2018-11 - Magdala, a Jewish town, cover-contents.pdf

Jerusalem. Brief History, 2018

Jerusalem - A Brief History shows how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures confer providential meaning to the fate of the city and how modern Jerusalem is haunted by waves of biblical fantasy aiming at mutually exclusive status-quo rectification. It presents the major epochs of the history of Jerusalem’s urban transformation, inviting readers to imagine Jerusalem as a city that is not just sacred to the many groups of people who hold it dear, but as a united, unharmed place that is, in this sense, holy. Jerusalem - A Brief History starts in modern Jerusalem—giving readers a look at the city as it exists today. It goes on to tell of its emergence as a holy city in three different ways, focusing each time on another aspect of the biblical past. Next, it discusses the transformation of Jerusalem from a formerly Jewish temple city, condemned to oblivion by its Roman destroyers, into an imperially sponsored Christian theme park, and the afterlife of that same city under later Byzantine and Muslim rulers. Lastly, the book returns to present day Jerusalem to examine the development of the modern city under the Ottomans and the British, the history of division and reunification, and the ongoing jostling over access to, and sovereignty over, Jerusalem’s contested holy places. Offers a unique integration of approaches, including urban history, the rhetoric of power, the history of art and architecture, biblical hermeneutics, and modern Middle Eastern Studies Places great emphasis on how Jerusalem is a real city where different people live and coexist Examines the urban transformation that has taken place since late Ottoman times Utilizes numerous line drawings to demonstrate how its monumental buildings, created to illustrate an alliance of divine and human power, are in fact quite ephemeral, transient, and fragile Jerusalem - A Brief History is a comprehensive and thoughtful introduction to the Holy City that will appeal to any student of religion and/or history.

Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods, New Theories. Eds. Lutz Doering and Andrew R. Krause, in co-operation with Hermut Löhr. Ioudaioi 11. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020

Lutz Doering reviews the current evidence for first-century, late Second-Temple synagogues and places the newly discovered synagogue at Magdala in this context. In doing so, he critically reviews previous proposals for the interpretation of the decoration and function of the Magdala stone table. Doering argues that, rather than providing a model of the Jerusalem Temple in the synagogue at Magdala, or bringing visitors of the synagogue into the Temple courts, the stone, through references to the Temple in its decoration, provides a connection between the local activity of Torah reading and the central institution of the Temple.

Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2023

In this article I draw an outline for understanding the settlement oscillations in Jerusalem between the Late Bronze Age Amarna period and the First Jewish Revolt. I begin by posing a question regarding the "Jerusalem Anomaly": located in a remote, marginal area with no natural resources, how was it that Jerusalem twice grew to become the largest city in the southern Levant? I propose that Jerusalem could reach a state of high prosperity only as a vassal serving the interests of great empires (Assyria and Rome). It could also benefit from serving local Levantine powers (Damascus and Israel). In the era discussed here Jerusalem achieved a state of prosperity as a relatively independent center of power only once-in the few decades from the days of John Hyrcanus until the takeover of the region by Pompey the Great.

The file includes the English abstracts of the articles published in this volume (in Hebrew): David Ussishkin: Was Jerusalem a Fortified Stronghold in the Middle Bronze Age? An Alternative View Amir Feldstein: The Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 'El-Amarna' Period Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor: Khirbet el Rai: An Iron Age Site in the Judean Shephelah Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman: A Lost Manuscript, Tomb 1 at Ain Shems and the Earliest Identification of Iron Age IIA in the Shephelah Ido Koch: Stamp-Amulets from Iron IIA Shephelah: Preliminary Conclusions regarding Production and Distribution, Pictorial Assemblage, and Function Avraham Faust: Tel ‘Eton and the Colonization of the Shephelah during the Iron Age IIA Gabriel Barkay and Robert Deutsch: Another Fiscal Bulla from the City of David Aaron Greener, Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Dvira (Zweig): Iron Age II Figurine Fragments from the Temple Mount Soil Efrat Bocher and Liora Freud: Persian Period Settlement in the Rural Jerusalem Hinterland Moran Hagbi: The Strategic importance of Judea and Jerusalem at the 2nd Century BCE - A view from the Fortified Sites David Gurevich: The Dam Dated to the Hasmonean Period at The Sultan's Pool, Jerusalem Eyal Regev: How Did the Hasmoneans Build Jewish Collective Identity Haim Cohen: Distinctive Plaster of Jewish Mikvaoth, Olive and Wine Presses during the Second Temple and the Talmud Period Zeev Safrai: Dk' lyh Shimon Gibson and Rafael Lewis: On Determining the Date of Agricultural Terracing Around Jerusalem Anat Avital: The Representation of Crops and Agricultural Tools in Late Roman and Byzantine Mosaics of Judea and Jerusalem Bat-Sheva Garsiel: The Description of Jerusalem in Travelers' Books Shlomo Lotan: The Description of the Fate of Jerusalem and the Crusader Kingdom in the Chronicles of the Roman Emperor Frederick II Eyal Davidson: Between the Bridge and the Strawberry Tree – The Jewish Cemetery in Jerusalem in the 16th Century Abraham David: The Travelogue of R. Moses Basola in the Beginning of Ottoman Rule as a Source for the History of Jerusalem and its Jewish Community

Journal for the Study of Judaism, 2005

In this paper, I present the material culture relevant to understanding Jewish life in Palestine in the century or so before the Revolt. I organize the evidence according to the locales and activities from which they result, paying particular attention to the evidence for date and distribution since these are the criteria that allow us to track when and where these activities and the attitudes they represent appear. Some aspects of life and culture are better represented by archaeological remains than others but of course that is a drawback of all ancient evidence, including that from texts. In brief, the archaeological evidence shows that Jews throughout Judea, Galilee, and Gaulanitis were closely linked by religious practices and so, likely, beliefs, but quite divided by cultural attitudes. Beginning in the early first century B.C.E., workshops for kitchen pottery, standardized oil jars, and household or neighborhood mikva’ot reveal that Jewish women and men adopted overtly religious activities and attitudes into their households and daily lives. In the later first century B.C.E. and early first century C.E., they began using stone vessels and a specific new form of oil lamp to further distinguish and identify themselves. Other remains, however, tell a different story. In Jerusalem, the wealthy embraced the use of decorated table vessels, Italian-style cooking pans, foreign modes of dining, and the construction of elaborately decorated display tombs – all of which reflect foreign, classicizing activities and attitudes. These sorts of remains are rare or absent in rural Judea, Jewish Galilee, and Gaulanitis. The archaeological evidence thus provides an eyewitness view of a population strongly unified in religious practices but sharply divided by cultural ethic. Such a view is certainly helpful for understanding the environment in which the Revolt began. Even better, it may assist in explaining why it failed.

The aim of this paper is to provide the historical research based on narratological analyses of a few rabbinic stories from the Mishna, Tosephta, and the Palestinian Talmud, originating in Roman Palestine in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The stories are united by the usage of the space of the market, which is a meaningful space, playing a role of identity marker typical of a city dweller. The plots happening in the marketplace are an inverted mirror of what is going on in the rabbinic academy. Another common characteristic of these story plots is the situation of the sabbatical year. Though the sabbatical year's ideal, archaic, and strange norms were successfully resuscitated by rabbinic legal fictions inside the house of study, they still look problematic in the marketplace. The self-awareness of the ancient Jewish literati in their role as a minority and their norms as a scholastic production need to be adjusted to the course of life of the commoners expressed in these stories. The market, as any 'lived space', is a space which the rabbinic imagination seeks to appropriate. Appropriating it, rabbinic urban actors subvert, inhabit, colonize, and impose their meanings, values, and uses on space in creative and playful ways that conflict and contest dominant forms and representations of space. Inhaltsverzeichnis Anzeigen Focus, applied concept and method State of the art Historical and spatial exposition, agents Tiberian Parable Sabbatical Year: Utopia and Reality Jews and Gentiles on the Market Galileans and Cappadocians on the Market of Sepphoris Explanatory hypotheses, potential generalisations, possible relations to other factors

Klaus Bieberstein, The Briefest History of Jerusalem, 2023

This overview of the history of Jerusalem up to its destruction by Titus was written by me for the "Stuttgarter Erklärungsbibel" of the German Bible Society, in which it will soon appear in a slightly edited version. It is therefore not a scholarly publication, but gives a brief overview of my reconstruction of the history of the city, which also forms the basis of my "Brief History of Jerusalem" of 2017 and my essay "Zwischen Skylla und Charybdis" of 2023.