Biblical Archaeology Review

These excavations are now directed by Zeev Weiss. There are actually three simultaneous excavations at the site. The third is directed by James F. Strange of the University of South Florida. Weiss and Netzer note the presence of two bathhouses in the lower city along the cardo, where they also located two or three mikva’ot (mentioned in the Sepphoris article, in “Architectural Development of Sepphoris,” p. 12, n. 4.

See the picture of women immersing glass and possibly metal vessels in a mikveh in Hensberger, Mikwe, p. 19. The image is reproduced from a 14th-century Spanish haggadah.

See the plan of the Dionysos house in Nagy et al., Sepphoris in Galilee, p. 112, fig. 46 (note the latrine and washbasin at the upper left [NW] and the mikveh at the right [E]).

This evidence is conveniently summarized by Stuart Miller and Isaiah Gafni in their articles in Sepphoris in Galilee, pp. 21–28, 51–58, and 59–66.

The evidence from lamps is summarized by Eric C. Lapp in Sepphoris in Galilee, pp. 221–222, and “The Archaeology of Light: The Cultural Significance of the Oil Lamp from Roman Palestine” (Ph.D. diss., Duke Univ., 1997), esp. pp. 80–113. The relevant numismatic data is conveniently summarized by Ya’akov Meshorer in Sepphoris in Galilee, pp. 195–198.

This is the point of view adopted by most of the authors in Nagy et al., Sepphoris in Galilee, and in Zeev Weiss and Ehud Netzer, “Architectural Development of Sepphoris During the Roman and Byzantine Periods,” in Edwards and McCollough, Archaeology and the Galilee, p. 128 and passim.

His 1996 unpublished Ph.D. dissertation at Northwestern University is entitled “A Zoological Model for the Study of Ethnic Complexity at Sepphoris.” Dr. Grantham is presently associate professor of anthropology at Troy State University in Alabama. He and I coauthored a paper on this subject, which I read at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion.