278 CHAPTER TENan easily traversed wadi or small valley (e.g., Meiron and Horvat Shema, or
Khirbet Natur and Khirbet Shura) or might be located only a kilometer or so
apart on a plain (e.g., in the Bet Shean Valley). In such cases, which were
common in late antiquity, when Palestine is thought to have reached its peak
premodern population density, fairly frequent intervillage contact was neces-
sarily normal but could be complicated by other factors.^11 Contacts between
two adjacent Jewish villages may have been no more frequent than those
between adjacent Jewish and Christian villages, but they may (or may not)
have had a different character.
Indeed, anxieties about such contacts may have sometimes helped to gener-
ate an ideology of self-enclosure—among both Jews and Christians—as a sub-
stitute for its reality (since its reality was impossible) and as a way of regulating
those contacts which inevitably occurred. The Jews of En Geddi in the sixth
century lived in a sparsely populated, mostly Christian area, which included
many monks. The curse inscribed on the synagogue floor hints at some of the
ambiguities of the Engeddites’ situation, indicating as it does both the fre-
quency and intimacy of contacts with outsiders, specifically called’amemayah
(“the nations,” i.e., gentiles), and “the community’s” disapproval.
Though villagers might deal mainly with each other, the self-sufficient vil-
lage exists only in fiction and political propaganda. We know little about the
economy of late antique rural Palestine, just enough, in fact, to know some-
thing about trading contacts outside the villages. As suggested in an earlier
chapter, some of the most important evidence for such contacts is provided
by the synagogues themselves, which required the importation of goods, ser-
vices, and the gold coins to pay for them, into the villages—a paradox, since
the synagogue was also the chief monument of the village’s religious self-
determination. Perhaps, in fact, we should think of the synagogues, and for
that matter the churches, as smaller-scale versions of the public structures in
high imperial cities, theaters, and temples, which served both as monuments
to civic pride, autonomy, and wealth, and also as celebrations of the city’s
participation in the imperial system. (The other function of the buildings, as
memorializations of the generosity/piety of the local elites, will be discussed
in detail below.)
The synagogues, and other occasional archaeological finds, may provide
evidence both for economic contacts between villages, and between villages
and cities, but tell us nothing about what we most need to know—the fre-
quency of such contacts and the social context in which they were embedded.
Should we imagine late antique Palestine as constituting a network through
(^11) See Goodman,State and Society, p. 29; such intervillage contacts are well documented for
late antique Egypt (see Bagnall,Egypt in Late Antiquity, pp. 138–42) and seem t ome t obe
implied, at least in a limited way, in the distribution patterns of the Kefar Hananiah pottery
analyzed by Adan-Bayewitz, though this is not how he interpreted the data. See next note.