Palestine in Late Antiquity

Samaritans, Biblical Studies, and Ancient Judaism: Recent Trends

“…Many scholars shy away from reliance on these late texts for reconstructing the pre-Islamic history of the Samaritans (Hjelm 2004b: 184), although Etienne Nodet advocates this position using the Samaritan chronicles (e.g., Nodet 2011), Hagith Sivan has cautiously drawn on them in her history of late antique Palestine (Sivan 2008) and others have attempted by a source-critical approach to bring the later texts to bear on much earlier material (Duchemin 2012; Stenhouse 2012). Although the Kitab al-Tarīkh , Samaritan Book of Joshua , and other chronicles certainly preserve a significant amount of material earlier than the compilation of their manuscripts, isolating those traditions does not easily account for the continuous composition of Samaritan chronicles (Hjelm 2004a: 31, 2004b: 187-88).…”

“…Fourth and finally, speaking again of late antiquity, recent decades have seen an efflorescence of work on Samaritans in the later Roman empire, in diaspora (van der Horst 2002; Zsengellér 2016), in Palestine (Sivan 2008), and with respect to material such as amulets (Pummer 2020). This work will become more and more relevant to the study of the earlier period as the lack of any straightforward Samaritan/Jewish ‘parting’ becomes more widely acknowledged, and in light of solid archaeological and textual evidence for the importance of Samaritans during the later period.…”

“…This work will become more and more relevant to the study of the earlier period as the lack of any straightforward Samaritan/Jewish ‘parting’ becomes more widely acknowledged, and in light of solid archaeological and textual evidence for the importance of Samaritans during the later period. The place of Samaritans in standard-issue histories of late antique cultural change is so far small, but secure (Barag 2009; Di Segni 1998; Gwynn 2010; Sivan 2008). Many—although by no means all—of the Christian representations of Samaritans in this period have been collected by Pummer (2002), but only a handful of analyses have so far emerged for this extensive corpus (Hahn 2020; Reed 2018: 159-66).…”

Archaeological evidence for the tsunami of January 18, A.D. 749: a chapter in the history of Early Islamic Qâysariyah (Caesarea Maritima)

“…According to this text, the "Byzantines" and Samaritans living in the coastal cities, including Caesarea, fled the onslaught of the Arabs and went to "Byzantium", after sending much of their portable wealth to inland villages away from the embattled coastal zone, expecting to recover it upon their return -which never came. For the Levant in general, see, e.g., Bowersock 2006Walmesley 2007;Sivan 2008;Holum and Lapin 2011;Avni 2011. 56 There is a clear, albeit necessarily episodic, pattern of abandonment and sometimes destruction of farms and villas outside the city walls which can be dated to c.640; 57 these are the holdings of Caesarea's wealthy proprietors, the leading men (prōteuontes) of the city, who stored the agricultural produce of their rural estates in warehouses such as those attached to the opulent private residences excavated in the city's SW sector.…”

The Public Intellectual according to Choricius of Gaza, or How to Circumvent the Totalizing Christian Discourse

“…Champion 2014, Amato, Thévenet and Ventrella 2014. 13 Ashkenazi 2004Sivan 2008, 346-47. Downey 1958 argued that in Gaza the classical tradition was kept so far divorced from Christian faith that no real tensions arose between them.…”