God's Gold (13 page)

A century later, when Pompey the Great and his military entourage violated the Holy of Holies in 63 BC, a single sacred menorah was seen alongside many other wonders. All these treasures were left in their original locations. In all probability it was this gold candelabrum—already an antique more than a century old, and crafted under the inspiration of Judah Maccabee—that Titus would seize from Herod's Temple in AD 70. By the time the sacred Jewish menorah reached Rome a year later, the most precious symbol of Judaism was already more than two centuries old.

However, the story does not end there. A perplexing feature adorns the Arch of Titus menorah, a highly elaborate base consisting of a two-tiered octagonal pedestal that remains the subject of great controversy for one very good reason: it is covered with highly conspicuous “pagan” figures in the form of sea monsters and eagles holding a wreath in their beaks. With the Old Testament's fierce prohibition against precisely this kind of artistic idolatry, many historians forcefully reject any notion that this specific lamp was the Second Temple original. So could the elaborate artwork of the Arch of Titus menorah expose the object as nothing more than a fantastic product of the mind of a Roman sculptor?

With ideas and counterarguments spinning through my mind, I decided to go to the one place I knew where this enigma could be settled once and for all: the ancient Jewish underground cemetery at Beth Shearim in the Galilee.

Bottle-shaped Besara, ancient Beth Shearim—House of the Gates in Hebrew and called Besara in Greek—nestles in a shallow wooded basin of the Lower Galilee, peering out westward toward the Jezreel Valley and the far-off Mediterranean Sea. For the home of one of the greatest Jewish necropolises of ancient Israel, this hill of death is remarkably tranquil. Perhaps the shaded terrain and geographical seclusion becalmed the atmosphere to form the perfect spot for intellectual thought and the rabbinical academy that evolved within the peaceful pine forest.

In the second century AD, the Jewish town of Beth Shearim became home to the Sanhedrin, the highest legislative body of Jewish Palestine and its supreme judicial council. With its fertile foothills and opportune location at a crossroads linking the cities of the Galilee and the Jezreel Valley with the Mediterranean coast, over time the settlement flourished to become rich in mind and pocket, especially renowned for its vast glassworks. Even today echoes of the town's proud inheritance stud the hillside across 1,650 by 650 feet in the form of the ruins of a giant press for producing exportable olive oil and a nine-ton slab of glass, imperfectly cast and abandoned 1,600 years ago. Following extensive excavations initiated in 1936, the ruins of Beth Shearim are today one of the country's heritage highlights, although local Israelis and bar mitzvah boys learning about their ancestry frequent the ruins more often than do overseas tourists.

By far the most startling remains, however, are underground. Over
the course of three hundred years, both local celebrities and the rich and famous of the Diaspora chose Beth Shearim as the favored Jewish burial place in the Mediterranean basin once Jerusalem was destroyed. Epitaphs written in Hebrew, Greek, and Palmyrene speak of the burials of the head of the Council of Elders of Antioch and his family, and the leading rabbis of the synagogues of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut. Rubbing shoulders with the great and wise were the finest families of Byblos, Palmyra, and Messene in Babylonia, all shipped back to the heartland for a perpetual peace: from Atio, the daughter of Rabbi Gamaliel who died still a virgin at age twenty-two, to Rabbi Judah HaNasi, who established the Sanhedrin at Beth Shearim and edited the Jewish Mishnah. With the Temple fallen, Beth Shearim served as a surrogate cemetery—Judaism's prime piece of mortuary real estate. Catacomb 20 alone, cut through 246 feet of limestone, held 125 sarcophagi and about 200 burials.

With its elegantly sculpted and arched facades and landscaped courtyards, Beth Shearim is a gem of design and engineering. Beneath the ground the dark tunnels, monumental sarcophagi (burial coffins), and inscriptions in many tongues create an eerie, macabre atmosphere. A third-century AD Aramaic inscription chillingly warns, “Anyone who shall open this burial upon whomever is inside it shall die an evil end.” I had no alternative but to descend into this underworld if I was to unravel the mystery of the Arch of Titus menorah. With its elaborately decorated base that seemed to ignore Deuteronomy's severe prohibition against idolatry, was this artistic depiction accurate or a Roman fantasy? The character of Jewish art officially permitted in Beth Shearim would answer this key question once and for all.

