Marking Religious and Ethnic Boundaries: Cases from the Ancient Golan Heights

In the aftermath of the 1967 “Six Days' War,” 254 ancient inscribed stones were found in forty-four towns and villages of the Golan Heights—241 in Greek, 12 in Hebrew or Aramaic, and 1 in Latin. These stones, along with numerous architectural fragments, served as the basis of the 1996 book by myself and Dan Urman, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in the Golan Heights—a study of settlement patterns of people of the three religions in this region in the early centuries of the common era.1 The area of the Golan heights, roughly the size of Rhode Island, was in antiquity a place of agriculture and, for the most part, small communities. Though historians of religions in the late Roman period have long been aware of the “quartering” of cities, and of the locations of particular religious groups in this or that section of urban areas, we have had little information concerning the ways in which Hellenes, Jews, and Christians took up residence in relation to each other in those rural settings featuring numerous towns and hamlets— most presumably too small to have “zones” for ethnic and religious groups. The surviving artifacts of a number of the Golan sites gave the opportunity for a case study. Part 1 of this article centers on evidence for the locations and possible interactions of members of these religious groups in the Golan from the third to the seventh centuries and entails a summary of findings in the earlier work, while part 2 takes up several lingering questions about religious identity and ways of “marking” it within Golan countryside communities. Both sections can be placed under a rubric of “boundary drawing and religion.”