Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 1986
The God-Fearers: Did They Exist?

Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite

By Robert F. Tannenbaum

A quiet, fertile valley folded into the Mediterranean hills, clear streams, tall poplars, ancient ruins more than 1,400 years old—a picture of pastoral quiet. Twenty-five years ago Kenan T. Erim, archaeologist and art historian at New York University, decided that the site of the ancient Roman city of Aphrodisias had more to offer than that. Now in southwest Turkey (an area known in ancient times as Caria), Aphrodisias was located next to a great marble quarry. The names of its sculptors have shown up as far away as Italy. Wouldn’t this be an ideal place to dig for […]

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Footnotes

1.

The Mishnah is the collection of rabbinical legal rules compiled in the first decades of the third century A.D.

2.

The Talmud is a legal commentary on the Mishnah, in two versions, Jerusalem and Babylonian, published between the fifth and seventh centuries, often embodying older material (and often not).

Endnotes

1.

The excavation has been funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

2.

The most important have been published in Joyce M. Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome (London: Athlone Press, 1982).

3.

So Commodian, a third-century Christian poet, and Cyril of Alexandria, a fifth-century patriarch, who use the word theosebeis.

4.

Some of the pseudepigrapha imply the same of pagan converts to Judaism (The Sibylline Oracles 4.164, c. 80 A.D.).

5.

The Jewish inscription from Aphrodisias is being published, with extensive commentary, in Reynolds and R. F. Tannenbaum, Jews and God-fearers at Aphrodisias: Greek Inscriptions with Commentary (Cambridge, England: Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Supplements, 1986).