| Beit She'arim | |
| Native Name: | Beit She'arayim |
| Alternate Name: | Sheikh Abreiḳ |
| Map Type: | Israel |
| Map Size: | 150 |
| Location: | Israel |
| Coordinates: | 32.7022°N 35.1292°W |
| Built: | Hellenistic period |
| Abandoned: | 20th century |
| Epochs: | Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Arab |
| Cultures: | Jewish, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine |
| Excavations: | 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1953, 1954, 1955 |
| Archaeologists: | Benjamin Mazar, Nahman Avigad |
| Condition: | Ruin |
| Public Access: | yes |
Beit She'arim (; / Bet Sharei),[1] also Besara (Βήσαρα),[2] [3] was a Jewish village located in the southwestern hills of the Lower Galilee, during the Roman period, from the 1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE. At one point, it served as the seat of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish judicial and religious council.
Josephus mentions Beit She'arim in the late Second Temple period as a royal estate belonging to Berenice, near the border of Acre. In the mid-2nd century CE, it flourished as a town under the leadership of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the compiler of the Mishnah, when it became a center of rabbinic scholarship and literary activity.[4] [5] After Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi's death around 220 CE, he was laid to rest in the adjoining necropolis.[6] This necropolis, a vast network of underground tombs, transformed Beit She'arim into a central burial ground for Jews from both the Land of Israel and diaspora communities across the Middle East.
Beth She'arim underwent a crisis in the 4th century and a continued decline by the 5th century, transforming from an urban center back into a rural village. Byzantine-period remains from the 6th and 7th centuries indicate a very limited presence at the site. Later this was the site of Sheikh Bureik, a village depopulated in the early 1920s due to the Sursock Purchase.
It is today part of the Beit She'arim National Park.
The site is situated on the spur of a hill about half a kilometer long and 200 meters wide, and lies in the southern extremity of the Lower Galilee mountains, facing the western end of the Jezreel Valley, east of Daliat el-Carmel, south of Kiryat Tivon, and west of Ramat Yishai. It rises 138m (453feet) above sea level at its highest point. It is first mentioned by Josephus as Besara where grain from the King's land was stored.
For many years the ancient site of Beit Shearim remained obscure and nearly slipped into oblivion. Some historical geographers thought that Sheikh Abreiḳ was to be identified with Gaba Hippeum (Geba), the site mentioned by Josephus as being in the confines of Mount Carmel.[7]
Historical geographer Samuel Klein argued in 1913 that Beth-Shearim and Besara were to be recognised as one and the same place, an opinion agreed to earlier by C.R. Conder,[8] but he was unable to pin-point its location. In 1936 Alexander Zaïd discovered what he thought was a "new" catacomb among the already known burial caves in the hill directly below Sheikh Abreiḳ, and brought the necropolis to the attention of archaeologist Benjamin Mazar and his brother-in-law Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; Ben-Zvi proposed that this was the burial grounds of the Jewish Patriarchal family of the 2nd-century CE. On this basis Klein proposed that Sheikh Abreik was the ancient site of Beit Shearim,[9] which was corroborated by the discovery of a broken marble slab, from a mausoleum above Catacomb no. 11, containing a Greek inscription, in which the funerary epigram (written during the deceased person's lifetime) bears the words: "I, Justus, the son of [S]appho, of the family Leontius, have died and have been laid to rest...alas... ...esar......", where "...esar..." was interpreted to have been Besara.[10] [11]
Arguably the most definitive pieces of evidence that helped scholars identify Sheikh Bureik with Beit Shearim is the Talmudic reference that the body of Rabbi Judah the Prince, after he had died in Sepphoris, was carried for burial at Beit Shearim,[12] during which funeral procession they made eighteen stops at different stations along the route to eulogize him. Josephus, when speaking about Besara in Vita § 24 (the Jewish-Galilean Aramaic dialect for Beit Shearim), places the village at "60 stadia (more than 11 km.) from Simonias," a distance corresponding with the site at Sheikh Bureik, where is situated the largest Jewish necropolis found in the Land of Israel, and only "20 stadia (3.7 km.) from Geba of the Horsemen," thought by Mazar to be Ḫirbet el-Ḥârithîye.[13] [14] This prompted historian Ben-Zvi to suggest that the necropolis at Sheikh Bureik (Shêkh 'Abrêq) and the tombs found there were none other than that of the Patriarchal Dynasty belonging to Judah the Prince.[15]