THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 217or as a Palestinian expression of hostility to the temple and priesthood, all
thesesthathavebeenproposedbymodernscholars.Nordoweknowwhether
it originated in one place—rural Egypt, say, the location of the earliest evi-
dence—and spread, or developed independently in several different places.
Nor, finally, can we tell whether the fact that synagogues might be called by
various names—synagoge ́,proseuche ́,sabbateion, and on rare occasion even
hieronornaos—implies that the synagogue originated in several different in-
stitutions whose functions took centuries to coalesce, or rather that the single
institution had fro mthe start a variety of functions or si mply a variety of
names.^4 In the absence of information, there seems little point in continuing
to debate these issues.
The most we can say is that buildings calledproseuchai(sing.,proseuche ́),
a ter mlater definitely applied to synagogues, were erected by Jewish ethnic
corporations in some Egyptian villages as early as the third centuryB.C.E.^5 It
is worth pausing briefly to consider the case of Ptolemaic Egypt because only
here does the evidence permit us to do more than guess about the nature
of the Jewish community before late antiquity. Let us, then, begin with the
proseuche ́.
The term, first of all, is peculiar, since it means simply prayer or vow, not
prayer house, yet in the inscriptions that serve as our only evidence for the
institution, it unambiguously designates a building. The wordproseuche ́also
provides the only hint of what went on in the buildings, but this exiguous
fragment of information is deeply significant for several reasons. All ethnic
corporations in Ptolemaic Egypt (and in other places where we know about
them, e.g., Delos) cultivated the worship of their ancestral gods. Although
pagansbuilttemples—naoiorhierainGreek—someJewsdidnot.Wecannot
in fact be certain that sacrifices were never offered in theproseuchai.^6 After
all,insomewaystheywereveryliketemples:theJewssometimescalledthem
“sacredprecincts,”one oftheproseuchaimayhavehad thesortofmonumen-
tal gateway typical of Egyptian temples, and one Jewish corporation claimed
for itsproseuche ́the right ofasylia, or inviolability, a right generally restricted
to temples.^7 Yet these Jews refrained fro musing the word “te mple,” which
implies very strongly that unlike their predecessors at Elephantine they had
(^4) For a comprehensive, though rather positivistic, survey, see Levine,Ancient Synagogue, pp.
19–41.
(^5) See Horbury-Noy, nos. 9, 13, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 117, 125.
(^6) S. Cohen, “Pagan and Christian Evidence,” p. 163.
(^7) Horbury-Noy, no. 125; J. Gwyn Griffiths, “Egypt and the Rise of the Synagogue,” in
D. Urman and P. Flesher, eds.,Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Dis-
covery(Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1: 3–16; S. Fine,This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue
during the Greco-Roman Period(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp.
25–26.