Um Rihan: A Village of the Mishnah

 

Um Rihan: A Village of the Mishnah

Shimon Dar, Zeev Safrai, Yigael Tepper

Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986

Read by the author in 2009 and reread in 2024, purchased for 65 NIS

I first came across this book in the introduction for Daniel Sperber's The City in Roman Palestine. Sperber describes it as  "A fine analysis of a village in Samaria from the Mishnaic period," where "Rabbinic sources were utilized to interpret the archeological findings." I made a point of reading most of the books mentioned in that introduction and was able to track down a copy of the book second-hand. The first time I read the book it was soon enough after my aliya that there are many Hebrew words underlined and translated. 

As Sperber explained, the book is basically an archaeological study of a village, but tries to use the archaeological remains to illustrate or identify specific urban terms that come up in the Mishnah. This is perhaps the opposite tact of most attempts to use realia to explain rabbinic literature, which start with the rabbinic texts and then seek field examples as illustrations. Here, rather, the authors start with the archaeology and try to match up their findings with tannaitic passages. The authors explain in their introduction that this serves as a type of correction to Krauss' work, which by necessity ignored archaeological data and tried to reconstruct the landscape using only rabbinic texts. 

To give a few examples: the authors describe the passages, alleyways, courtyards and piazzas of the town, and then compare this with texts mentioning mevo'ot, hatzerot, rehavot, paltiya, etc. Remains of storefronts are discussed and then compared to texts which describe similar arrangements. Water cisterns, defensive architecture, as well as agricultural buildings are treated in a similar manner. 

As a postscript, a few years after reading this I was invited to speak in Ariel University about historic preservation in Rosh Haayin and was given a copy of the journal of their school of architecture, Architext as a present. This bilingual volume (III) contained an essay by Michal Moshe entitled "The Remains of Local Architecture - Umm Rayhan as an Example." While most of this essay is an summary of the book, stripped of reference to rabbinic literature, Moshe does present a different view of how this town developed, analyzes the spaces from the point of view of private and public space, and attempts to draw out some conclusions about local urban planning in that period.