248 CHAPTER NINE
Most synagogues, though, utilized elements of the specifically Jewish icono-
graphic language just discussed .Whatever precisely the elements of this lan-
guage may have meant to the people who used and contemplated them, they
clearly served as indications of the sacred; it would, I hope, be uncontentious
to suggest that the sanctity of the synagogue was somehow embodied in its
decoration, that it was not only the Torah scroll that made the place holy, as
in the rabbinic scheme, but the character of the synagogue’s structure and art.
Some of the motifs used in synagogue decoration—especiallymenorot,
arched structures, andlulavim—were also used to decorate small objects such
as stone plaques, lamps, glasses, plates, and rings .Such items may often have
been used in synagogues, and they were certainly used in tombs; sometimes
the same motifs were carved on tombstones .If these items were also used in
homes, which is unknown but not unlikely, they would have lent them a kind
of diffuse sanctity .For the rabbis, the home was ritually charged: blessings
and prayers were constantly recited, meals echoed, if only faintly, the sacrifi-
cial cult, commandments were observed even in the bedroom .We do not
know if nonrabbinic Jews shared this view, but to the extent that it is foreshad-
owed in the Hebrew Bible and was common,mutatis mutandis, in the Jews’
Christian environment,^21 the notion that a diffuse sanctity pervades the home
is likely to have been widespread and thus marked, in nonrabbinic style, icon-
ographically.
In sum, there is little justification for a rabbinizing approach to synagogue
art, which is not to deny that rabbinic texts may occasionally help explain
peculiar details of the art .The explosive diffusion of the synagogue itself, no
less an overdeterminedly holy place than the consecrated church (though
there is no evidence for a formal ritual of synagogue consecration), warns us
against a rabbinizing approach .The synagogue’s sanctity was inherent and
constituted in part in the structure and decoration of the building .All of this
is dramatically at odds with what we know of the rabbis’ ambivalence (not
straightforward hostility) to figurative representation.^22 But more to the point,
it reflects an attitude to the sacred that has little in common with the rabbis’
formalism.
On the Program of the Sepphoris MosaicIn the following pages I discuss one aspect of Ze’ev Weiss’s reading of the
recently discovered mosaic pavement of the Sepphoris synagogue .This is the
most fully elaborated programmatic reading of a synagogue mosaic that I am
(^21) Cf .E .D .Maguire, H .P .Maguire, and M .J .Duncan-Flowers,Art and Holy Powers in the
Early Christian House(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp .1–33; Elsner,Art and the
Roman Viewer, pp .251–70.
(^22) See Stern, “Figurative Art.”