Diaspora Synagogues, Leontopolis, and the Other Jewish Temples of Egypt in the Histories of Josephus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many historians of early Judaism continue to generalize the various sources and finds related to the synagogues, as if we may continue to speak of a centralized synagogue institution with standardized traits. This tendency becomes apparent in the secondary literature surrounding Josephus’ two narratives regarding the Leontopolis temple from Bellum Judaicum (BJ) and Antiquitates Judaicae (AJ). Many scholars present both with exclusivist ideologies of the Jerusalem Temple, which leads them to treat the ἱερά in AJ 13.62–73 as standardized “synagogues” as we understand them. I will thus argue that Josephus uses this tradition in distinct, if not opposing, ways within his two histories. Whereas the BJ 7 passage is interested in the opposition to the Jerusalem Temple, the focal point of this entire book, the AJ 13 pericope is more concerned with the “ancestral customs” of the Jews and proper worship, as Onias contends with the many, heteropraxic Jewish ἱερά that existed in Egypt. Antiquitates is interested in showing the honours and rights bestowed upon the Jewish communities by foreign rulers, legitimizing their way of life. Despite some terminological correspondence, we must not theologize these ἱερά as proper synagogues, even if they were in the synagogue tradition. Instead, we should treat them as early institutions, which Josephus rejected due to syncretistic practices. This is in keeping with other Jewish ἱερά referred to as at least temple-like in Antiquitates. Moreover, such a reading is consistent with the external literary attestation and material character of Diaspora synagogues and worship practices, especially in Egypt. This reading of AJ 13.62–73 allows for us to treat the many Jewish assemblies in Egypt as a variegated group of holy places, which took on certain symbols and elements of Egyptian cultic practice, just as later synagogues would absorb elements of the surrounding cultures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".