154 CHAPTER FOURor controversial dating and function and Beth Shearim, with its basilica.^87
These findsconfir mthei mpression createdby rabbinicliterature that thebig
villages of Lower Galilee were in close contact with the cities. They also
confor mwith what Fergus Millar observed about high i mperial Syria gener-
ally—the tendency of large villages to adopt the institutions and cultural
norms of the cities.^88 Presumably the chief mechanism of the transformation
wastheambitionofthemostprosperousvillagelandownerstosecurefortheir
villages some urban prestige and even, in some cases, city status.
The most extensive nonurban remains from our period come from its very
end, from the middle of the third to the middle of the fourth centuries—the
period of transition fro mhigh to late e mpire or perhaps even a bit later.^89
These are fro mthe big Lower Galilean village of Beth Sheari m, where the
most prominent feature is the vast necropolis. Although most burials in high
imperial Palestine were, like those of the later Second Temple period, made
in single underground chambers or very small cave complexes, twenty cave
complexes were found at Beth Shearim, some of them containing hundreds
of burials. From the inscriptions we know that the primary catchment of the
necropolis was not only local but regional, and it included some Diaspora
communitiesaswell.^90 AlsoatypicalofhighimperialPalestinianburialsisthat
at BethShearim Jewish symbolsare carved and scratchedalmost everywhere.
It seems obvious that the burial caves of Beth Shearim were used mainly by
especially Torah-orientedJews, who evenin the third centuryremained close
to the traditional symbolic center of Judaism. Indeed, if it is the case that
evenstrongly “Jewish”Jewswere oftenburiedwithoutthe accompanimentof
Jewish iconography—that despite what we are accustomed to think about
such liminal moments as birth, death, marriage, and so on, death was not yet
generally an occasion among Palestinian Jewsfor strong public affirmation of
group identity—then Beth Sheari mshows that the judaization of Jewish
(^87) For er-Rama, see V. Tsaferis, “A Roman Bath at Rama,”Atiqot, Eng. ser., 14 (1980): 66–75;
for Capernaum, seeNEAEHL, s.v.; for Beth Shearim, see below.
(^88) See Millar,Roman Near East, pp. 17–24; cf. Goodman,State and Society, pp. 27–28. For
other Palestinian examples, note Roth-Gerson,Greek Inscriptions, no. 30; L. Y. Rahmani, “A
Bilingual Ossuary Inscription fro mKhirbet Zif,”IEJ22 (1972): 113–16; pace Rahmani, there is
noparticularreasontothinkthedeceasedhadanyconnectionwithEleutheropolis-BethGuvrin;
more likely he was head of a village council with pretensions.
(^89) Z. Weiss, “Social Aspects of Burial in Beth Shearim,” in Levine,Galilee, pp. 357–71, espe-
cially 370–1, suggests that the necropolis remained in use “well into the fifth century,” though
presumably he accepts the standard view that most (?) of the burials are earlier. See note 93
below for an inscription likely to have been carved in the later period.
(^90) Beth Sheari mis usually described as an “international” or a “central” necropolis, but this is
not borne out by the inscriptions. See T. Rajak, “The Rabbinic Dead and the Diaspora Dead at
Beth Shearim,” in P. Scha ̈fer, ed.,The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture(Tu ̈b-
ingen: Mohr, 1998), pp. 356–61.