A 1,500 to 2,100-year-old Hebrew text from Jerusalem refers to “Shalom, mother of the synagogue.” And two burial niche inscriptions from Beit She’arim in the Galilee, both dated 250 to 350 C.E., refer in Greek to “Sara daughter of Nehemiah, mother of the priestess, the lady Maria.” “These inscriptions tend to provide little detail, so it is hard to know what to make of some of them,” Michael Satlow, professor of Judaic studies and religious studies at Brown University, told Zenger News.
“What on earth it meant for a woman to be a priestess of a synagogue, for instance, is very unclear.” There is no male equivalent, of which Satlow is aware, of “mother of the synagogue,” he added. The three are among some 5,250 already digitized texts and their translations documented in the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project, which Satlow directs. The project, which began at the University of Virginia in 1996 and moved to Brown in 2002, aims to make 10,000 inscriptions from 500 BCE to 614 C.E. accessible online. “Once deciphered, these inscriptions are then often published in specialized scholarly journals or excavation reports,” Satlow told Zenger News.
