Palestine: People and Places

Palestine enjoys a typically Mediterranean climate, with hot summers, somewhat humid on the coast, and moderate winters with some rain--very little in the south. Rainfall varies from about 700 mm per year in the Galilee to about 500 mm in Judaea to under 100 mm in the Negev.   Fruits and grain were cultivated in the coastal plains and valleys while the hills were used for pasturage.

Places

The history of Romanization depends partly on the co-optation of the imperial center of local elites (the bouleutic class) and partly on urbanization--the growth of cities of the Greco-Roman type.  These cities, especially colonies like Caesarea, had municipal institutions and social life that connected the elite to Rome and the emperor.  They also had an urban fabric that supported this political and social life, a fabric that included amenities such as theaters and baths but also facilitated communication by land and sea with other cities.  Finally they controlled large territories and so brought peasants and villagers into the orbit of Greco-Roman culture.   Palestine outside of Judaea had a number of Hellenistic cities; their transformation into Greco-Roman cities and the foundation of new Greco-Roman cities began in the Herodian period, increased most markedly under the Severans, and reached saturation in Late Antiquity.  The map indicates the road system, which attained a great extent in the late second and early third century, with some subsequent additions.  Brief descriptions of some of the more important cities follow.   For bibliography click on the city title.

Ascalon
Ascalon (modern Ashkelon) constituted a large city from the Chalcolithic to the Mameluke periods (before 3000 BCE to the thirteenth century CE).   Its importance, like Gaza's, lay in its location in the border area between Palestine and Egypt and in its role as a port and trading center for southern Palestine.   Herod the Great embellished the city.  Mostly Gentile, it housed a large Jewish community.  Christians came to live here as well, and by the sixth century a bishop sat in Ascalon.  By the fourth century Ascalon had the status of a Roman colony.
Ascalon has seen large-scale excavations since 1985 as the Leon Levy Expedition has uncovered many Roman buildings and tombs, a synagogue and two churches, and a great variety of amphorae, which attest to the city's long-distance trade.  Still, the overall plan of the Roman city remains little known.

Beth Shean (Scythopolis)
Beth Shean overlooks the juncture of the Jezreel Valley and the Jordan Valley.   The classical and medieval city surrounds the commanding Bronze and Iron Age tel.   One of the cities of the Decapolis, Beth Shean--also and officially called Scythopolis in the Hellenistic and Roman periods--secured for itself autonomy from the client kings and then the Roman government until the second century.  Although a Jewish minority lived here, Beth Shean remained primarily a Gentile city, pagan until Late Antiquity.
Extensive excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Institute for Archaeology of Hebrew University began in the 1980s and have made the city center, which lies south of the tel, very well known.  In the second century the city received a layout of an approximately orthogonal plan including some colonnaded streets and lavish public buildings.  The latter include the finely preserved theater, an amphitheater, and the largest bath excavated in Israel.  Other features include the city walls, a church on the tel, and a synagogue--probably Samaritan--outside the city walls.

Caesarea Maritima
Herod founded Caesarea on the site of a Phoenician port town called Strato's Tower in 22-10/9 BCE and made it a showcase of his Hellenizing policy.  Josephus describes the new city at length (Jewish Wars 1.408-414; Jewish Antiquities 15.331-37, 16.136-41).  It had the usual amenities of a Greco-Roman city, notably a vast amphitheater (discovered in the early 1990s) and a magnificent harbor.  A temple of Roma and Augustus stood on an artificial platform overlooking the harbor.  Herod completed Caesarea's cultural orientation by instituting a Roman-style festival celebrated every four years.  The city grew progressively, reaching its greatest extent in the late antique period when a vast circuit of walls encompassed it.  These features, as well as a synagogue and a church, a hippodrome and a theater, aqueducts, and the overall city plan with many other architectural features, have received extensive archaeological investigation and considerable renovation.
After the death of Herod Roman governors made Caesarea their usual seat of government.   This Greek city had a large Jewish community, all but wiped out at the beginning of the First Jewish Revolt in 66.  The fledgling Christian congregation disappeared at the same time.  But both Christians and Jews returned and by the middle of the third century Caesarea housed brilliant schools of Jewish and Christian scholarship, and its bishop dominated the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Palestine until the rise of the bishop of Jerusalem in the fourth and firth centuries.
Caesarea has seen nearly continuous systematic excavation since the late 1950s.  The Missione Archaeologica Italiana's work on the center, the theater, and the city walls lasted from 1959 to 1964.  Avraham Negev worked especially in the city center in the early 1960s.  The Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima began its work in 1971 and the Combined Caesarea Expeditions in 1989; both excavated throughout the city and even beyond its walls.   Hebrew University mounted several excavations in various parts of the city in the 1970s and 1980s and the Israel Antiquities Authority conducted a major campaign just south of the center in the the early 1990s.  In the 1980s the Caesarea Ancient Harbor Excavation Project conducted maritime archaeological investigation of the harbor.

