Shikhin Between Jews and Romans

By: James Riley Strange

Most archaeological sites in the ancient world are important for one reason or another. But every once in awhile, archaeologists uncover one that that helps them solve long-standing problems, or that opens up a new tin of questions that must be answered.

The Roman period village of Shikhin in Israel’s Lower Galilee is one of those sites. On one hand, it fills out our picture of Jewish villages in the Roman period. The material culture allows archaeologists to see connections between Judeans in the South and Galileans in the North, and to say something about their ongoing devotion to the Torah before and after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE.

At Shikhin, we have uncovered remains of a synagogue, broken pieces of stone vessels (stone cannot be rendered ritually impure), two different cemeteries outside the village, and at least one miqveh (a tub carved into bedrock for rendering people and objects ritually pure).

The majority of the coins are Hasmonean, minted in huge numbers in Jerusalem by the descendants of the Maccabees in the late Hellenistic period. In Jewish towns all over ancient Palestine, Jewish people continue to use these coins in transactions centuries after they were struck. Besides making a living, commerce became a way of expressing identity and making a political statement.

Along with other objects and faunal remains, these things make up the standard repertoire that archaeologists expect to find in Jewish towns of the early Roman age (roughly 37 BCE–70 CE). They indicate that, so far as we can tell, the Jews of Palestine found ways to keep Torah in all aspects of their workaday lives, as best they could.

On the other hand, some things make Shikhin exceptional. For one thing, it is revealing enormous numbers of sherds from pots that were ruined in production. The rabbis remembered this town for the quality of the pottery made there, and they singled out storage jars in particular—large vessels with narrow necks and rounded bases used for transporting and storing liquids, such as wine or oil, and small solids, such as olives.

A survey in 1988 revealed that ancient potters had indeed made all types of vessels at Shikhin; pottery waste could be found on the very surface of the hill. But once we started digging in 2012 we began to see just how extensive that pottery manufacturing was. Shikhin’s potters made most of the known Galilean forms, including cooking pots, but they also experimented with new forms. We have seen more unfamiliar forms here that I am aware of at any other village of this type.

The most provocative discovery at Shikhin, however, is its lamp production. The most common way to light the interior of ancient building was to burn wicks in small ceramic lamps that fit in the palm of one’s hand. These lamps used some type of oil as fuel, most commonly olive oil.

But the lamps’ value was not limited to their function; their decorations and very shapes expressed meaning. For example, Israeli scholar David Adan-Bayewitz has shown that even though Jews in the Galilee knew perfectly well how to make a certain type of plain lamp on a potter’s wheel, they preferred instead to purchase theirs in Jerusalem. That preference required a round trip of over 130 miles.

Nevertheless, the lamps were not the main focus of the journey. Rather, it was the temple that drew Galileans southward, and returning with this type of lamp probably signified bringing home the temple’s light. After all, in scripture, light represents many aspects of God: goodness, righteousness, wisdom, creation, the Torah itself. Thus, an unassuming object of everyday life becomes a window into all sorts of important things, including the ability to travel long distances and religious devotion.

Through chemical analysis of Shikhin’s clays, we hope to be able to learn whether or not Shikhin’s residents carried out a similar practice. It would be noteworthy if we will be able to show that even a village of lamp makers did not make this particular type of lamp, preferring instead to bring it from Jerusalem. The opposite is also true: it will also be worthwhile to show that, in addition to buying their wheel-made lamps in Jerusalem, some Galilean villages procured lamps from Shikhin.

We know that Shikhin’s residents made oil lamps because we have found many of their stone molds. We have molds for two types of lamps, both of which developed from the Jerusalem-style wheel-made lamp. The wheel-made lamp is often called a “Herodian” lamp with a “spatulated” or “knife-pared” nozzle. Its body is round because it was thrown on a wheel like other pots. Naturally, the nozzle was added later. The mold-made lamps are still round, even though there is no need to make round lamps in stone molds (in fact, sometimes we find square lamps of this type). The nozzles are also similar to those of the Herodian lamps, but they are molded along with the rest of the lamp body. There are two types of these lamps: one plain and one decorated.