Pots

FRAN K E L I N ST I TUTE A N N U A L 201 8 Jews and the Material in Antiquity 4 Frankel Institue Annual 2018 Jews and the Material in Antiquity RACHEL RAFE NEIS & JEFFREY VEIDLINGER H ow did Jews in the ancient Mediterranean engage, sense, and construct material entities, artifacts, bodies, buildings and more? How did those who were not Jewish perceive or represent the relationships between Jews and matter? How has the history of Jews and matter been reconstructed in modern scholarship and how might scholars approach the nexus of Jews and the material more productively? hese questions were the focus of the 2017-2018 Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, which was organized around the theme “Jews and the Material in Antiquity.” Head Fellow R AC H E L R A F E N E I S brought together a group of distinguished scholars from around the world with expertise in archaeology, art history, ancient history, rabbinics, early Christianity, and comparative and ancient religion. he group charted new ways of studying the interface of material culture, materiality, and Jewish history from the third century BCE to the eighth century CE and from Palestine to Babylonia. Learning and conversation was stimulated not only in weekly workshops, public events, and conferences, but also in the context of several hands-on workshops with curators, artists, and makers. he group modeled a comparative and collaborative approach to the study of antiquity and to Judaism. 5 Frankel Institue Annual 2018 Fellows approached the theme from a variety of Finally, two fellows worked on ancient natural perspectives. D E B O R A H F O R G E R considered the worlds: C . M I K E C H I N studied the world imagined variegated materialization of the divine in Second by late ancient thinkers using an object-oriented Temple Jewish authors, TO D D B E R Z O N worked to approach, which reconigures the intellectual history understand the ways in which Jews and Christians of late antiquity as a speculative environmental understood the materiality of language and tongues history of imagined worlds and R AC H E L R A F E N E I S (literal and otherwise), and C H AYA H A L B E R S TA M grappled with late ancient science through the read Second Temple and rabbinic sources through theories of reproduction and generation of human feminist materialist lenses to illuminate the complex and nonhuman species held by rabbis and others. relationships between partiality and justice. Several fellows sought to understand artifacts and their vitality in ancient Jewish and Mediterranean cultures: J UA N T E B E S considered Idumeans through the relationship between Jewish textual sources and the art, pottery, and porcine remains in the archaeological record; R I C K B O N N I E studied the use and sensory experience of synagogues and ritual installations, with very cautious use of textual sources; and S E A N B U R R U S explored Jewish visual culture in Palestine and in the diaspora through a series of case studies across diferent media. Other fellows worked at the interstices of material and text: M E G A N N U T Z M A N studied amulet inscriptions for healing and their use by Jewish, Christian, and other people in late antique Palestine; M I C H A E L S WA R T Z analyzed divination texts and artifacts alongside the performative and economic conditions of the professionalized liturgical poets; and DA N I E L P I C U S researched reading as a material practice among late ancient Jews and rabbis. We hope you enjoy exploring these new dimensions of scholarship on Jews and material in Antiquity. As a special gift to our readers this year, we invite you to challenge yourselves with the Activity Pages included as an appendix to this volume. We thank C . M I K E C H I N and C H AYA H A L B E R S TA M for their contributions to the editing process and for putting together the Activity Pages. ● 16 Frankel Institue Annual 2018 a pun on Edom’s name? We’ll probably never know, luminous delicate earthen but we know a lot about the pots with which Edomites and Judaeans cooked, ate, and drank. A bowl from Horvat Qitmit in 7th century BCE northern Negev A potter living in Horvat Qitmit, or at a nearby locale within the ancient kingdom of Edom, manufactured a ine globular bowl, using the whitish-green clay coming from the local loess so typical of the northern Negev. Its thin walls and painted decoration—including bands, lines, and dots in red, brown, and black— exhibit the potter’s advanced skills. Bowls of this kind, and others with latter or deeper bodies, were widely popular in Edom and the Negev during the 7th and irst half of the 6th centuries BCE, especially in the Edomite city of Buseirah. hough seemingly mundane objects, they tell a profound story of how the persons who populated the ancient Mediterranean JUAN MANUEL TEBES world—including those from Israel—appropriated, rejected, and even at times embraced aspects of Pots neighboring cultures in order to bolster the cultural status of their own. It’s not diicult to guess why these ine bowls T he setting is known: Esau came back enjoyed such popularity: they are aesthetically exhausted from the countryside and saw appealing and performed their function as serving his younger brother Jacob cooking a stew. So he asked Jacob to feed him with that red (adom in Hebrew) stew; Jacob agreed but only after trading the stew for Esau’s birthright. his is why, the story goes, Esau was known as Edom. his seemingly common biblical family story, recounted in Genesis 25:29-34, attempts to explicate the origins of the name of the ancestor of the Edomites, people that inhabited southern Transjordan during the irst half of the 1st millennium BCE. Was the adom stew a real meal known by the author(s) of the story—apparently prepared with lentils and accompanied by bread—or is just a literary device to make “Edomite” painted