1. I also encountered this phenomenon during my visits to the Mount while studying the history of the religious and eschatological meaning of the Mount of Olives in the Abrahamic traditions. See Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “’On That Day His Feet Will Stand on the Mount of Olives’: The Mount of Olives and Its Hero between Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” Jewish History 30, no. 2 (2016): 138–57.
2. Jews and Christians use the term Al Aksa to refer to the mosque on the southern end of Herod the Great’s artificial plateau. Muslims use this name to refer both to the mosque specifically and to the entire space generally.
3. Teaching at the University of Haifa, where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim citizens of Israel study together, provides a similar experience. A course dealing with holy sites that I teach reveals a clear difference in how the students designate the sites. For example, the site identified in popular Jewish tradition as the tomb of Rabban Gamaliel in Yavneh is identified in popular Arab tradition as the tomb of Ali Abu Hurairah. See Doron Bar, Sanctifying a land: The Jewish holy places in the State of Israel 1948–1967 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben Gurion University Press and Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 2007), 46–47.
4. Regarding the spatial turn in historical inquiry, see Philip J. Ethington, “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History,” The Journal of Theory and Practice 11, no. 4 (2007): 465–93; Edward W. Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity,” in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 10–42; Stephen Russell, Space, Land, Territory, and the Study of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2017). On the spatial turn in Jewish studies see Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, eds., Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008) and the review by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies,” AJS Review 33, no. 1 (2009): 155–64. The main expression of the spatial dimension in Jewish studies has involved the issue of an eruv, the Sabbath boundary; see Gil P. Klein, “Squaring the City: Between Roman and Rabbinic Urban Geometry,” in Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Henriette Steiner and Maximilian Sternberg (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 34–48. Recently, Kelley Coblenz Bautch published a valuable survey of the use of spatial theory in the apocalyptic literature, mainly Enoch and Daniel. See Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “Spatiality and Apocalyptic Literature,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 3, no. 5 (2016): 273–88. However, discussion of and engagement with the spatial turn in the field of Jewish studies has focused primarily, until now, on the individual and urban spaces, as seen in the works of Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Gil P. Klein. See also Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseilles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). While most research has focused on personal, home, and urban space, in this book I seek to address the Jewish ethnic space of the land of Israel and its holy places, and its bearing on Jewish identity in the ancient period.
5. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
6. Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): 125–33; Aleida Assman, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert E. Goodwin and Charles Tilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 210–26. On the need to expand the term “collective memory” and communicate with other components, see Wolf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002): 179–97.
7. Immanuel Kant, “The Transcendental Aesthetic,” in Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 157, 162. Just as history is a description of time and not time itself, so geography is a description of space and not space itself, with the description reflecting the perspective of the writer. As Richard Hartshorne asserts, “Geography is to be defined essentially as point of view” Richard Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography (Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers, 1939), 432.
8. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 62–78.
9. Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1974); idem, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
10. David Atkinson et al., Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: Tauris, 2005).
11. See Shmuel Berkovits, “How dreadful is this place!”: Holiness, politics, and justice in the Holy Places in Israel [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Carta, 2007); Issachar Rosen-Zvi, Taking Space Seriously: Law, Place, and Society in Contemporary Israel (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2004).
12. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
13. In Tannaitic literature, the term “place” (makom) is often used to refer to God. However, in Amoraic literature, using place to refer to God is less prevalent, and the phrase “The Holy One, Blessed Be He” is used more often to refer to God. The midrash Genesis Rabbah asks why “The Holy One, Blessed Be He” is referred to as “the place” in Genesis 28:11, where it is written “and he reached the place” to describe Jacob’s arrival at Bethel. The interpretation offered in Genesis Rabbah is that He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place (58:9). Ephraim E. Urbach in The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1987), 66–79, argues that in rabbinic literature, the term “place” actually expresses closeness to God; he therefore sees the use of this term as an internal development within rabbinic language intended to express intimacy between God and the world.
14. In fact, this is an experiment I conduct every year. At the University of Haifa, where I teach and where Jews and Arabs study together, I show slides of pictures taken from the Mount of Olives at the beginning of a course on space and holy places. When I ask the students what they see, the Arab students reply “Al Aksa” and the Jewish students answer “the Temple Mount.”
15. As Michel Foucault has noted, one space may include different “times.” The clearest illustration of this is the space of a museum, where one room contains artifacts from different eras. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1980).
16. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). It was Edward Soja who expounded on the influence of the social dimension on the perception of place. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
17. According to Émile Durkheim, an individual’s feelings are also a function of the social context in which he or she lives. On space in its social contexts and as social production, see Lefebvre, Production of Space. Accordingly, different societies produce different places even in the same space. See also David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 224, and Rosen-Zvi, Taking Place Seriously, 126–27. Maurice Halbwachs began addressing this issue in On Collective Memory. When Halbwachs developed the concept of collective memory and laid the foundation for studying it as a distinct field, he connected collective memory with place and time. He contended that memories were partial and thus required different contexts in order to be preserved. As a result, the context of place and space is an integral part of collective memory. Collective memory is created by the individual and personal memories that are integrated into the general context of collective memory.
18. Michel De Certeau posits that an individual’s cognitive map of the city is created out of that individual’s daily life, and that the paths he or she traverses create the space relevant to that individual, in contrast to a general map of the city or an inclusive city panorama. See Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Randel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
19. One expression of how social realities and processes shape the apprehension of space can be found in an experiment carried out by Yuval Portugali. Portugali asked Jews and Arabs living within fifteen kilometers of one another in the Netanya area and the region known as the “Triangle,” an area that includes Jewish communities in the west and Arab communities in the east, to draw the space in which they lived. Portugali found that Jews primarily drew the Jewish communities, with little or no reference to the Arab ones. Furthermore, Jews included Jewish settlements over the Green Line, even though these were more distant than the Arab communities they omitted. The Arabs drew Arab towns while omitting nearby Jewish communities. See Yuval Portugali, Implicate Relation: Society and Space in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).
20. Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
21. Elden, Birth of Territory, 18. Michel Foucault argues that the transformation of “land” to “territory” was the basis for the transformation of people into populations. This indicates that territory is a political category of delineation and control. See also Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009).
22. Stuart Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34 (2010): 816–17.
23. Elden, Birth of Territory, 26–52.
24. Sophocles, Antigone, 842–843, 936.
25. “The Greek polis was a politically autonomous community of people living in a defined territory comprising a civic center with surrounding arable countryside” (Aristotle, Politics 1276a). See also Thucydides, who preceded Aristotle: “Man makes the polis, not walls or a fleet of crewless ships” (History of the Peloponnesian War 7.77).
26. Philip B. Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 53.
27. Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Irad Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 59–60. On the other hand, Malkin argues that the map of sites where Greek myths, such as The Odyssey, were said to have occurred included peripheral locations that served to connect local populations to Greek culture. See Philip Kaplan, “Ethnicity and Geography,” in A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Jeremy McInerney (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 298–311.
28. John Richardson, The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
29. Elden, Birth of Territory, 75–82; Richardson, The Language of Empire.
30. Benjamin Isaac argues that the Romans had extremely general ideas about the exact borders of the empire. See Benjamin Isaac, Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 372–418. On the perceptions of space in the Roman Empire, see Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Richard Talbert and Kai Brodersen, eds., Space in the Roman World: Its Perception and Presentation (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004). On the perceptions of space in early Christianity, see Laura Salah Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second Century Church Amid the Spaces of the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51–86.
31. Thus, the references to the borders of the land in rabbinic literature and the borders of the Roman world as viewed by the Romans correspond to the provincial borders, as opposed to the borders of the empire.
32. The foundations of my research on the conceptualization of the land rely in large part on the link between place and time. Geographical-historical research on the ancient land of Israel is diverse and abundant. Highlights in research on the topic begin with Eusebius’s Onomasticon, a reference book for the study of the scriptures and evangelical literature that identifies the places mentioned. An additional milestone in research on the land of Israel took place some one thousand years later with Ishtori Haparchi’s composition of Sefer kaftor ve-ferah. (Book of button and flower) in the fourteenth century. His volume of Jewish religious law included historical-geographical discussions about the land’s borders and the descriptions of the land found in scripture. The renewed discovery of the land of Israel in the nineteenth century on the part of European and American society generated momentum in the field. See Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979). The pioneering book Tevu’ot ha’arets (Crops of the land), written by Rabbi Joseph Schwarz, was published in 1845. Emil Schürer studied the administrative division of the land in place and space as well as demographics; see the revised edition, Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (London: T & T Clark, 2014). Another prominent German scholar was Gustaf H. Dalman (Sacred Sites and Ways: Studies in the Topography of the Gospels [London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1935]). With the establishment of the Hebrew University, Samuel Klein also became an important voice. Upon immigration to Palestine in 1929, Klein developed the research he had begun in Europe and became the dominant figure in the field. In terms of research on the classical periods, Michael Avi-Yonah laid the foundations for historical-geographical subjects (Michael Avi-Yonah, The Holy Land: From the Persian to the Arab Conquests, 536 BC–640 AD: A Historical Geography [Jerusalem: Carta, 2002]), and Abraham Schalit focused on questions of administration (Abraham Schalit, The Roman administration in Palestine [in Hebrew] [Jerusalem: Ariel, 2001]). Menahem Stern, Benjamin Isaac, Joshua Schwartz, and Ze’ev Safrai all conducted research on the administrative division; Doron Bar studied demographics (Doron Bar, “Fill the earth”: Settlement in Palestine during the late Roman and Byzantine periods 135–640 C.E. [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and The Schechter Institute, 2008).
The foundations laid by Avi-Yonah in the land of Israel’s historical geography in classical periods were developed by his student Yoram Tsafrir who, along with Leah Di Segni, worked on the Tabula Imperii Romani and the Onomasticon of Judea. For more on the subject, see Yoram Tsafrir, “The Provinces in the Land of Israel: Nomenclature, Boundaries, and Borders,” in The Land of Israel from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the Muslim Conquest, ed. Z. Baras et al. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1982); Yoram Tsafrir, Leah Di Segni, and Judith Green, Tabula Imperii Romani: Maps and Gazetteer (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Humanity and Sciences, 1994); Leah Di Segni and Yoram Tsafrir with Judith Green, The Onomasticon of Iudaea: Palaestina and Arabia in the Greek and Latin Sources (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Humanity and Sciences, 2015). Lee I. Levine’s as yet unpublished Talmudic Onomasticon project will also be instructive.
On the Middle Eastern space and the land of Israel, see Maurice Sartre, The Middle East under Rome (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), and Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); on Arabia, see Glen W. Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
33. Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989), 322–54. On the myth of the “Empty Land,” see below, chapter 2.
34. Doron Mendels, The Land of Israel as a Political Concept in Hasmonean Literature (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1987). The dating of the compositions is not widely agreed upon—for example, his dating of the book of Jubilees or Judith.
35. Kelley Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: “No One Has Seen What I Have Seen” (Leiden: Brill, 2003). See, more recently, Coblentz Bautch, “Spatiality,” 273–88. Coblentz Bautch examines the mental map of Enoch 17–19’s author, following the theory of Peter Gould and Rodney White as well as R.D. Sack.
36. Liv Ingebord Lied, The Other Lands of Israel: Imaginations of the Land in 2 Baruch (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 13–16. Lied uses critical spatial theory, following Henri Lefebvre and Edward W. Soja, as well as Michel Foucault, Jonathan Z. Smith, David W. Harvey, and Doreen Messey.
37. John M. Vonder Bruegge, Mapping Galilee in Josephus, Luke, and John: Critical Geography and the Construction of an Ancient Space, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), based mainly on the theory of Edward Soja about “thirdspace.”
38. See Isaiah M. Gafni, Land, Center, and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997).
39. A far-reaching step, to my mind, that does not necessarily look at the complexity of the Babylonian sages’ approach; the sages folded Tannaitic and Amoraic statements about the need to settle the land of Israel into the discussion justifying their settlement in Babylonia.
40. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
41. This is the path traversed, as well, by Jacob Neusner (“Map Without Territory,” History of Religions 19, no. 2 [Nov. 1979]: 103–12), who claims that the Mishnah sketched an unrealistic map; the sages, then, were separated from the realistic land following the destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kokhba Revolt. In my opinion, this approach ignores a large corpus of references relating to the realistic regions and borders of the land, some of which I will discuss in the fourth chapter.
42. In the preface to his The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: California University Press, 1982), Davies explains his interest in this issue as resulting from a letter received from E.E. Urbach, who asks for support for the Israeli cause on the eve of the Six Day War in 1967. The book was published again in 1992, following the Gulf War. This edition was published with a symposium of additional scholars. In the preface, he notes that from the period he was working on The Gospel and the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), “this issue continued to burn in my bones like a fire.”
43. The final sentence of his book is: “Then Judaism is not a territorial religion: The Land is not the essence.” Yehuda Elitzur, in contrast, identifies in the Hebrew Bible itself the interdependence of Jewish existence as a nation and its presence in the land. The fact that the nation was not born in the land means, in his opinion, that it can exist without one; living in the land is contingent on moral behavior. See Yehuda Elitzur, “The land of Israel in biblical thought,” in Land of inheritance, ed. Yehuda Shaviv [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mizrachi, 1977).
44. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
45. Tsafrir, Di Segni, and Green, Tabula Imperii Romani, 14.
46. See below, chapter 4.
47. See Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “’Cities Surrounded by a Wall from the Time of Joshua bin Nun’ as a Rabbinic Response to the Roman Pomerium,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106, no. 1 (2016): 17–19.
48. So, for example, in the Persian period, with the Jewish return to the land, the Babylonian returnees settled in Judea in a Persian administrative district called Yehud, which was part of Eber nāri, the fifth satrapy (province) of the Persian Empire, from the Euphrates to Egypt. Throughout the Persian period this entity was characterized by a Jewish settlement that primarily comprised the returnees from Babylonia. The rest of the land was divided into provinces under the regime of the Eber nāri satrap. In this reality, the space of the land of Israel was blurred; it became part of the Persian Empire, while the space in Judea maintained its unique nature.
An additional example comes from the province of Arabia. The central change after the first Jewish revolt against the Romans was the founding of a new province east of the Jordan, Provincia Arabia (Arabia Petraea), in 106 C.E. as a result of Trajan’s conquest of the Nabatean Kingdom. The western border of the province was not the Jordan—a natural boundary—but rather the concentration of the Jewish population east of the Jordan, in Perea. This boundary between the provinces reflects the demographical dimension in the Roman imperial decision with regard to the division into provinces. This space was included in the borders of the Babylonian immigrants. The division into provinces may have had an effect on the Jewish demographics in its inclusion in the Babylonian immigrant boundaries; see below, chapter 4.
49. See chapter 4.
50. Strabo, Geography 16.2.1.
51. Ptolemy, Geography 5.15.1; 5.15.7
1. Graham Harvey, The True Israel: Uses of the Name Jews, Hebrews, and Israel in Ancient Jewish and Early Christian Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1996). This is a detailed survey of how the terms Jew, Hebrew, and Israel were used in ancient Jewish and early Christian literature. However, note the criticism offered by Shaye Cohen in The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 71 n. 5. Cohen asserts that the word Ioudaoi in Greek had a territorial meaning until the end of the second century B.C.E., but, due to conversions to Judaism and the growth of the Hasmoneans, was later imbued with a sense of Jewishness that referred to the Jewish people (69–106). Steve Mason claims that the absence of the term “Judaism” from Second Temple literature suggests that there was no conception of an identity beyond a shared territorial affinity. Accordingly, he employs only the term “Judean” rather than “Jew.” See Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 457–512. Daniel Schwartz emphasizes that in ancient Hebrew there is no form for “Judean,” and in some cases the term Judean does not fit the context. In the Second Temple period, Yehudi, or Jew, referred to the national and cultural as well as the territorial dimension. See Daniel R. Schwartz, Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). See also a pertinent discussion about the usage of Judean rather than Jew in “Jew and Judean: A Forum on Politics and Historiography in the Translation of Ancient Text,” Marginalia Review of Books, ed. Timothy Michael Law and Charles Halton, “Have Scholars Erased the Jews from Antiquity?” http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/jew-judean-forum/. On the name Israel in the Jewish Hellenistic literature, see Karl Georg Kuhn, “Ἰσραήλ, Ἰουδαῖος, Ἑβραῖος, in Jewish Literature after the OT,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966), 3:359–69. About Israel in the New Testament, see Walter Gutbrod, “Ισραήλ, Εβραίος, Ἰουδαῖος in the New Testament,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 3:375–91; Walter Gutbrod, “Ισραήλ, Εβραίος, Ἰουδαῖος in Greek Hellenistic Literature,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 3:369–91. Recently, David Goodblatt advanced the discussion on Jewish identity as opposed to the identity of Israel in the period between the return to Zion from Babylon and the Bar Kokhba revolt, in Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 108–66; see also the detailed bibliography in 118 n. 3.