Eleutheropolis
Eleutheropolis (at the site of modern Beth Guvrin) became Idumaea's principal city in the late Roman period.   Aside from the small amphitheater, excavated since the 1980s, the city remains little known.Septimius Severus founded it about 200 and awarded it an immense territory reaching as far eastward as the Dead Sea

Gaza
This ancient city on the southeastern Mediterranean coast in the area on the border of Palestine and Egypt flourished under Roman rule.  A great center of pagan worship, it had many temples.  But a Jewish community also resided here, and the few known features of the site include a synagogue.  In Late Antiquity it hosted a famous school of rhetoric.
Herod ruled Gaza, which passed into the hands of the Roman governor in Syria in 4 BCE; by the mid second century--and possibly as early as 70--it lay within the province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina.  Gaza fell to the Arabs about 635, first of all Palestine's cities.

Jerusalem (Aelia Capitolina)
This ancient city sprawling over several hills in the Judaean desert but well watered by springs has seen continuous habitation ever since the Chalcolithic Period.   Herod transformed it into a Greco-Roman city with such great architectural projects as the temple on its artificial platform (seen here from the southwest) and several palaces; he also had entire quarters rebuilt (see esp Josephus Jewish Wars 5.136-247).  Jerusalem lost its administrative role when the Roman governors established their seat at Caesarea but retained its importance as the center of Judaism until its destruction in 70 CE.  From that time until the fourth century it remained a minor city.  In 130 Hadrian refounded it as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina and excluded Jews from its territory.  The soldiers of the tenth legion dominated the city until their departure at the end of the third century.
Extensive systematic excavations and salvage work since the late nineteenth century have redressed the dearth of information about the city between the time of Josephus and the explosion of Christian interest in the fourth century.  Beginning with Constantine Aelia enjoyed Christian expansion and building activity, and in the fifth century its bishop received patriarchal status.  It reached its greatest ancient extent in the sixth century.

Neapolis
The Flavians founded Neapolis (modern Nablus) near the ancient Samaritan site of Shechem in 72-73 CE, a Roman city in the heart of Samaria,  with a temple to Zeus on the sacred Mt Gerizim above the city.   Neapolis also had a hippodrome, theater, and other urban amenities.  Philip the Arab made it a Roman colony in 244.  The Christian presence increased in strength in Late Antiquity, and in 484 a Church of Mary replaced the temple to Zeus.

Sebaste
Samaria, a Greek town founded by Alexander the Great, became an important city when Herod enlarged and embellished it and renamed it Sebaste.  Septimius Severus made it a Roman colony, but in the third century it lost importance to Neapolis.  Excavations in 1932-35 revealed the Roman features of the city: a theater, stadium, forum, walls, and the Herodian temple of Augustus, whose ruins appear in this photograph.

Sepphoris
Sepphoris (moder Zippori), called Diocaesarea from the time of Hadrian or Antoninus Pius (early to mid second century), constituted a center of Judaism throughout the Roman period and served briefly (at the turn of the third century) as the seat of the patriarchate in the second century.   Although pro-Roman during the first Jewish War, it attracted many Jews who survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70.  A Christian community emerged but never seems to have outnumbered the Jewish community.  By the sixth century a bishop served Sepphoris.  The extensive excavations have exposed a great city of orthogonally planned colonnaded streets below the acropolis to the east, lavishly decorated buildings, and the usual public monumental buildings.  A residential area west of the acropolis housed Jews until 363, when the city suffered extensive damage from an earthquake in 363; thereafter it seems to have become a Christian quarter.  After 363 the city rapidly recovered and flourished in Late Antiquity.
The city has become increasingly well-known since the 1980s because of the systematic excavation by teams from the University of South Florida, the Joint Sepphoris Project, the Institute of Archaeology of Hebrew University, and Duke University.

