Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae 5: Galilaea and Northern Regions ed. by W. Ameling et al. (review)

Reviewed by: Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae 5: Galilaea and Northern Regions ed. by W. Ameling et al. Seth Schwartz Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae 5: Galilaea and Northern Regions Edited by W. Ameling, H. Cotton, W. Eck, A. Ecker, J. Heinrichs, B. Isaac, A. Kushnir-Stein†, J. Price, P. Weiss, O. Abudarham, and A. Yardeni†. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2023. Part 1: xliv, 1041; part 2: x, 2098. Volume 5 is the richest and most complex of the CIIP volumes so far. The territory covered, corresponding to Israel north of the Jezreel Valley, is small: a mere thirty miles from the Sea of Galilee to the Mediterranean, and sixty from Skythopolis/Beth Shean at the southern end to the Israel-Lebanon border at Metula, in the so-called Finger of Galilee, which is not part of Galilee at all but is a segment of the Great Rift Valley that contains the Huleh Valley north of the Sea of Galilee and stretches north towards the Beqaa Valley. Until the recent past this was an area of staggering cultural complexity, some of it balkanized into separate enclaves and some of it evident in religiously, ethnically, and linguistically mixed towns and villages. This was, if anything, even more true in antiquity, and then, as later, highly local and particularized identities were only infrequently based on primordial local attachments. Indeed, the CIIP enables one to trace with ease the transformation of an area like the Huleh Valley, home at the opening of the period covered by the volumes to wealthy Greek farmstead-owning grandees (5920–61); to a landscape dotted with Greco-Phoenician villages, most notably the substantial settlement of Kadasa (5965–79); to the biblical Kedesh Naftali, containing in the middle Hellenistic period far more evidence for its Phoenician than its Greek affiliations; to a linguistic and constitutional shift under Rome, with all writing now in Greek and elements of an urban euergetistic culture in place, side by side with what could be read as religious survivals from an earlier period. More likely, however, these Greco-Syrian gods were innovations of the Roman period, as were the sodalities that cultivated their worship. But there is evidence for a real survival: a grandee, the owner of a great estate in the Valley, ca 200 c.e., whose oikonomos was distinguished enough to be commemorated with a beautifully carved and inscribed funerary altar. But the grandee is now not a Greek colonist but a Roman lady of senatorial rank (5978). Finally, there is evidence from the sixth century c.e. for the emergence of rural ecclesiastical foundations in the immediate vicinity of Kadasa as wielders of significant economic power, reinforced by imperial rescript (5983), testifying to the material impact of Christianization even in this peripheral part of the Holy Land. [End Page 171] An even more striking time-lapse effect is provided by two exceptionally significant items discovered on neighboring kibbutzim in the eastern Jezreel Valley, the rural hinterland of Skythopolis/Bet Shan/Beisan. The first text is the famous Hefziba inscription (7561), containing a dossier of documents recording privileges extended to the royal official Ptolemy son of Thraseas before and after the Fifth Syrian War, in the course of which Ptolemy switched sides. Ptolemy owned villages in the area to which the kings granted privileges. But the main privileges benefited Ptolemy himself: he received exclusive jurisdiction over the laoi who populated the villages of his lands, and even demanded a say in the resolution of disputes between "his" laoi and those controlled by others. This is important evidence for the virtual enserfment of the residents of proprietary villages of this grain-rich region. Flash forward seven hundred years, and much about the villagers is unrecognizable: the epigraphical remains of the synagogue at Bet Alfa, close to the findspot of the Hefziba inscription, introduce us to villagers with at least three self-consciously embraced and performed identities (as Jews, Bet-Alfans—in fact the ancient name of their village is unknown—and Romans), a strong sense of agency, and a recognition of the significance of their rural...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.