bowl from Tel ‘Aroer in the northern Megev. Courtesy of Hebrew Union College 17 Frankel Institue Annual 2018 and drinking vessels for the table quite eiciently. this “Edomite” potter, and others like him, deliber- Yet there is a deeper social (and political) aspect ately manufactured their pots with characteristics to consider: these bowls bear a striking resemblance diferent from those in use in the Negev Judaean sites. to contemporary ine carinated Assyrian vessels, In doing so, they created and maintained social known by their revealing name of “palace ware” boundaries with their western neighbors. and associated with elite drinking rituals. his is a perfect example of what anthropologists call elite emulation and conspicuous consumption: in short, the use of food consumption to imitate the ethereal power emanating from the power centers of civilization. “Edomite” bowls performed this function extraordinarily well. hese open and shallow pots highlighted the display of high-valued food among guests. heir polychrome painted and molded decoration appealed to the eye while their delicate surface texture, hardness, and proile caressed the hands, thus establishing social bonds of solidarity between peers while at the same time maintaining unequal relations of status and power. A cooking pot from Tel Malhata in 7th century BCE northern Negev A domestic potter living in Edom or the eastern Negev manufactured a diferent pot with the clay from the local Nubian sandstone typical of the Petra region, in what is Jordan today. He made it open and neckless, although at other times he prepared cooking pots with a short neck. he remarkable thing is that someone—probably the potter or another villager or pastoral nomad moving between Edom and the Negev—transported it to the Judaean town of Tel Malhata, a distance of about 37 miles as the crow lies. Why would someone take the trouble to carry a bulky casserole-like dish across a desert landscape when similar pots were available at the destination point? We know that cuisine is one of the most traditional aspects of culture, so it’s possible that “Edomite” casserole-like dishes presented a wider oriice than did their Judaean counterparts, making it easier to insert and remove food and, most importantly, allowing a greater evaporation of liquids. his gave the resultant food a diferent, “dryer” taste. Flavor was also manipulated by the use of sandstone clays; these clays contain a high proportion of quartz particles that decrease shrinking during iring, thus permitting higher temperatures and contributing to a more “burnt” efect in taste. Meals cooked in a casserole-like dish such as these tasted diferently than those prepared in the Judaean pots. A holey bowl from Tel Maresha in 2nd century BCE Idumaea Five centuries later Edom was gone, but its culture survived in Idumaea (the Greek name for Edom), a heavily Hellenized territory in the Judaean mountains. A potter living in Tel Maresha, the most important Idumaean city, was adamant about producing very peculiar vessels: bowls, plates, and jugs with one, two, or more holes in the bases and under the handles. What was the rationale in puncturing vessels after iring, turning them into earthenware that was not functionally usable, a phenomenon also present in pottery found at other contemporaneous sites? Scholars have long debated the meaning of this practice, but the current consensus suggests possible ritual signiicance. Jewish notions of purity and impurity, which we know of from much later-dating 18 Frankel Institue Annual 2018 Mishnaic sources, may be at play. If this is the case, TODD S. BERZON then the holes were likely meant to prevent the reuse of the vessels. his would render the vessels pure, or preclude them from being deiled. If our potter and his clients from Maresha were following early precedents of the halakhic rules, then the Monuments Bowls, cooking pots, and other seemingly common T vessels tell a long story of ethnic boundaries, social political values. hey were celebrated monuments hierarchies, and class camaraderie, but they also of their time, and continue to inspire reverence and reveal shared ritual values across diferent ethnic awe to the present day. here is one monument, communities in ancient Edom (and later Idumaea), however, that stands in stark opposition to this list and their ancient Judaean (and later Jewish) coun- of magisterial achievements. It is a monument that terparts in the Negev. It may be that Judaeans and was never completed and likely never existed. It was Edomites could inally share a bowl of a good lentil built as much from pride and hubris as it was from Idumaeans’ forced conversion to Judaism, as described by Flavius Josephus, would have been easier than usually assumed. adom stew. ● he Statue of Liberty. he Taj Mahal. he Pyramids of Giza. he Colosseum. he Great Wall of China. hese massive structures are enduring symbols of cultural power, social bonds, natural resources, and brick and mortar. For that very reason, it is perhaps the most consequential monument never to have existed: it is the biblical tower of Babel. lentils flavor speech According to Genesis 11, a linguistically united and ambitious human race decided to build a city with a tower that would reach heaven so as to “make a name” for itself; “otherwise,” the inhabitants of Babel feared, “we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Gn 11:4 et seq.). God, evidently fearing the power of a uniied and motivated human race—“look, they are one people, and they all have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them”— halted construction of the city by confusing humanity’s singular language. God further concretized this linguistic chaos by scattering humans across the earth. he tower of Babel is the Bible’s explanation of linguistic and national diversity. It is a story of human diference.