Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[The Minsky Moment]

For everyone else not as interested in the iconographic question:

What makes this interesting regardless of whether the artist saw directly or secondhand the inner sanctum of the Second Temple, this does appear to be an effort to represent that inner sanctum and that is significant.  By this period in Jewish history, the Jerusalem priests jealously regarded their monopoly.  The priesthood made a lot of money off of pilgrims travelling to the Jerusalem temple in order to perform ritual requirements (like the Passover lamb slaughter).  They would have looked askance at any effort to make some sort of local copy or substitute to the Temple.  Which would suggest one of following were true:

1.  This synogogue was built by "dissenters" from the Jerusalemite priesthood.
2.  The priesthood didn't have as much reach into more distant backwaters like the Galilee.
3.  The priesthood was actually OK with such imitations as long as they were used to a certain (unknown) way
4.  Our understanding of late Second Temple Judaism is mistaken or incomplete in some way.

[Razgovory]

I'd go for 4.  History before the printing press is so depressingly opaque.

[Martinus]

As for the "shocking" iconography found in the recent synagogue - you simply can't judge early synagogues by rabbinical "rules" that developed centuries later. Many early synagogues have oddities to them that surprise and baffle modern scholars. For example, I visited one which had a fully-formed zodiac wheel with what appears to be a picture of Helios in the centre of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_Alpha

The central panel features a Jewish adaptation of the Greco-Roman zodiac. The zodiac consists of two concentric circles, with the twelve zodiac signs appearing in the outer circle, and Helios, the Greco-Roman sun god, appearing in the inner circle.[16] The outer circle consists of twelve panels, each of which correspond to one of the twelve months of the year and contain the appropriate Greco-Roman zodiac sign. Female busts symbolizing the four seasons appear in the four corners immediately outside the zodiac.[17] In the center, Helios appears with his signature Greco-Roman iconographic elements such as the fiery crown of rays adorning his head and the highly stylized quadriga or four-horse-drawn chariot.[18] The background is decorated with a crescent shaped moon and stars. As in the "Binding of Isaac" panel, the zodiac symbols and seasonal busts are labeled with their corresponding Hebrew names.

This zodiac wheel, along with other similar examples found in contemporaneous synagogues throughout Israel such as Naaran, Susiya, Hamat Tiberias, Huseifa, and Sepphoris, rest at the center of a scholarly debate regarding the relationship between Judaism and general Greco-Roman culture in late-antiquity.[19] Some interpret the popularity that the zodiac maintains within synagogue floors as evidence for its Judaization and adaptation into the Jewish calendar and liturgy.[20] Others see it as representing the existence of a "non-Rabbinic" or a mystical and Hellenized form of Judaism that embraced the astral religion of Greco-Roman culture.

You certainly would not get that in a later synagogue! In my opinion, it just represents the symbology current at the time; I don't think it means they literally worshipped Helios (I think he's just there symbolizing "the sun").

Yeah, it sounds like a hellenic influence, or perhaps a qabbalistic one, Helios being associated with Sun and thus with the sephira of Tiphereth and letter Resh.

[Razgovory]

It was my understanding that Kabbalah came much later, a product of the middle ages.

[Malthus]

We know that for centuries there was a tension between the desire of the Temple priesthood to maintain a central monopoly, and the reality that locals needed some sort of local outlet for worship and ceremonies.

I just don't think you can draw too much data from the way a synagogue was decorated. Survivals from that time period are so rare and incomplete that we can't know what was common in such places, and so it is difficult to draw firm conclusions. For all we know, drawing the symbols of the Temple was a sign of loyalty to the Priestly caste; that's  more or less as likely as that it demonstrated dissent from them.

Is the find important? Undoubtedly, as few such places have been found, and none decorated with mosaics etc. from that time period. Does the decoration have anything profound to say about the readiness of the local population to follow the new Jesus cult, as stated in the article? That's an almighty stretch.

[Martinus]

It was my understanding that Kabbalah came much later, a product of the middle ages.

It is actually connected to the second temple period, at least in a legendary way. The "foundation text", Zohar, is indeed younger (dated to 13th century) but the school of thought is deemed to be older.

