Expressions of Cult in the Southern Levant in the Greco-Roman Period: Manifestations in Text and Material Culture

The coming of Alexander the Great ushered in many changes within the southern Levant. The subsequent period saw many upheavals, including the Greek and Roman conquests, the Jewish Revolts, and the gradual Christianization of the 'Holy Land'. Throughout this period, various local cults and cultic places dotted the landscape. These cults included an assortment of 'pagan', Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian ritual behaviours. Although undergoing processes of profound change, the cults maintained much of their older identities, while simultaneously interacting with each other. This volume seeks to present these processes both synchronically and diachronically, along three different axes--cultic places, personnel, and objects. The common denominator shared by these three axes is the people whose beliefs and practices shaped the religious behaviour in the Greco-Roman Southern Levant. The 26 articles in this volume investigate whether cultic practices formed a coherent cultural system. They consider the co-existence and competition of the different religious systems, analyzing them in terms of continuity, discontinuity, and change over an extended period of time, roughly from Alexander the Great to the Imperial integration of Christianity (ca. late 4th c. BCE - early 4th c. CE). The approaches presented at a conference held at The Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem and manifested in this volume are varied and interdisciplinary, combining archaeological, philological, historical, and art-historical analyses of the multiple bodies of evidence.