104 CHAPTER THREElimited to rabbis. As for the patriarchs, they acquired much of their influence
precisely by relaxing their ties to the rabbis and allying themselves instead with
Palestinian city councillors, wealthy Diaspora Jews, and prominent gentiles.
Both rabbis and patriarchs were probably convinced that they had a right
to exercise legal authority over the Jews by virtue of belonging to the class of
scribes/Torah experts (furthermore, some of them were priests), a class em-
powered by the Torah itself. Yet in the wake of the Destruction and the Bar
Kokhba revolt, and the imposition of direct Roman rule in Palestine, the
Tora hand its representatives lost t heir institutional position and muc hof t heir
prestige, and they and their successors spent the rest of antiquity struggling to
restore them. For the rabbis, the struggle did not finally succeed until the rise
of Islam, at earliest. The patriarchate’s meteoric rise in the fourth century
predetermined its meteoritic fall in the early fifth. Indeed, even the restoration
of the Torah to the center of Jewish life in late antiquity (to be discussed in
part 3 of this book), though it may have set the stage for the official empow-
erment of the rabbis in the seventh century and following, occurred largely
independently of rabbinic influence and in many places generated varieties
of Judaism that were strikingly nonrabbinic. We need, therefore, to keep the
rabbis to one side if we wish to understand the character of Jewish society
between 70 and 640—a fortiori between 70 and 350.
If not the rabbis, then who? Rather surprisingly, no one, for there was not
really any Jewis hsociety to lead. In c hapter 4, I will discussseriatimvarious
bodies of evidence—autonomous bronze city coinage, other archaeological
finds, some rabbinic accounts of the public life of the Palestinian cities, funer-
ary inscriptions from Tiberias, and inscriptions and art from the necropolis at
Beth Shearim. All this material is mutually confirmatory in indicating that
Jewish Palestine between c.100 and 350 scarcely differed from any other high
imperial provincial society. All legal authority and political power were in the
hands of the Roman state and its local representatives, and the cultural norms,
even in the countryside, were overwhelmingly set by the elites of the Palestin-
ian cities, including such “Jewish” cities as Tiberias, Sepphoris, and Lydda.
These norms were pervaded by pagan religiosity and were basically shared by
imperial Greek cities generally.
Part of the evidentiary foundation of my thesis is the pagan iconography
that is so common in high imperial Palestinian art and decoration. Much of
this material has long been familiar, though the recent excavations at Sep-
phoris have considerably added to the corpus. But it has also long been con-
ventional to juxtapose it with the iconography of the necropolis at Beth
Shearim and of the Palestinian synagogues, which mixes pagan and Jewish
elements, and furthermore to see the whole complex of material through the
prism of rabbinic prescriptions and presuppositions. Many scholars have
sought to provide judaizing interpretations of the pagan material or, where
that seemed implausible, to dismiss it either as trivial ornamentation or as