A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED 209Jews’ general failure to date synagogues and graves is a puzzling fact that will
not detain us here.) So we know that the great age of rural church construction
in Palestine was the middle and later fifth century, with considerable activity
continuing through the sixth. The buildings were remarkabl yuniform—over-
whelmingl yapsidal, and later triapsidal, basilicas, though a small number
were octagonal. In both cases, the models were the great Constantinian urban
and pilgrimage churches.^28
B ycontrast, the dating of the s ynagogues is, as I have alread ysuggested,
controversial and their architecture was, uncontroversially, highly varied.^29
What is often forgotten is that the controvers yabout dating attaches to onl y
one categor yof s ynagogues. Otherwise, there is general agreement on several
important issues. First, the basic version of the old tripartite typology (Gali-
lean/“broadhouse”/apsidal basilica) elaborated b yAvi-Yonah from the work of
Kohl and Watzinger and Sukenik can no longer be maintained, since many
of the synagogues discovered since the 1960s have failed to conform to any of
the old categories. Second, even those who retain an earl ydating for the
“Galilean” type do not deny a late antique date for the other types, and pre-
sumabl ywould not hesitate to depend on stratigraph yand other ostensibl y
objective criteria to date synagogues that conform to no type. In sum, even
followers of Avi-Yonah would have to admit, if the yapplied their own methods
rigorously, that the synagogue did not reach its maximal diffusion until the
fifth or sixth centuries. In practice, though, Israeli scholars, who are now al-
most alone in believing that the Galilean synagogues were built in the later
Severan period (and even among them consensus is breaking down; see
below), tend to regard them as alread yan essential component of the Jewish
village.^30 The matter is thus worth a brief discussion.
(^28) Tsafrir,Ancient Churches Revealed, pp. 2–16. There is no corpus of (the hundreds of) Pales-
tinian church inscriptions, though the ywill presumabl ybe included in the data-base/corpus now
being prepared at Tel Aviv University. Meanwhile, most convenient, though seriously out of date,
is M. Avi-Yonah, “Mosaic Pavements in Palestine,” inArt in Ancient Palestine, pp. 283–382,
supplemented b yA. Ovadiah and R. Ovadiah,Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byzantine Mosaic
Pavements in Israel(Rome: L’Erma di Brettschneider, 1987). For a discussion of the dated inscrip-
tions, see L. Di Segni, “Epigraphic Documentation on Building in the Provinces Palaestina and
Arabia, Fourth-Seventh Centuries,” in J. H. Humphrey, ed.,The Roman and Byzantine Near
East,(JRAsuppl. 31 (1999)): 149–78.
(^29) A few synagogues are dated: that at Nabratein to 562 (see below); Gaza, 508 (Lifshitz,Do-
nateurs73a = CIJ 2.967); an inscription from Ascalon dates a gift to the synagogue there to 604
(Lifshitz,Donateurs70 = CIJ 2.964); the mosaic pavement at Bet Alfa was made in the reign of
Justin (Naveh,Al Psefas43); the reasons given b ymost commentators for preferring Justin I
(reigned 518–527) over Justin II (567–578) are inadequate. For a convenient set of plans of Pales-
tinian synagogues, see Hachlili,Ancient Jewish Art, pp. 144–47.
(^30) E.g., Z. Safrai,Jewish Community. Strikingly, even L. Levine, who rejects the old typology,
nevertheless regards it is indubitable that the synagogue functioned as the central institution in
Jewish communities (i.e., presumably, towns) “everywhere” in the second and third centuries:
The Ancient Synagogue(New Haven: Yale Universit yPress, 2000), pp. 171–72. Even among