Tiberias
Founded 18-20 CE by Herod Antipas as the capital of his kingdom, Tiberias has ever since constituted one of the principle cities of Galilee.  Agrippa II shifted the capital northward to the Syrian/Phoenician city Caesarea Philippi (Banyas) in 61, and after his death about 96 Tiberias became part of the Roman province Judaea.   Elagabalus (218-22) made it a Roman colony.  Nevertheless, Tiberias always remained a primarily Jewish city, and the Sanhedrin and Patriarchate moved here in the third century.  Tiberias constituted the center of Jewish religious life through the rest of antiquity and well into the medieval period.
The Talmud locates thirteen synagogues in Tiberias, but the salvage excavations that have exposed small parts of the ancient city have revealed only one of them.  Except for a campaign in 1973-74, Tiberias has received no systematic excavation; so only part of the city wall, the theater, a church, and a spectacular bathhouse of the sixth century have come to light.  Two more synagogues lie in the area of hot springs south of the city, at Hammath Tiberias.  One of these saw continuous use throughout the Roman period and in its fourth-century phase featured magnificent mosaics.

Peoples

Throughout Palestine, in the countryside and especially in the great cities of the coast and the Decapolis lived Gentiles--non-Jewish people.  Some of these people traced their descent from the Greek colonists settled by Alexander and his successors.  They worshiped Greek and Syrian gods in temples built in the Hellenistic style.  And they lived in cities or their territories with Greek political and cultural institutions and the public structures to house them: gymnasia, theaters, hippodromes, stoas.  There seems no way to establish the ethnic identity of any Gentile group in Palestine.  Fergus Millar characterized most Gentiles living in Palestine as Greco-Aramaic--and even the Jews, the only group with a clear ethnic self-definition, commonly spoke Aramaic.  To call these Gentiles "Greeks" or "Syrians" falsely suggests that we actually know something about their ethnic identity or about a homogenous cultural/ethnic group in southwestern Asia.

The Jews, by the beginning of the Roman period, had come to identify themselves not ethnically so much as religiously.  That identification focused on the Bible, canonized before the Roman period as the Tanak, consisting of the five books of Moses (the Torah), the books of the prophets (the Nebiim), and the writings (the Ketubim).  This identification outlasted any religious or political institutions thanks to the rabbi's colossal interpretation of the experience of defeat in the first and second centuries, an interpretation commensurate with the prophet's interpretation of defeat in the First Temple Period.  Religious life focused on the great festivals, pilgrimages to Jerusalem, daily observances (scriptural study, prayer), dietary restrictions and ritual purity, observation of the Sabbath, and attendance at synagogue for prayer, instruction, and meetings.  The accounts of Josephus, the New Testament, and the documents from the Judaean desert attest to the variety within Judaism of the first century that included such sects as the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Saducees, and the Christians.

All varieties of Judaism had more or less Hellenized by the Roman period--that is, Jews adopted the standard material culture of the Greco-Roman world and--with some variation--ate, dressed, and built like Gentiles.  Hebrew had fallen out of everyday use, and the Jews spoke the prevailing languages of the area: Aramaic and Greek (the picture shows a piece of a Jewish tombstone from late antique Caesarea, written in Greek but carrying Jewish names, symbols, and title: priest).  In the hands of some philosophers, such as Philo, even the theology and interpretation of the Bible had Hellenized.  Some purists--Essenes, for example, and the amorphous groups known as Zealots and sicarii (some of whom seem more like bandits or politically motivated terrorists than like religious puritans)--decried the extent of Hellenization within Judaism and tried to preserve or restore the True Israel by withdrawal into the desert, by militancy, or by both.  From them emerged the violent Messianism that in times of political distress erupted into popular rebellion against Roman rule, especially during the two great revolts of 66-73/74 and 132-35.

