Biblical Archaeology Review

See Ruth Ovadiah and Asher Ovadiah, Mosaic Pavements in Israel: Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine (Rome: L’erma di Bretschineider, 1989), p. 163.

See, for example, Michael Avi-Yonah, The Holy Land from the Persian to the Arab Conquest (586 B.C.-A.D. 640): A Historical Geography (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1977), p. 161: The Darom’s “distinguishing characteristic was that ut contained an unusually high number of Jewish settlements which had apparently survived Bar-Kokhba’s War.”

The Byzantine method of dating according to the “indiction” was based on a 15-year cycle between assessments of property for purposes of taxation. Our date creates a two-year discrepancy between the two indiction years. We have not yet been able to resolve this discrepancy.

This inscription, as well as the one in the atrium and the one in Area D (see below), was read by E. Shenhav and Leah Di Segni.

Eusebius, Onomasticon 11.4–9, in Ferdinand Larsow and Gustav Parthey, eds., Eusebii Pamphili Episcopi Caesariensis Onomasticon (Paris: Berolini, 1862), p. 233.

I want to express my sincere gratitude to Géza Alföldy for inspiring this study and for his great assistance. I also thank E. Badian of Harvard University, Boruch K. Helman of Brookline, Mass., Asher S. Kaufman and Israel Shatzman of Hebrew University and Hershel Shanks, BAR editor, for many helpful suggestions.

City of God 6.11.

Malalas, 10.46.

Remains of a theater built near the end of the first century and presumably to be identified with the one mentioned by Malalas were excavated in 1934–1935. See Donald N. Wilber (“The Theatre at Daphne: Daphne-Harbie 20-N,” in Richard Stillwell, ed., Antioch-on-the Orontes, vol. 2 [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1938], pp. 57–94), who concludes that Vespasian did, indeed, build a theater at Daphne.

Robert E. Glanville Downey (“References to Inscriptions in the Chronicle of Malalas,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 66 [1935], pp. 55–72) demonstrates, however, that all of Malalas’s references to inscriptions may be derived from literary sources rather than from personal observation.