Is It or Isn’t It—A Synagogue?
Archaeologists disagree over buildings at Jericho and Migdal
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Footnotes
See James F. Strange and Hershel Shanks, “Synagogue Where Jesus Preached Found at Capernaum,” BAR 09:06.
See Danny Syon, “Gamla—Portrait of a Rebellion,” BAR 18:01; and “Gamla: The Masada of the North,” BAR 05:01.
See Ze’ev Weiss, “The Sepphoris Syangogue Mosaic,” BAR 16:05, and Steven Fine, “Iconoclasm: Who Defaced This Jewish Art?” BR 16:05.
Moreover, the lower floor fits right into the water channels without any gaps. If the water channels were introduced only in phase 2, the phase 2 builders would have had to break through the Phase 1 floor to install the water channels.
Endnotes
The late Yigael Yadin, excavator of Masada, argued that it was a synagogue even earlier, when it served as a desert redoubt for Herod the Great. However, as Lee Levine notes in The Ancient Synagogue—The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), p. 59, n. 74, Yadin’s view has not been generally accepted.
Ehud Netzer, “A Synagogue from the Hasmonean Period Recently Exposed in the Western Plain of Jericho,” Israel Exploration Journal 49 (1999), p. 20.
Virgilio C. Corbo, “Scavi Archaeologici a Magdala,” Liber Annus 24 (1974), p. 5; “La Citta Romana di Magdala,” Studia Hierosolymitana, vol. 1 (1976), p. 355.