280 CHAPTER TENinhabitants had to sell part of their wheat crop to fund the production of a
mosaic pavement.^14 This implies that the ideology of community can be
profitably approached as primarily a cultural system, no doubt embedded in
a loosely constituted social and economic system, and generative in its own
right of new types of social relations and patterns of expenditure, which served
t olend an air of similarity t oall Jewish settlements. But it als oimplies that
the extent to which people defined themselves around the community, the
role it played in their lives, varied.
This point is confirmed by the existence of urban communities, in both
Palestine and the Diaspora. Though such communities grew up in very differ-
ent sorts of environments from rural communities, their material manifesta-
tions were substantially identical: they too tended to build (usually small)
synagogues, decorated in much the same ways as the rural synagogues, and the
inscriptions found in these synagogues indicate that they shared an ideology.
Though there are differences—for example, Greek was widely used in urban
inscriptions, and they yield more evidence for loose hierarchies of communal
officials—the similarities are more striking and significant.
InscriptionsinContextInscriptions were as essential a feature of the monumental synagogue as its
distinctive decoration.^15 Every synagogue with extensive remains has yielded
inscriptions, usually more than one. Inscriptions are closely linked to decora-
tion; they are found especially in the most heavily decorated parts of the syna-
gogue—on the fac ̨ades of the “Galilean” synagogues, worked into the mosaic
pavements of the other types—though they have turned up also on columns,
chancel screens, thrones, polycandela, and other items of furniture and deco-
ration. The frescoed walls of the Rehov synagogue, like those of Dura Euro-
pus, had writing painted on them, and there is no reason to think this was not
the case for synagogues whose walls have not survived.
(^14) Ilan and Damati,Meroth; Bet Alfa: Naveh,On Mosaic, no. 43.
(^15) The most comprehensive study of the synagogue inscriptions is G. Foerster, “Ketovot Mi-
battei Hakeneset Ha’atiqim Veziqatan Lenusahim shel Berakhah Utefillah,”Cathedra 19
(1981): 12–39, a gold mine of comparative material and valuable observations, but curiously
insensitive to the inscriptions’ context and social function, as noted in the brief response by J.
Yahalom, in the same volume, pp. 44–46, and Yahalom, “Synagogue Inscriptions in Palestine:
A Stylistic Classification,”Immanuel10 (1980): 47–56. In brief, Foerster assumes that because
the synagogue inscriptions resemble inscriptions found in Hatrean temples (see below) and
certain prayers found in later Jewish liturgy, they must have functioned in precisely the same
way. Hence the emphasis in my account on context, the importance of which in constituting
the meaning of the synagogue inscriptions seems to me to require no special argumentation.
For a more nuanced discussion of the relation between the inscriptions and liturgy, see N.
Wieder, “The Jerich oInscripti on and Jewish Liturgy,”Tarbiz52 (1983): 557–79; and see Lapin,
“Palestinian Inscriptions.”