an "inscription" naming the mosaicist as Staurachios Ezbontinos. It also says that his colleague Euremios paved the presbytery in March 756. Second, the mosaic includes a border section depicting ecclesiatcial cities in the region. The images begin in the right corner next to the presbytery with Kastrom Mefa'a, move on to Madaba, Philadelphia (modern Amman), etc. Opposite Kastrom Mefa'a is they "Holy City" or Jerusalem. The mosaic (see above) includes an image of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, just as the Madaba map!
Another interesting thing about these mosaics is that you can see the work of iconoclasts. While we often think of iconoclasts destroying figural art, it is interesting to see how they actually reconstructed the mosaics into non-human figures. The image to the left, for example, is a fish that has been put in the place of a human figure that was apparently riding some sea animal. You can see the blacked out human face in the upper-right corner. They also "scrambled" many human figures in the central part of the mosaic and even replaced some with symbols, such as spades. The explicitness of their work is thought provoking . . .
