Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

148 CHAPTER FOUR

completelyinaccessible.Wemayinferfromthestoriesinourpassage,though,
that on the whole the depaganization of Tiberias (in the later third century?)
wasnottheworkoftherabbis.Iftherabbishadbroughtaboutthetransforma-
tion of the city by natural means, there would have been no need to claim
that they had done so by supernatural ones.

TIBERIANINSCRIPTIONS^68

There is little in the inscriptions of the second and third centuries to warn us
of the city’s subsequent transformation. Most of the inscriptions in question
are funerary, and as such require some introductory remarks. A noteworthy
characteristic of these inscriptions is the absence of any discernible “Jewish”
content: the deceased are not designated asIoudaioi; no one thought to in-
clude in their epitaphs such biblically derived prayers as “may the memory
of a righteous man (or woman) be a blessing,” or “may his (or her) soul be
bound in the bundle of life”; the epitaphs do not conclude with the Hebrew
wordshalom, nor do they mark the Jewishness of the deceased with such
symbolsasthemenorah,shofar,palmbranch,orrosette.Allofthesepractices
becamecommoninJewishepitaphsbeginninginthefourthcentury,butJews
seemrarelytohavefeltconstrainedtomarkthemselvesassuchontheirfuner-
ary inscriptions previously.
Why? Burial practice (unlike mourning ritual) was a surprisingly marginal
issueinJewishlawinantiquity.TheBibleoffersnoguidance,exceptbyimpli-
cation,andfar-reachingchangesareknowntohaveoccurredinJewishburial
practiceinthesecondandfirstcenturiesB.C.E:burialinkokhim(long,narrow
shelves dug perpendicular to the wall of the cave) was introduced, as well as
the practice of ossilegiu m(collection and reburial of bones), which left no
traceintheabundantreligiouspolemicalliteratureoftheperiod.^69 Therabbis
took for granted a corpus of established burial practice—which had again

(^68) The main collections are M. Schwabe, “Letoldot Teveryah: Mehqar Epigrafi”; and L. di
Segni, “Ketovot Teveryah,” in Y. Hirschfeld, ed.,Teveryah. Schwabe’s restorations (not always
followed by di Segni) of some of the most fragmentary texts are speculative.
(^69) See R. Hachlili, “Changes in Burial Practice in the Late Second Temple Period: The Evi-
dence fro mJericho,” in Y. Singer, ed.,GravesandBurialPracticesinIsraelintheAncientPeriod
(Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi/IES, 1994), pp. 173–89. This failure of shifts in burial practice to be
meaningfullyrelatabletootherideologicalshiftsisparalleledbytheRomanchangefromcrema-
tion to inhumation in the second centuryC.E. See A. D. Nock, “Cremation and Burial in the
Roman Empire,” in Z. Stewart, ed.,Essays on Religion and the Ancient World(Oxford:
Clarendon, 1972), 1: 277–307, arguing that the shift was not very meaningful, largely a matter
of“fashion,”andcertainlynotassociatedwithanychangeinviewsabouttheafterlife;forasimilar
argumentabouttheJewishevidence,see,inthesamevolumeasHachlili,N.Rubin,“Secondary
Burials in the Mishnaic and Talmudic Periods: A Proposed Model of the Relationship of Social
Structure toBurial Practice,” pp.248–69; in general,Rubin,TheEndofLife:RitesofBurialand
MourningintheTalmudandMidrash(Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uhad, 1997).