Prize Find: An Incense Shovel from Bethsaida

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Slowly it emerged from the ground: a beautiful, 8-inch-long bronze incense shovel, the prize find of the 1996 excavations at Bethsaida, near the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

The shovel lay in a first-century C.E. refuse pit. Just a few meters away is the corner of a building. In part because of the shovel, we have tentatively identified the building as a Roman temple. Situated on top of the mound, the building is oriented in an east-west direction and has a ground plan typical of Roman temples—a porch with at least one column at the center, a pronaos (approaching hall), a naos (the holy of holies) and an opisthodomus (back room). Among the debris were decorated stones and figurines, which also lend support to our identification of the building as a temple.

X-rays reveal that the shovel was cast in one piece, probably using the the lost-wax (cire perdue) technique, in which molten metal is cast in a mold formed with the use of wax.

The shovel has a handle shaped like a Corinthian capital and a rectangular pan decorated with two small leaves, resembling a horned altar. The pan itself is also engraved with five concentric-circle designs, perhaps not just for decoration.

In 30 C.E. Philip, the son of Herod the Great, elevated Bethsaida to the status of a Greek polis (city) and renamed it Julias in honor of Julia, known better as Livia, the wife of the emperor Augustus. Julia died in 29 C.E. Bethsaida’s status as polis, together with the temple and incense shovel, suggest that this site was one of the centers of the Roman imperial cult.

Philip’s father had earlier built three magnificent temples in other parts of the country and renamed the cities in the same fashion.¹

Bethsaida is mentioned in the Gospels more often than any city except Capernaum and Jerusalem. Thus Jesus may have developed and expounded his theology in the shadow of an important center for the Roman imperial cult in Palestine.²

Paradoxically, an ancient synagogue recently uncovered at Sepphoris, a bare 23 miles from Bethsaida, had a mosaic floor with a very similar incense shovel directly in front of the Torah ark depicted in the mosaic. Other synagogue mosaic floors of the late Roman and Byzantine periods display this same scene, which regularly includes the most powerful symbols of rabbinic Judaism: in addition to the Torah ark and incense shovel, a candelabrum (menorah) or two, a ram’s horn (shofar) and the palm branch (lulav) and citron (etrog) used on the festival of Sukkot. All of these symbols were used in synagogue rituals. Did the incense shovel, too, figure in some synagogue ritual?

Decorated oil lamps, as well as bone carvings, monuments and tombs in Israel, North Africa and Rome also display this same short-handled incense shovel. It was apparently an important Jewish symbol, despite its association with the imperial cult.

The Bible describes “firepans … of bronze” (Exodus 27:3) that were used to carry coals and burning incense to the four-horned altar of the desert tabernacle. Incense was burned in the Temple. In addition to the vessels mentioned in the Bible, later rabbinic interpretation of the Temple incense rituals adds a short-handled shovel similar to the one from Bethsaida to the list of necessary ritual objects.

Should we be surprised that shovels of the same style as those used in incense rituals in Roman temples should also be used in synagogues?

Slowly it emerged from the ground: a beautiful, 8-inch-long bronze incense shovel, the prize find of the 1996 excavations at Bethsaida, near the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.