Excavation Uncovers Picture of Judaism During Jesus’ Lifetime

Blood ran through the streets of the town. Virtually every man and child was massacred, and the women and babies were captured to be sold into slavery. Such was the end of Yodfat, the first Jewish city to fall to Vespasian’s legions during the AD 67 Great Revolt against Roman domination--a futile struggle that culminated three years later in the destruction of Jerusalem.

For thousands of years, the town and evidence of the carnage remained buried in this rocky hilltop, with its peaceful and scenic view of the Galilean countryside.

Now, a team of archeologists led by the University of Rochester in New York and Israel’s Antiquities Authority is excavating the site, untouched since Roman times. They say the excavations, in their fifth year, are yielding new insights into the practice of Judaism in Galilee at the time Jesus lived and preached, as well as the tensions that led to the revolt against Roman rule.

The picture emerging at Yodfat is of a community that clung to Jewish observance despite its poverty and distance from the center of Jewish worship, the temple in Jerusalem, according to University of Rochester religion professor William Scott Green, educational director of the archeological team.

Yodfat is only seven miles from Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, and was never resettled after the massacre nearly 2,000 years ago, leaving the town fossilized in time.

“It’s a pristine site. When you walk here, you are in 67 AD, just 35 years after Jesus was crucified,” said Green, who recently completed this summer’s dig.

“Yodfat will fill out some of the features of ordinary Jewish life in the Galilee at the time of Jesus,” said Peter Richardson, professor at the Center for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and another key collaborator in the dig.

“This becomes terribly important for understanding Jesus, since his home was in the Galilee, his main activity was in the Galilee, and his closest followers were from the Galilee. So the origins of Jesus and his upbringing are going to be extensively influenced by how rigorously Judaism was practiced there.”

Scholars caution, however, that Yodfat is only one town, and that no absolute generalizations can be made about Galilean lifestyles.

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Larger and more affluent towns in the region--such as Sepporus, Tzipoori and Ceasarea Phillipi--were heavily influenced by Greek culture. They featured a mixed religious makeup, amphitheaters and large temples dedicated to the Roman emperor.

Green says the dig at Yodfat suggests that the level of popular Jewish piety in Galilee was far greater than what may have been present in the larger Roman provincial outposts.

In Jewish history, the era in which Jesus lived is known as the Second Temple period. At that time, the temple in Jerusalem--which had been built by the biblical King Solomon, was destroyed and rebuilt again--still dominated Jewish religious life, serving as the focus both for the ceremonies of animal sacrifice and thrice-annual pilgrimages by Jews from around the land.

Conversely, Jews scattered in the hills of Galilee--far from the routine of temple worship--were sometimes viewed as less obedient to their ancient religion.

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Greco-Roman culture--with its adulation of physical prowess, its amphitheaters for entertainment and its cult of idol worship--was promoted by provincial Roman governors, and competed for the allegiances of Jews living in far-flung districts.

“In some ancient texts, Galilee is referred to as the Galilee of the Gentiles, suggesting that the region was heavily Hellenized and Romanized, and not terribly Jewish,” Richardson said.

It is against such regional tensions that some scholars have sought to explain the unconventional religious message of the Galilean Jesus.

“You have several choices in trying to understand Jesus,” Richardson said. “You can interpret him as a kind of radical Jew, relative to legal observance and ordinary Jewish piety, and that’s the way a lot of Christian scholars would want to see him.

“Another way of interpreting him would be to argue, as I would, that he is relatively observant, and that he tends to share many features of Jewish piety, and differs in relatively few.”

The excavations at Yodfat have unearthed numerous stoneware pots and mikvaot, or ritual baths. Both items indicate that the Galilee Jews of Yodfat observed stringent laws regarding ritual purity, a dominant concern of temple Judaism.

Stoneware, rather than the more porous earthen pottery, was used by devout Jews for eating because they believed it did not transmit ritual impurity, Green said. Ritual baths, although expensive and difficult to build, were constructed inside a number of Yodfat homes, even though the town was not particularly wealthy and other architectural embellishments were lacking.

The use of Jewish coins bereft of Roman idols’ likenesses, evident in the types of money unearthed at Yodfat, was another symbol of ordinary piety, according to Richardson.

Some New Testament stories, such as the incident in which Jesus overturns the money changers’ tables in the temple, are better understood in light of the revelation that the Jews of Galilee used such coins, Richardson said.

The story has popularly been understood as Jesus’ protest against the commercialization of a house of worship. But Richardson says he believes that Jesus was probably staging a much more limited protest--against the exchange of the Jewish coins for Roman mint, which featured religiously forbidden images of idols.

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‘That, in a sense, makes him more conservative than the temple priests, rather than more radical,” Richardson said.

The Yodfat excavations also have confirmed many historical details provided by the Jewish historian Josephus, who commanded Jewish forces at Yodfat until his surrender. He described the 47-day Roman siege in his epic work “The Jewish War,” which he wrote as a Roman prisoner after his defeat and surrender.

The excavations have unearthed the double walls that Josephus said were used to fortify Yodfat against the Roman siege. Spears and catapult stones have also been found. The catapult stones, in particular, helped weaken the town’s impressive military fortifications.

The desperate rebel resistance against far superior forces underscores how much of the fight was motivated by religious zeal, says Matt Stanley, a 21-year-old University of Rochester student who participated in this summer’s dig.

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‘Yodfat shows how intensely Jews felt about their religious piety--even though they were in fact accorded more religious autonomy than other areas under Roman rule,” he said.

The town’s rebellion and conquest proved to be a turning point in Jewish and early Christian history. After Yodfat was conquered, the remaining towns in the Galilee surrendered without a fight. The Romans marched on the Jewish fortress of Gamla in the nearby Golan Heights, continued on to Jerusalem, and finally arrived in Masada, where the remaining Jewish rebels staged a mass suicide rather than be conquered.

The destruction of Jerusalem, with its imposing temple, shifted the focus of Jewish ritual away from animal sacrifice to prayer and study of the Bible. Although the temple continued to be a major theme in Jewish thought, the synagogue--a simple meeting place that could be constructed in any Jewish community--became the practical focus of everyday ritual observance.