NEWS FEATURE: Ancient Galilee _ more than Jesus

c. 1998 Religion News Service LOS ANGELES _ As movie theaters nationwide await the Dec. 18th opening of the animated biblical epic,”The Prince of Egypt,”a host of archaeology lectures here on recent discoveries by archaeologists in the Middle East are reminding Americans that ancient Galilee is about more than”one first century Jew”_ Jesus. Over the […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES _ As movie theaters nationwide await the Dec. 18th opening of the animated biblical epic,”The Prince of Egypt,”a host of archaeology lectures here on recent discoveries by archaeologists in the Middle East are reminding Americans that ancient Galilee is about more than”one first century Jew”_ Jesus.

Over the past several weeks, speakers from Vanderbilt and Duke universities, Rome’s Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology as well as Israel’s Bar Ilan and Haifa universities, have sought to inform Americans of the complex life of ancient Israel and its neighbors.


Simple things like charity in Galilean towns can be misinterpreted by modern people who may think a town’s poor were there only for Jesus to feed, said Steven Fine, a professor of rabbinic literature and history at the Baltimore Hebrew University.”One shouldn’t live in a town where proper charity isn’t distributed,”Fine said in a Nov. 30 lecture at the University of Judaism here, spelling out what he said were the old Jewish requirements of what a proper Galilean town should have.”They assumed a local community was responsible for taking care of its poor, wherever it was in Israel.” Meanwhile, the Skirball Cultural Center, a large Jewish art museum, and the UCLA Institute of Archaeology hosted an all-day conference,”Crossing Borders: Ancient Egypt, Canaan & Israel”which brought scholars from several University of California campuses, Harvard, the University of Chicago and Southern Methodist University.

Linking the lectures was the theme that the ancient world was far less divided yet more fluid than either Hollywood or current Middle East politics would have Americans believe.”In reality there were no firm borders in antiquity; to understand change in any society, we must examine extra-regional exchanges,”said Thomas Levy, chair of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.”Many archaeologists have ignored the impact of neighboring cultures on stabilizing social evolution or promoting change.” Levy, speaking at the Skirball center, said the 1979 Egypt-Israeli peace accord allowed more cross-border contacts between the Egyptologists in one country and Judean scholars in the other.

Because of antiquity’s less rigid borders, trade between Egypt and Israel was stronger than previously assumed.”The more complex social-political systems required large quantities of externally derived goods and information,”Levy said.”The more complex the social-political hierarchy in any society, the more imports are needed to support and extend its power.” Another Skirball speaker, Hebrew professor Richard Elliott Friedman, was a consultant on the forthcoming”The Prince of Egypt,”which he said is an exception to Hollywood’s”usually pretty bad”Bible movies.

While scholars have debated the Bible’s accuracy for centuries, Friedman said the Old Testament represents,”the first great long work of prose written anywhere on earth.””A nation born in slavery in Egypt, that is not the kind of thing you make up,”said Friedman.”If you’re making up history, it’s that you were descended from gods or kings, not from slaves. There’s no percentage in that. So it’s believable.” Fine, meanwhile, told his audience that in ancient Galilee, Jewish burial was like Roman burial and that Christian graves were affixed with crosses only later. “It was only within a couple of hundred years after the end of the crucifixion, that somebody made it a Christian symbol,”he said.”Anybody who has ever seen a crucifixion would not use it as a symbol. Crucifixion was too ghastly.” Before Rome banned crucifixion, Fine said,”Christians sometimes used a fish or shepherd or a ship,”to signify graves of those who followed Jesus as fishermen or shepherds.

Jews and Christians were united in preaching to their flocks against going to Galilee’s 8,000-seat amphitheater for Roman gladiatorial games and pagan sacrifices. But that was about the extent of local Jewish-Christian unity,”he added.

At Skirball’s symposium, Anthony Loprieno, chair of the Near Eastern Cultures department at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Egyptians displayed such strong interests in archaeology that one pharaoh’s son,”was the first documented archaeologist of humankind.” In an Egyptian culture rich with libraries”you have a central role which is played by the book, pretty much in the modern sense, not just by a text, by a series of texts, by a classification of texts,”he said.

Unlike rapid change in modern life, Loprieno said the ancient world’s gradual changes seeped across borders. For example, an Egyptian oven might look like one in a Canaanite home.”When the changes are so slow and so global within a civilization, what we should be looking for is perhaps common patterns in these civilizations, common patterns of intellectual development.””Israel and Egypt end up creating some kind of a similar religious horizon. If (ancient historian) Herodotus at the same time had been visiting Jerusalem, he might have probably written exactly the same things that he wrote about the Egyptians,”Loprieno said.


Added Friedman:”The final implication of all of this is that, in the largest sense, Israel’s destiny was always linked to Egypt even more than we thought before.”

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