The Galilee in Late Antiquity (review)

166 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 His attacks on jeremias's perspective perhaps enable Sanders to overlook an aporia in his own. Although "orthopraxy" is his stated concern, he tends to de-emphasize the importance of diversity and disagreement within early judaism (d. pp. 197,201,207,229,231, 236ff.). He is good at distinguishing the idiosyncrasies of Zealots (pp. 280ff.) and Essenes (p. 352), and he knows-following Neusner-that the Pharisees' take on purity distinguished them from other groups (pp. 387ff., 428ff., 442-443). But his invocation of "covenantal nomism" as that which made jews seem jewish (to insiders and outsiders) leads Sanders to posit a commonjudaism where there were more likely variant, practica1)udaisms. Sanders's book represents the state of the art with which scholars of the New Testament evaluate early judaism: it is critical, up to date (but for the notable omission to mention the Targumim), and lucid. But the transition from the older, dogmatic definition of judaism to the practical and systematic approach of recent scholarship is not yet complete. Students should read the book with a good teacher (and perhaps also a copy ofJeremias) within easy reach. Bruce Chilton Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion Bard College The Galilee in Late Antiquity, edited by Lee 1. Levine. New York: The jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992. 410 pp. $35.00. Galilee is, for Christians, the "sea" on which Jesus walked, around which his early ministry unfolded. For most "the Galilee" is the home of the am-ha-aretz, the country bumpkins of late antiquity. By contrast with Judea to the south, the Galilee has generally been considered an unsophisticated region in late antiquity. The book under review here is a collection of essays demonstrating that the Galilee enjoyed a much more vigorous life than this image suggests. The editor has gathered twenty studies under six headings: 1. Early Christianity in the Galilee, 2. Aspects of Galilean Society, 3. Roman Rule in the Galilee, 4. Rabbis and Galilean Jewry in Late Antiquity, 5. Language and Literature in the Galilee, and 6. Archeological Evidence in the Galilee. The authors of these essays are drawn from a wide cross-section of seasoned scholars. Each one participated in the First International Book Reviews 167 Conference on Galilean Studies in Late Antiquity that met at Kibbutz Hanaton in the Lower Galilee, Israel, August 13-15, 1989. One can only envy the privilege of taking part in such a colloquy. For three days the panicipants enjoyed unhurried hours of listening to and discussing one another's papers in the morning, followed by afternoon field trips to archaeological sites. , The authors make clear that the Galilee was a highly developed area before the fall ofJerusalem to Titus in 70 C.E., a calamity that forced many Judean Jews to flee northward. Clark Kee observes that "the cities and trade routes of the Galilee in the first century C.E., and especially the Via Maris near where Jesus grew up, were among the busiest in ancient Palestine." This was possible because there was not the extensive anti-Roman activity there that disrupted Judea. Uriel Rappaport argues that unlike Judea, the Galilee had few pockets of unrest other than Jotapata and Gamla. Sepphoris, Tiberias, and Gischala, in fact, opened their gates to welcome the Romans. People there largely resisted the inducements to unrest ofJesus, son of Sapphias, mentioned by Josephus. Gary Rendsburg proposes that Mishnaic Hebrew developed in the Galilee, where eventually the Mishna was codified at the end of the second century. Schiffman argues that there was not a distinctly different Galilean halacha. Instead, certain local Galilean customs are mentioned in the Mishna, while the Galilee shared the tannaitic traditions usually associated with the rabbis ofJudea. In the Galilee there may have been even greater stringency in observing the halacha. The Aramaic of the Targums mirrors the Hebrew spoken by Galilean Jews. Thus, the idioms in which later Jews learned their tradition came not only from Judean rabbis, but from the Galilee. The Galilee helped considerably to shape the character of later Judaism. Gideon Foerster's argument concerning the early presence of synagogues in the Galilee is supported more...