The arrival of Alexander the Great in the southern Levant ushered in many changes, and the subsequent period saw many more upheavals, including the Roman conquest, the Jewish revolts, and the gradual Christianization of the Holy Land. Throughout this period, many local ‘pagan’, Jewish, and Christian cults and cultic places dotted the local landscape of the southern Levant, which today covers the area of Israel, Jordan, and parts of Lebanon and southern Syria. These cults underwent processes of profound change, but also preserved much of their older identities while still interacting with each other.
This volume seeks to present these processes both synchronically and diachronically, along three different axes – cultic places, personnel, and objects. The common denominator shared by these three axes is the people whose beliefs and practices shaped religious behaviour in the Greco-Roman southern Levant. The 18 articles in this volume investigate whether cultic practices formed a coherent cultural system. They consider the co-existence and competition of the different religious systems, analyzing them in terms of continuity, discontinuity, and change over an extended period of time, roughly from the arrival of Alexander the Great to the Imperial integration of Christianity (ca. late fourth century BCE - early fifth century CE). The approaches presented in the volume are varied and interdisciplinary, combining archaeological, philological, historical, and art-historical analyses of multiple bodies of evidence
Author(s): Oren Tal, Zeev Weiss
Series: Contextualizing the Sacred, 6
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 309
City: Turnhout
List of Illustrations
Expressions of Cult in the Southern Levant in the Greco-Roman Period: Introductory Remarks — OREN TAL AND ZEEV WEISS
Part I: Cult in Context
Cults in Contexts in Hellenistic and Roman Southern Levant: The Challenge of Cult Places — NICOLE BELAYCHE
Cult and Culture: Amusing the Crowds under the Auspices of Gods and Caesars — ZEEV WEISS
Aurelian and the Cult of the Unconquerable Sun: The Institutionalization of Christmas, Solar Worship and Imperial Cult — MICHELE RENEE SALZMAN
The Beginnings of Philosophy of Religion and the Fate of Polytheism in the Late Antique Levant — ROBERT LAMBERTON
Part II: Cult and Cult Places in the Urban Sphere
People and Gods in the Cities of Roman Palestine: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Popularity of Civic Cults — AVNER ECKER
Deities at the Service of Cities and PeopleL Sculpted Images from Caesarea Maritima — RIVKA GERSHT
Markers of Pagan Cults in a Jewish City: Rethinking the Hadrianeum of Tiberias — SHULAMIT MILLER
Part III: Cultic Practices beyond the Temple Premises
Votive Offerings from the Late Roman Period in the Te’omim Cave, Western Jerusalem Hills — BOAZ ZISSU, EITAN KLEIN, URI DAVIDOVICH, RO’I PORAT, BOAZ LANGFORD, AND AMOS FRUMKIN
A Mediterranean Overview on Painted Motifs in the Southern Levant — ALIX BARBET
(Presumable) Cultic Artefacts from Domestic Contexts at Dora — RENATE ROSENTHAL-HEGINBOTTOM
Magic in the Cemeteries of Late Antique Palestine — GIDEON BOHAK
More Than Trash: Cultic Use of Pottery Lamps Found in Late Antique Dumps: Apollonia (Sozousa) as a Test Case — OREN TAL AND ITAMAR TAXEL
Part IV: Coins as Evidencing Cult
Coin Iconography and Archaeology: Methodological Considerations about Architectural Depictions on City Coins of Palestine — ACHIM LICHTENBERGER
Heroes and Deities on the Coins of Gaza under Roman Rule: The Case of Io, the Argive Nymph and Minos, The Mythic King of Crete — YOAV FARHI
Unpublished Coin Type of a Nursing Woman — GABRIELA BIJOVSKY
Part V: Cult-related Issues of Jewish Faith
Temple, Cult, and Consumption in Second Temple Jerusalem — HAYIM LAPIN
Debt Fraud, Ḥērem Entrapment, and Other Crimes Involving Cultic Property in Late Hellenistic and Early Roman Judea — BENJAMIN D. GORDON
The Decline of Jewish Ritual Purity Observance in Roman Palaestina: An Archaeological Perspective on Chronology and Historical Context — YONATAN ADLER
Index
