68 A History of Judaism
retelling of the exodus story, as it developed after 70 ce, but the cere-
mony itself must have been very similar for those many Jews unable to
participate in the pilgrimage festival in Jerusalem.
This use of communal liturgy to reinforce national memories was the
explicit purpose of the reading of the book of Esther in synagogues on
the festival of Purim (see p. 62) and of the domestic lighting of candles
on the festival of Hanukkah which commemorated the victory of
the Maccabees over Antiochus Epiphanes. This latter deliverance, unlike
Esther’s, seems to have been celebrated liturgically not by telling the
story, but primarily by exhibiting lights for eight days on what, as we
have seen, II Maccabees called ‘the festival of booths in the month
of Kislev’. R. Judah in the second century ce noted that a shopkeeper
who left his light outside a shop so that the flax carried by a passing
camel caught fire and burned the shop was not liable for damage to the
flax or the camel if the light was a Hanukkah light. The only liturgical
issue for Hanukkah discussed in the Mishnah is the reading from the
Pentateuch during the festival: the Mishnah stipulates that the section in
Numbers is to be read which describes the offerings to be brought to the
sanctuary in the desert by the princes of the tribes, thus implicitly link-
ing the original dedication of the sanctuary to the rededication of the
altar in the time of the Maccabees.^44
In view of the role of synagogues as teaching institutions, the choice
of synagogue leaders and administrators must have been of import-
ance to Jews in antiquity just as in more recent periods of Jewish history.
One would expect the role of the public reader of the Torah to have
been of great significance, since he had the onerous task of reading out
sacred scripture accurately despite the lack of vowels and other punctu-
ation in the text, and he would need to know by heart traditional
readings which seemed to contradict the manuscript text (what the later
scribes called the ‘read’ text rather than the ‘written’), but there is
remarkably little evidence for such individuals being held in high esteem.^
The Acts of the Apostles refers to ‘rulers of the synagogue’ in diaspora
communities as responsible for the preservation of communal discipline
in places like Corinth, where they are said to have attempted (un -
successfully) to control the apostle Paul. Honorific and funerary
inscriptions bearing in Greek the same titles, or similar titles such as
‘fathers of the synagogue’ or ‘elders’, have been found in many sites in
the eastern Mediterranean where Jews were settled in late Hellenistic
and early Roman times.
A number of square or rectangular public buildings in late Second