User:Srmcg/Dura-Europos synagogue

Excavation

In preparation for the Sassanian siege on Dura in 256 AD, the Roman military fortified the city walls by building embankments out of earth and debris from demolished buildings. The embankments buried and preserved the synagogue, Christian church, and Mithraeum, which were all located on the road designated “Wall Street” by the excavators. The first evidence of the Synagogue’s existence were upright plaster fragments found at the end of the fifth season of excavations in Dura. The following season, the team began excavating the site on November 22, 1932.

Before the excavation of Dura-Europos, art historians had assumed that there was no tradition of figurative art in Judaism, out of observance of the Second Commandment against "graven images." Because of the paintings adorning the walls, the synagogue was at first assumed to be a pagan temple, until the vice-director of excavations Robert du Mesnil du Buisson translated aloud the Aramaic inscription of one of the paintings that read, "Moses, when he went out from Egypt and cleft the sea." The discovery of the synagogue helped to dispel narrow interpretations of Judaism's historical prohibition of visual images.

Torah Shrine

During the rebuilding of the synagogue around its earlier building, the House of Assembly was renovated to position the extant Torah Shrine in the center of the western wall, directed toward Jerusalem. The builders added stone columns, plastered and painted to resemble green marble, and a plaster conch shell in the top of the arch. The conch shell was light blue with a dark green border, until exposure to sunlight upon its excavation diminished the blue pigment.

The interior of the niche is decorated with five rectangular panels, alternating between brown diamond and green wave patterning, each framed by horizontal pink and vertical red bands. The central panel contains black diamond with a yellow circle in the middle. The diamond is framed with the same bead-and-reel design as in the second and the fourth panels.

Above the apex of the arch, the Temple of Solomon, containing the Ark of the Covenant, is represented by the facade of a traditional Roman temple building with Corinthian columns. The right spandrel of the arch depicts The Sacrifice of Isaac, at the moment when Abraham, with the knife raised above his head and prepared to kill his son, is interrupted by an angel. The Hand of God symbolically ordains the tradition of animal sacrifice in Judaism that begins after this event. Both figures in the scene face away from the viewer, and the angel that speaks to Abraham is left invisible. The shrine facade was painted in the 240s, a decade earlier than the rest of the synagogue walls, and before the codification of the Jerusalem Talmud in which Rabbi Johanan permitted synagogue wall painting. It is thus possible that the painters of the shrine facade, or the synagogue congregation, were reluctant to violate the Second Commandment. The left spandrel of the arch contains symbols of Jewish festivals: the seven-branched menorah, the ethrog citrus fruit, and the ritual lulav palm branch. The ethrog and lulav are associated with the Feast of the Tabernacles, which is first celebrated by Abraham after his son is saved and is the first holiday celebrated at the Temple of Solomon after its dedication.

Immediately above the shrine is The Blessings of Jacob and David, Pious King, and above that work, David, King over all Israel depicts David enthroned above figures representing the twelve tribes of Israel and, based on their differing outfits from the Israelites, converts to Judaism.

The two central horizontal panels are flanked by four vertical wing panel figures, all symbolizing modes of communication between God and humanity. The excavators at Dura originally identified the portraits as Moses and the Burning Bush, Moses Receives the Law, Ezra Reads the Law, and Abraham Receives the Promise. The Ezra figure has alternately been identified as the prophets Jeremiah or Samuel, the latter who was the namesake of the congregation’s leader. Several scholars have also contended that all four wing panels depict Moses.

Holes in the paintings above the shrine suggest that there was once a Torah curtain that hid the sacred text from view. The niche itself was likely too small to hold the synagogue's entire collection of Torah scrolls; instead, the shrine held one or two at once that were significant based on the time of year. Holes in the floor south of the shrine indicate the position of the bema platform, where it would not block the view of the Torah.

Wall-paintings

The walls of the synagogues were divided into five horizontal zones, all painted with tempera on plaster. Little remains of the highest row just beneath the ceiling; the painted pilasters in the corners of the room suggest that the row was painted to imitate an architrave. The middle three registers contain the Biblical wall paintings, each separated by twisted ribbon-patterned bands. It is estimated that only an estimated 60 percent of the paintings survived, and the remaining 28 panels depict 59 scenes from the Old Testament. The bottom dado was painted to imitate marble and matches the animal and mask designs of the ceiling.

Register A

Only four identifiable paintings were preserved in the top register, narrating two key moments in the history of the Israelites. The top left panel of the north wall depicts Jacob at Bethel. Though only a small portion of it remains, the original excavators identified the top left panel of the west wall as potentially being The Anointing of Solomon. Next to that fragment is the better preserved Solomon Receives the Queen of Sheba. Exodus and Crossing of the Red Sea is the rightmost panel in the top register, and the longest on the west wall. The three-scene story is described by captions written in Aramaic as the Exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the drowning of the Egyptians.

Register B

No paintings in the second register were preserved on the east wall. The story of the Temple of Jerusalem begins in the fragment of the right panel on the north wall depicting Hannah and the Child Samuel at Shiloh. To its left is the Battle of Eben-ezer, when the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant. The story proceeds with the rightmost panel on the west wall, Ark in the Land of the Philistines, then to the left with the recovery of the Ark in Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon.

