Books in Brief

The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period

Yizhar Hirschfeld (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1992) 305 pp., $35.00

Byzantine Christian civilization staked out its claim to the Judean desert in the fourth through seventh centuries C.E. At the height of this monastic movement, in the late fifth and early sixth centuries C.E., about 3,000 ascetics lived in the desert in at least 55 identified monasteries, and thousands of pilgrims and travelers came to seek the monks’ advice and to venerate places where great ascetics lay buried. The wilderness itself was crisscrossed with footpaths, which Yizhar Hirschfeld has mapped in what is clearly the finest book yet written on Judean desert asceticism. He has made available to the lay person, as well as to professional archaeologists and historians, most of the archaeological and historical materials needed to understand Judean monasticism. He has done it in one of the most readable, intelligent and beautifully illustrated books I have seen.