2. This is the place to note that the first external reference to Israel in the Merneptah Stele, which dates to the thirteenth century B.C.E., is to Israel in the sense of the nation and not as the name of a land. See Anson F. Rainey, “Israel in Merneptah’s Inscription and Reliefs,” Israel Exploration Journal 51 (2001): 57–75. For a comprehensive dissection of the name Israel in the Hebrew Bible, see Hans-Jürgen Zobel, “Yisrael,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 397–420.
3. The phrase “the land of Israel” appears eleven times in the Hebrew Bible: 1 Samuel 13:19; 2 Kings 5:2 and 6:23; Ezekiel 27:17, 40:2, and 47:18; 1 Chronicles 22:2; 2 Chronicles 2:26, 30:25, and 34:7; and Joshua 11:22 (where it appears as “the land of the Sons of Israel”).
4. Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989); Hugh G.M. Williamson, Israel in the Book of Chronicles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Goodblatt, Elements, 112 n. 11.
5. This name was also employed for the sake of caste distinction among priests, Levites, and Israelites. See Nehemiah 10:40; 11:3, 20; 12:47; and Ezra 2:70.
6. See Solomon’s prayer to “The Lord, God of Israel” in 1 Kings 8:15, 17, 20, 23, 25, which refers to the entire kingdom and not only to the northern tribes. Also see 1 Kings 10:9: “Blessed is the Lord your God, who has taken pleasure in you and set you on the throne of Israel; because the Lord has loved Israel forever and therefore He made you king to do justice and righteousness.”
7. In Jewish Antiquities, Josephus asserts that a Jew is someone descended from the tribe of Judah and who returned from the Babylonian exile. “Judeans, taking their names from the place; for the place they inhabited is called Judea” (Ag. Ap. 1.79).
8. Chapters 1–9 use the ethnic designation “Israel,” while in chapters 10–16, which make use of official documents, the name changes more generally to “Jew,” which is the name that usually appears in official documents.
9. When Philo seeks to identify the land of Canaan in the Hebrew Bible, he uses different terms inconsistently. In the story of Sodom’s destruction, he describes the “land of the Sodomites, a part of the land of Canaan afterwards called Palestinian Syria” (Abr. 133; F.H. Colson trans., Loeb Classical Library ed.). Likewise, he employs the terminology “Cities of Syria” in his description of the land that the people of Israel were supposed to conquer after leaving Egypt (Moses I, 237; F.H. Colson trans., Loeb Classical Library ed.). Philo describes the Exodus from Egypt as a migration to “Phoenicia and Coelesyria and Palestine, then called the land of the Canaanites” (Moses I, 163). In continuation, he describes how “after traversing a long and pathless expanse, they came within sight of the confines of habitable land, and the outlying districts of the country in which they proposed to settle. This country was occupied by Phoenicians” (Moses I, 214). When Abraham went down to Egypt, he did so because of the famine in “the Cities of Syria” (Abr. 91). The spies “ascended the highest of the mountains in the neighborhood and surveyed the country. Much of it was plainland bearing barley, wheat and grass, while the uplands were equally full of vines and other trees, all of it well timbered and thickly overgrown and intersected with springs and rivers which gave it abundance of water, so that from the lowest part to the summits the whole of the hill country, particularly the ridges and the deep clefts, formed a close texture of umbrageous trees” (Moses I, 228). In the fortieth year, “they succeeded in reaching those boundaries of the country to which they had come before” (Moses I, 238). Because of the sin of the spies “they did not come sooner to the land where they proposed to settle . . . though they could have occupied the cities of Syria and their portions of land in the second year after leaving Egypt” (Moses I, 237). Although Philo does not specify where the miracle occurred, in every instance, as Graham Harvey demonstrates, the common terminology in Philo and Josephus for the Jewish ethnos is “Jew” (Harvey, True Israel, 43–46, 61).
10. David Goodblatt expands the discussion of Jewish identity as opposed to the identity of Israel from the return to Zion after the Babylonian exile until the days of Bar Kokhba. See Elements, 108–66.
11. As noted by David Goodblatt, “From Judeans to Israel: Names of Jewish States in Antiquity,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 39 (1998): 1–38.
12. Most of the documents from the caves in Wadi Murabba’at in the Judean Desert are from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt. However, Hanan Eshel, Magen Broshi, and Timothy Jull suggest dating them to the time of the Great Revolt, because a few of the letters contain the name Israel. See Hanan Eshel, Magen Broshi, and Timothy A.J. Jull, “Documents from Wadi Murabba’at and the status of Jerusalem during the War,” in The Bar Kokhba refuge caves, ed. Hanan Eshel and David Amit [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1998), 233–38.
13. Esther Eshel, Hanan Eshel, and Ada Yardeni, “A document from ‘Year 4 of the destruction of the House of Israel’ in which a widow declared that she received all her rights” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 132 (2009): 5–24.
14. Herodotus, The Histories 2, chap. 104, mentions the Syrians of Palestine.
15. Meteorology, 2 (359a).
16. Louis H. Feldman, “Some Observations on the Name of Palestine,” Hebrew Union College Annual 61 (1990): 1–23, shows that the Jews of Palestine before Hadrian referred to the coastal strip and not the hill country. Writers like Hecataeus of Abdera and Clearchus of Soli, the student of Aristotle, writing around 300 B.C.E., named the hill country Judea and its inhabitants Jews (Ag. Ap. 1.79). See also Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Humanity and Sciences, 1974), 1:3, 7, 39, 49, 348.
17. Karl Kuhn (Karl Georg Kuhn, “Ἰσραήλ, Ἰουδαῖος, Ἑβραῖος in Jewish Literature after the OT,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament [Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 1966]: 3:359–69) and Abba Bendavid (Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew [in Hebrew] [Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1967], 167–68) suggest a distinction between Israel as a name used internally by the Jews for themselves and the term Jews, which was used externally by gentiles. They claim that this distinction is true for Hellenistic literature as well as the gospels and rabbinic literature. But the bronze Hasmonean coins, which were minted for internal use, bear the word “Jews,” which also appears in 2 Maccabees and the Letter of Aristeas from the second century B.C.E. (see chapter 3).
18. Lam. Rab., proem 17. The translation here is taken from Lamentations Rabbah, trans. A. Cohen (London: Soncino Press, 1983), 22–23.
19. Ibid.
20. M. Shevi’it. 6:2, Philip Blackman, trans., Mishnayoth (New York: Judaica Press, 1964), 265. See also m. Ketubot 13:10; m. Baba Batra 3:2; t. Sanhedrin 2:2. In all these sources, the three regions of the land are mentioned without the general name “land of Israel” (Erets Yisrael). There are a few exceptions to this practice: m. Nedarim 12:11 and m. Ketubot 7:6, according to MS Kaufmann ans. Parma 138. This is also true in the ketubah, or marriage document, of Babatha found in a cave near Ein Gedi in the Judean Desert, dated to the beginning of the second century B.C.E.: “that you will be my wife according to the law of Moses and the Judean.” See Yigael Yadin, Jonas C. Greenfield, and Ada Yardeni, “Babatha’s Ketubba,” Israel Exploration Journal 44 (1994): 85–87. The common denominator in all of these sources is the ketubah, which might reflect colloquial usage.
21. T. Ohalot. 16:3, translation from Jacob Neusner, in The Tosefta: Translated from the Hebrew with a New Introduction (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002).
22. Mekilta Pisha, Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael, trans. Jacob Z. Lauterbach (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004), 3.
23. As Goodblatt has noted in Elements, 108–39.
24. “For the true spiritual Israel and descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham” (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho XI); “As, therefore, Christ is the Israel and the Jacob, even so we, who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ, are the true Israelitic race” (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho CXXXV).
25. It took about three weeks to write the Declaration of Independence. It was first drafted by a committee and went through many subsequent changes. See Yoram Shahar, “The early drafts of the Declaration of Independence” [in Hebrew], Tel Aviv University Law Review 26 (2002–3): 523–600. Examination of these drafts reveals that the earlier versions were entitled Declaration of Independence of “The Jewish State.” In the draft of May 9, 1948, the pertinent phrase is left incomplete: “the name of the state will be_____.” In the very next draft, prepared by Moshe Sharett, the title appears with the term “the Jewish State” crossed out; for the first time, it proclaims the name as “The State of Israel.” This became the draft used by David Ben-Gurion.
1. Ephraim Stern, “The Religious Revolution in Persian-Period Judea,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 199.
2. The description in Chronicles of Passover celebrations in the reign of Hezekiah after the exile of the Kingdom of Israel indicates that not all coming to celebrate came from Judah; some came from regions of the Kingdom of Israel: “Some of the people of Asher and Manasseh and Zebulun, however, were contrite and came to Jerusalem” (2 Chr 30:11).
3. Jewish scripture describes how, after the exile of residents of Jerusalem, groups of natives remained in the land (2 Kgs 25:12; Jer 39:10; 52:16). The scriptural account and archaeological findings together testify to the continuation of settlement in certain districts, such as the far side of the mountain north of Jerusalem. Oded Lipschits, “The origins of the Jewish population in Modi’in and its vicinity” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 85 (1997): 7–32. But see also the reservation expressed by Bustenay Oded in “Where Is the ‘Myth of the Empty Land’ to Be Found? History versus Myth,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 55–74.
4. Sara Japhet suggests that from a linguistic perspective, as well, there is a great difference between the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, on one hand, and Chronicles, on the other. She criticizes the consensus governing research: Sara Japhet, “The Supposed Common Authorship of Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah Investigated Anew,” in From the Rivers of Babylon to the Highlands of Judah: Collected Studies on the Restoration Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 1–37. This is also the position taken in Hugh G.M. Williamson, Israel in the Book of Chronicles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 37–59.
5. The lists include a register of the returnees from exile that appears twice (Ezr 2:1–61; Neh 7:6–38) and a list of the builders of the wall (Neh 3:1–32). There is also an inventory of priests and Levites, and sponsors of the wall (Neh 12). A fifth list records the small unwalled settlements of members of the tribes of Benjamin and Judah (Neh 11:25–35), which expands the region of settlement southward and records twelve settlements south of Bet Tzur. This is the southernmost point in the previous lists. It seems that the final verse in the list of the cities of Judea, “they settled from Beer-sheba to the Valley of Hinnom” (Neh 11:30), which sets these two places as northern and southern borders of the tribal portion of Judah as related in Joshua (15:8, 28), indicates that the objective of the list is to keep the memory of Judah’s inheritance alive in accordance with this text. For the relationship between the areas of the provinces, see Oded Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 154–84.
6. For a survey of the opinions relating to the borders of the province Yehud, see Charles E. Carter, The Emergence of Yehud in the Persian Period: A Social and Demographic Study (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 75–113, and John W. Wright, “Remapping Yehud: The Borders of Yehud and the Genealogies of Chronicles,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 67–89.
7. Sara Japhet, “The Historical Reliability of Chronicles: The History of the Problem and Its Place in Biblical Research,” in From the Rivers of Babylon to the Highlands of Judea: Collected Studies on the Restoration Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 96–116.
8. On the question of the size of the population that remained after the exile to Babylon and the related issue of whether the Hebrew Bible indeed created the “myth of the empty land,” see Hans M. Brasted, “The Myth of the Empty Land: Major Challenges in the Study of Neo-Babylonian Judah,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 3–20.
9. The fact that the returnees to Zion sacrificed “twelve bulls for all of Israel” (Ezr 8:35)—in other words, that they saw themselves as the continuation of the twelve tribes without relating to the northern tribes and their holdings—suggests that there is no territorial dimension in these works. The prayer of Nehemiah relates the history of the nation in the context of the “broad and fertile land” that was promised to Abraham (Neh 9:7–8) and their fathers who dwelt in the “broad and fertile” land but sinned and were exiled, compared with the returnees to Zion who “labor upon it” (Neh 9:35–5). Nehemiah complains about the insult to the Jewish entity and not the tribal inheritances of their ancestors who are not in Jewish possession.
10. Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989), 352–94.
11. Of the ten appearances of the compound term “land of Israel” in the Hebrew Bible, four appear in Chronicles. See above, chapter 1.
12. This also emerges from the description of the Passover over which Josiah presided and which priests and Levites attended “and all Israel and the residents of Jerusalem were there” (2 Chr 35:18). See Japhet, Ideology, 297–99. Cf. the apocryphal 1 Ezra, which belongs with—but is excluded from—the Jewish biblical canon, a book that is similar in nature to Ezra and Nehemiah and not to Chronicles. The verse reads “the people of Israel that were present in Jerusalem” (1:19); Zipora Talshir, I Esdras: A Text Critical Commentary (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001), 33–35. In other words, while Chronicles relates to the Israelite population remaining in the borders of the Kingdom of Israel, 1 Esdras depicts them as residing in Jerusalem and does not recognize an “Israel” outside of Jerusalem or Judea, unlike Chronicles, with its inclusive approach.
13. Japhet, Ideology, 334.
14. Ibid., 267–394.
15. Some, like Grintz, have suggested that the work belongs to the Persian period. See Yehoshua M. Grintz, The book of Judith: Recovery of the original text with foreword, commentaries, and maps [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1986). Archaeologist Adam Zertal came to the same conclusion based on his comprehensive survey of Samaria, noting that the communities mentioned in Judith were all settled in the Persian period: Adam Zertal, “The district of Shamrain during the Persian and Hellenist Periods,” in Michael: Studies in history, epigraphy, and the Old Testament in honor of Prof. Michael Heltzer, ed. Yitzhak Avishur and Robert Deutsch [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center, 1999), 75–98. Moore sets the date later in the Hasmonean period; Carey A. Moore, Judith: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1123. Recently, Deborah Levine Gera suggested a more precise dating of approximately 100 C.E. in Judith (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 25–44. The argument setting the work’s composition in the reign of John Hyrcanus, who conquered Samaria, does not accord with the fact that he also conquered Edom, an area which is not represented as part of the region of Jewish settlement, whose southernmost point noted in the work is Jerusalem.
16. The complicated relationship between Jews and Samaritans in the Second Temple period has been dealt with extensively in the literature. See Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2016), 15–25. Josephus presents a hostile situation, reflecting tension and a split between the Samaritans and the Jews beginning in the Persian period; see Pummer, Samaritans, 54–65.
17. All quotations from the book of Judith are from Judith, trans. Carey A. Moore, The Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
18. Mendels has investigated the relationship between regions, comparing the mountain with others included at the end of the work. See The Land of Israel as a Political Concept in Hasmonean Literature (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1987), 51–56. Based on the territorial dimension, he suggests dating the work to 140–135 B.C.E., when the Hasmonean state was on the cusp of expanding into these territories. I accept Mendels’s geographical analysis; however, in my opinion the link to these years is one possibility, but not the only one.