The story of the Tabernacle begins on the south wall with The Dedication of the Temple, corresponding to the panel on the right of the west wall that depicts the same event. The Tabernacle narrative continues on the west wall in Wilderness Encampment and the Miraculous Well of Be’er, followed by the culminating scene of The Consecration of the Tabernacle and Its Priests next to the Torah shrine.

Register C

The paintings of register C are preserved in their entirety on the west and north walls, and partially on the south and east walls. The sequence begins in the southwest corner of the room, with Elijah Revives the Widow’s Child on the far left of the west wall. The south wall proceeds with the story of Elijah, depicting his triumph over the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel. Only portions of the two paintings on the east wall remain; the painting between the doors was originally identified as Belshazzar’s Feast and the Fall of Babylon, and the painting on the north end as David and Saul in the Wilderness of Ziph.

The largest painting of the synagogue, the four scene Ezekiel, the Destruction and Restoration of National Life, occupies the entire bottom register of the north wall. The panel depicts the vision of Ezekiel of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine and, possibly, the revolt of the Maccabees. That assumption is the basis for alternate identifications of the east wall paintings as depicting the victory of Judas Maccabeus and the cleansing of the Temple in the Book of Ezekiel.

The rightmost panel on the west wall is the four scene Pharoah and the Infancy of Moses. On the left of the Torah shrine is Mordecai and Esther and to its right is Samuel Anoints David.

These scenes are not directly connected in the narrative of the Bible; instead, these works, that stood at eye-level for the congregants of the synagogue, are united by their themes of deliverance of the Jews and messianic prophecies.

Cultural context and purpose of the murals

Altogether, the paintings of the synagogue serve as a "pictorial aretalogy." The top register narrates the history of Israel and the middle register depicts the capture and recovery of the Ark of the Covenant. The bottom register has five separate stories, united by the theme of God intervening in history for the salvation of the Jewish people. In rabbinic tradition, preachers used the decorations of their synagogues as visual aids in their homilies. The various Biblical episodes of the Dura paintings could be referenced and interpreted differently depending on the liturgical and festival calendar.

Given the religious diversity of Dura and the broader Greco-Roman world of the 3rd century, it is possible that non-Jewish visitors were welcomed into the synagogue and saw the paintings. The stylistic similarity to the art of other Durene religious buildings, recognizable contemporary costumes and architecture, and the simplicity of the narrative compositions made the paintings easily legible even to those unfamiliar with the source Scripture. The paintings' focus on the covenant between God and the Jewish people can also be read as an provocative assertion of religious superiority; Jaś Elsner has argued that the panel Ark in the Land of the Philistines, depicting the supernatural destruction of the statue of Dagon in the Temple of Dagon, purposefully denigrates pagan cult-worship.

Summary of Contributions

• Added Excavation section
• Rewrote Torah Shrine section (condensed original content about the Torah niche to into the second paragraph, the rest is mine)
• Rewrote introduction to Wall Paintings (fact about the tempera plaster was from original article, the rest is mine)
• Added sections describing 3 registers of paintings to Wall Paintings
• Rewrote Cultural Context section

Extra Effort

The only version of The Excavations of Dura Europos Final Report VIII, Part 1 available in New York was a limited 1979 reprint of Carl Kraeling's original 1956 monograph, that is only available for supervised use in the Dorot Reading Room at the New York Public Library. As the librarian explained to me, even if it was out of copyright and she could let me use the library's scanners to capture the parts of the book I needed—almost all of it—it was literally falling apart at the seams and I wouldn't be able to get a good picture of the book resting in its supports. However, she did let me know that she had no authority over what photos I could take with my phone. So, I spent probably 12 hours over the course of a couple days there taking notes and hundreds of photos. :)

I also did not originally intend on editing the Torah Shrine section, but the original section was pretty bad and I felt obligated to fix it, if only for my own peace of mind.

References

Hopkins, Clark. The Discovery of Dura-Europos. First edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Kraeling, Carl. The Synagogue (Reprint (with new foreword and indices) of final report 8, pt. 1 in the series: Excavations at Dura-Europos originally published in 1956 by Yale University Press, New Haven ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Elsner, Jaś. “Cultural Resistance and the Visual Image: The Case of Dura Europos.” Classical Philology 96, no. 3 (2001): 269–304.

Fine, Steven. Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Baird, J.A. Dura-Europos. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

McClendon, Charles. "The Articulation of Sacred Space in the Synagogue and Christian Building at Dura-Europos". In Brody, Lisa; Hoffman, Gail (eds.). Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity. McMullen Museum of Art, 2011.

Berger, Pamela. "The Temple/Tabernacles in the Dura-Europos Synagogue Paintings". In Brody, Lisa; Hoffman, Gail (eds.). Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity. McMullen Museum of Art, 2011.

Rajak, Tessa. "The Dura-Europos Synagogue: Images of a Competitive Community". In Brody, Lisa; Hoffman, Gail (eds.). Dura Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity. McMullen Museum of Art, 2011.

Hachlili, Rachel. "The Dura-Europos Synagogue Wall Paintings: A Question of Origin and Interpretation". In Weiss, Zeev; Irshai, Oded; Magness, Jodi; Schwartz, Seth (eds.). Follow the Wise: Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine. Penn State University Press, 2021.