[The Minsky Moment]

Sephirot and the like are much later. 

[The Minsky Moment]

We know that for centuries there was a tension between the desire of the Temple priesthood to maintain a central monopoly, and the reality that locals needed some sort of local outlet for worship and ceremonies.

I just don't think you can draw too much data from the way a synagogue was decorated. Survivals from that time period are so rare and incomplete that we can't know what was common in such places, and so it is difficult to draw firm conclusions. For all we know, drawing the symbols of the Temple was a sign of loyalty to the Priestly caste; that's  more or less as likely as that it demonstrated dissent from them.

All this is true.

[Martinus]

Sephirot and the like are much later.

Not in the tradition.

[The Brain]

It was my understanding that Kabbalah came much later, a product of the middle ages.

The Madonna has been around a long time.

[Martinus]

It was my understanding that Kabbalah came much later, a product of the middle ages.

The Madonna has been around a long time.

[dps]

Yeah in Judaism the Pharisees are the good guys and the founders of "modern" Judaism. Though since we are talking about the last 2 thousand years or so I use that term loosely.

I would imagine Jesus, if he existed and my views on him are correct, would have originally been on their team before he joined the cult of John the Baptist. Whatever being a Pharisee would have meant to an extremely poor landless laborer anyway.

From my reading of the Bible, my impression is that Jesus and his followers considered the many of the Pharisees overly rigid, sometimes corrupt, and a bit too concerned with politics and worldly affairs, but not fundamentally wrong on Jewish doctrine.  The Sadducees, OTOH, are pretty much stated to be wrong on certain doctrinal issues.

[jimmy olsen]

War...war never changes.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-brutal-massacre-may-be-earliest-evidence-war-180957884/?no-ist

An Ancient, Brutal Massacre May Be the Earliest Evidence of War

Even nomadic hunter-gatherers engaged in deliberate mass killings 10,000 years ago


By  Brian Handwerk 

smithsonian.com
January 20, 2016


kulls smashed by blunt force, bodies pin-cushioned by projectile points and hapless victims—including a pregnant woman—abused with their hands bound before receiving the fatal coup de grâce.

This violent tableau resembles something from the darker side of modern warfare. But it instead describes the grizzly demise of a group of African hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago. They are the victims of the earliest scientifically dated evidence for human group conflict—a precursor to what we now know as war.

The battered skeletons at Nataruk, west of Kenya's Lake Turkana, serve as sobering evidence that such brutal behavior occurred among nomadic peoples, long before more settled human societies arose. They also provide poignant clues that could help answer questions that have long plagued humanity: Why do we go to war, and where did our all too common practice of group violence originate?

"The injuries suffered by the people of Nataruk—men and women, pregnant or not, young and old—shock for their mercilessness," says Marta Mirazon Lahr of the University of Cambridge, who co-authored the study published today in the journal Nature. Still, she notes, "what we see at the prehistoric site of Nataruk is no different from the fights, wars and conquests that shaped so much of our history, and indeed sadly continue to shape our lives."

Nataruk's prehistoric killers did not bury their victims' bodies. Instead their remains were preserved after being submerged in a now dried lagoon, near the lake shore where they lived their final, terrifying moments during the wetter period of the late Pleistocene to early Holocene.

Researchers discovered the bones in 2012, identifying at least 27 individuals on the edge of a depression. The fossilized bodies were dated by radiocarbon dating and other techniques, as well as from samples of the shells and sediment surrounding them, to approximately 9,500 to 10,500 years ago.

It's not clear that anyone was spared at the Nataruk massacre. Of the 27 individuals found, eight were male and eight female, with five adults of unknown gender. The site also contained the partial remains of six children. Twelve of the skeletons were in a relatively complete state, and ten of those showed very clear evidence that they had met a violent end.

In the paper, the researchers describe "extreme blunt-force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men." Four of them, including a late-term pregnant woman, appear to have had their hands bound.



The murderers' motives are lost in the mists of time, but there are some plausible interpretations that could challenge conventional ideas about why people go to war. 