19. The nomenclature “Judah” (“people of Judah” in 4:3; “tents of Judah” in 14:7) for the people throughout the work is seldom employed, while “Israel” is the dominant term: “people of Israel” (6:2); “Children of Israel” (14:7; 15:3, 5, 7–8; 16:25), “House of Israel” (6:17; 8:6; 14:10), “Israel” (14:10; 18:1, 8); as well as “man of Israel” (15:13) and “pride of Israel” (15:9). On the term “woman of Israel” (15:12), see Levine Gera, Judith, 446.
20. One interpretation is that the Samaritans are omitted, despite the fact that Samaria is the setting for the plot, as a way of dealing with a Samaritan presence that was unwanted in the eyes of the author. That is to say, Judith’s author held a negative view of Samaritans—which accords with the enmity toward the Samaritan presence in Shechem. Ben Sira elects to refer to Samaritans as “the despised people living at Shechem,” without mentioning their name. See Ben Sira 38:50 and the Testament of Levi 7:2.
21. Unless we accept the late dating of Levine Gera at the high point of the Hasmonean state, when it extended to these regions. Omission of the Samaritan population can explain the author’s identification as “Israel,” intended perhaps, among other things, to oppose the same identity claimed by Samaritan residents of Samaria.
22. In two inscriptions from Delos, the Samaritans designate themselves as Israelites: “The Israelites who make offerings to Holy Argarizein” (Mount Gerizim); see Philippe Bruneau, “Les Israélites de Délos et la juiverie délienne,” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 106 (1982): 465–504.
23. The work ends with the murder of Simon Maccabee and the ascension of his son, John Hyrcanus, to rule after him in 135 C.E. Researchers therefore date the book’s composition to during the latter’s reign. Seth Schwartz, “Israel and the Nations Roundabout: 1 Maccabees and the Hasmonean Expansion,” Journal of Jewish Studies 42, no. 1 (1991): 16–38, even argues for a more specific dating, to the beginning of his reign around the year 130, prior to his major conquests. According to Jonathan Goldstein, on the other hand, it can be dated to the reign of his son Alexander Jannaeus. See Jonathan A. Goldstein, II Maccabees: A New Translation, The Anchor Bible 41A (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 64.
24. This is what emerges, for instance, from an analysis of the testament of Mattathias (1 Mc 2:65), which legitimizes the rule of Simon and his descendants.
25. All quotations are taken from I Maccabees: A New Translation, with Introduction and Commentary, trans. Jonathan A. Goldstein, Anchor Yale Bible 41 (New York: Doubleday, 1976).
26. Simon is the only one of the five brothers mentioned as leader in the will that the author attributes to Mattathias, written on the eve of his death (1 Mc 2:65). He is also the only brother to receive a panegyric listing his acts (14:4–15) and thus is selected by the people as governor and “eternal high priest until the coming of the true prophet” (14:41).
27. On the territorial dimension and the complexity of integrating scriptural heritage with the Hellenistic world, see Katell Berthelot, In Search of the Promised Land?: The Hasmonean Dynasty between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy, Supplement Series 24, Journal of Ancient Judaism (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018)
28. Aryeh Kasher, in his Jews and Hellenistic Cities in Eretz-Israel: Relations of the Jews in Eretz-Israel with the Hellenistic Cities during the Second Temple Period (332 BCE–70 CE) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990), argues that the use of the biblical term by the author of 1 Maccabees to refer to regions such as the land of the Philistines is significant for mapping (58–60), as opposed to others who saw the biblical style of the book as nothing more than rhetorical. See, for instance, Martin Goodman, “Aryeh Kasher, Jews, and Hellenistic Cities in Eretz-Israel: Relations of the Jews in Eretz-Israel with the Hellenistic Cities during the Second Temple Period,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 24, no. 1 (1993): 110–12. In any case, the map that this chapter draws testifies to the mental map of “Israel” in the author’s consciousness. Thus, there is something more at work than just the rhetorical.
29. As we noted in chapter 1, the first nine chapters of the composition use the word “Israel” the second half—chapters 10–16—employ the name “Yehudim,” in line with the official documents presented. The author apparently had access to these texts due to his connection to the Hasmonean court.
30. See Doron Mendels’s discussion of the biblical territorial dimension in the writing of Eupolemus, who was an intimate of Judah Maccabee; Doron Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism: The History of Jewish and Christian Ethnicity in Palestine within the Greco-Roman Period (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992), 93–94. On Joshua as a model for the Hasmoneans, see Berthelot, Promised Land, 102–8.
31. Joseph Klausner’s approach to the nation is expressed in his presentation of the objective of the Hasmoneans “to make Judea into the land of Israel.” Klausner, History of the Second Temple [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Achiasaf, 1949), 3:31.
32. A more extensive discussion of the link between the scrolls found at Qumran and the Essenes can be found in the next chapter.
33. See Géza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 95; Moshe J. Bernstein, “’Rewritten Bible’: A Generic Category which Has Outlived Its Usefulness?” Textus 22 (2005): 169–96. On the territorial aspects of Jubilees and Genesis Apocryphon, see Berthelot, Promised Land, 185–203.
34. The main considerations related to the dating of this book are paleographic; the scribe who wrote the scroll in which the book of Jubilees was found lived at Qumran ca. 150–100 B.C.E. Thus, we know that the book was composed prior to this. The accepted opinion among researchers dates the period in which the book was composed to the years 161–140 B.C.E. See James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees, Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 246n4: “a central issue in the dating of the work lacks consideration by scholars, the decrees of Antiochus, and therefore there are those who have seen the work as more ancient than these decrees and the rebellion of the Hasmoneans they provoked.” See Jonathan A. Goldstein, “The Date of the Book of Jubilees,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 50 (1983): 69–70; George W.E. Nickelsburg, “The Bible Rewritten and Expanded,” in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 78–79. It is not possible, they assert, that such a significant religious-political event would be wholly without mention even by way of allusion anywhere in the work. There are those who have seen the prohibitions on nudity in Jubilees 3:31 as a response to the establishment of the Gymnasium of Jason on the eve of the rebellion (2 Mc 4:7). Doran sees the prohibition as a principle holding for all times. See Robert Doran, “The Non-Dating of Jubilees: Jub. 34–38; 23:14–32 in Narrative Context,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 20 (1989): 1–11. Kister considers the omission of any mention of the decrees of Antiochus as indicative of the book’s unity. See Menahem Kister, “Concerning the history of Essenes: A study of the Animal Apocalypse, the Book of Jubilees, and the Damascus Document” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 56 (1986): 5–9. His opinion on the dating puts it later than the decrees and the rebellion; he believes it was written before 100 B.C.E. Werman also holds this opinion, placing the text’s composition sometime in the last third of the second century B.C.E. See Cana Werman, Book of Jubilees: Introduction, translation, and interpretation [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2014), 48. Segal suggests viewing Jubilees as the redaction of revised sources. See Michael Segal, The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology, and Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 319–22. He sees in Jubilees more ancient sections that were edited together at Qumran. Accordingly, the sources of Jubilees are not sectarian, but the final redaction of the work was done within the community. An example of this is found in the geographical sections, which he thinks are taken from the Genesis Apocryphon and are an example of the work of a Qumran redactor.
35. This is the main argument put forth by James M. Scott in his Geography in Early Judaism and Christianity: The Book of Jubilees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
36. Segal, Jubilees, 6–7. According to a fragment of Jubilees 2:19–21, preserved in Qumran 4Q216 VII, 9–13 (E. Ulrich and F.M. Cross, eds., Qumran Cave 4.VII: Genesis to Numbers, DJD XII [Oxford: Clarendon, 1994], 19), the nation was selected at creation. According to the Torah, the selection of Israel as a special nation is due to the acceptance of God’s commandments (Ex 19:5–6).
37. According to the biblical description of the Table of Nations, it seems that the borders of the land of Canaan extend from Sidon to Gaza, where Canaan, Noah’s grandson, dwelt with his descendants (Gn 10:15–19) until the “Covenant of the Pieces,” when the land was promised to Abraham and his descendants. This disinheritance was justified by the sins of the Amorites. But because the time had not yet come, Abraham’s descendants went to Egypt for four hundred years (Gn 15:13–16).
38. Machiela sums up the discussion of the dating of the Genesis Apocryphon by asserting that it is contingent on the question of its relationship with 1 Enoch and Jubilees. That is, were those works a source for the Genesis Apocryphon, or was it a source for them? See Daniel A. Machiela, The Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon: A New Text and Introduction and Special Treatment of Columns 13–17 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 8–17. Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad propose that the Apocryphon was a source for parts of 1 Enoch and Jubilees; they thus date the Genesis Apocryphon before the second century B.C.E. Nevertheless, they note that the paleography of the copy found at Qumran dates it later, to the end of the first century C.E. or the second half of the first century B.C.E. (Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin, A Genesis Apocryphon: A Scroll from the Wilderness of Judaea; Description and Contents of the Scroll, Facsimiles, Transcription, and Translation of Columns II, XIX–XXII [Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University and Heikhal ha-Sefer, 1956], 19). Kutscher, in analyzing the language of the scroll, also dates it to the first century B.C.E. or the first century C.E. See Edward Yechezkel Kutscher, “The Language of the Genesis Apocryphon: A Preliminary Study,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 4 (1958): 1–36. Joseph Fitzmyer also believes it should be dated to between the mid-first century B.C.E. and the destruction of 70 C.E. (Fitzmyer, “Some Observations on Genesis Apocryphon,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 27 [1965]: 348–72). See also James L. Kugel, A Walk through Jubilees: Studies in the Book of Jubilees and the World of Its Creation (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 305–42. Daniel Machiela, who predates the Genesis Apocryphon to Jubilees, claims an indirect relation between the two and suggests a common source for them both. See Machiela, Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon, 17; idem, “On the Importance of Being Abram,” in A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, ed. Eric F. Mason (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 2:705–36; see also Cana Werman, “The book of Jubilees and its Aramaic sources” [in Hebrew], Megilot 8–9 (2010), 135–54.
39. Daniel Machiela, “Each to His Own Inheritance: Geography as an Evaluation Tool in the Genesis Apocryphon,” Dead Sea Discoveries 15 (2008): 50–66.
40. Translation found in Machiela, Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon, 78–79.
41. See Werman, Book of Jubilees, 79–93; Segal, Jubilees, 257.
42. See Segal, Jubilees, 319–22.
43. Polybius, Histories v.21.3. See also Yuval Shahar, Josephus Geographicus: The Classical Context of Geography in Josephus (Tübingen: Brill, 1996), 130–71.
44. Ze’ev Safrai and Yuval Shahar have argued that the basis for this description is a Jewish tradition regarding Judea, Galilee, and Transjordan, prevalent in the Mishnah, with a description of Samaria filling the gap between Judea and the Galilee. Ze’ev Safrai, “Description of the land of Israel according to Josephus Flavius,” in Josephus Flavius: Historian of the land of Israel, ed. Uriel Rappaport [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1983), 96–99; Shahar, Josephus Geographicus, 196.
45. As Shahar has shown in Josephus Geographicus, 190–255.
46. This also accords with the repeated expression “when you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan” (Nm 33:51; 35:10), as well as in the description of the cities of refuge: “Three cities shall be designated beyond the Jordan, and the other three shall be designated in the land of Canaan: they shall serve as cities of refuge” (Nm 35:14). See also Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “Josephus’s Lands: Mining the Evolution in the Depiction of the Land of Israel in the Works of Josephus,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 26, no. 4 (2017): 275–304.
47. Ant. 1.239. This is how Josephus explains the gifts Abraham bestows on the sons of the concubines in the biblical account (Gn 25:6).
48. Peter A. Brant, “Laus Imperii,” in Imperialism in the Ancient World, ed. Peter D.A. Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 164–72.
49. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagels (New York: Viking, 2006), 56.
50. Daniel Schwartz recently demonstrated two distinct geographic excurses in Josephus’s Jewish War: the first, of Galilee-Perea and Judea in 3.35–58, focuses on the deeds of the Roman emperors; the second diverges from this region and includes the battles for Masada and Machaerus described in book VII, actually emphasizing a spatial description. Schwartz explains this through changes Josephus experienced over the course of the work. According to this suggestion, it is not only possible to distinguish between the spatial descriptions of the land between his works, but even within one of his compositions. Daniel R. Schwartz, “Josephus Between the Flavian and God: On the Duality of the Judean War,” in Milestones: Essays in Jewish History Dedicated to Zvi (Kuti) Yekutiel [in Hebrew], ed. Immanuel Etkes, David Assaf, and Yossef Kaplan (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2015), 33–42.
51. This is Shaye Cohen’s thesis in Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 237–38. Similarly, it is Tessa Rajak’s position in Josephus: The Historian and His Society (London: Duckworth, 1983).
52. Tessa Rajak characterizes the later Josephus as a writer forgiving of the Roman world, interested in presenting the Jews as a society worthy of membership in the family of nations; see Rajak, Josephus, 223–29, as well as her essay “The Against Apion and the Continuities in Josephus’ Political Thought,” in Understanding Josephus: Seven Perspectives, ed. Steve Mason, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplement Series 32 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 222–43. This approach illuminates the surprising statement of Josephus in his apologetic polemic Against Apion in the 90s C.E. about the Jews who dwell only in the highlands and stay away from the sea (Ag. Ap. 1.60–62).
1. For instance, the calamitous national punishments described in the Pentateuch revolve around exile, but even in exile Jewish existence will not wane as a result of leaving the land: “And you I will scatter among the nations” (Lv 26:33); “The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other” “Yet even among those nations you shall find no peace, nor shall your foot find a place to rest” “The Lord will send you back to Egypt in galleys by a route which I told you should not see again” (Dt 28:64–65, 68).
Abram is commanded in Haran: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gn 12:1). Canaan here stands in contrast to his “native land.”
2. “You shall then recite as follows before the Lord your God: ‘My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation’” (Dt 26:5). It is in Egypt that the family becomes a “nation.” For autochthony in ancient Greek culture, see Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 21–30.
3. The book of Chronicles ends with the Edict of Cyrus, which authorizes the return of the Jews from their exile in Babylonia; the books of Ezra and Nehemiah describe Jewish life in the land of Israel after their return.
4. Enoch is the figure to whom the books of Enoch—or Enochian literature—are dedicated. However, apocryphal works such as the book of Jubilees also contain elaborations of his narrative. See Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
5. See James C. VanderKam, “The Book of Enoch and the Qumran Scrolls,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Timothy H. Lim and John B. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 274–75.
6. The presence of Enoch in Second Temple Jewish literature emerges from the writings of the Qumran community, where he is conspicuous. The figure of Enoch and his ascent to the heavens recalls and is also found in Ben Sira (14:49; 16:44), and in Jubilees (4:17–25). However, fragments of the Book of Watchers were also found at Qumran, along with other sections from 1 Enoch. See Reed, Fallen Angels.
7. Gregory H. Dix and Józef T. Milik recognize the influence of Ethiopian Ge’ez in the surviving corpus, generally referred to as 1 Enoch, or as the Ethiopic Book of Enoch. It is a compilation of five works that together constitute a sort of quasi-Pentateuch: The Book of Watchers (1–36); The Book of Parables of Enoch, or Similitudes of Enoch (37–71); The Astronomical Book, or Book of Heavenly Luminaries (72–82); The Book of Dream Visions, or Book of Dreams (83–90); and The Epistle of Enoch (91–108). See Gregory H. Dix, “The Enochic Pentateuch,” Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1926): 29–42, and Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 58, 77–78. Jonas C. Greenfield and Michael E. Stone have gleaned from the surviving fragments found at Qumran that there were different versions and components of the work. See Jonas C. Greenfield and Michael E. Stone, “The Books of Enoch and the Traditions of Enoch,” Numen 26 (1979): 51–65. For a comprehensive discussion of the compilation of Enochian literature and the ways in which it was produced, see George W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 21–36; George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 21–36; and Devorah Dimant, “The Biography of Enoch and the Books of Enoch,” Vetus Testamentum 33 (1983): 14–29.
