Ethnic Identity monumental form. The known cases are few, but just sufficient for our pur-
poses. There are in fact two examples of Samaritan mosaic inscriptions from
this period, at Tel Qasile (Ramat Aviv) and at Sha‘albim, both fairly brief.^66
It is very significant that both are bilingual, in Hebrew (in Samaritan script)
and Greek. That immediately raises the question, which applies with even
more force to the Jewish community of Palestine, of what the everyday lan-
guage of the Samaritans really was: presumably a particular variety of Ara-
maic, or in other words what a Graeco-Roman observer, had there been any,
would have called ‘‘the Syrian language’’? Or perhaps they will have used just
the same variety as might (as Theodoret seems to imply, text to n. above)
have been spoken by any of the ‘‘Palaistinoi,’’ whether gentile, Samaritan, or
Jewish? Or was their everyday language in fact Greek?
The idea that in reality all the conflicting religious or ethnic communi-
ties of Palestine might have used both a version of ‘‘the Syrian language’’
and Greek, but in different ways, has a lot to commend it. The Jews and
Samaritans were, of course, distinctive in basing their identity on a sacred
text in Hebrew, the whole Bible in the one case and only the Pentateuch
in the other. In the Jewish case a more recent work composed in Hebrew
was also of central importance, namely the Mishnah, apparently compiled
in the early third century, and accompanied by a mass of further writing in
Hebrew, theTosefta(‘‘addition’’). We can be certain of the centrality of the
Mishnah, since both the ‘‘Palestinian’’ and the ‘‘Babylonian’’ Talmuds are in
effect commentaries on it. Both of them, however, as preserved, are written
indialectsofAramaic.^67 We can therefore presume a knowledge of Bibli-
cal Hebrew, and a capacity on the part of at least some people to read and
understand Mishnaic Hebrew. The vast mass of material, with many Greek
loan-words, represented by the ‘‘Palestinian’’ Talmud, a composition belong-
ing to this broad period, strongly suggests that the Jewish version of ‘‘the
Syrian language’’ was at leastalanguage of common use in Palestine, without
proving whether it was different from the Samaritan or Christian versions,
or whether or not either Hebrew on the one hand or Greek on the other
(as opposed to individual Greek loan-words) were also current in daily life
among Jews.
The place-names reflected in the surviving sections of the ‘‘Palestinian’’
Talmud give a clear indication of the broad geographical zone from which
. See R. Ovadiah and A. Ovadiah,Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine Mosaic Pave-
ments in Israel(), nos. and .
. For a basic guide, H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger,Introduction to the Talmud and
Midrash().