Eretz Israel in Late Antiquity: Introductions and Studies, Volume One

Eretz Israel in Late Antiquity: Introductions and Studies, Volume One

Editors Joseph Patrich, Ora Limor, and Hillel Newman

Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 2002

ISBN: 0 2220007501 5

Read by the author in 2023-4, purchased during Hebrew Book Week, June 2023

One of the first steps I took before writing ArchitecTorah was approaching a professor and asking for a reading list of books on architecture in the Talmud. At the top of his list, and indeed the very first scholarly book I read on the subject, was Yoram Tsafrir's Eretz Israel from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the Muslim Conquest, Volume II: Archaeology and Art. That book, also published by Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, was a great introduction to the world of archaeology, architecture, and rabbinic literature, as it discusses most of the major building types in the country and brings in archaeological evidence as well as some rabbinic sources. 

A lot of spades have been turned since the 1984 publication of that book, and the new two-volume set, though limited in time to the Byzantine period, is a welcome new version of the same idea. So far I have read volume one (640 pages) and about another 300 pages of volume two. The book is a little dryer than Tsafrir's offering, but brings in much new information and new methodologies, with forty years of new papers and excavation reports to reference. As someone who is not in the field of archaeology (or Jewish Studies, for that matter), this can be very useful. To offer one very simple example, while I read Hirschfeld's book on residential architecture, I hadn't read some of the criticisms on it or some of the newer papers on the subject. In this manner, the book is a valuable resource as a starting point for research. 

The book is not entirely composed of architectural content, and for someone with my interests the first two sections - beyond the introductory chapter - were beyond dull. It was a slog getting through all the church leaders and ecclesiastic history. I appreciate the background, theoretically, but in practice I can't imagine ever returning to those chapters. 

Things got much more interesting in Section III, Cities and Villages, where editor Joseph Patrich got to shine. Every essay in this section was full of useful and interesting information. The brief chapter on agricultural buildings was a nice overview, while it's clear that studies on city vs country have come a long way since Krauss' day. I found the discussions about population booms to be informative and unexpected.

Volume II contains much more architecture, and I'm looking forward to refreshing my knowledge on additional building types.