Temple or Synagogue?
We have long known about the Jewish temple on Elephantine, even though nothing remains of it. The announcement that a Jewish temple had been discovered in Turkey raised astonished eyebrows, particularly as it was dated by its discoverers to the 3rd century AD, a time when Jewish orthodoxy was in full swing.
Alas, on reading the press release it quickly became apparent that either Dr Nevzat Cevik was having problems with his English or that he was deliberately telling porkies to get the maximum publicity for his excavation. What he has found is nothing more exciting than a perfectly normal synagogue.
The best known Turkish synagogue is the one at Sardis. A large rectangular building next to the city's huge gymnasium, the Sardis synagoge was decorated with panels of multicoloured marble and a floor of the same material. The table at the front on which the sacred scrolls rested was a huge marble construction with legs in the shapes of lions - probably a reference to the Lion of David. Clearly the Jewish population of Sardis was numerous and wealthy.
The newly discovered synagogue is at Andriake, an ancient port city of Lycia. It is located in a choice location facing the sea and is decorated with marble slabs carved in reliefs that depict various Jewish symbols and figures, including a menorah, the seven-branched candlestick that is a symbol of Judaism.
“When we first discovered the temple, we weren't sure what it was," Dr Cevik told reporters, "but after continuing to dig, the archaeological findings and particularly the first-quality marble slabs that we found were evidence for us that they were part of a Jewish temple.”
A little later he added, “To encounter remnants of Jewish culture for the first time has caused great excitement. We're adding another layer to what we know of Lycian culture - now that we know that there was a Jewish presence in Lycia as well, we can follow this path and better understand other finds.”
I suggest that Dr Cevik needs to do a bit of basic research. 1 Maccabees 15:23 mentions Lycia as one of the places where Jews were granted freedom of worship and protection. Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews mentions that Jewish settlers were sent by Antiochus to Phrygia and Lydia, though some interpret this as Lycia - ie. a reference to either the kingdom of Lydia, which included Lycia, or to the Roman province of the same name. Furthermore the city of Tlos, one of the six principal cities of Lycia, had a large Jewish community which had the privilege of electing its own magistrates.
Granted that his may be the first synagogue to be discovered in the area, it still remains that his find does not add something new to our knowledge of Lycian culture.
nothing remains The temple was destroyed in anti-Persian/anti-Jewish riots around 4** BC and we only know of it through the discovery of correspondence between the Jews of Elephantine and the Persian authorities, seeking permission to rebuild. Unwilling to offend either the Jewish mercenaries or the local Egyptians, the Persian governor prevaricated, saying that he would give permission provided the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem approved.
The Jews applied to Jerusalem, which put the Jews there in a similar quandry. On the one hand they didn't want to offend their Persian masters, on the other, their orthodox souls, recently reformed by men like Ezra and Nehemiah, recoiled with horror at the thought of another temple to Yahweh outside the sacred soil of Palestine. They too prevaricated by filing the letter and doing nothing about it.
After a while the Elephantine Jews got the message and came up with a creative way round the problem: they applied to Sanballat of Samaria! Unfortunately we don't know what happened next as the correspondence comes to an abrupt end. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
