JUDAIZATION 259nothing more than a versified horoscope.^47 Indeed, since this text is alunar
horoscope, the juxtaposition of month names and zodiacal signs at Sepphoris
may even have been meant tofacilitateits use as a horoscopic aid!
RabbinizationThus, the ancient synagogues as a group seem to embody a different notion
of sanctity from that evident in rabbinic texts .The synagogue seems often to
have constituted an unearthly realm, a reflection of the heavenly temple, an
inherently sacred space, and the community that built and maintained and
attended the synagogue regarded itself as a holy congregation, an Israel in
miniature (see below) .The rabbis, by contrast, regarded the synagogue as
primarily a place of Torah, which belonged tobeneiTorah, a place whose
sanctity was a formal derivative of the physical presence in it of the Torah
scroll; as to the sanctity of the community, the rabbis never bothered to try to
theorize it and in general had little interest in it .The Torah was, as we have
seen, important in the actual, nonrabbinic synagogues, and it may have grown
in importance as time went on .But it was embedded there in a type of religios-
ity that apparently owed little to the rabbis’ “covenantal nomism,” and quite
a lot to general late antique (i.e., Christian) conceptions of the sacred.
Caution is in order, however .Varieties of religiosity can coexist in the same
social group; indeed, even if inherently contradictory, they can function com-
plementarily .Specifically, there is some reason to think that the rabbis came
to play an increasingly important role in late antique Jewish society, especially
in the sixth century, though there is no reason to believe that they were an
essential part of the picture until the Middle Ages .In late antiquity, where
they were influential they normally supplemented, subtly shaped, and were
shaped by, rather than replaced, local varieties of Judaism .Next I will discuss
some physical and literary artifacts of this complex social interaction.
Physical Remains: Anxieties of RepresentationThe Sepphorite zodiac, made in the fifth century, reminds us that for some
Jews in late antiquity, the very act of figural representation, if not problematic
per se, had its problematic aspects; in the sixth and early seventh centuries,
Jews in some places began plastering over the painted walls of their syna-
gogues, laying flagstones, or geometric mosaics, over figurative mosaic pave-
ments, and sometimes even gouging out the eyes or in other ways disfiguring
(^47) See J .Greenfield and M .Sokoloff, “Astrological and Related Omen Texts in Jewish Palestin-
ian Aramaic,”JNES48 (1989): 201–14.