Second Letter from Nazareth
It’s Sunday morning and I’m in the hotel’s coffee bar,
waiting for the students whom I will take to Haifa, whence they will take the
train to Tel Aviv. One student has an
Israeli friend who lives there and will tour the students around the city. Today is our day off, so the group is
scattering to various outings. I will
get some work done, and I’ll drink my fill of cappuccinos.
We have had a good week of archaeology. Digging has gone slowly because our area
supervisors are new to their positions and they are proceeding with caution,
but that’s to be expected. We would
rather see caution than abandon. Some of
our folks have sharp eyes and have already turned up two lamp molds and some
lamp fragments of various types. We have
been finding an abundance of both ever since we began digging, which means that
we’re uncovering evidence that Shikhin’s potter’s produced lamps. That is now beyond question, in my opinion. My partner, Motti Aviam, thinks that we are
going to find evidence that after the wars of 70 and 135 CE, Jews migrated to
Galilee from Judea (that much is already known), and some of them relocated to
Shikhin, where they began to make lamps, turning Shikhin into a regional lamp
manufacturing center. He and I are in
the process of writing an article in which we will float that hypothesis. We can then test it in our excavations.
By and large, we always have a good group of diggers. The hotel staff treats us like family, and
they appreciate the interactions with our volunteers, which has a different
quality than their interactions with other guests. They allow us to make our own cappuccinos,
for example, and I never see any other guests besides us in the kitchen. But this year we seem to have a crop of
especially gregarious volunteers, many of whom are making a real effort to
learn Arabic greetings and sayings. The
staff is charmed. Some of them have
remarked to me how much they appreciate these efforts. Of course, occasionally those efforts produce
humorous results, as when volunteers try out their Arabic on Hebrew-speaking
Israelis. There is a lot of goodwill on
all sides, however.
Yesterday (Saturday) we traveled to two important sites:
Beit She‘arim and Caesarea. In the third
century CE, Beit She‘arim became a popular place for Jews to be buried. The Mount of Olives used to play that role,
but that ended with the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem and the surrounding
area in 135. A rabbi named Judah Ha-Nasi
(“the Prince”) lived out the end of his life in Sepphoris (a 20 minute walk
from our site), where he is credited with finishing the compilation of the
Mishnah: the core of the two Talmuds. He
was buried, however, in Beit She‘arim. He
was so revered (he became known simply as “Rabbi”), that other Jews began to do
the same, and by the middle of the fourth century, when the Romans destroyed
the town, the town’s hillside was honeycombed with large mausoleums. Archaeologists rediscovered them only in the
last century. It became an act of piety
to be buried at Beit She‘arim, so much so that even Jews from the Diaspora were
brought here for interment. It is also
known for the world’s largest slab of glass, which was ruined in production and
so left behind for us to see. (It was
poured to make raw glass to sell to glassblowers.)
Caesarea was an invention of Herod the Great. Caesar Augustus had given him the Phoenician
town of Strato’s tower, and he built a Roman city on the site, complete with a
Roman theater, amphitheater, palace, and grand temple to Caesar Augusts, for
whom he named the city. Eventually there
was a hippodrome as well. Josephus was
impressed with the speed of its construction, as well as its water system and
harbor. The Romans made it their capital
when they took direct control of Judea in 6 CE.
Pontius Pilate governed from the city, and Peter converted the Roman
Centurion Cornelius and his family there.
Christian theologians Origen and Eusebius served there as bishops. For our part, we toured the Roman, Byzantine,
and Crusader period ruins, got some refreshing gelato, and then went swimming
at the famous Roman aqueduct, as we do most years.
The generosity that has come to define this dig is in full
force this year. Yes, students and
volunteers pay a lot to come and work, but they also behave as if it is a
pleasure to do so, and to do whatever is asked of them besides. I have already mentioned the hotel
staff. My parents continue to come: my
father as my Architect, but also as a de-facto Field Supervisor and Tour Guide,
and my mother as my Camp Manager. Motti
is as busy as anyone with the responsibilities of directing, and he is also
making important connections with other archaeologists, schools, and
technicians. People donate funds. If all we had was money from grants, we could
do the work, but not with the care, and hence precision, that this kind of
openhandedness produces. Needless to
say, I am grateful.
Pray for the peace of Israel.
James
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