worship 69
Temple period sites in the Judaean desert (at Masada and Herodium), in
Gamala on the Golan and in the Judaean hills (at Kiryat Sefer and
Modiin) have been identified quite plausibly as synagogues, but in light
of the multiple purposes attested for the complex of buildings erected
by Theodotus, and the use of the ‘prayer house’ in Tiberias in Galilee for
political meetings in 67 ce noted by Josephus, it is likely that such
buildings were essentially communal rather than religious. On the other
hand, the Gospels mention healings and miracles being performed in
synagogues in Galilee, and Josephus described problems at the syna-
gogue of Caesarea in 66 ce which came to a head, during a dispute with
a non- Jewish landowner who tried to build workshops blocking the
way to the synagogue, when local gentiles sacrificed some birds just
outside the synagogue entrance. In the view of the local Jews, this action
caused ‘their site [to be] polluted’, which suggests that they attributed
sanctity to the synagogue edifice.^45
Ascription of sanctity to synagogues while the Temple was still stand-
ing seems to have been more common in the diaspora than in the land
of Israel. Thus Philo noted that in Alexandria in his time there was
uproar when hostile Greeks installed images of the emperor Gaius in
the Jews’ prayer houses in the city, including ‘in the largest and most
notable a bronze statue of a man mounted on a chariot and four’, which
Philo and the other Jews took to be idols. The synagogue in Antioch in
Syria, adorned with brass offerings and attracting to its religious ser-
vices many local Greeks, was even described by Josephus in one passage
as a ‘temple’. Philo writing about the Essenes (on whom see Chapter 6),
probably for non- Jewish readers, in his treatise That Every Good Man
is Free, referred to the instruction they received on every seventh day in
the ‘holy places which are called synagogues’. But such sanctity was of
a quite different level to the sanctity of the Jerusalem Temple. Thus
when the synagogue in Caesarea came under attack in 66 ce, the Jews
there ‘snatched up the laws and retreated to Narbata’, a district at some
distance from Caesarea, leaving the synagogue to its fate, whereas four
years later many of the priests and lay people of Jerusalem defended the
Temple to the death.^46
The synagogue had developed as an institution in the final centuries
of the Second Temple period quite separately from the development of
the Jerusalem Temple itself. There is no reason to imagine that syna-
gogue architecture, organization or liturgy in this period were shaped
by the Temple with its ritual, nor (conversely) that the synagogue repre-
sented a type of Judaism different from that in the Temple.^47 In the eyes