A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter twenty-five
The Great SeaIn the Hebrew Bible, the ancient Israelites refer to the Mediterranean as the Great
Sea. From the hilltops of their small-scale society in the central highlands of Palestine
it might have been distinguishable as a thin blue edge on the distant western horizon.
Unlike the Israelites, who had a landward orientation, their closely-related Phoenician
neighbors came to live on the waters and capitalize on the opportunities the sea
offered. The Bible’s inclination toward land leads it to all but ignore the trans-marine
origins of ancient Israel’s archrivals, the Philistines, whose probable Aegean back-
ground is of little consequence for the Bible’s narratives of struggle between the
highlands and the coastal plain. Nonetheless, the Bible’s land-based viewpoint, char-
acterized by narratives of Egyptian captivity, desert revelation, and the long engage-
ment with Mesopotamia’s great land empires, and by law codes designed for an
agrarian society, does not succumb to a wholly landlubber perspective. The Bible
incorporates a modicum of knowledge of far-flung lands. For example, it mentions
the ships of Tarshish that range far, and important ports of the Land of Israel appear
often in the text, including Jaffa and Acre on the Mediterranean (Stieglitz, 2000;
Patai, 1998).
In the post-biblical era, the building program of Herod the Great (died 4 bce)
repositioned the land of the Jews within the notional geography of the Roman
Mediterranean, in part through a re-conceptualization of the Jewish Temple of
Jerusalem as a famous attraction. At the same time, Jewish connections to the
Mediterranean were intensified by the construction of a great seaport at Caesarea.
Herod’s engagement with the wider Mediterranean and Roman worlds only ampli-
fied the multicultural interactions between Jews and others that had begun in the
Hellenistic era, in the later part of which the Hasmonean Jewish rulers of Judea and
the Galilee were able to play off Near-Eastern Seleucid hegemony against distant
Mediterranean Roman power. That Jews increasingly were engaged in seafaring
(Kashtan, 2000) is reflected in the late antique literature of the rabbis, which
Jews
Fred aStren