8. On the date of the foundation of the Qumran community, see Hanan Eshel, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hasmonean State (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans; Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2008).
9. Jonathan Ben-Dov, “Hebrew and Aramaic in the Pseudepigrapha and the Qumran scrolls: The ancient Near Eastern background and the quest for a written authority” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 78 (2009): 27–60. Ben-Dov has suggested a connection between the appearance of Aramaic compositions found at Qumran, like Enoch, and its universalistic character. Given that the authorizing biblical figure in the work precedes the giving of the Torah at Sinai, the Aramaic reveals a link to a Babylonian source of authority. Hebrew is used by authors of compositions like Jubilees, which relate the authority to the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, and convert traditions like these of Enoch from Aramaic to Hebrew.
10. Pierre Grelot, “La géographie mythique d’Hénoch,” Revue Biblique 65 (1958): 33–69. Jonathan Stoch-Hesket maps Enoch’s journeys in chapters 21–32 and notes the symmetry between this description and its theological significance, with Jerusalem positioned at the center of the map. However, he fails to distinguish between real sites found generally throughout the Book of Watchers and not solely in Enoch’s journeys on the one hand, and the mythical sites discussed on the other. See Jonathan Stoch-Hesket, “Circles and Mirrors: Understanding 1 Enoch 21–32,” Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha 21 (2000): 27–57. Recently, Kelley Coblentz Bautch published a comprehensive study on spatiality in the apocalyptic literature in the light of spatial theories, including a discussion on space in the Book of Watchers, with a detailed bibliography on spatiality in the Book of Watchers. See Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “Spatiality and Apocalyptic Literature,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 5, no. 3 (2016): 273–88.
11. The Hermon and its environs function as a sort of axis mundi, a path between heaven and earth along which angels ascend and descend (1 En 6:6). Enoch visits the Dan River at the foot of the Hermon: “And I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, in the land of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon. I read their petition till I fell asleep” (13:7–8) and there receives visions meant for the Watchers, with whom he meets intimately between Mount Lebanon and Mount Snir and reprimands mourners (13:9–10). In chapters 26–27, Jerusalem is not mentioned by name, but as the “middle of the earth” where stands a “blessed place” featuring a “holy mountain,” referring to Mount Moriah (26:1–2). The “high mountain” to its east is the Mount of Olives and the “deep and narrow ravine” is the Kidron Valley (26:3–4), and the lower mountain mentioned to the west of it is what we call today Mount Zion; the book also mentions the valley between it and Mount Moriah (26:4). Mount Sinai appears in the opening of the book (1:4), as does the Red Sea (32:2). According to Genesis Apocryphon (21:17–19) Abram states the he walked to the Euphrates River and Erythraean Sea until he reached “the branch of the Red Sea.” See Daniel A. Machiela, The Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon: A New Text and Introduction and Special Treatment of Columns 13–17 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 117.
12. Unless, of course, the author is from the north but familiar with Jerusalem and its environs because of its importance; perhaps he even visited the city.
13. Central sectarian characteristics include the separation between the “way of light” and “the way of darkness,” and the cosmic war between these two primal sources; the use of a solar calendar; the belief in predestination; and special stringent laws dealing with issues of purity and impurity. See James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 137–56.
14. Devorah Dimant, “The Qumran Manuscripts: Contents and Significance,” in Time to Prepare the Way in the Wilderness, ed. Devorah Dimant and Lawrence H. Schiffman, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1995): 23–58.
15. See John J. Collins, “Sectarian Communities in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Timothy H. Lim and John B. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 151–72.
16. See John J. Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 1–12, 209.
17. For instance, the author of the Genesis Apocryphon (see chapter 2) expresses his ties to the land very differently than the sectarians convey their perception of territory.
18. Ed Parish Sanders, “The Dead Sea Sect and Other Jews: Commonalities, Overlaps, and Differences,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Their Historical Context (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 7–43; Daniel Schwartz, “The Dead Sea sect and the Essenes,” in The Qumran scrolls and their world, ed. Menahem Kister [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2009), 601–12. But see the recent critics of these hypotheses and the suggestions about varied groups; Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community.
19. Damascus Document, CD MSa 6.4–6 (The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations, vol. 2: Damascus Document, War Scroll, and Related Documents, ed. James H. Charlesworth [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1995], 22).
20. As Josephus testifies: “No one city is theirs, but they settle amply in each” (J.W. 2.124). Philo in Prob. 76, states: “They live in many Cities of Judea, and also in many villages, and large populous groups.” We must bear in mind that Josephus and Philo do not mention the Essene settlement in the dessert; it was only Pliny who described the Essenes to the west of the Dead Sea (Nat. 5.73).
21. Daniel Schwartz has connected the abandonment of the Temple and relocation to the desert to the issue of separating from territory; Schwartz, “Qumran and early Christianity,” in The Qumran scrolls and their world, ed. Menahem Kister [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2009), 2:624. This theory rests on 1QS IX, 3–6; the text professes a preference for the good deeds of the Jewish people over the sacrificial cult: “When, according to all these norms, these (men) become in Israel a foundation of the Holy Spirit in eternal truth, they shall atone for iniquitous guilt and for sinful unfaithfulness, so that (God’s) favor for the land (is obtained) without the flesh of burnt-offerings and without the fat of sacrifices. The proper offerings of the lips for judgment (are as) a righteous sweetness, and the perfect of the Way (are as) a pleasing freewill offering. At that time the men of the Community shall separate themselves (as) a House of Holiness for Aaron, for the Community of the most Holy Ones, and a house of the Community for Israel; (these are) the ones who walk perfectly” (Charlesworth translation, with slight emendation). This is a call for disassociation from the Jerusalem Temple and its operation, which they saw as contrary to the values of the community. In general, Schwartz sees in critiques of the Temple, such as that of Jesus (Mt 21:12–13), a nullification of the value of territory. However, this is not necessarily so, a critique of the Temple’s operation, even to the point of advocating a boycott, would not of necessity relate to land and territory.
22. According to Menahem Kister, it was one movement that contained different attitudes toward Jerusalem, the Temple, and its sanctity. Menahem Kister, “Jerusalem and the Temple in the Writing from Qumran,” in The Qumran scrolls and their world, ed. Menahem Kister [in Hebrew] .(Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2009), 2:477–98.
23. David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998), 227–36.
24. Carol Ann Newsom, The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 52 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004) points to the methods used by other scrolls to form identities among the sectaries at Qumran and how they created an alternative world in their writings.
25. 2 Maccabees is an abridgement of a work in five parts written by Jason of Cyrene. We have no information about the person who prepared it, but the work reveals a figure loyal to the Torah, the commandments, and the Temple in Jerusalem.
26. For a discussion of the diasporic orientation of Maccabees, see Daniel Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 45–56. In particular, see n. 100 there, in relation to the suggestion of Jan Willem van Henten, on the basis of which the book was written. See Jan Willem van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees, Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement, 57 (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 50. In any event, the diasporic character of the work is clear. Also, see Sylvie Honigman, who also believes the book is pro-Hasmonean: Sylvie Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochos IV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Thus the question of where it was written is of secondary importance.
27. The narrative begins in chapter 3. After two introductory chapters, the author opens with the serenity of the holy city (2 Mc 3:1). It ends with the liberation of the city (15:37). Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, 50–51.
28. Benjamin G. Wright III, The Letter of Aristeas: “Aristeas to Philocrates” or “On the Translation of the Laws of the Jews,” Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 14.
29. Sylvie Honigman, “La description de Jérusalem et de la Judée dans la Lettre d’Aristée,” Athenaeum 92, no. 1 (2004): 73–101 Wright, Letter of Aristeas, 229–31.
30. Andrea Lieber, “Between Motherland and Fatherland: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and the Spiritualization of Sacrifice in Philo of Alexandria,” in Heavenly Tablets: Interpretation, Identity, and Tradition in Ancient Judaism, ed. Lynn R. LiDonnici and Andrea Lieber (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 193–210.
31. The political paradigm in Greece was not that of a state but of a city or polis. See Elden, Birth of Territory, 21–52.
32. In Flaccum, 46. For a comprehensive discussion on the significance of the representation of Jerusalem as a metropolis in Philo, see Sarah Pearce, “Jerusalem as ‘Mother-City’ in the writings of Philo of Alexandria,” in Negotiating Diaspora: Jewish Strategies in the Roman Empire, ed. John M.G. Barclay (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 19–37. The research prior to Pearce’s understood Jerusalem’s centrality for Philo from his representing it as a metropolis; Pearce feels that the comparison to a metropolis and its colonies actually underscores the influence of Greek apoikia in the wake of the Septuagint. According to Pearce, this is more indicative of the importance of the colonies than of Jerusalem.
33. See Lieber, “Between Motherland and Fatherland.”
34. On Philo’s lack of interest in the “Holy Land,” see Samuel Sandmel, Philo’s Place in Judaism: A Study of Conceptions of Abraham in Jewish Literature (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1956), 116, and Daniel R. Schwartz, “Philo, His Family, and His Times,” in The Cambridge Companion to Philo, ed. Adam Kamesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). I am not convinced by his theory about Philo’s reservations regarding the Temple (see Daniel R. Schwartz, “Humbly Second Rate in the Diaspora,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan et al. [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013], 81–89) mainly because of Philo’s emotional depiction of his feeling and thoughts when he came to the Temple in De Specialibus Legibus I:68–70; 271–77.
35. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, 50–51.
36. 2 Baruch is a Jewish apocalyptic and eschatological work composed in Judea in response to the destruction of the Temple. The author presents himself as Baruch son of Neriah, the prophet Jeremiah’s amanuensis. See Matthias Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism in Late First Century Israel: Reading Second Baruch in Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 1–36. The book is preserved in Syriac and is also referred to as the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, although Syriac is not, in fact, the language of its original composition.
37. He felt this was about the Temple, as well. See De Specialibus Legibus 1:66–67.
38. Philo felt the need to oppose those who employed an allegorical approach to the commandments, which he himself championed, in order to satisfy their observance and avoid undermining it. See De Abrahamo, 89–93. There he represents observance of the commandments as the body and their meaning as the soul. It would be no stretch to say that much like the allegorization of the commandments does not nullify the requirement to perform them according to Philo, the existence of the celestial Jerusalem does not nullify the status and importance of the earthly Jerusalem, which Philo related to also as body and soul.
39. Philo also sees the sacrifices in the Temple as being for the Jews and for humanity: “The sacrifices which are whole burnt offerings and are joint offerings on behalf of the nation or—to speak more accurately—on behalf of the entire race of humanity” (Spec. 2:167).
40. As well as the idea that the high priest prays, on the Day of Atonement, for all of humanity (Legat. 306) and not only for his Jewish brothers, as the rabbinic literature asserts; see b. Yoma 53b.
41. Both 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, pseudepigraphical works composed following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, feature authorial figures who present themselves as characters from scripture associated closely with the Temple. Baruch the son of Neriah lived at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, and Ezra lived at the time of the return from Babylonian exile and commencement of the construction of the Second Temple. Jerusalem is the central focus of 2 Baruch. Liv Lied sees the book as a work that moves between a heavenly land and an earthly one. She reads the description of the rescue in the days of Hezekiah and insists that according to Baruch, the “Holy Land” will become relevant at the End of Days. See Liv Ingebord Lied, The Other Lands of Israel: Imaginations of the Land in 2 Baruch, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 307–9. Lied proposes reading the historical descriptions woven through the work as a territorial dimension—for instance, the description of the rescue of Zion, Jerusalem, and Israel in the reign of Hezekiah (2 Bar. 63:9–10) and that of the nation dwelling in the “Holy Land” (2 Bar. 63:10). Similarly, the call to the nine and a half tribes in 2 Baruch 77:2 and 78:1, in which the author insists that it is not the land that sinned, but the nation living upon it. However, as Matthias Henze has shown, the principal objective of the work is to enable Jewish life to continue after the destruction, without a Temple and without any independent territory. See Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism, 8–10. Accordingly, the destroyed Jerusalem is presented as a secondary city to the celestial Jerusalem, which was not harmed; the land even becomes the “Holy Land” in this work, a land that will await the nation that perseveres in other lands until the End of Days.
42. Davies interprets the appearance of this term as a glorification of the status of the land. In 2 Baruch, the “Holy Land” is mentioned in 63:10, when Israel will be saved and “all those who were in the Holy Land rejoiced, and the name of the Mighty One was glorified” and in 71:1, “And the Holy Land shall have mercy on its own, And it shall protect its inhabitants at that time.” He also calls on the people in the diaspora to “remember you the law and Zion, and the Holy Land and your brethren, and the covenant of your fathers, and forget not the festivals and the Sabbaths” (84:8). Similarly, 4 Ezra 13:48 mentions the “holy border.” See William D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Saarbrucken: Scholars Press, 1990), 49–52.
43. This work is contemporary with the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, also written after the destruction of the Second Temple, which contains eschatological visions of the End of Days. The book was originally written in Hebrew and the author presents himself as Ezra the Scribe. See Hindy Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 7; Michael Stone, Fourth Ezra, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 10–11. There is a close relationship between the texts, both written to hearten the nation, so much so that some consider them synoptic compositions. See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 194–232; Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism, 148–59; Hindy Najman, Itamar Manoff, and Eva Mroczek, “How to Make Sense of Pseudonymous Attribution: The Cases of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch,” in A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism, ed. Matthias Henze (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 308–36.
44. The work was apparently composed in the land and reached us in Latin, even though its original language was Hebrew, as far as we can tell. The author mentions the fast of the Seventeenth of Tammuz (19:7); from this one can glean that its composition postdates the destruction. It belongs to the genre we refer to as the “rewritten Bible” and revises the scriptural books to efface the biblical borders of the geographical land, as well as the relation of Abraham’s arrival in the land and his lookout over its expanse. In contrast to the Genesis Apocryphon and Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo elects to exchange the geographical orientation of Abraham’s survey with that of Moses, as it is related at the end of Deuteronomy (34:1–3). This survey is oriented to the cosmos with no direct link to the land of Israel (19:10). On the land of Israel in Pseudo-Philo, see Betsy Halpern Amaru, Rewriting the Bible Land and Covenant in Post Biblical Jewish Literature (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity, 1994), 69–94.
45. Ephraim E. Urbach (“Heavenly and earthly Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem through the ages, ed. Joseph Abiram [in Hebrew] [Jerusalem: Magnes, 1968], 156–71) contrasts the emphasis on the place of the celestial city in these works to the approach found throughout rabbinic legal and exegetical literature, produced at the historical moment when Jews were forbidden entrance to the city. The latter sees the earthly city as primary and the celestial city as secondary. Urbach, “Jerusalem” Rivka Nir, The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Idea of Redemption in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003); Michael E. Stone, “The City in 4 Ezra,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (2007): 402–7.
46. Robert Louis Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 34–37.
47. A second-century B.C.E. Jewish work from Alexandria. John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 160–5.
48. In Flaccum 202; the Jews destroy the altar in Jamnia, as it was built as a desecration of the “Holy Land.” Similarly, in Legatio ad Gaium 205, 330, he relates to Jews of the “Holy Land.” The only reference to “Holy Land” is in 2 Maccabees is 1:7; Wilken explains that it is from a letter sent by the residents of Jerusalem to their brothers in Alexandria; Wilken, Land Called Holy, 24–25. However, this may be a paraphrase by the redactor of the text, with Jason of Cyrene framing the letter according to his diasporic Hellenistic Jewish attitude. In any case, the nomenclature of the “Holy Land” does not occur in 1 Maccabees, written in the land of Israel.
