Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

292 CONCLUSION

social worlds in which the ancient Jews lived can help explain why the evi-
dence is the way it is, why covenant and myth are so inextricably combined
in the literature of the Second Temple period, why the archaeology of Jewish
Palestine in the second and third centuries seems so similar to that of the
eastern Roman Empire in general, while its exiguous literary remains are so
different from the products of the “second sophistic,” and why, finally, the
synagogue and the religious ideology that justified its construction reached
their greatest diffusion only under Christian rule.