JEWISH INSCRIPTIONS AND THEIR USE 459 Chapter Thirteen Jewish Inscriptions and Their Use Jonathan J. Price and Haggai Misgav Sources and Limitations 459 Historical Information on Jewish Inscriptions 461 Epigraphic Cultures: Content and Language 466 Relation to Rabbinic Judaism 478 Sources and Limitations Jewish inscriptions, defined as texts written or commissioned by Jews, com- prise a tiny subset of the many hundreds of thousands of inscriptions surviving from Graeco-Roman antiquity in Greek, Latin and other languages. Despite 150 years of scholarship on Jewish epigraphy, no firm criteria have been de- veloped – or are likely to be developed – to distinguish Jewish inscriptions from others. Conventionally an inscription is marked as ‘Jewish’, or at least suspected to be so, if it contains one or more of the following signifiers: He- brew or Aramaic (discounting magical tablets); typically Jewish symbols (me- nora, lulav, etc.); mention of typically Jewish institutions (e.g., proseuche); use of typically Jewish terminology (Ioudaios, theos hypsistos), formulae (shalom al Yisrael) or titles (rabbi, archisynagogos, etc.); typically Jewish names; location in an identifiably Jewish site, such as a Jewish cemetery or a syna- gogue. 1 A single criterion is usually not in itself sufficient evidence for the Jewishness of the author or commemorand of a text, so that there are inevita- bly some texts in the standard corpora which are not in fact Jewish (it is often especially difficult to distinguish between Jewish and early Christian epitaphs). Conversely, many inscriptions which were written by and/or commemorate Jews are not identifiable as Jewish because they lack identifying characteris- tics, which should not however be interpreted as the author’s lack of interest in Judaism or detachment from personal Jewish identity; quite the opposite may 1 The most detailed discussion is W. Ameling in IJO I, 8-21; compare the prefaces to the other volumes in that series, IJO I, v, and IJO III, v; V. Tcherikover in CPJ I, xvii; D. Noy and W. Horbury in JIGRE, x-xi. There have been some surveys of Jewish inscriptions and their use for the historian, e.g., L. Kant, ‘Jewish Inscriptions’, and M. Williams, ‘The Contribution of Jewish Inscriptions’. It is not the purpose here to give another such summary, but to highlight methodo- logical and interpretive problems, with the focus on material from the Land of Israel.