Talk:Peki'in Synagogue

Hardly anything reliable on history, dates, and inscriptions content

As of now, we have little going beyond the most superficial news scoop level.

We lack a recent source on

• the age of the two carved stone tablets (menorah and Torah shrine/Temple facade). Apparently at least the menorah is either ancient, or – medieval. Say some researchers. But I found no closer details, just a single sentence in a newspaper article. The only source we have, Segal Chiat's book, is a typed handbook published in 1982, almost 40 years ago. It is just a gazetteer (not an archaeological study), collecting data from a 1931 (!) PEFQS contribution by Eliezer Sukenik, the grandfather of Israeli archaeology, and from another gazetteer published in 1977 by F.G. Hüttenmeister with Gottfried Reeg – both Judaists, not archaeologists, so just repeating older assessments made by others.

We lack a reliable source on

• the content of the capital inscriptions: I could only find the "provisional" reading from right after the discovery, with no concrete rendering of the text. Just some vague notion about donors. I couldn't find any IAA publication online.
• no proper dating of the capital. The IAA press release copied word by word by the press says "1800 years old", and that's always a simplification, sometimes based on a misunderstanding, hinting at either the 2nd or 3rd century. Not good enough. Having no proper IAA publication like a final report or other analysis means: we're not there yet.
• no source for the synagogue preceding the current one and allegedly destroyed in an earthquake (there had been two major tremors in the Galilee several decades earlier, in 1837 and 1856). There must have been a synagogue there for sure, the Jewish population at the time required one, but: no source.
• nothing, let alone a source, for the "medieval synagogue" mentioned as alternative possibility to an ancient one. Unless it's just a misunderstanding – or the same one as the one above, the earthquake casualty.
• no word about the possible dating of the other carved stones displayed at the synagogue. They can be seen online, for instance here. One looks like a chancel screen of a type well known from Byzantine churches, but the carved lion could well be from a Torah Ark.

Still a long way to go. Anyone with solutions? Cheers, Arminden (talk) 04:48, 24 April 2021 (UTC)