A Cautionary Note on the Report of the Discovery of a Synagogue in Galilee

Why is biblical archaeology in the broad sense – W. F. Albright’s “From the Stone Age to Christianity” – alive and well? Because that curious band of highly gifted and intelligent people who choose to study theology and Bible, some of whom go on to teach Religious Studies in the world’s best universities, specialize in the archaeology of the Levant or some other part of the Ancient Near East, and/or concentrate on one or more ancient languages and literatures, continue to design and execute projects of exquisite archaeological and historical significance. An example: The Kinneret Regional Project, a joint project of the Universities of Bern, Mainz, Leiden, and Helsinki. It is staffed each excavation season by 30 volunteers, mostly students of theology, religious studies and archaeology from the Netherlands, Finland, and Switzerland, but also, Romania, Belgium, Spain, Israel, and Germany. For a photo album that puts BAR to shame, go here. Pop quiz for students of Hebrew Bible: can you pick out Martti Nissinen among the photos? That’s him in more than one picture. For a fantastic collection of aerial photos, go here.

In a publication of Leiden University, it was just announced that “An international team of researchers, including Jürgen Zangenberg, from Leiden's Institute for Religious Studies, has discovered close to Galilee a synagogue that was in use in around the year 400.” On the excavation project’s website, The Kinneret Regional Project, a brief description of the finds in Area A of Horvat Kur that led to the conclusion that a synagogue has been found is given. The finds described are the following: an elaborately constructed monumental wall, a low bench made of hewn stones and covered with grey plaster running alongside the wall. Is that enough to speak confidently about the existence of a synagogue in Area A? Of course not, but leave it to a blogger and excavation team member, Tijmen Baarda, to give us more background:

There are some speculations going around that the building that is being excavated in area A . . . is a synagogue. It is not completely sure, but more and more clues are revealing. A number of archaeologist[s] coming as visitors to the site were convinced that it was when they saw it.   

I’m betting that Eric Meyers and Dina Avshalom-Gorni were among the visiting archaeologists. The multiple clues have yet to be laid out. One thing is certain. If we want to know what took place in a synagogue in Greco-Roman antiquity, the answers, insofar as we will ever have them, will derive from cross-disciplinary research in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, history, history of religions, and biblical and cognate literatures, inclusive but not limited to the literature of the Sages. For examples of the kind of cross-disciplinary breadth I have in mind, go here and here.

Still, caution is in order. Just last year, in Hadashot Arkheologiyot – Excavations and Surveys in Israel (HA-ESI), the directors of the excavation, Stefan Münger, Juha Pakkala  and Jürgen Zangenberg, had this to say: 

The hilltop location and the outline of walls suggested that Area A was situated in the public section of the site, yet it was not possible to confirm the earlier assumption that a synagogue had existed at this location.

The movers and shakers in the Regional Project are not yet household names in the halls of biblical studies. But some of us have already been astounded by the implications of the finds at Tel Kinrot discussed by Nissinen and Münger here. Based on an accumulation of evidence, the notion that a symbiotic set of processes of ethnogenesis occurred in the early Iron Age across the Levant continues to gather steam.

A short list of participating scholars:

Stefan Münger, Institute for Biblical Studies, University of Bern; Juha Pakkala, Department of Biblical Studies, University of Helsinki; Jürgen Zangenberg, Faculty for Religious Studies, University of Leiden; Wolfgang Zwickel, Ev.-Theol. Fakultät Seminar für Altes Testament, University of Mainz

A longer list:

Walter Dietrich; Gabriele Fassbeck; Volkmar Fritz; Henriette Manhart; Angela von den Driesch; Nimrod Marom; Guy Bar-Oz; Stefan Münger; Christian Mayer; Natalie Schmidt; Inga Müller; Juha Pakkala; Jürgen Zangenberg; Wolfgang Zwickel; Martti Nissinen; Katri Saarelainen; Kirsi Valkama; and Tuula Tynjä.

For a list of scholarly publications of KRP to date, go here. 

But I love  the debate Tijmen initiates about what is most important, the synagogue, or the domestic spaces that led into, as it were, the synagogue. And what about the land and land use, the balance of ecology, technology, and theology so richly illustrated in the traditional and archaeological sources of Judaism, that gave meaning to life in Greco-Roman Jewish antiquity? The Holy Land indeed. If only we could recover that, for all land everywhere. 

For the location of Horvat Kur, enlarge Todd Bolen's image here.

Comments

[Seth Sanders]

John, in a nutshell, what do you think the implications of the finds at Tel Kinrot are? All I get from a quick read of the article is that N Israel and Syria in the IA I was a bit more interconnected and less poverty-stricken than we've assumed.

[Jürgen Zangenberg]

Dear John, dear readers,

thanks for your symapethetic comments on Kinneret Regional Project's most recent discovery. Let me add a few details to it.
a) Careful readers of our recent webreport and the 2008 account in ESI could indeed be tempted to think we were talking about one and the same synagogue. That is not the case. In 2008 we excavated a test trench (called area A) at a spot where Yosef Stepanski and Zvi Ilan had located an East-West oriented synagogue in the 1980ies entirely on the basis of architecture visible on the surface. It turned out that all relevant architecture was unconnected and floated on soil. Gone was the synagogue.
In 2010, however, we substantially enlarged area A and found the western wall of a North-South oriented (!) synagogue whose remains were not visible above ground and could therefore not have been seen by Stepanski and Ilan. Back was a second, now "real", synagogue - through the back door as you might say. It is entirely possible that at least some of the architectural fragments seen by Stepanski and Ilan originally belonged to this "real" synagogue. Stepanski who visited he site yesterday, agrees with me, and many other visitors such as Benni Arubas, Uzi Leibner, Dina Avshalom-Gorni and Motti Aviam concur.
b) The excavations on Roman through Mediaeval Horvat Kur are an independent branch of Kinneret Regional Project (www.kinneret-excavations.org), hitherto concentrated on Bronze- and Iron-Age Tel Kinrot. In a way, Horvat Kur makes KRP really "regional". Our purpose for Kur was and still is to do research on rural Galilee and the correlation between a village (Horvat Kur being the test case) and its natural environment. Survey and economy therefore remain high on the agenda as you can also see in our webreport. The discovery of the synagogue was no goal in itself (nor was it targeted), but - together with our excavations in domestic area C - it adds to a better understanding of the structure of a Galilean village in the Roman and Byzantine periods.

I am looking forward to further comments.
Best wishes from all of us,

Jürgen Zangenberg (acting field director Horvat Kur, KRP and professor for New Testament and for Archaeology at Leiden University)

[JohnFH]

Hi Seth,

The Tel Kinrot finds compel me to formulate new questions. Compare the standard discussions of Iron Age I by Mazar (1990), Finkelstein (1995), and Stager (1995, 1998). Back then, one thought of Iron Age IA as the period in which an Egyptian administrative and military presence in Canaan came to cease; the Philistine city-states were formed on the southern coast, with a "backyard" extending as far as Afula; and a rural Israel came into existence in the highlands. Now Iron Age IB is coming into sharper focus. It remains probable that the rise of the Israelite state is an example of secondary state formation in response to the Philistine threat, but we now have to ask about the emergence of "cosmpolitan" cultures, of however short duration, with ties to the north, around the sea of Galilee, in the case of Tel Kinrot and Tel Hadar and, along different lines, at Dan and Hazor. We also need to ask with greater insistence what kind of place Megiddo was in this period. For example:

(1) At Tel Kinrot and, across the lake, at Tel Hadar, fortified settlements are in existence in Iron Age IB, in the case of Tel Kinrot (I don't know about Tel Hadar), for the first time since LB I. Who were they fortifying against?

(2) In Iron IB northern m.d. Israel, distinct cultural assemblages are attested at (1) Horvat Rosh Zayit and (2) Afula with places like (3) Megiddo and (4) Tel Kinrot "cosmopolitan" but in distinct ways. The article speaks of a cultic koine' based on the distribution of Iron Age I fenestrated vessels that was limited to the northern part of the Jordan Rift Valley, with connections to the Eastern Mediterranean and coastal Syria to the North. What does this tell us about cultural diffusion, cultural slopes, and cultural sinks, and disassimilatory processes of ethnogenesis in Iron Age IB?

I won't be happy until it's possible to describe the emergence of the national scripts out of processes of ethnogenesis but also over against the concomitant flourishing of cities where different ethnoi (I may be giving Kempinski too much credit here) existed side by side.

[JohnFH]

Dear Jürgen,

Thank you very much for the clarifying remarks.

My most important archaeological mentors, Al Glock and John Holladay, taught me to think in terms of the interface between things like architecture and ceramics and society and ecology. It's good to see that KRP formulates its questions in similar terms.

[Seth Sanders]

;-) well, perhaps the upcoming SBL panel will make you a bit happier?

[JohnFH]

Yeah, I bet that Avi Faust has thought about these questions already.