Zeev Safrai

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology

The southern Levant is probably the most excavated and surveyed part of the world. While many past studies have attempted to use this wealth of information, they usually focused on certain phenomena and, moreover, the data was not systematically quantified. This study presents a new, quantitative, approach to the data. We rely on two datasets: (1)...

The many rich finds from Tel Abu-Shusha (Mishmar Ha-‘emek) in the Jezreel Valley attest to its having been an important site in the Roman and Byzantine periods. The site is identified as Geva Philippi, a city with polis status. Based on several convincing finds, Zeev Safrai and Micha Lin also identified the site as Geva Parashim (Gaba), referred to...

The climate factor has become a focus of much historical and archaeological investigation, encouraged recently by improvements in palaeoclimatic techniques and interest in global climate change. This article examines correlations between climate and history in the Byzantine southern Levant (c. 4th-7th centuries AD). A proposed 5th century economic...

This article presents a survey of research in farming and agriculture. It discusses the extent the economy was open that involved export and import. It then demonstrates how the local agriculture was adapted into the structure of the economy, and assesses the impact of the agrarian structure on agricultural variety. It also studies the influence Je...

Most parts of Israel were excavated intensively, and most of the country was also covered by surveys. Our knowledge of settlement patterns and distribution during the various periods is very comprehensive — probably more so than in any other region in the world. Using data from the numerous excavations and from the detailed surveys, many studies ha...

In this paper, the historical and archaeological evidence for connections between the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia during the Talmudic/Byzantine period is examined in order to define the nature, the context, and the extent of these contacts. The analysis demonstrates that a wide range of connections did in fact exist, a...

The authors attempt to show that the Copper Scroll was not a record of treasures of the Second Temple; rather it recorded treasures connected to the biblical period. This was one element in the debate about legitimacy during the Second Temple period in which some groups who claimed the leadership of the Jewish nation wrote that the vessels of the F...

The article presents, in catalogue form, a corpus of the known coin hoards found in Eretz Israel and dating to the Roman and Byzantine periods. The study is based on a sample of 152 coin hoards found in the region, containing coins ranging from 27 BCE to 695 CE. The objective was to investigate the reasons for hoarding in the light of historical ev...

This study presents a corpus of the coin hoards found in Israel, dating to the Roman and Byzantine periods. In this study we investigated data relating to the shelf life of coins in Roman and Byzantine hoards found in Israel. It is commonly accepted that coins were in circulation for more than ‘a few years’. However most of the hoards in our sample...

Qumran is the site that was inhabited by the Essenes. Moreover, excavations conducted at Qumran have shown that its inhabitants enjoyed a high standard of living. This being the case, there is no possibility that Ein Gedi was the Essenes' place of residence due to the different social structure and standard of living of the two settlements. The sit...

Kufr Thulth is the focus of an analysis of a village and its satellite settlements. Offshoot settlements occupied an internal ring during the Roman-Byzantine period. Nucleated hamlets and dispersed homesteads characterize the modern period. Both the ancient and the modern patterns are related to land scarcity and the presence of discontinuous arabl...