Every shred of evidence conspired to suggest that the golden candelabrum originated in the Hellenistic period, seemingly crafted by order of Judah Maccabee. But with its eagles and sea monsters, a string of scholars have vehemently denounced the Arch of Titus menorah and its sacrilegious base as nothing more than an abominable product of imperial Rome.

Wandering around the hillside sloping down to this Jewish underworld brought back unwanted memories. In 1992 I had managed to
contract tick-borne relapsing fever (TBRF) here. A rare condition more commonly known as cave fever, TBRF has the genetic ability to vary its surface antigens like malaria, with relapsing fever endemic for years afterward. Only 10 percent of caves in Israel are infested by cave fever's specific offending ticks, but in the Lower Galilee, where Beth Shearim lies, this figure soars to 55 percent. Hence, my reluctance to dip back into these catacombs.

However, I soon refocused on the menorah's fancy pedestal base and recalled the lines of the Ten Commandments that Moses carried down Mount Sinai on two tablets:

This command was emphatic and, if taken verbatim, then the base of the Arch of Titus menorah clearly broke Israel's covenant with God. Equally damning were the high emotions provoked when King Herod dramatically bolted the figure of a golden eagle over the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem. Two of the most celebrated interpreters of Jewish law of this period, Judas son of Saripheus and Matthias son of Margalothus, considered this act a blasphemous violation of God's commandment. Josephus vividly recalls these two ancient academics inciting the youth of Jerusalem to

Jerusalem's rebellious teenagers didn't need a further invitation to rip down the eagle in broad daylight and hack it into pieces with an ax. Would the Jewish necropolis of Beth Shearim confirm this prohibition against graven images? If it did, I would be back to square one again with the Arch of Titus menorah. If the lamp's base wasn't Jewish art, then perhaps the entire representation was the fabrication of Roman imagination. Trying not to think about ticks and cave fever, I ducked through the triple-arched entranceway cut through the Eocene limestone into the distant past of my ancestors.

The light abruptly died, the air became damp and heavy, the temperature plummeted by at least eighty degrees—the perfect playground for ghouls. An icy breeze hovered over the hallowed halls. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, ghostly shapes of centuries gone by rose from the shadows. This city of the dead was impressively planned. Arched ceilings and narrow corridors of soft, white limestone led to discrete chambers containing family tombs. The deceased were laid to rest in massive stone sarcophagus boxes, and it was these that intrigued me most. Just how these highly observant ancient Jews chose to adorn their tombs would get me closest to the realities of Temple law and to the precise styles of decoration acceptable in the Bible lands.

Although underground Beth Shearim is something of a menorah city, with dozens of representations incised into walls and even sculpted out of the living rock, other weird and wonderful images, equally conspicuous, came as a shock. The sarcophagi are all alike: simple rectangular limestone boxes about five to six and a half feet high and ten feet long, with corresponding lids whose edges are sculpted into horns resembling ancient altars. Was this a deliberate replication of Temple ritual, I pondered, with the deceased offering his or her soul to God?

While most of the stone sarcophagus containers I came across were simply adorned with plain circular roundels and rosettes, several others
were staggeringly elaborate. Stylized lions with hungry large eyes and sharp teeth made sense as symbols of the Lion of Judah. In the Early Iron Age, for instance, King Solomon notably adopted this beast as the symbol of royalty:

Why the Beth Shearim lions were aggressively chewing an ox, however, was a completely different matter. This composition didn't seem particularly holy to me. But sights even more perplexing were to follow. The front of yet another sarcophagus blatantly displayed two flying Nikes—Roman Victory—alongside a pillar. Long before she was elevated to shoe manufacturer's paradise, the perfect brand image, Nike was a mainstream Roman goddess of victory throughout the empire—you really couldn't get closer to an archetypal pagan symbol.