49. Aryeh Kasher notes that Philo refers to Jerusalem as “the holy city” (Legatio ad Gaium 225, 278, 281, 288, 299, 346). Additionally, he refers to the immaterial “City of God” (Somn. 2:250). Accordingly, we see Philo ascribing sanctity to the city in the sense of separation from the physical space. Arie Kasher, Jews and Hellenistic Cities in Eretz-Israel (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990).
50. In m. Kelim 1:6 we have “The land of Israel is holiest of all lands,” but not the appellation “holy land.”
51. For similar phenomena in the medieval sources and even modern sources, see Aviezer Ravitzky, “Awe and fear of the Holy Land in Jewish thought,” in The land of Israel in modern Jewish thought [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), 1–41.
52. Schwartz sees early Christianity as a movement fed by two sources. One is the Qumran community that voluntarily abandoned Jerusalem and took up residence in the desert; the rejection of the Jerusalem priesthood established a precedent for detachment. The move from practical observance of the commandments to an allegorical approach was influenced by the diaspora figure Philo. These two sources informed the inception of the Pauline movement, with its rejection of the Commandments and the territory of the land of Israel. Schwartz outlines the roots of the way in which “Pauline Christianity already represents Jesus’s teachings as allegorical literature” Schwartz, “Qumran and early Christianity.”
53. Comprehensive and fundamental research on the place of the land of Israel in early Christianity and especially in synoptic evangelism is found in Davies, Gospel and the Land.
54. The sphere of Jesus’s activities is concentrated in these districts, as opposed to the entire Galilee. Yet the evangelists and writers of early Christian literature engaged an extremely broad area. Over the last 150 years, a movement has developed that presents the Galilee as an early Christian stronghold. Researchers such as Richard Horsley, in his Galilee: History, Politics, People (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1995) and Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbi (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1996), present the Judaism of the Galilee as oriented to Israel as opposed to Judah and as consisting of a different Jew from that found in Judea. According to this approach, the roots of Galilean Judaism are to be located in the remnants of the historical Kingdom of Israel amalgamated with beliefs of the local population. Emil Schürer even ties the historical testimony regarding excessive conversions to the context of the century. Jonathan Reed holds a similar view, which he bases on archaeological findings from sites in the Galilee dated to the First Temple, compared with Galilean sites associated with the Second Temple period. He finds a lack of material continuity between these periods at these sites. Accordingly, Reed’s approach complicates acceptance of the historical continuity between First Temple and Second Temple Judaism argued by Horsley; Jonathan L. Reed, “Galileans, Israelite Village Communities, and the Sayings Gospel Q,” in Galilee through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures, ed. Eric M. Meyers (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 87–108. More recently, based on surveys of the eastern Galilee, Uzi Leibner has suggested that the beginning of Jewish settlement can be traced to the Hasmonean conquest. See Uzi Leibner, “The Origins of Jewish Settlement in the Galilee in the Second Temple Period: Historical Sources and Archeological Data [in Hebrew]” Zion 77, no. 4 (2012): 437–70. Other researchers, such as Sean Freyne, do not accept this thesis of Jews as latecomers to the Galilee. In Freyne’s opinion, Galilean Jews at the end of the Second Temple period were loyal to Jerusalem. One sees this expressed in the activities of the sages of Yavne in the Galilee after the destruction; Sean Freyne, Galilee, from Alexander the Great to Hadrian, 323 B.C.E. to 135 C.E: A Study of Second Temple Judaism, University of Notre Dame Center for the Study of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980). Others have emphasized the Talmudic evidence for a difference between the leaderships of Judea and the Galilee. See Jacob Neusner, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, Ca. 1–80 C.E. (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 47–53; Géza Vermes, Jesus in His Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), 52–57; Martin Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132–212 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 93–118, 232, 244. Israeli scholars such as Klein, Safrai, Urbach, Oppenheimer, and Rappaport strive to emphasize the link between the Judaism of Judea and the Galilee, seeing the latter as inseparable both from the former and from the Temple in Jerusalem. They interpret the differences between them as local variations of the same religion. For a historical survey of this debate in theories of Galilean history and culture, see Freyne, Galilee, 1–29.
55. The areas that are not mentioned in the description of Jesus’s activities include the Golan, the Sharon, the northern coastal plain, the Judean foothills, the region south of Bethlehem, Mount Hebron, Idumea, and the Negev.
56. The flight of Jesus and his parents, Joseph and Mary, to Egypt is related in Matthew 2:13 and the subsequent command to return to the land in 2:20: “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” Jesus reaches Tyre and Sidon (Mk 7:24–30). This is recounted as a journey abroad and return.
57. As noted by Daniel Schwartz. See Daniel Schwartz, Agrippa I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990), 153–56. According to Schwartz, the order of events in the book of Acts is arranged not chronologically but rather emphasizes the expansion from a plot unfolding in the land to one extending across the Mediterranean Basin, which in turn highlights the link between the rupturing strictures of national affiliation and the rupturing of territorial borders.
58. Daniel Schwartz sees in the critique of the Temple in Matthew 12:12–13 and of the sacrifices in 12:7 a reservation regarding the idea that the Temple is the House of the Lord; it becomes clear that “Jews of the Galilee could not participate in sacrificial worship” see Schwartz, “Qumran and early Christianity,” 624. However, the critique is aimed at what is done in the Temple; the reliance on sacrifices at the expense of moral actions is already found in the books of the Prophets. As such, Galilean Jews of the first century C.E. were familiar with the words of Solomon: “I have now built for You a stately House, a place where You may dwell forever” (1 Kgs 8:13). Solomon also states: “But will God really dwell on earth? Even the heavens to their uttermost reaches cannot contain You, how much less this House that I have built!” (1 Kgs 8:27). Thus, the practical critique of the Temple and the value of the sacrifices do not necessarily negate the status of territory, as we see in Paul.
59. Origen, De Principiis 4.3.8. See Wilken, Land Called Holy, 70.
60. Tertullian (ca. 150 C.E.–ca. 240 C.E.) from Carthage in North Africa, describes the Jews as believers that the Holy Land is the “special soil of Judea,” while according to him there is no earthly Holy Land; Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Body, 26.10.
61. See Wilken, Land Called Holy, 55. In a verbal communication, Oded Irshai made note of statements about the community as the church in Eusebius’s letter to Paulinus, bishop of Tyre (Church History 10.21–27); this was similar to the conception of the Qumran sects, with the community replacing the territory.
62. On the role of Eusebius in constructing the “Holy Land”—alongside Constantine—and about the mechanism of that process, according to Eusebius’s Vita Constantini, see Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 74–83.
63. I prefer to see in this composition a kind of reference book for studying scripture; the pilgrimage dimension in the Onomasticon is minimal. Moreover, the Onomasticon’s composition is dated prior to Constantine’s revolution concerning pilgrimage to the holy places. See Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 106–25; Joan E. Taylor, “Introduction,” in The Onomasticon by Eusebius of Caesarea, ed. and with an introduction by Joan E. Taylor (Jerusalem: Carta, 2003), 1–5; Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20.
64. Peter W.L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 51–132.
65. Robert A. Markus, “How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 257–71; Günter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 48–85; Edward D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in Later Roman Empire A.D. 312–460 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984), 6–49; Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 17–27.
66. Markus, “How on Earth” Stemberger, Jews and Christians, 48–85; Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 6–49.
67. Andrew Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula. A Commentary on the ‘Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae’ with an Introduction, Text, and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
68. Epistola 129: Ad Dardanum de terra repromissionis, CSEL 56 Hilberg (ed.), Vienna, 1918), 162–75.
69. See Wilken, Land Called Holy, 129–32
70. A comprehensive and detailed discussion of the land of Israel in Jerome’s writings can be found in Hillel I. Newman, “Jerome and the Jews” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997), 220–78. Newman emphasizes Jerome’s academic interest in the earthly “land of Israel.” According to his view, Jerome’s spiritual attitude to the land was based on his interpretation of the land as an arena of the biblical narrative. On the promised land according to Jerome, see Susan Weingarten, The Saint’s Saint: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 193–266.
71. Αaron Demsky, “Holy City and Holy Land as Viewed by Jews and Christians in the Byzantine Period: A Conceptual Approach to Sacred Space,” in Sanctity of Time and Space in Tradition and Modernity, ed. A. Houtman, M. Poorthuis, and J. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
72. On the Madaba Map, see: Leah Di Segni, “The ‘Onomasticon’ of Eusebius and the Madaba Map,’” in The Madaba Map Centenary 1897–1997: Travelling through the Byzantine Umayyad Period; Proceedings of the International Conference Held in Amman, 7–9 April 1997, ed. Michele Piccirillo and Eugenio Alliata (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1999), 115–20.
Herbert Donner, “The Uniqueness of the Madaba Map and Its Restoration in 1965,” in The Madaba Map Centenary 1897–1997: Travelling through the Byzantine Umayyad Period: Proceedings of the International Conference Held in Amman, 7–9 April 1997, ed. Michele Piccirillo and Eugenio Alliata (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1999), 37–108.
73. Glen W. Bowersock, Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
1. Sources composed and edited by Jews between the second and seventh centuries reflect the world of “the sages.” Over the past decades, scholars have pondered the question of the degree to which such sources reveal the ethos of the sages or, alternatively, society at large. This question is connected to that of the place and status of the sages in their society, as well as how homogeneous Jewish society was after the destruction. See Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Stuart S. Miller, Sages and Commoners in Late Antique ‘Erez Israel: A Philological Inquiry into Local Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Isaiah M. Gafni, “Symposium: In the Wake of the Destruction: Was Rabbinic Judaism Normative?” in Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern, ed. Lee I. Levine and Daniel R. Schwartz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 163–64; Hillel I. Newman: “The Normativity of Rabbinic Judaism: Obstacles on the Path to a New Consensus,” in ibid., 165–71; Ze’ev Safrai and Chana Safrai, “To What Extent Did the Rabbis Determine Public Norms? The Internal Evidence,” in ibid., 172–94. For a list of scholars and studies and the spectrum of their opinions, see David Levine, “Between Leadership and Marginality: Models for Evaluating the Role of the Rabbis in the Early Centuries CE,” in ibid., 194 n. 1; Moshe David Herr, “The Jewish Identity of the Jewish People: Continuity or Change,” in ibid., 213–19. See also the survey in Isaiah M. Gafni, “A generation of scholarship on Eretz Israel in the Talmudic era: Achievement and reconsideration” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 100 (2001): 222–26.
However, whether rabbinic literature is representative of the mainstream society in which it was written is a subject of some debate. Particularly for the topic of discussion in this chapter, discovery of the Rehov inscription (see below), which deals explicitly with the boundaries of the land and the Beit Shean area, especially on the walls of the synagogue, “removes” the source from the academies of the sages and transfers it to the synagogues, which is a popular space, as opposed to one reserved for the scholarly elite. It seems that this is a kind of blurring of the division between the sages and their society, or between the sage in his study house and the common Jew of the synagogue.
2. For more on the assembly and character of rabbinic literature, see Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar, Handbook of Jewish Literature, from Late Antiquity 135–700 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012), 23–95.
3. Maria Pretzler, Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece, Classical Literature and Society (London: Duckworth, 2007).
4. Except for the religious autonomy of Rabbi Judah the Prince, which we learn of primarily in rabbinic literature. See Martin Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132–212 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 111–18. See also the testimony of Origen, a contemporary of Rabbi Judah the Prince, in his Epistle to Julius Africanus, on the authority held by the Jewish nasi (patriarch) to judge capital cases; Origen, Ep. ad Africanum 14, Patrologia Graeca (Paris: Migne, 1857–66), xi, cols. 82–84.
5. T. ‘Abod. Zar. 5:2. The proliferation of homilies and instructions on the issue of living in the land are connected to a crisis of Jewish settlement following the Bar Kokhba revolt. See Isaiah M. Gafni, “Reinterment in the Land of Israel: Notes on the Origin and Development of the Custom,” in The Jerusalem Cathedra 1, ed. Lee I. Levine (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1981), 100–101. These pronouncements are also found in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Ketub. 110b–111b), but some Babylonian sages present an alternative approach that prohibits the leaving of Babylon for the land of Israel. This is likely because they wanted to maintain the status of the Babylonian yeshivot, their welfare, and their freedom of religion.
6. However, engagement with territorial boundaries was not limited to halakhic purposes. Midrashic and Aggadic literature attest to the relevance of scripture according to different perspectives.
7. Michael Avi-Yonah, The Jews Under Roman and Byzantine Rule (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2003), 220–23.
8. Günter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 48–85. For ethnographic history of the fourth to seventh century C.E., see Ze’ev Safrai, The Missing Century: Palestine in the Fifth Century; Growth and Decline, Palaestina Antiqua (Leuven: Peeters 1998), 51–82; Doron Bar, “The Christianization of the Rural Palestine,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 54, no. 3 (July 2003): 401–21.
9. Yoram Tsafrir, Leah Di Segni, and Judith Green, eds., Tabula Imperii Romanii: Maps and Gazetteer (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Humanity and Sciences, 1994), 18–19. See also “Ethnographic History,” in Safrai, Missing Century, 51–82; Michael Avi-Yonah, The Holy Land: From the Persian to the Arab Conquests, 536 BC–AD 640: A Historical Geography (Jerusalem: Carta, 2002), 218.
10. See Gil P. Klein, “Torah in Triclinia: The Rabbinic Banquet and the Significance of Architecture,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 325–70; Gil P. Klein, “Squaring the City: Between Roman and Rabbinic Urban Geometry,” in Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Henriette Steiner and Maximilian Sternberg (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 33–48.
11. Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974), 3–4, 7.
12. Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 174–224; Walter D. Ward, “In the Province Recently Called Palestine Salutaris: Provincial Changes in Palestine and Arabia in the Late Third and Fourth Centuries C.E.,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 181 (2012): 289–302.
13. Israel Shatzman suggested a later date for the establishment of Palestina Salutaris: 388–392 CE; Israel Shatzman, “From Judaea to the three provinces of Palaestina: The framework of the Roman administration in the land of Israel from the first to the early fifth century CE,” in Arise, Walk through the Land: Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Land of Israel in Memory of Yizhar Hirschfeld on the Tenth Anniversary of His Demise, ed. Joseph Patrich, Orit Peleg-Barkat, and Erez Ben-Yosef [Hebrew section] (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, 2016), 1–16.
14. Notitia dignitatum et administrationum omnium tam civilium quam militarium, Leah Di Segni and Yoram Tsafrir, with Judith Green, The Onomasticon of Iudaea: Palaestina and Arabia in the Greek and Latin Sources, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Humanity and Sciences, 2015), 240–51.
15. See Yoram Tsafrir, Leah Di Segni, and Judith Green, eds., Tabula Imperii Romani: Maps and Gazetteer (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Humanities and Sciences, 1994).
16. This particular impurity is associated in the Talmud with ancient sages who were active in the Hasmonean period (y. Šabb. 1:4, 3c; b. Šabb. 14b). The sages do not explain the rationale for their decree. Medieval scholars, including Rashi and Maimonides, explain this impurity with the rationale that the gentiles do not bury their deceased and, therefore, their land is impure. This is the position of Christine Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 199–204. However, Gedalia Alon suggests that this concept dates to Ezra and Nehemiah’s efforts to enforce separation between Jews and gentiles. See Gedalia Alon, Jews, Judaism, and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), 144–47. But these Tannaitic halakhot, it appears to me, demonstrate that the creation of a contiguous Jewish settlement and ownership meant purity; thus, the halakhah states that the roads in Syria in the area of Babylonian return, which might be considered impure, are considered pure. Contiguous Jewish settlement from the land of Israel to Syria in effect purified the roads of impurity of the gentiles (t. ‘Ohal. 3:18). See also David Zvi Hoffmann, ed., Midrash Tannaim [in Hebrew] (Berlin: Druck von H. Itzkowski, 1908–9), 112; m. ‘Ohal. 18:8. The creation of territorial contiguity through purchase of land in the area adjacent to the land of Israel purifies it of the impurity of the land of the gentiles; there is no requirement to purify it.
