Tabula imperi romanii: Iudaea-Palaestina, Eretz Israel in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods.

AuthorRainey, Anson F.

By Y. TSAFRIR, L. DI SEGNI and J. GREEN with contributions by I. ROLL and Ts. TSUK. Publications of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Section of Humanities. Jerusalem: THE ISRAEL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, 1994. Pp. x + 264.

This work, together with its maps, forms a milestone in the study of historical geography in the Land of Israel and it will prove to be an essential tool for anyone interested in Palestinology. It is also a contribution to the international project Tabula Imperii Romani (TIR), a long standing endeavor to map the entire Roman world. The team that produced this monograph is also working on the Onomasticon of Eretz Israel in the Greek and Latin Sources, and one hopes that this companion project will come to fruition in the near future. The five maps accompanying the volume are splendid productions, the work of the Archaeological Survey of Israel. They will be highly useful to everyone engaged in research on historical geography.

The Gazetteer, which comprises the main part of the book, contains some 1250 sites, 524 of which are known from literary sources (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac). The remainder are documented only as archaeological sites. The disparity between archaeological and written documentation shows just how limited is our knowledge of the society in Palestine during the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. It also shows that the archaeological database is finally reaching usable proportions, which was hardly the case forty years ago when the late M. Avi-Yonah was doing his pioneer work.

To place this new volume in its proper context, a few observations are in order. First of all, it should be recognized that for those concerned with the older periods, Bronze and Iron Ages - the so-called "biblical period" - a thorough acquaintance with the Graeco-Roman geographical data is essential. One has to mention only the Onomasticon of Eusebius, a tool no biblical geographer can do without. Secondly, the converse is also true: data from the Bronze and Iron Ages is often crucial for identifying the site of an historically attested settlement. This pertains not only to the mention of the towns by name but also to other data regarding the geographical locale as indicated by the Bronze and Iron Age sources. It is in the area of biblical geography that the authors need to strengthen their foundations even though their interests are in the later periods.

Thirdly, the term Negev or Negeb is not attested in Graeco-Roman sources. In the Bible, Negeb means "south," "south land." However, all indications are that the biblical Negeb is the modern Beer-sheva basin and the Besor drainage area. Someone at Kadesh-barnea was not in the Negeb; he had to go up to the Negeb (Num. 13:17). But in the volume under review the authors use the modern term Negev to refer to the entire area from Beer-sheva to Elath. This may be in accordance with the erroneous usage current in modern Israel, but it is misleading when used anachronistically in a scholarly work such as this. For example, Eboda (pp. 114b-15a) is said to be a "Nabataean-Byzantine town in the central Negev." Historically this is dead wrong. And since the authors use other geographical terms such as Galilee, Sharon, Samaria, Judea, etc., the hapless reader would assume that...

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