Two unrelated events occurred at Heftzibah, the kibbutz in northern Israel, shortly after its foundation in 1922.
First it refused, in circumstances that remain intriguingly obscure, a membership application from none other than Arthur Koestler, the writer later celebrated worldwide for his political novel Darkness at Noon. Who knows what incisive literary work he might have produced as an early Zionist pioneer? It was not to be.
Happily, Heftzibah left us a more positive legacy soon afterwards when, during excavations for an irrigation system its members excitedly unearthed the mosaic floor of what we know as the early sixth century synagogue at Beth Alpha, oriented south towards Jerusalem, and one of the best preserved of the many found in Israel to date.
Some of those floors, like that revealed recently at Hukkok in Galilee, may be more spectacular in the grand Roman-Byzantine manner. Yet the simple folk art of Beit Alpha has an appeal all its own. Its inscriptions are also unique in crediting the work to Marianos and his son Hananel as the first recorded Jewish artists of their time.
Of its three panels the central zodiac wheel is undoubtedly the most striking as well as the most controversial. There’s no better time to consider it than now at the turn of our Jewish year.
The outer circle shows the twelve Zodiac signs with their Hebrew names corresponding to the months of the year. The Gemini/Sivan twins are immediately recognizable, for example. The four winged women in the corners represent the Tekufot, the four seasons, while what appears to be the fire-crowned Sun god Helios in his quadriga, the four-horse chariot, is displayed at the centre.
In the words of the late Hershel Shanks, long-time editor of the Biblical Archeology Review —“What in the name of heaven is a Greek god doing in an ancient synagogue?” What indeed!
Yet Beit Alpha was only the first of seven similar discoveries. By the year 2000 the identical Zodiac arrangement had been found in synagogue floors at Na’aran, Yafiya, Horvat Kur, Hamat-Tiberias, Susiya and Tzippori. It’s far from being a one-off phenomenon, and others undoubtedly remain to be identified. They’re all dated to Roman and Byzantine rule from the 4th to 6th centuries over what remained of Jewish communities in the land of Israel after the disastrous Bar Kochba war of 132–136 CE.
What are we to make of this challenging zodiac? Astrology, the 5000-year-old claim of a link between celestial observation and terrestrial events, has been an issue for Jews since time immemorial.
The Torah condemns divination and fortune-telling unambiguously (Lev. 19:26, Deut. 18:10-12). Isaiah (47:13) mocks the “the scanners of heaven, the star gazers, who announce what will come upon you month by month.” Jeremiah (10:2) warns us not to be “dismayed by portents in the sky” like other nations.
Yet ever since Pompey first captured Jerusalem in 63 BCE, if not earlier, the pervasive classical culture in which such predictions were embedded was bound ultimately to seep into daily Jewish life and thought. To this day we still celebrate a happy event with “mazaltov”, our wish for a favourable constellation.
The Rabbis were initially divided on the issue. Whereas R. Akiva had been deeply opposed to astrological practice (BT Sanhedrin 65b), the 3rd century’s Galilean scholars R. Joshua b. Levi, Hanina b. Hama and others agreed to disagree with R. Johanan b. Nappaha and Abba Aricha who disapproved of such auguries. (BT Shabbat 156a).
By the fourth century, however, coinciding with the earliest examples of our synagogue floors, we find no recorded dissent from the eminent sage Rabbah b. Nahmani’s startling declaration that longevity, fecundity, and sustenance are matters for the stars. (BT Moed Katan 28a). Astrology would thereafter face no serious challenges in Jewish thinking until condemned by Maimonides 800 years later.
The debate hasn’t stopped since, but either way that extraordinary image of the sun god, the Greek Helios, the Roman Sol Invictus, demands its own explanation.
In Psalm 19:1 we extol God’s creation, - “the Heavens declare His glory, the firmament proclaims His handiwork”. Yet in that same text we also celebrate the sun’s passage, portrayed at verse six as “a bridegroom emerging from his canopy, a hero eager to run his course”. An ancient oral tradition recorded in Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer (6:12), a Midrash of the eigthth or nineth century, imagines him riding a chariot in his progress.
In focusing on the sun as the source of the zodiac’s seasons, the Jews of Beit Alpha, like their peers elsewhere, were probably aware of that comment and illustrated it by appropriating the imagery of their time without adopting its alien meaning. We’ve been doing that for millennia, borrowing ideas from our surroundings and reinterpreting them for our own purposes. Like the chariot in the Midrash itself? Possibly!
That’s how, for instance, Libra’s scales of balance and harmony were transformed to symbolise Tishri’s Yom Hadin, Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment. Disagreements about such astrological concepts aside, let’s join in wishing, hoping, and praying for a New Year of fulfilment and well-being for us all.
Eli Abt writes on the Jewish arts.