17. This is expressed in a homily in the Tannaitic midrash, Sipre Dt 51. At the beginning of its discussion, it relates to the biblical land of Canaan (Nm 34), but the conclusion relates to “the border of those who came up from Babylon,” which is a smaller area than the biblical borders of Canaan. Aaron Demsky, “From Kzib unto the river near Amanah’: A clarification of the northern border of the returnees from Egypt” [in Hebrew], Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies 10 (1990), 71–81, esp. 73; Yehuda Feliks, Talmud Yerushalmi Tractate Shevi’it [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass Press, 2000), 2:15.
18. Hanoch Albeck, The Mishna, Seder Zeraim, Commentary by Hanoch Albeck (Tel Aviv: The Bialik Institute, 1988), 379.
19. This is the interpretation of several medieval commentators, including Nahmanides; Feliks, Talmud Yerushalmi, 2:15.
20. A double offering was taken from the produce that grows in that area, “one for the fire and one for the priest” (m. Ḥal. 4:8).
21. At least with regard to the area of “those who came up from Egypt,” according to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the farthest that those who came up from Babylon reached did not expand past Judah. The fact that the Galilee was included up to Acre or Chezib demonstrates the view that the move into the Galilee, which began in the Hasmonean period, was the work of the descendants of the returnees from Babylon. This idea is the foundation of the Mishnah’s view that the residents of the land of Israel were the descendants of those who returned with Ezra: “Ten family stocks came up from Babylon” (m. Qidd. 4:1).
22. Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 21–96.
23. Nicole Loraux, Né de la terre: Mythe et politique à Athènes (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 49–50.
24. Elden, Birth of Territory, 26–30.
25. Elden, Birth of Territory, 53–96; Irad Malkin, The Return of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
26. See above n. 16.
27. Sipre Dt 51 has two different textual traditions, and two more are found in t. Šeb. 4:5 and y. Šeb. 6:1, 33c.
28. The majority of the inscription has parallels in rabbinic literature except the last passage, lines 26–29, which relate to towns in the area of Sebastia. This passage does not appear in an inscription on the stucco walls of the building (not yet published). From this, together with analysis of the proximity between the ornamentation around the lines, remnants of which were preserved in the stucco, one can infer that the floor inscription postdates the inscription on the walls. The passage relating to the towns from which agricultural produce is permitted in the area of Sebastia was added to the floor inscription. Fanny Vitto, who excavated the synagogue, dates the mosaic to the seventh century C.E.; see Vitto, “The Synagogue at Rehov,” in Ancient Synagogues Revealed, ed. Lee I. Levine (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1982), 90–94. Zeev Weiss dates it even earlier, to the fourth century C.E.; Zeev Weiss, “New light on the Rehov inscription: Identifying the ‘Gate of Campon’ at Beit Shean” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 70 (2001): 35–50. For more on the inscription and the identification of the Gate of Campon, see Yaacov Sussmann, “A halakhic inscription from the Beit Shean valley” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 43 (1974): 153.
29. See y. Šeb. 6:1, 39b.
30. Chaim Ben David, “The Rehov Inscription: A Galilean Text Formula?” in Halakhah in Light of Epigraphy, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten et al., Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011): 231–40.
31. Yaacov Sussmann, “The baraita of the ‘boundaries of Eretz-Israel’” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 45 (1976): 245.
32. Maurice Sartre, The Middle East Under Rome (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 323.
33. Yoram Tsafrir, “The provinces in the land of Israel: Nomenclature, boundaries, and borders,” in The land of Israel from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Muslim conquest, ed. Zvi Baras et al. [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1982), 350–86.
34. Louis H. Feldman, “Some Observations on the Name of Palestine,” Hebrew Union College Annual 61 (1990): 1–23; Bernard Lewis, “Palestine: On the History and Geography of a Name,” The International History Review 2, no. 1 (January 1980): 1–12. Both Feldman and Lewis stress the political dimension of the use of the name Palestina by Hadrian.
35. So it appears from a list of Tannaitic sources. Rabban Gamliel, for example, ruled that the dough offering from the area of those who returned from Babylon to that of those who came up from Egypt, extending “from Chezib to Amanah,” was obligatory (m. Ḥal. 4:8). In other words, Rabban Gamliel identified the area between the border of those who came up from Babylon and Egypt as part of Syria.
36. This area is called “Aram” in Jewish scriptural literature. The fact that the sages do not use the biblical name but rather the Hellenistic Roman one, which is the name of the province, demonstrates that their avoidance of the word Palestina is not due to a consistent preference for using the biblical name of a location.
37. The boundaries of the province of Syria changed throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods. Even so, the way in which the Roman Strabo, in the first century C.E. (Geography 16.1.2), and, later Ptolemy, in the second century C.E. (Geography 5.14), describe the area of Syria has the northwestern limit at the ridge of the Amanus and the Euphrates in the northeast. This accords with the border of those who came up from Egypt, while according to my suggestion above, in rabbinic literature, the border of those who came up from Egypt is also the Syrian border. For the boundaries of the province of Syria, see Sartre, Middle East, 2; Fergus Miller, The Roman Near East: 331 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 121–23, 423–24.
38. Moshe Hartal, “The Material Culture of Northern Golan in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University, 2003), 250.
39. According to Chaim Ben David, “Beyond the Jordan: Definitions and borders through the history,” in Man near a Roman arch: Studies presented to Prof. Yoram Tsafrir, ed. Leah Di Segni et al. [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, 2009), 65; Menahem Stern, “A description of the land of Israel,” in Studies in Jewish history: The Second Temple period, ed. Moshe Amit, Isaiah M. Gafni, and Moshe David Herr [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1991), 218–19. The area included in Perea, which was part of the province of Judea or Arabia, is the area that featured dense Jewish settlement.
40. “Why did they not decree concerning the air of Gerarike [that it is unclean as part of land of Gentiles]? Rabbi Simon in the name of Rabbi Joshua b. Levi [said], ‘It is because it is a terrible region [since the area is uninhabitable, there was no reason to make specific proclamation concerning it].’ To where [did they do not ordain the area outside of Israel to be unclean as the land of the peoples]? Rabbi Hanin in the name of Rabbi Samuel bar R. Issac [said], ‘To the brook of Egypt’” (y. Šeb. 6:1, 36c). See The Talmud of the Land of Israel: A Preliminary Translation and Explanation, vol. 5, Shebiit, trans. Alan J. Avery-Peck (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 208–9.
41. This is the import of a number of Tannaitic sources. See t. Kel. 1:5, m. Ḥal. 4:11, t. Ter. 2:9–11.
42. Gedalia Alon, The Jews in the Land in the Talmudic Age, ed. and trans. Gershon Levi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 156.
43. Aharon Oppenheimer, “Urbanization in city territories in Roman Palestine,” in The Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman world: Studies in memory of Menahem Stern, ed. Isaiah M. Gafni, Aharon Oppenheimer, and Daniel R. Schwartz [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1996), 209–28; David Levine, “Rabbi Judah the patriarch and the boundaries of Palestinian cities—A literary-historical study” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 138 (December 2010): 27–32. The rationale of encouraging Jewish settlement is explained by Oppenheimer with the fact that exemptions of cities such as Sepphoris, Tiberias, and Lod, all of which featured large Jewish populations and where there was, therefore, no need to encourage Jewish settlement, are not mentioned.
44. Philip B. Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5–6.
45. T. ‘Ohal. 18:4. See also Oppenheimer, “Urbanization,” 214.
46. This is what arises from the Rehov inscription, demonstrating that the exemption of Beit Shean from commandments dependent upon the land extends to the agrarian areas around the city.
47. Isaiah M. Gafni, “How Babylonia Became ‘Zion’: Shifting Identities in Late Antiquity,” in Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern, ed. Lee I. Levine and Daniel R. Schwartz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 333–48.
48. It is difficult to determine the extent of their reservations; in the Babylonian Talmud, only Rav Judah Bar Yechezkel is recorded as opposing the ascent of his student Rabbi Zeira (b. Ketub. 111a).
49. Isaiah M. Gafni, Land, Center, and Diaspora—Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 114, based on b. B. Qam. 84a–b: “We [in Babylonia] serve as their agents.”
50. Indeed, the Galilee was part of Palestina Secunda, but the division of the province into two, and afterward into three, was a secondary division and Caesarea functioned as the overall capital of the entire province where sat the duke, who was the military governor of the entire province. See Tsafrir, “provinces in the land of Israel,” 32; and Israel Shatzman, “From Judaea to the Three Provinces.”
1. On the evolution of this tradition, see Shraga Bar-On and Yakir Paz, “‘The Lord’s allotment is His people’: The myth of the election of Israel by casting of lots and the Gnostic–Christian–Pagan–Jewish polemic” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 79 (2010–11): 23–26.
2. The relationship in Zechariah 2:16 to Judea as “holy ground” is general. Yet lands outside the land of Israel are described as impure space, as in Joshua 22:19. The tribal holdings in western Transjordan were to the east of their fellow Israelites: “If the land of your possession be unclean, then pass ye over unto the land of the possession of the Lord.” The prophet Amos also describes the land of exile as impure land (Am 7:17). However, this does not yet establish the concept of a holy land, for the dichotomy is between impurity or profanity and purity, not holiness.
3. The burning bush, actually located outside the land of Israel, is called “holy ground” because of the divine revelation, although there is no continuity of holiness in this place. The “Mountain of God” (Ex 3:1; 4:27; 18:5; 24:13, and see also 1 Kgs 19:8), referring to Sinai, is likewise not a permanent designation, for it is only due to it being the site of a particular theophany at a particular moment. Neither is continuously holy.
4. Ex 29:31 and Lv 6:9, 19, 20; 7:6, 10, 13; 24:9; and 16:24. See Baruch J. Schwartz, The holiness legislation: Studies in the priestly code [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999), 256n54. The tabernacle was not static but rather portable; it moved from place to place.
5. As is commanded in relation to the tabernacle: “And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them” (Ex 25:8). In other words, the divine presence will be “among them” and not necessarily contained in the tabernacle.
6. Isaiah is the prophet who names Jerusalem the “holy city” (Is 52:1) as well as the “holy mountain” (57:6). Psalm 24:3 also relates to the Temple and Jerusalem as “the place of His holiness.”
7. Seth Kunin suggests that the Hebrew Bible itself contains two models, the centralist, according to which Jerusalem is the center, and the decentralist, which recognizes other sites such as Bethel and the Carmel as holy places. According to this approach, after the destruction of the Temple, Jerusalem ceased to be the center. The sages actually leaned toward the decentralist model and exchanged the sanctity of the holy place for the sanctity of the synagogues built throughout the land and the diaspora. See Seth D. Kunin, God’s Place in the World: Sacred Space and Sacred Place in Judaism (London: Cassell, 1998). However, a holistic and expansive reading of the Hebrew Bible as the sages read it suggests a dedication to the concentration of ritual. Bethel is represented in Kings as the place where Jeroboam erected his golden calves as an alternative cult and is criticized and therefore destroyed. The righteous and upright kings are Hezekiah and Josiah, who attended to the destruction of the ritual high places outside Jerusalem. Dispersion of the cult is seen as a central sin of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the cause of its exile.
8. Tannaitic literature presents a more complex approach to the shift between the prohibition of worship on the high places and permission to sacrifice there. This attitude confirms the existence of the high places upon which figures such as Samuel sacrificed, or Solomon at Givon, without criticism, and contrasts with the prophets’ criticisms of sacrificial rites outside Jerusalem: “After they came to Jerusalem the high places were forbidden and never again permitted” (m. Zebaḥ. 14:8). Performance of sacrificial rites upon the altar that Elijah set up on Mount Carmel is explained in the Talmud as “the needs of the hour,” requiring transgression of the words of the Torah (b. Yebam. 90b). In other words, it represents a dramatic ad hoc exception.
9. See, for example, Jürgen Wolf, “Place, Sacred,” Brill Dictionary of Religion, ed. Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 3:1456. For a discussion of the meaning of holy place and holy space in the Jewish and the Greco-Roman worlds, see Kunin, God’s Place, and Hannah K. Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Greco-Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001), 47–58.
10. See the discussion in Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 39–40, 54.
11. On the issue of holiness in Leviticus, see Jacob Milgrom, “Holiness,” in Leviticus 17–22: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1397–1400.
12. Mircea Eliade saw holy places as sites of “an eruption of the sacred” that turned the place into a “holy place,” a sort of axis mundi. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1959), 20–67. However, Eliade’s approach, which was very influential in the field of comparative religion in the second half of the twentieth century, has been critiqued by Jonathan Z. Smith. Smith points out Eliade’s uncritical use of parallels. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 97–103, 291–93; idem, To Take Place, 1–23. For an analysis of the conflict between Smith and Eliade regarding territory, see Sam Gill, “Territory,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Marc Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 298–313.
13. Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941).
14. Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de la mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92). Cf. Yoram Bilu, “The sanctification of place in Israel’s civil and traditional religion” [in Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore 19–20 (1998): 65, who defines holy places per se as “areas of memory” in that they are “sites connected to a mythic past and to a transcendental reality, entrenched with spiritual and holy symbolic significance.”
15. Even as the Mishnah numbers ten spheres of holiness and the external sphere is the land of Israel, the more internal spheres are the walled cities, and more interior than them are Jerusalem and the Temple. Flavius Josephus relates to Jerusalem in his seven spheres of holiness; J.W. 5.193–99, 227–29, 236. See David Nakman, “The halakhah in the writings of Josephus” [in Hebrew] (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2005), 228–32; Matan Orian, “Josephus’s Seven Purities and the Mishnah’s Ten Holinesses,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 47 (2016): 183–211.
16. Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “‘On That Day His Feet Will Stand on the Mount of Olives’”: The Mount of Olives and Its Hero between Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” Jewish History 30, no. 2 (2016): 138–57.
17. Opinions on the origins of the holiness of Mount Gerizim in the Samaritan tradition are split, but all agree that during the era of the sages, the Samaritans’ holy place was Mount Gerizim and not Jerusalem.
18. See the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs for repeated emphasis on Hebron as the burial place not only of patriarchs but also of each of the sons of Jacob.
19. “Walled cities” are an exception because they are outside Jerusalem and inside the land. The Gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797), for example, deleted the words “walled cities,” because this was an individual opinion in the parallel Tosefta (t. Kelim 1:14). However, to date no manuscripts support his emendation. Samuel Krauss, Antiquities of the Talmud [in Hebrew] (Vienna: Moriya Press, 1924), 92–93, applied the halakhah forbidding entry of lepers to houses in walled cities to Jerusalem alone. Nevertheless, even if we maintain this version, it provides only a general definition without reference to a specific walled city.
20. A passage in Sipre Zuta that is parallel to Numbers recounts the ten degrees of holiness of the land of Israel. This list includes Transjordan in the land of Israel but distinguishes between the land of Canaan and Transjordan. “The land of Canaan is holier than Transjordan because the land of Canaan is suitable for the house of the Divine Presence, Transjordan is not suitable for the house of the Divine Presence” (Sipre Zuta, Naso 5, Horowitz ed., p. 228; trans. by author). Whereas Canaan is suitable for the house of the Divine Presence—for building the Holy Temple—the Temple could not be built in Transjordan. This level of sanctity, following the sanctity of the land of Israel, from which the Omer and the first fruits and the two loaves could be brought, does not appear in the Mishnah (Kelim 1:6). Early and later scholars have discussed the contradiction between the “ten sanctities” named in the opening of the Mishnah and the eleven degrees found in the Mishnah itself. For Jacob N. Epstein’s explanation that this was a Mishnah of Rabbi Jose into which Rabbi Judah the Prince incorporated a Mishnah of Rabbi Meir, see his Introduction to Tannaitic literature [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1957), 127–28; and idem, Introduction to the text of the Mishnah, 3rd ed. [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000), 739. For a discussion of the Mishnah, see Richard S. Sarason, “The Significance of the Land of Israel in the Mishnah,” in The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 112–18. For a discussion of the hierarchy and concentric nature of the spheres of sanctity reflected in the Mishnah, see Kunin, God’s Place, 45–48.
21. Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “The Rabbinic Polemic against Sanctification of Sites,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, 40, no. 2 (2009): 260–81.
22. This insight sheds new light on the polemic against Bethel found in Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, and, finally, in rabbinic literature. These polemics exhibit a shared tendency that aims both to ratify the sanctification of Bethel in the biblical story and simultaneously subordinate it to Jerusalem. On the polemic against Bethel in Second Temple period literature, see John Enders, Biblical Interpretation in the Book of Jubilees (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1987), and Esther Eshel, “Jubilees 32 and the Bethel Cult Traditions in Second Temple Literature,” in Things Revealed: Studies in Early Jewish and Christian Literature in Honor of Michael E. Stone, ed. Esther G. Chazon, David Satran, and Ruth A. Clements (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 21–36.
23. These relate especially to the origins of the axis in an explosion and the temporal dimension, as well as Eliade’s uncritical use of parallels. See Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 291–93; idem, To Take Place, 1–23. Recent widespread critiques of Eliade describe him as motivated by perceptions deriving from early Eastern Christianity, as Joseph Dan has pointed out in On sanctity [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1997), 29–30, 62–63, and especially 167–69; also notes 43–46. For Eliade’s dependence on Romanian Orthodox Christianity and “holiness in nature,” with allusions to the pagan world, as derived from Eliade’s diaries, see Moshe Idel’s Postscript to Mircea Eliade, The myth of eternal return [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2000), 144.
24. On the motif of a “high mountain” as an axis mundi connecting heaven and earth and serving as a site of revelation, see Mircea Eliade, “Sacred Places: Temple, Palace, ‘Center of the World,’” in Patterns in Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), 367–77; idem, “Axis Mundi,” Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 2:20–21; and “Mountains,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 10:130–34. See also the latter’s annotated bibliography and the references to Eliade’s extensive writings. For the use of Eliade’s models to interpret the role of the sacred place in the Bible, mainly the “high mountain,” see Robert L. Cohn, The Shape of Sacred Space: Four Biblical Studies (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981). Regarding the “high mountain” as a holy place in Mediterranean society, see Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 413–14 and the revised bibliography there, p. 625.
25. See Shimon Dar, Settlements and Cult Sites on Mt. Hermon Israel, Tempus Reparatum, British Archaeological Reports International Series 582 (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1993).
26. See the Palestinian Targum to Judges 5:5; Rimon Kasher, Targumic Toseftot to the Prophets [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: World Union for Jewish Studies, 1996), 88–90. For a view that sees these traditions relating to the four mountains as a reflection of their sanctity in rabbinic literature, see Ze’ev Safrai, “Sacred tombs and holy sites in the Jewish tradition,” in Zev Vilnay’s jubilee volume, part 2, ed. E. Schiller [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ariel, 1987), 303–13. I regard them in an opposite fashion, as a polemic against the mountains’ sanctification.
27. The biblical text does not contain a description of the mountain’s location either; it appears that the midrash relies on this, too, in characterizing Sinai as low and unimpressive.
28. For a detailed discussion on this paragraph from the perspective of Talmudic research, See Yonatan Sagiv, “A place where miracles were done for Israel: The baraita, the scholion, and what lies in between” [in Hebrew], Sidra 32 (2017): 111–44. For different interpretation of these blessings, see Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Seeing Is Believing: Miracles, Providence and Reality in the Talmud,” Toronto Journal of Theology 33, no. 1 (2017): 87–101.
29. Meir Bar-Ilan, “Miraculous places in the land of Israel in ancient times,” in Judea and Samaria studies: Proceedings of the fifth conference 1995 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Reuben Mass, 1996), 229–39. The attempt to find a common denominator for the sites mentioned in the baraita leads to the insight that, except for Lot’s wife, all the other sites are related to the path that the people of Israel followed during the Exodus from Egypt, from the fords of the Red Sea, to the Arnon and the war with Og, and Joshua’s wars of conquest in Jericho and Beth Horon. If that is indeed the baraita’s framework, then the parallel to Egeria’s journey is remarkable, as she declared that she went on her journey “because I wanted to learn more about the places which the children of Israel visited on the way from Rameses to Sinai, the Mount of God” John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels: Newly Translated with Supporting Documents and Notes, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 1999), 118. According to the twelfth-century composition of Petrus Diaconus, who compiled all the places mentioned in Egeria’s journey, “the place where Moses sat and the stones that were placed beneath his arms are apparent to this day.” She also visited the place of the crossing of the Red Sea (ibid., 101–2) and described the “Jordan fords” (ibid., 119). Descriptions of Egeria’s travels also contain references to the unique place of high mountains and summits. In writing about her travels, the seventh-century author Valerius describes her visits to the following places: “One was Mount Nebo (just like the afore-mentioned Sinai) from whose summit blessed Moses looked across into the Promised Land, and on which he died, and they say, was buried by angels. Another was the mountain towering above Paran, extremely high, on the top of which Moses prayed. . . . There was the most awesome eminence of Tabor, where the Lord appeared in his glory with Moses and Elijah; an equally vast mountain called Hermon in which the Lord used to rest with his disciples; and a third called Ermes, very lofty, on which he taught the disciples the Beatitudes. There was a very high mountain called the mount of Elijah on which the Prophet himself dwelt . . . and another like it which overhangs Jericho, sanctified, like the others, by the Lord” (ibid., 202). Regarding this, cf. Hillel Newman, “Jerome and the Jews” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997), 256. This list is similar in character to the medieval Jewish lists of holy places. Regarding such lists, see Elchanan Reiner, “The impact of the tradition of holy places in the land of Israel,” in And this for Yehudah: Studies in the history of the land of Israel and its settlement, presented to Yehudah Ben-Porat, ed. Yehoshua Ben-Aryeh and Elchanan Reiner [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2003), 312–14.
30. Although Josephus testified that he saw “Lot’s wife . . . changed into a pillar of salt. And I bore witness to this, for it even now still remains” (Josephus, Ant. 1.203). For additional parallels, see Schalit’s notes to Ant. 1, n. 240. In rabbinic literature, the pillar of salt attributed to Lot’s wife is mentioned only in a midrash composed after the Muslim conquest, Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer, chap. 25: “And she was made a pillar of salt and she stands all day.” Gerald Friedlander (Midrash Pirke DeRabbi Eliezer [New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1981], 186n8) did not include this passage, which is an addition to the midrash, in his translation and indicated additional parallels as well. Regarding this work as a late composition of folk literature, see Dina Stein, Saying, Magic, Myth: Pirke DeRabbi Eliezer in the Light of the Study of Folk Literature (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005). On the connection between Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer and the journey of Paula by Hieronymus, with regard to identifying the hill of the foreskins mentioned in Joshua 5:3, see Newman, “Jerome and the Jews,” 256.
31. Rabbinic literature is filled with expressions of love and affection for the land and for dwelling in it; for instance, when the group of Tannaim traveled to study the Torah with Rabbi Judah ben Beteira in Nitzivin “and drank the tears from their eyes” when they left the land (Sipre Dt 80), or when Rabbi Abba would kiss the stones of Acre, which were considered borders of the land (b. Ketub. 112a). In similar fashion, Mekilta de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai states that prophecy can only occur in the land of Israel: “the land of Israel was consecrated [as the exclusive location for divine speech] . . . . Once the land of Israel was so consecrated, there was no divine speech with the prophets anywhere [outside the land of Israel], except next to the water” (Mekilta de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai 2:3, W. David Nelson trans., with slight revisions). Characterization of the land as holy through the commandments is found in the Mishnah (Kelim 1:6), as we saw; this is a purely halakhic, rather than spiritual, form of holiness.
32. On the characterization of Jerusalem in a manner that also characterizes the land, see Zeev Safrai and Chana Safrai, “The sanctity of Eretz Israel and Jerusalem,” in Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple, Mishna, and Talmud period: Studies in honor of Shmuel Safrai, ed. Isaiah M. Gafni, Aaron Oppenheimer, and Menachem Stern [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1993), 344–71.
33. In the Mishnah, there are halakhot concerning the holiness of synagogues: “Moreover Rabbi Judah said: [Even] if a synagogue was in ruins lamentation of the dead may not be made therein, nor may they twist ropes therein or stretch out net therein, or spread out produce [to dry] on its roof or make it a short bypath; for it is written, And I will bring your sanctuaries into desolation—their sanctity [endures] although they lay desolate” (m. Meg. 3:3). I tend to accept Harold Turner’s division; Harold W. Turner, From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology and Theology of Places of Worship (Paris: Mouton, 1979), 338–41. Turner distinguishes between a domus dei, a place with immanent holiness that substitutes for the Temple, and a domus ecclesiae, with functional holiness derived from the activities which it houses, such as communal assembly and Torah reading, as noted by Steven Fine in This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 159–61. The Saf Veyetiv synagogue in Nehardea is described in the Talmud as a place of the “Shekhinah-Presence,” as is the synagogue in the Hotzal; the Divine Presence is described as alternating locations. However, these statements constitute the exceptions that prove the rule.
34. With the exception of the “houses of walled cities” Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “‘Cities Surrounded by a Wall from the Time of Joshua bin Nun’ as a Rabbinic Response to the Roman Pomerium,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106, no. 1 (2016): 17–19.
35. See chapter 4, n. 1.
36. To these I would add the testimony of Cassius Dio on the Bar Kokhba revolt (Hist. rom. 69.14.2) about the tomb of King Solomon, which was destroyed as a result of the Roman activity against the revolt.
37. Van der Horst argues for a Jewish origin to the composition Vitae Prophetarum; Pieter W. van der Horst, Japheth in the Tent of Shem (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 119–38. Van der Horst returns to the claim of Joachim Jeremias (Heiligengräber in Jesu Umwelt (Mt 23,29; Lk 11,47). Eine Untersuchung zur Volksreligion der Zeit Jesu [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958]), who dates the composition to the end of the second century C.E., viewing it as a Jewish work, as well as Samuel Klein who saw it as a Jewish folk composition (“On the book Vitae Prophetarum,” in Sefer Klausner [in Hebrew], ed. N.H. Torczyner et al. [Tel Aviv: Vaad Hayovel, 1937], 208–9). David Satran, on the other hand, notes the Christian and foreign character of Vitae Prophetarum relative to the world of the sages (Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine: Reassessing the Lives of the Prophets [Leiden: Brill, 1995], 38–49). It is a book laden with traditions regarding the birthplaces and tombs of prophets. Satran rejects the interpretation of Samuel Klein (“On the book,” 189–209), who tries to tie the work to rabbinic circles. In her monumental work on Vitae Prophetarum, Anna Maria Schwemer (Studien zu den frühjüdischen Prophetenlegenden Vitae prophetarum [Tübingen: J.C. B Mohr (P. Siebeck), 1995–96] advocates Jewish authorship and a date in the first century C.E. for this work. This ascription of Jewish origin was adopted by Pieter van der Horst, who suggests that the graves of patriarchs were venerated in the Second Temple period, and that the rabbis later reluctantly tolerated this practice.
38. The surprising ritual is described in b. Sanh. 47b: “It was the practice of people to take earth from Rav’s grave and apply it [as a remedy] on the first day of an attack of fever. When Samuel was told of it, he said: They do well; it is natural soil, and natural soil does not become forbidden.” Samuel is referring more to the medical use of the soil from the grave than to the veneration of tombs.
39. Ora Limor, “Christian Sacred Space and the Jew,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen, Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien 11 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 55–77.
40. Newman, Jerome and the Jews, 238–78.
41. Elchanan Reiner, “From Joshua to Jesus—The Transformation of a Biblical Story to a Local Myth: A Chapter in the Religious Life of the Galilean Jew,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, First–Fifteenth Centuries CE, ed. Arieh Kofsky and Guy G. Stroumsa (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), 223–71; Elchanan Reiner, “From Joshua to Simeon Bar Yohai: Towards a Typology of Galilean Heroes,” in Jesus among the Jews, ed. Neta Shtahl (New York: Routledge, 2012), 94–105.
42. For a similar approach concerning the Mishnah, see Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Is the Mishnah a Roman Composition?” in The Faces of Torah: Studies in the Texts and Contexts of Ancient Judaism in Honor of Steven Fraade, ed. Christine Hayes, Tzvi Novick, and Michal Bar-Asher Segal, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 22 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 487–507.
43. “If you seriously desire me to come to you, there are two hundred and four cities and villages in Galilee. I will come to whichever of these you may select, Gabara and Giscala excepted” (Life 235).
44. Chaim Ben David, “Were there 204 Settlements in Galilee at the Time of Josephus Flavius?” Journal of Jewish Studies 62, no. 1 (2011): 21–36.
45. According to Chaim Ben David, the Golan was also under the command of Josephus and was included in the Galilee according to his division.
46. Remains of five archaeological inscriptions of the list dating to the Byzantine period were found in Israel at Nazareth, Rehov, Ashkelon, and Kissufim. The most complete list was found in Yemen.
47. The context of the divisions of Jehoiarib and Jehoiada, which are mentioned in the Talmud, is definitively negative, going so far as to blame the priests for the destruction of the Temple. This reflects a tension between the sages and the priests; see Josef Yahalom, Poetry and society in Jewish Galilee of late antiquity [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), 111–16; Uzi Leibner, Settlement and History in Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Galilee: An Archaeological Survey of the Eastern Galilee (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 404–19.
48. Yoram Tsafrir, Leah Di Segni, and Judith Green, eds., Tabula Imperii Romani: Maps and Gazetteer (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Humanities and Sciences, 1994), 194; Jack Finegan, The Archeology of the New Testament: The Life of Jesus and the Early Church (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 40–74.
49. James F. Strange, “Nazareth,” in The Archeological Records from Cities, Towns, and Villages, vol. 2, Galilee: In the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Period, ed. David A. Fiensy and James Riley Strange (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 173; see also, Jack Finegan, “Nazareth,” in The Archeology of the New Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 43–65.
50. Bellarmino Bagatti, “Nazareth,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archeological Excavations in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993), 3:1103–5; Zeev Weiss, “Jewish Galilee in the first century C.E.: An archeological view,” in Flavius Josephus, Vita: Introduction, Hebrew translation, and commentary, ed. Daniel R. Schwartz [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2007), 19; Strange, “Nazareth,” 167–80.
51. Bagatti, “Nazareth,” 1103–5. Joan Taylor, however, claims that this location functioned not as a mik.ve but as a pool for collecting the juice of pressed grapes; Joan Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish Christian Origins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 244–53.
52. Bellarmino Bagatti, “Ritrovamenti nella Nazaret evangelica,” Liber Annuus 6 (1955): 5–44.
53. Epiphanius, Panarion 30.11.9–10.
54. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 96; Paul Geyer et al., ed., Itineraria et Alia Geographica, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 175 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1965), 98.
55. John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage before the Crusades (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 1999), 80–81; Geyer et al., Itineraria, 130–31.
56. Walter Ameling et al., eds., Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, vol. 2, Caesaria and the Middle Coast 1121–2160 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 66–68.
57. Paul Kahle, Masoreten des Westens (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1927), 20–22. On Hadutahu, see Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar, Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity (135–700 CE) (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012), 135–36.
