244 CHAPTER NINEof the Bet Leontis, or the gladiator on the floor of the Meroth synagogue,^10
images not uncommon in domestic decoration but, it seems to us, quite out
of place in a synagogue?), much of it is part of a fairly limited iconographic
repertoire that, however precisely we explain it, indubitably functioned to
mark as “Jewish” the place or the object in or on which it was found .Of this
repertoire, some is straightforwardly Jewish in content: glyptic and mosaic
images ofmenorot,lulavim, Torah shrines, incense shovels, or biblical scenes
(also used by Christians)—the binding of Isaac at Sepphoris and Bet Alfa,
Noah’s ark at Gerasa, Daniel in the lions’ den, much damaged but still dis-
cernible, at Susiyah.^11 Other components of the iconographic repertoire—
pairs of lions guarding narthices or arks, zodiac circles with Sol Invictus at the
center inscribed in squares featuring personifications of the seasons at the
corners—have no obvious Jewish content but appear repeatedly in synagogues
and rarely or never elsewhere.^12 Still other common images appear occasion-
ally in synagogues but are not restricted to them, for example, not quite nature
scenes—mosaic “carpets” of animals (some of them saddled or caged) and
vegetation framed by grape vines, derived from the still life, agricultural, and
hunt scenes that decorated the floors and walls of the houses of wealthy Ro-
mans—Nile scenes, and so on, which are common also in the decoration of
churches and private houses .These images are in fact more typical of church
than of synagogue decoration, for in the preiconoclastic period, Christian
iconography still consisted very largely of themes taken over from domestic
decoration with little alteration.^13
There had been a paltry and enigmatic Jewish iconographic language in
the Second Temple period and immediately following, all the more difficult
to interpret for being largely nonrepresentational .This featured such items as
rosettes and arches and perhaps themenorotthat decorated some lamps pro-
duced in Judaea immediately after the Destruction .But the first appearance
(^10) See S .Mucznik, A .Ovadiah and C .Gomez de Silva, “The Meroth Mosaic Reconsidered,”
JJS47 (1996): 286–93; on Bet Leontis, see Roussin, cited below.
(^11) There is no convenient recent reference work in English listing and discussing the syna-
gogue remains (the books of Hu ̈ttenmeister and Reeg, and Marilyn Chiat, are out of date); the
NEAEHLhas separate entries for many of the sites discussed, and much information can be
found in Levine,Ancient Synagogue; Hachlili,Ancient Jewish Art; and in A .Ovadiah and R.
Ovadiah,Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byzantine Mosaic Pavements .Most convenient is a He-
brew publication: Z .Ilan,Ancient Synagogues.
(^12) An apparently non-Jewish example of the zodiac motif has now come to light in a bathhouse
of approximately the fifth century on the Aegean island of Astypalaea, excavated in the 1930s and
never published but recently seen by Ruth Jacobi: see her brief note, “The Zodiac Wheel from
the Greek Island of Astypalaea,”Qadmoniot118 (1999): 121.
(^13) See E .Kitzinger,Israeli Mosaics of the Byzantine Period(Milan: Collins/UNESCO, 1965),
pp .8–15; in general, A .Grabar,Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins(Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1968) .On the zodiac circles, see especially Foerster, “Zodiac in Ancient
Synagogues.”