260 CHAPTER NINEthe human or divine figures portrayed on their synagogue floors.^48 In the fol-
lowing section I will discuss a case of sixth-century Jewish iconophobia.
There is no reason a priori to consider ambivalence about representation
a tracer for rabbinization .It is true that the rabbinic documents themselves
express ambivalence about representation; and it is true as well that some of
the specific contents of synagogue art were prohibited, or at least deemed
problematic, by the rabbis .But nonrabbinic Jews might have had reasons of
their own for avoiding figural representation .Those of the Second Temple
period had been far more rigorous in their avoidance of figural art than the
rabbis were, and a case could surely be made for regarding the evidence for
a move away from figural representation among the Jews in the sixth century
as part of a general late antique and early medieval Near Eastern tendency
toward iconophobia—presumably an aspect of the more or less self-conscious
rejection of the Greco-Roman ethos or aesthetic as a cultural model in favor
of ideological systems whose central concerns often involved renunciation or
subordination of the body.^49
Sometimes the Jewish ambivalence toward images has a distinctly rabbinic
character .The Rehov synagogue, which in the fourth and fifth centuries was
decorated with friezes of lions, was decorated in the sixth and seventh with a
geometric mosaic pavement but, most famously, with a vast mosaic inscription
that closely parallels a series of rabbinic texts concerning the sabbatical year.^50
In any case, the growing aniconism should perhaps be taken together with
(^48) See Hachlili,Ancient Jewish Art, pp .371–72; D .Amit, “Iconoclasm in Ancient Synagogues
in Eretz Israel,”Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division B, vol .1
(Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1994), Hebrew section, pp .9–16; Levine,Ancient
Synagogue, pp .340–43.
(^49) For an account emphasizing the shared elements in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim icono-
phobia and proposing a (perhaps excessively) specific hypothesis about how they came to be
shared, see P .Crone, “Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and Byzantine Iconoclasm,”Jerusalem Studies in
Arabic and Islam2 (1980): 59–95 .Crone also assumes that Judaism was inherently iconophobic.
Perhaps; but the Jews were a different matter .Elsner argues that the stylistic shift visible in late
antique Christian art reflects the art’s new status as normative and exegetical, as opposed to
descriptive .Such a shift, arguably characteristic of contemporaneous Jewish art as well, should
allow anxieties about the act of pictorial representation to come to the fore (or may indeed be
somehow generated by them); seeArt and the Roman Viewer, pp .190–245.
(^50) Naveh,On Mosaic, no .49 .For a summary of the archaeology of the Rehov synagogue, see
F .Vitto inNEAEHL, s.v.; the most extensive discussion of the inscription is Y. Sussmann, “A
Halakhic Inscription from the Beth-Shean Valley,”Tarbiz43 (1973–1974): 88–158, concerned
mainly with its relations to rabbinic texts .To the more puzzling and difficult questions, What
were the purpose and function of the inscription? Saul Lieberman devoted an assertive paragraph
(“The Halakhic Inscription from the Beth-Shean Valley,”Tarbiz45 [1975–1976] 1: 54–55) .That
the inscription “was intended to publicize the pertinent halakhot to the local Jewish inhabitants”
(in Aaron Demsky’s English formulation, “The Permitted Villages of Sebaste in the Rehov Mo-
saic,”IEJ29 [1979]: 182) rests on a series of assumptions, for example, about the extent of literacy
in rural Palestine, about the social structure of synagogue dedications, and about the diffusion of
halakhic rigor, which cannot withstand scrutiny.