58. Shulamit Elizur, introduction and commentaries to The liturgical poems of Rabbi Pinhas Ha-Kohen: Critical edition [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2004), 638. Pinhas HaCohen was from Tiberias and is usually dated to the eighth century C.E.
59. Mordechai Aviam and Peter Richardson, “Josephus’ Galilee in Archeological Perspective,” in Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, vol. 9, Life of Josephus: Translation and Commentary, ed. Steve Mason (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 184; Zeev Weiss, “Jewish Galilee,” 19–20.
60. Massimo Luca, “Kafr Kanna (The Franciscan Church),” in The Archeological Records from Cities, Towns, and Villages, vol. 2, Galilee: In the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Period, ed. David A. Fiensy and James Riley Strange (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 156–64.
61. Aviam and Richardson, “Josephus’ Galilee,” 184.
62. Douglas R. Edwards, “Khirbet Qana: From Jewish Village to Christian Pilgrim Site,” in The Roman and Byzantine Near East, vol. 3, Late-Antique Petra, ed. John H. Humphrey, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 49 (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2002), 101–32; Thomas McCollough, “Khirbet Qana,” in The Archeological Records from Cities, Towns, and Villages, vol. 2, Galilee: In the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Period, ed. David A. Fiensy and James Riley Strange (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 127–45.
63. Yardena Alexander, “Karm er-Ras Near Kafr Kanna,” in The Archeological Records from Cities, Towns, and Villages, vol. 2, Galilee: In the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Period, ed. David A. Fiensy and James Riley Strange (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 146–57.
64. Ora Limor, Holy Land Travels: Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), 151.
65. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 63.
66. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 81; Geyer et al., Itineraria, 130.
67. Daniel Goldschmidt, The order of Lamentations for Tisha B’av [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1968), 49.
68. Kahle, Masoreten des Westens, 1–3.
69. Elizur, Liturgical poems, 633.
70. Reiner Degan, “An inscription from Yemen about the 24 watches of the priests” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 42 (1973): 302–7.
71. Tsafrir, Di Segni, and Green, Tabula Imperii Romani, 97.
72. Aviam and Richardson, “Josephus’ Galilee,” 184–85.
73. Stanislao Loffreda, “Capernaum,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Archeology in the Near East, ed. Eric M. Meyers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1:416–19.
74. Zvi Uri Ma’oz, “The Synagogue at Capernaum: A Radical Solution,” in The Roman and Byzantine Near East, vol. 2, Some Recent Archaeological Research, ed. John H. Humphrey, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 31 (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1999), 137–48; Benjamin Arubas and Rina Talgam, “Jews, Christians, and ‘Minim’: Who Really Built and Used the Synagogue at Capernaum—A Stirring Appraisal,” in Knowledge and Wisdom: Archeological and Historical Essays in Honor of Leah Di Segni, ed. Giovanni C. Bottini, Leslaw D. Chrupcala, and Joseph Patrich (Milan: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2014), 237–74.
75. Arubas and Talgam, “Jews, Christians and ‘Minim,’” 233–70.
76. Geyer et al., Itineraria, 99.
77. According to John, the centurion’s appeal to Jesus and the healed took place in Cana, whereas the centurion’s paralyzed son was in Capernaum.
78. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 52. Paula sees Capernaum, together with Cana, as a “testimony to his miracles.”
79. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 63; Geyer et al., Itineraria, 115.
80. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 81; Geyer et al., Itineraria, 133.
81. When Josephus describes the Galilee in his The Jewish War (3.519), he mentions the unique abundance of the Capernaum well and even compares it to the Nile. This is a mention that is linked not to a particular event but rather to a distinguishing characteristic of the site. This place should probably be identified as the Heptapegon or Tabgha, the place in which Jesus gave his sermon on the Mount of Beatitudes and fed thousands of people with loaves of bread. We have documentation of visits by Egeria, Paula, Theodosius, and St. Sabbas at Capernaum as well. The local church was probably built during the fourth century and replaced with a larger church in the fifth century. Egeria visited the “seven flowing wells”—the Heptapegon—and describes collecting, for medicinal purposes, slivers from the stone on which Jesus lay the loaves of bread, which was turned into an altar; Geyer et al., Itineraria, 99. Paula and Theodosius similarly visited the site, and even St. Sabbas and Antoninus did so (ibid., 133), identifying it as the site at which the miracle of the bread and fish took place, a site which is described as “deserted.”
82. Tsafrir, Di Segni, and Green, Tabula Imperii Romani, 85.
83. According to Matthew (14:13), this miracle took place in a “deserted place” according to John (6:3), it happened on a “mountain” on the bank of the Sea of Galilee.
84. Matthew (11:22) also mentions Capernaum.
85. Egeria (John Wilkinson, ed., Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land [Jerusalem: Ariel, 1981], 196) places the miracle of the bread and fish in a “field.”
86. Rami Arav, “Et-Tell and el-Araj,” Israel Exploration Journal (1988): 187–88.
87. Mendel Nun, “Has Bethsaida Finally Been Found?” Jerusalem Perspective 54 (1998): 12–31. Nun claims that there were Herodian remains in Tel el-Araj, while Arav states that Herodian remains were found only in Et-Tell. See R. Steven Notley, “Et-Tell Is Not Bethsaida,” Near Eastern Archaeology 70 (2007): 220–30; idem, “Reply to R. Arav,” Near Eastern Archaeology 74, no. 2 (2011): 101–3; Rami Arav, “Bethsaida—A Response to Steven Notley,” Near Eastern Archaeology 74 (2011): 92–100, 103–4.
88. Bargil Pixner, “Searching for the New Testament Site of Bethsaida,” The Biblical Archaeologist 48 (1985): 207–16. Dan Urman, The Golan: A Profile of Region during the Roman and Byzantine Periods, British Archaeological Reports International Series (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1985), 121.
89. According to Matthew 11. Luke 10 mentions only Korazim and Bethsaida.
90. Ze’ev Yeivin, The Synagogue at Korazim: The 1962–1964, 1980–1987 Excavations (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2000), 2:301–4.
91. Jodi Magness, “Did Galilee Decline in the Fifth Century? The Synagogue at Chorazin Reconsidered,” in Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity in Ancient Galilee: A Region in Transition, ed. J.K. Zangenberg, H.W. Attridge, and D.B. Martin (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 259–74.
92. Eusebius, Onomasticon, ed. Steven Notley and Ze’ev Safrai (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 164.
93. Wilkinson, ed., Egeria’s Travels, 201.
94. Vassilios Tzaferis, “Kursi,” The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and Carta, 1993) 3:893–96.
95. Mendel Nun, “Kursi: A monastery near a Jewish fisherman’s hamlet,” in Zev Vilnay’s jubilee volume, part 2, ed. Ely Schiller [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ariel, 1987), 184.
96. This inscription has not yet been published; see Ian Blumenthal, “Discovery Suggests Jews Lived in Galilee 1,500 Years Ago,” Ynetnews.com, Dec. 16, 2015, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4740314,00.html.
97. On Tractate Soferim, see Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar, Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity (135–700 CE) (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012), 54–55.
98. The midrashim that were edited before the Arab conquest are Genesis Rabbah, Song of Songs Rabbah, Pesiqta deRav Kahana, and Lamentations Rabbah.
99. Ze’ev Safrai, The Jewish Settlement in the Golan after the Destruction of the Second Temple (Keshet: Beit Sepher Sade Keshet, 1978), 36.
100. Uzi Leibner, “Ritual law and a Roman road in the Golan” [in Hebrew], Al Atar 4–5 (1999): 193–200.
101. Yeshayahu Press, A topographical-historical encyclopedia of the land of Israel [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1955), 4:795–96; see also Félix-Marie Abel, Géographie de la Palestine (Paris: Lecoffre, 1939), 2:440.
102. See Günter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 48–120. For Christian pilgrimage, see the detailed references in Oded Irshai, “The Christian Appropriation of Jerusalem in the Fourth Century: The Case of Bordeaux Pilgrim,” Jewish Quarterly Review 99 (2009): 465–86.
103. Doron Bar, “Fill the earth”: Settlement in Palestine during the late Roman and Byzantine periods 135–640 C.E. [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and The Schechter Institute, 2008), 121–62.
104. Tsafrir, Di Segni, and Green, Tabula Imperii Romani, 18–19.
105. A survey of this copious literature is beyond the scope of the current text. One of the prominent representatives of this approach is Ephraim E. Urbach; see Oded Irshai, “Ephraim E. Urbach and the Study of Judeo-Christian Dialogue in Late Antiquity—Some Preliminary Observations,” in How Should Rabbinic Literature Be Read in the Modern World? ed. Matthew A. Kraus (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 247–75. For references to scholars who follow this line, see the comprehensive introduction of Adiel Schremer in his Brother Estranged: Heresy, Christianity, and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 149n18. Schremer himself takes issue with the attempt to present many rabbinic homilies as products of Jewish-Christian polemic.
106. Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
107. Even the anti-Christian polemic found in the midrashim does not directly mention Jesus and his students, nor the term Christianity. See Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 116–29; Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisbis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 16–18; Daniel Boyarin, “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Charlotte Fonrobert and Martin Jaffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 336–65. On the absence of Jesus from Tannaitic literature, other than Tosefta Ḥullin, see Adiel Schremer, “The Christianization of the Roman Empire and Rabbinic Literature,” in Jewish Identity in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern, ed. Lee I. Levine and Daniel R. Schwartz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 365n65.
108. Ben-Eliyahu, “On That Day,” 138–57.
109. The transfiguration, according to the gospels, took place on a “mount” (Lk 9:28) or a “high mount” (Mk 9:2; Mt 17:1). During the fourth century, this mount was identified as the Mount of Olives; later, in the fourth and fifth centuries, the identification moved to Mount Tabor. See Ben-Eliyahu, “Rabbinic Polemic,” 260–81, esp. 266.
110. This approach is in line with the way in which Claude Levi-Strauss distinguished between nature and culture. While structuralism shapes the culture, nature is stable. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
111. The sages’ abstention from making reference to places that served as pilgrimage sites might also be connected to the absence of references to the Sadducees and the Essenes, or other groups that were active at that time. Martin Goodman has claimed that, although these groups continued to exist after the destruction of the Temple, the sages called them minim, heretics, a general term, but did not refer to them in a particular manner. The same is relevant for the pagan groups. While the archaeological remains of various pagan groups are numerous and varied, they are referred to in rabbinic literature as one large group, with no distinctions made between them. See Sacha Stern, Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writing (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 215–23, who describes the rabbinic perception as a solipsism. According to Stern, the rabbis concentrated on their issues, rather than attacking the minim, heretics. See also Martin D. Goodman, “Sadducees and Essenes after 70 CE,” in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Michael D. Goulder, ed. S.E. Porter, P. Joyce, and D.E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 347–56; Martin D. Goodman, Judaism in the Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 153–62; Martin D. Goodman, “The Function of Minim in Early Rabbinic Judaism,” in Geschichte–Tradition–Reflexion: Festchrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hubert Cancik, Hermann Lichtenberger, and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 1:506; Goodman, Judaism in the Roman World, 170–71. See also Amram Tropper, Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography: Tractate Avot in the Context of the Greco-Roman Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 231–32.
112. As mentioned above, this claim is in line primarily with the literature redacted from the second half of the fourth century and onward: the Jerusalem Talmud and primarily the Aggadic midrashim. The names of these settlements, however, are also absent from Tannaitic literature, although it is difficult to suppose that Christian presence bothered the redactors of the Tannaitic corpus as early as the beginning of the third century.
113. When David left Jerusalem because his son, Absalom, had taken control there, he went up to the summit of the Mount of Olives, where he worshiped God (2 Sm 15:32). Later, Solomon erected high places (i.e., altars) for his foreign wives there (1 Kgs 11:7), which Isaiah destroyed (2 Kgs 23:12).
114. M. Mid. 4:2.
115. M. Parah 3:4. See Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “The ramp of the Red Heifer” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 107 (2003): 183–86.
116. Sipre Nm 151. Concerning the location of Bethpage according to gentile texts and rabbinic literature and the relationship between the different sources, see Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “On the location of Beit-Pagi referred to in rabbinic literature” [in Hebrew], Al Atar 6 (2000): 51–62.
117. Josephus, J.W. 2.261–62; Ant. 20.167–72.
118. Eusebius, ed. Edward Schwartz (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1903–8), 308: “The emperor, Hadrian, issued a decree against the entire people from even coming near Jerusalem and the surrounding area, so that even from a distance they could not see the Land of their Fathers.”
119. Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’Empire romain: Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale (Paris: Geuthner, 1914), 2:172; Amnon Linder, “The Roman imperial government and the Jews under Constantine” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 44 (1975): 136–37; Oded Irshai, “Constantine and the Jews: The prohibition against entering Jerusalem; history and hagiography” [in Hebrew], Zion 60 (1995): 129–78.
120. According to Luke (24:50–51), Jesus’s Ascension to heaven occurred near Bethany on the Mount of Olives. Acts 1:1–12 reflects the same tradition. Both gnostic and apocryphal literature contain many traditions describing the Ascension on the Mount of Olives and the revelation of the mysterious secrets there. See Peter W.L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).
121. Ben-Eliyahu, “On That Day,” 55–63.
122. Bernard D. Mandelbaum, ed., Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (New York: Schocken, 1987), 234–35.
123. B. Roš. Haš. 31a; Avot de-Rabbi Natan, recension A, chap. 34. One finds polemics against Christianity more frequently in the Babylonian Talmud than in Palestinian sources. This phenomenon has been discussed recently in Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 116–29; Becker, Fear of God, 16–18; and Boyarin, “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” 336–65.
124. B. Sukkah 5a, according to the manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod.hebr.140.
125. This approach is in line with my assumption about the rabbis’ reservations even regarding internal sanctification and visiting of such sites and holy places. See Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “The Role of the ‘Holy Place’ in the Rabbinic Literature,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 40, no. 2 (2009): 260–81. See also Joshua Levinson, “There Is No Place Like Home: Rabbinic Responses to the Christianization of Palestine,” in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, ed. Natalie B. Dohrman and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 99–120.
1. Antony Smith defined affinity to territory as one of the six properties of a nation. According to Smith, the affinity to territory is one of the elements that makes an ethnos a nation; Antony D. Smith, “State and Homelands: The Social and Geopolitical Implications of National Territories,” Millennium 10 (1981): 183–99. See also David Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–27; Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Between borders: The boundaries of Eretz-Israel in the consciousness of the Jewish People in the time of the Second Temple and in the Mishnah and Talmud period [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2013), 27–28.
2. For example, see Itzhak Galnor, The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
3. See, for example, Zev Vilnai, Holy tombstones in the land of Israel [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Achiever, 1986); Doron Bar, Sanctifying a land: The Jewish holy places in the state of Israel 1948–1968 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben Gurion University Press and Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 2007).
4. Michael Ish-Shalom, Holy Tombs: A Study of Traditions concerning Jewish Holy Tombs in Palestine (Jerusalem: Rabbi Kook Foundation Publishing House and the Palestine Institute of Folklore and Ethnography, 1948). Elchanan Reiner, “Traditions of Holy Places in Medieval Palestine—Oral versus Written,” in Offerings from Jerusalem: Portrayals of Holy Places by Jewish Artists, ed. Rachel Sarfati (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2002), 9–19.
5. Jonathan Garb, “The Cult of the Saints in Lurianic Kabbalah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 203–29.
6. Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
7. Marshall J. Breger, Yitzhak Reiter, and Leonard Hammer, eds., Holy Places in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict: Confrontation and Co-existence (London: Routledge, 2009); Marshall J. Breger, Yitzhak Reiter, and Leonard Hammer, eds., Religion and Politics: Sacred Space in Palestine and Israel (London: Routledge, 2012); Shmuel Berkovits, “How dreadful is this place!”: Holiness, politics and justice in Jerusalem and the holy places in Israel [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Carta, 2007).