JUDAIZATION 245of parts of the later repertoire is over the ark of the synagogue of Dura Europos,
constructed in 244C.E .A bit later,menorotwere commonly carved on the
walls of the catacombs of Bet Shearim, along with a repertoire of other items
that differ both from the later synagogue iconography and from the funerary
iconography of the Second Temple period.
Traditionally, the very existence of representational synagogue decoration—
featuring images derived from Jewish religious life and biblical stories and also
borrowed from pagan, secular, and Christian sources, all jumbled together—
has been regarded as problematic .How could Jews ignore the Second Com-
mandment, or why, in a more nuanced version of the question, did they now
interpret it laxly after having interpreted it rigoristically in the Second Temple
period? How could they juxtaposelulavim, or biblical scenes, with images of
Sol Invictus derived directly from the iconography of late Roman paganism?
How could descendants of the Jews who had risen up against Herod when he
installed a golden eagle over the entrance to the Jerusalem temple install stone
carvings of eagles over the entrances to their own synagogues?
These conventional concerns do indeed merit attention .Clearly, general
Jewish attitudes toward representation were very different in late antiquity
from what they had been in the first century and earlier .But we must remem-
ber the implications of the revised chronology of the synagogue .Although
there are few traces of representational art in Jewish Palestine in the first
century, the second and third centuries were rich in it, and it was without
exception pagan in character, as we have seen .What we need to understand,
then, is not so much the emergence of representational art among the Jews,
already an old story by 350, as the emergence of aJewishrepresentational art.
Ancient Jewish Art in ContextIt is generally acknowledged that most ancient synagogue art is symbolic.
Whereas Roman temples were often decorated with reliefs more or less natu-
ralistically portraying scenes of sacrifice, the images used to decorate syna-
gogues (and churches) bear only an oblique relationship to what occurred in
the buildings.^14 Apart from the function that the synagogue art shares with
the naturalistic decoration of pagan temples—marking the “otherness,” the
concentrated sanctity, of the space they occupy—it seems intended to convey
a religious message that stands outside of the images themselves yet was some-
how intelligible to the congregants who viewed it.^15
(^14) Cf .J .Elsner,Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to
Christianity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp .190–210.
(^15) For the conceptual background of this paragraph, see N .Bryson,Word and Image: French
Painting of the Ancien Re ́gime(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp .1–28; cf.
Grabar,Christian Iconography, pp .7–30.