Before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE the Jews also had powerful political and religious institutions to help them establish an identity, especially vis-à-vis the Romans: the priesthood and the calendar of festivals, all focusing on the temple cult in Jerusalem, and the Sanhedrin or council of aristocratic Jews under the presidency of the Chief Priest.  Jerusalem constituted the geographical and imaginary center of Judaism (imaginary because it remained a center even after its destruction) even for the Jews living outside Palestine in the scattered communities of the Diaspora.   Until 70 CE the Romans or their client kings appointed the Chief Priest, but left to him and the Sanhedrin control over the internal affairs of Jewish regions of Palestine.   Local leaders owed their position to the Sanhedrin.  Autonomous Jewish areas or communities included Jerusalem and the villages of Judaea, the Jordan valley, and Peraea; the Jewish communities in otherwise Gentile cities on the coast; and the rural villages of Galilee and Idumaea where the Hasmoneans and Herod had forced the Gentiles to convert to Judaism.  The disaster of the Bar Cochba Revolt in 135 entailed a profound demographic consequence: the nearly complete removal of Jews from Judaea, which the Romans repopulated with Gentiles.

For the most part the aristocratic Jewish leadership fit well into the pattern of Roman rule via co-optation of local elites.  But in 66 CE Jewish leaders failed to contain popular resistance to Roman rule and, rather than let it destroy them, they joined the revolt.  After 70 and the dissolution of the Sanhedrin the Romans no longer permitted the Jews to handle their own affairs except in cities (eg, Tiberias and Sepphoris) with enough well-off Jews that they could dominate the Roman-style municipal government.  Religious leadership passed to a group of scholar/teachers or rabbis who settled at Iamnia in the coastal plain southwest of Jerusalem.  They established a court that gradually acquired the religious and judicial authority of the Sanhedrin.   After the Bar Cochba Revolt this group moved to the Galilee and settled in a series of towns until it became permanently established in Tiberias as a reconstituted Sanhedrin under the leadership of a patriarch.  This religious leadership held the respect of and received regular contributions from the Jews of the Diaspora.  The scholars of Tiberias also formulated the new style of Judaism known as rabbinic Judaism and prepared their people for a long future without large-scale formal religious institutions and without political autonomy.  Gradually, over the second and third centuries, the patriarchate came to hold civil power as well as religious authority as the Romans recognized the patriarch as the representative of the Jews.  This role ended in the Christian era of Late Antiquity.

The Samaritans did not differ ethnically from the Jews, but due to their religious heterodoxy in the Hasmonean period they suffered a negative identification on the part of the southern Israelites and, in consequence, persecution.   In 110 BCE John Hyrcanus destroyed their temple and city (Shechem) at Mt Gerizim.   But they rebuilt and continued to flourish during the Herodian and Roman period despite official attempts to destroy their identity by acts of terrorism and the foundation of colonies and planting of military garrisons among them.  The Samaritans concentrated in Samaria, although the cities of Samaria-Sebaste and Scythopolis remained mostly Gentile.  Samaritans also lived in the territories of the cities of the coastal plain.

The Christians emerged as a sect within Judaism.  They had limited success in winning Jewish converts (called Minim from the second century), and under the leadership of the apostles in the first generation turned their efforts at proselytism toward the Gentiles much more successfully.  The small Christian community of Jerusalem did not join the Jews in their revolts, but Jewish members could not remain after 135.  The small congregation in Jerusalem thus became wholly Gentile.  Not until the fourth century and the beginning of imperial patronage did a significant congregation rise there, and only at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 did the bishop of Jerusalem, hitherto subordinate to the see of Caesarea, attain patriarchal status.  In late antiquity Christians constituted the majority of the population in all of Palestine.  The picture shows the tombstone of a Christian family, George, Anastasia, and their children; note the crosses placed before and below the text.

The nomads of the desert regions to the east and south, called by such names as Arabs, Tent-dwellers, and Saracens, represent not a single ethnic group but peoples whose style of living threatened Roman security and so precipitated the formation of the limes.  The degree to which they settled in Palestine in the Roman and late antique periods remains unclear.

Descendants of the Nabataeans (themselves sometimes called Arabs) presumably still lived in southern Palestine after the absorption of their kingdom by the Romans in 106, although their language rapidly went out of use thereafter.

A number of Romans, finally, sojourned in Palestine, usually in consequence of their official duties.  These people included thousands of soldiers and scores of governors, commanders, administrators, and their staffs.  They originated from all over the Mediterranean but especially Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Syria.  They spoke Latin and whatever native languages they came to Palestine with; educated Romans, of course, commanded Greek as well.  But Latin gradually went out of use in Palestine--as throughout the eastern empire--during the third century, and Greek replaced it as the language of government.

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copyright  Last update 22 February 2007.