The apparent contradiction between the law of God and earthen reality continued. I hardly had time to draw a breath and mull over the meaning of the weird and wonderful images of Beth Shearim before Deuteronomy was profaned yet again. In front of me stood a sculpted soldier with a menorah on his head, a scene that could have been lifted straight out of the sketchbook of the Jewish painter Marc Chagall, whose surreal art included rabbis standing on people's heads. This candelabrum was typically seven-branched with a common three-pronged base. Intriguingly, however, its shaft was elaborately adorned with the twisted knot of a tree. Clearly the deceased had personally commissioned a highly original piece of mortuary art. As the symbol of eternal light, the menorah in this composition was an obvious divine plea for enduring life in the afterworld.

Figurative art is traditionally considered an abomination in Judaism. Any image in human form detracted from the omnipotence of God
and, hence, was prohibited. So much for theory. In reality, from the Hellenistic period onward the Near East was flooded with highly vivid images drawn from the broad panorama of paganism. Initially a source of religious tension, it didn't take long for ideas and images to be absorbed into local culture and given new meaning. Irrespective of historical age or religious context, this is one of the common laws of human behavior. Unless you live inside a ghetto, it is simply impossible for people to be unaffected by changing cultural tastes and fashions.

By the Early Roman period—contrary to the view of many modern historians—there is no shadow of a doubt that Judaism was successfully evolving culturally with changing times. What we would traditionally term
graven images
became mainstream Jewish symbols, with alternative layers of meaning tailored toward the ideology of the user.

Stepping gingerly along the corridors of death, an uninvited guest, I considered the reality of Second Temple Judaism. Because it lies underground and was untouched for two thousand years, the necropolis of Beth Shearim is amazingly well preserved. And if the observant Jews of the headquarters of the Sanhedrin were allowed to decorate their tombs freely with figurative art, then certainly any Jewish community across the Diaspora must have enjoyed the same liberty.

Abruptly, two sets of images of my old friend the eagle peered at me from the sides of further sarcophagi and I knew I had absolute proof for the authenticity of the base of the Arch of Titus menorah. The art from Beth Shearim and on the candelabrum's base on the arch were identical. The vandalism of Herod's eagle over the Temple entrance had been a political act, not driven by religion. Herod may have been many despicable things, but he was no fool. Why spend a king's ransom on a spiritual home for Judaism and then antagonize its people? Ipso facto, the Arch of Titus candelabrum and its base, adorned with eagles and sea monsters, was indeed an authentic depiction of the sacred one from Jerusalem's Holy of Holies, the perpetual lamp from Herod's Temple. Though stylized, there was no mistaking the beak, outspread wings, and talons of this lord of the birds confronting me in Beth Shearim's catacombs.

Having safely obtained the evidence I needed, I scrambled out of this hole in the ground, scrubbed my hands and face at length in the hope of purifying myself of any residual mold, and walked up to Beth Shearim's ancient synagogue to collect my thoughts. Arches and walls spring from the living bedrock of this house of prayer.

My research trip to Beth Shearim had revealed watertight proof that Judaism had no issue with figurative art in the Roman period, as long as the images told the right religious message. Take the eagle, for instance, which in reality is a primary symbol of the Old Testament. The eagle of ancient Judaism was clearly not the bloodthirsty, violent bird of prey that topped the military standards of Roman soldiers marching into battle. If anything, Rome stole this image from the Near East where, as early as the third millennium BC, the thunderbird represented the sun in Mesopotamia.

The biblical eagle has manifold meanings: the symbol of God and his protection of the chosen people; a sign of royalty; an expression of immortality. In Exodus (19:4), God reminds Moses of his protective powers: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself.” Deuteronomy (32:11–12) reveals how the Lord watches over Israel: “As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions, the Lord alone guided him.”

Perhaps even more graphic were the dreams of the exiled prophet Ezekiel in Babylon, which confirm the eagle as a divine symbol in Judaism. One particularly vivid dream explains the presence of both the eagle and the ox in Jewish art: