252 CHAPTER NINEpavement of the Bet Alfa synagogue, which is otherwise very similar to that
of Sepphoris? If two pavements use almost the same repertoire of images to
tell different stories, if, that is, the images themselves have no stable meaning,
how can Weiss’s reading of the Sepphorite art be correct?
A New Programmatic ReadingThe evident instability of the images’ meaning suggests the need for a different
type of programmatic interpretation, more modest in its claims and more
complex in its results .We may as well admit at the outset that we cannot
recover the intentions of the mosaic’s patrons .We do not know who they, or
the other congregants, were, what, if anything, they are likely to have read or
heard read aside from the Hebrew Bible, what it was that shaped their intellec-
tual and religious environment .The synagogue art cannot be approached in
the same way, with the same pretense to certainty, as the contemporaneous
art of such imperial foundations as the churches of Ravenna or monastic/
pilgrimage centers such as St .Catherine’s near Mount Sinai, whose social,
intellectual, political, and religious contexts are relatively well known.
Though the quantity of surviving late antique Jewish texts is considerable,
none of these texts can be connected with certainty to the synagogue art, as
already suggested.
Nevertheless, it may be worth trying to suggest a kind of minimalistic pro-
grammatic interpretation, which the texts are likely to have appropriated and
reacted against .After all, everyone, patrons and viewers, saw the same sweep
of images when they entered the synagogue .The impression created by this
experience may have been relatively unspecific—the pavement may first of
all have produced a mood, not told a story .But the mood, if not the story, was
shared .How then to proceed?
The Physical SettingThe interiors of many synagogues, which often required artificial lighting,
were riotous.^27 Floors and walls were decorated with brightly colored mosaics
and paintings, columns were topped with ornately carved capitals, and the
congregants faced elaborate stone arks sometimes, though apparently not al-
(^27) Z .Ilan, “Survey of Ancient Synagogues,” 171, observed that oil presses have often been
discovered in the immediate vicinity of synagogues and suggested that they were used primarily
to provide ritually pure oil for lighting the synagogue .Synagogues frequently hadmenorotand/
or polycandela .Windows may in some cases have been arranged to highlight features of the
interior (e.g., at Dura Europus, the ark was in constant sunlight): see A. J. Wharton,Refiguring
the Post Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem, and Ravenna(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p .31 .Palestinian synagogues have generally not survived to the level of
the windows.