Inside BAR
Imagine walking into a living room and discovering a display of antiquities rivaling the holdings of the great museums. That’s what you see when you walk into the home of Shlomo Moussaieff, one of the world’s pre-eminent collectors of antiquities. BAR editor Hershel Shanks recently visited Moussaieff in his London apartment. As is typical of the shadowy world of antiquities collecting, Moussaieff had been doing his best to stay out of the public spotlight for years. Once the door was thrown open, both literally and figuratively, the Jerusalem-born Moussaieff was eager to discuss his artifacts, his colorful life and the world of collecting. It is a world filled with priceless items, possible fakes, the contradictory opinions of scholars over authenticity—like the movie classic The Maltese Falcon except that it’s real. Shanks describes Moussaieff’s “Magnificent Obsession.”
Jerusalem’s population rose 20 percent in the past 10 years, and apartment buildings, shopping centers, parking lots and highways multiplied to accommodate the newcomers. Such rapid growth could have quickly destroyed many ancient remains in the city. But, because Israeli law requires developers to stop work immediately when remains are unearthed and to call in archaeologists to investigate the site, development has actually become a boon—leading archaeologists to conduct dozens of small digs throughout the city. Many of the sites are being preserved for the public as archaeological parks. In “Jerusalem as Textbook,” Gideon Avni surveys several of these digs, conducted in the narrow streets of the Old City, beside the Temple Mount and outside the Old City wall.
Avni is chief archaeologist of the Jerusalem district for the Israel Antiquities Authority. A Ph.D. candidate at Hebrew University, Avni is writing his doctoral dissertation on the necropolises of Jerusalem and of Beth-Guvrin, where he has directed excavations. His previous BAR articles include “Akeldama—Resting Place of the Rich and Famous,” BAR 20:06, and “The Rampant Rape of Israel’s Archaeological Sites,” BAR 15:02.
According to conventional wisdom, the Jerusalem Temple was not represented visually until long after it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. The Temple, some scholars say, was too holy a place to be depicted—especially at a time when a strict interpretation was given to the Second Commandment’s prohibition on “graven images.” Only later, when attitudes changed, could images of the Temple and other sacred objects be made. But in “Behold the Temple,” Asher Grossberg claims that such depictions were made much earlier than has been thought—even while the Temple stood. Several first-century A.D. ossuaries (boxes for bones) from a cave-tomb in Jerusalem bear designs that closely resemble descriptions of the Temple’s facade by Josephus (who actually saw the Temple) and in the Mishnah. Also, since many of the names inscribed on these ossuaries are priestly or Levite names, Grossberg argues, the cave-tomb probably belonged to a priestly family. What could be more fitting than for a family of priests, who alone were entrusted to perform Temple functions, to decorate their final resting-places with the image of the Temple itself?
An economist with the Bank of Israel, Grossberg is also an accredited tour guide, specializing in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period. He is currently completing a four-volume book on Israelite life in antiquity, Jerusalem and the Temple in the Sources—From Creation to the Destruction of the Second Temple (Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, forthcoming), for which he was awarded the 1992 Israel Minister of Education’s prize in the field of Jewish culture.