Warfare has often been associated with more advanced, sedentary societies that control territory and resources, farm extensively, store the foods they produce and develop social structures in which people exercise power over group actions. Conflict erupts between such groups when one wants what the other possesses.

The bodies at Nataruk provide evidence that these conditions aren't necessary for warfare, because the hunter-gatherers of the time lived a far simpler lifestyle. Yet the killings have the hallmarks of a planned attack rather than a violent chance encounter.

The killers carried weapons they wouldn't have used for hunting and fishing, Mirazon Lahr notes, including clubs of various sizes and a combination of close-proximity weapons like knives and distance weapons, including the arrow projectiles she calls a hallmark of inter-group conflict.

"This suggests premeditation and planning," Mirazon Lahr notes. Other, isolated examples of period violence have previously been found in the area, and those featured projectiles crafted of obsidian, which is rare in the area but also seen in the Nataruk wounds. This suggests that the attackers may have been from another area, and that multiple attacks were likely a feature of life at the time.

"This implies that the resources the people of Nataruk had at the time were valuable and worth fighting for, whether it was water, dried meat or fish, gathered nuts or indeed women and children. This shows that two of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies—control of territory and resources—were probably the same for these hunter-gatherers, and that we have underestimated their role in prehistory."

"This work is exciting and it suggests, at least to me, that this type behavior has deeper evolutionary roots," says Luke Glowacki, an anthropologist with Harvard University's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

We aren't the only species to engage in such behavior, he adds. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, regularly engage in lethal attacks. "To deliberately stalk and kill members of other groups, as the chimps do, that alone is very suggestive of an evolutionary basis for warfare," he says.


But evidence to support or refute such theories has been thin on the ground. The sparse previous examples of prehistoric violence can be interpreted as individual acts of aggression, like a 430,000-year-old murder victim found in Spain last year. That makes Nataruk a valuable data point in the fossil record.

More clues may be found among the behaviors of living peoples. Researchers can make inferences about conflict among early human hunter-gatherers by studying their closest living parallels, groups like the San of southern Africa. But such comparisons are tenuous, Glowacki notes.

"The San are very different from our ancestors. They live in nations, they are surrounded by pastoralists and they go to markets. That limits the utility of making inferences about our own past." Still there are other suggestions that resource competition isn't always at the root of human violence.

"In New Guinea for example, where there are abundant resources and land, you've traditionally seen very intense warfare driven by tribal and status dynamics," Glowacki says. "We don't have any way of knowing if that was involved at Nataruk."

And whatever its roots, warfare persists even in the same region of Africa: "This is still an area with a lot of intense violence in the 21st century," Glowacki notes. "It was eye-opening from my perspective that the first really good fossil evidence for warfare among ancient hunter-gatherers comes from a place where there is still, today, this ongoing intergroup violence."

But, the authors point out, there is another aspect of human behavior that has also stood the test of time.

"We should also not forget that humans, uniquely in the animal world, are also capable of extraordinary acts of altruism, compassion and caring," Mirazon Lahr says. "Clearly both are part of our nature."

[Valmy]

Huh. I thought it was a fundamental fact that ancient hunter/gatherer groups exterminated their enemies for control of their territory. It was, after all, a matter of life or death. My understanding was that slavery developed as a comparatively merciful way of handling defeated enemies.

But that may have just been a theory.

[Valmy]

Yeah in Judaism the Pharisees are the good guys and the founders of "modern" Judaism. Though since we are talking about the last 2 thousand years or so I use that term loosely.

I would imagine Jesus, if he existed and my views on him are correct, would have originally been on their team before he joined the cult of John the Baptist. Whatever being a Pharisee would have meant to an extremely poor landless laborer anyway.

From my reading of the Bible, my impression is that Jesus and his followers considered the many of the Pharisees overly rigid, sometimes corrupt, and a bit too concerned with politics and worldly affairs, but not fundamentally wrong on Jewish doctrine.  The Sadducees, OTOH, are pretty much stated to be wrong on certain doctrinal issues.

Yeah I would agree with that.