7 Frankel Institue Annual 2018

Sean P. Burrus some minerals and metals were mined in the Negev desert to the south, but stone was everywhere, easy to acquire and used for everything. Much of the land Stone is made up of limestone bedrock, which is found in the Galilee and the Carmel Range, the Judean hill country, and . Limestone is a calcareous n Roman , stone was everywhere. stone, made up mostly of the sedimentary fragments People lived in stone, they worked with stone, of the calcite skeletal remains of sea organisms like they worshiped with stone, and they were coral combined with other sedimentary matter like buried in stone. Stone paved the streets, stone silica, silt, and clay. Among the several kinds of Ibuilt the houses, stone even made other materials as limestone in Roman Palestine, the most prized was well. In the lives of ancient Jews living in Palestine, called meleke (Hebrew for ‘king’), a hard, white stone was ever present, following them throughout limestone that was prized for its pure color, its their lives and even into death, always surrounding, workability, and its durability. Meleke was used protecting, and producing. Their houses were built to pave major streets and build many of the finest of stone, and filled with stone objects. Their places buildings of Roman Jerusalem, including those of of worship, the temples and later synagogues, were the Herodian complex. Because of built of finer stone, and filled with finer stone this, the stone is often referred to today as ‘Jerusalem objects. And in death, the bodies and the memories stone,’ and can still be found at the , of the wealthiest of the land were protected by and paving the streets of the , as well as in stone. Our lives today are filled with material of all many modern buildings in Jerusalem. ‘Zedekiah’s kinds and in great quantities: Assemblage of basalt stone spindle whorls, excavated at Sepphoris in the metals, plastics, woods, leathers, Roman Galilee (Photo: Author; courtesy of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology) natural and synthetic textiles. Some of these materials existed in antiquity as well, of course, but stone played an outsized role in the lives of Jews in Roman Palestine, much larger than stone plays in our lives today.

The land was rich in stone of several different kinds; it would be easy to argue that stone was the most abundant natural resource of Roman Palestine. Wood had to be imported from Syria and Lebanon to the north, and 8 Frankel Institue Annual 2018

Cave’ is actually a major used in the Roman at Beth She’arim. Later, when Roman funerary and Byzantine periods to produce meleke limestone fashions changed and tastes swung to inhumation for Jerusalem building projects. Situated next to the over cremation, like their neighbors, elite Jews and spanning five acres below the adopted the stone sarcophagus as the pinnacle of Old City, the quarry can be visited today, and gives burial fashion: Catacomb 20, at Beth Shea’rim, a good sense of the immense scale of the economy contained more than one hundred sarcophagi of local stone in Roman Palestine. carved of local limestone and the remains of more than a dozen imported marble sarcophagi. If in life, stone houses provided protection from the elements and other dangers, stone tombs and burial Stone was used in the making of other materials as vessels provided a different sort of protection well. Large stone presses were used to crush and against the threat of erasure in death. The wealthy extract olive oil and wine, while mills and grinding aspired to continue their connection with stone stones typically made of basalt were used to process in death, through burial in ‘rock-cut’ tombs hewn grains. Basalt is a heavier, more durable stone than out of the bedrock hills, and possibly, if one was the limestone that was so common in the land. It is wealthy enough, in a stone burial vessel. Rock-cut a dark grey and black volcanic stone that is found in tombs of various kinds were the preferred mode of the Golan, on the northern shores of the Sea of burial for those who could afford it (and when there Galilee, and in the Hauran Plateau in the Transjordan. were those who could afford it) in Jerusalem and Basalt stone weights were used for measuring various across Palestine for nearly a millennium, from at kind of materials during transactions and in produc- least the 8th century BCE to the 5th century CE. tion. Stone was also used to produce textiles. One of More than 1,000 tombs are known from the hills the more common finds in excavations of domestic surrounding Jerusalem alone. These tombs, which contexts in Roman Palestine are spindle whorls, grew increasingly elaborate over time and often took small round discs that are pierced at the center and on aspects of Hellenistic and Roman architecture, used as a weight to increase the speed and force of were costly to hew and excavate and were reserved the spinning motion that created threads. These for very upper crust of Judean society. Dark and cool whorls were made of various materials, including on the inside, the gleaming white walls of the tombs bone and shell, but most commonly of basalt. They were damp and velvety to the touch. The tradition came in various shapes and sizes, and most were was carried on in the Galilee from the 2nd century plain, possibly with one or two concentric rings CE on, when tombs—often sprawling networks of incised during their production on a lathe (see figure). them—were carved into the soft limestone hills of Stone—walls—tombs—tools: that hard material that the region. Famous among these are the catacombs envelopes flesh, living and dead. That produces the of Beth Shea’rim, a necropolis with more than food that nourishes it, the clothes that protect it, the 30 catacombs surrounding the small village where buildings that shelter it. Though dead and inert, it is the Mishnah is said to have been redacted. Many only a small stretch to say that stone, soft limestone prominent rabbinic figures were buried in the and hard basalt, was truly the stuff of life. ● catacombs, and Jews also came from the surround- ing region, and from as far as Palmyra, to be buried