Endnote 4 – The Salome No One Knows

 For the various spellings of Salome, see Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity Part I: Palestine 330 B.C.E.–200 C.E. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), pp. 249–252. Gunter Mayer (Die jüdische Frau in der hellenistisch-römischen Antike [Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1987], pp. 107, 110) suggests that Salome is a Hebrew name whereas Shelamzion is Aramaic. Based on a newly discovered ossuary of two sisters, I believe that Shelamzion and Salome are variations of the same name and that each was spelled several ways in Greek and Aramaic. I plan to deal with this issue fully in a planned biography of Salome Alexandra. For these inscriptions, see T. Ilan, “New Ossuary Inscriptions from Jerusalem,” Scripta Classica Israelica 11 (1991/92), pp. 155–157.