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The Children of Noah JEWISH SEAFARING IN ANCIENT TIMES Raphael Patai With Contributions by James Hornell and John M. Lundquist PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © 1998 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Third printing, and first paperback printing, 1999 Paperback ISBN 0-691-00968-6 The Library ofCongress hascataloged theclothedition of thisbook as follows Patai, Raphael, 1910- Thc children of Noah : Jewish seafaring in ancient times / Raphael Patai ; with contributions by James Hornell and John M. Linquist. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Navigation—Palestine—History. I Hornell, James, 1865-1949. II. Lundquist, John M. III. Title. VK113.P3P32 1998 387.5'0933—dc21 97-40059 ISBN 0-691-01580-5 (cl. : alk. paper) This book has been composed in Galliard An earlier version of the foreword by Howard M. Sachar was first published inFields of Offerings: Studies in Honor of Raphael Patai, copyright © 1983 by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, East Rutherford, New Jersey The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper) http://pup.princeton.edu (http://pup.princeton.edu) Printed in the United States of America 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Foreword, byHoward M. Sachar ix Preface: How ThisBook WasWritten xi Introduction xv CHAPTER 1 The Ark of Noah 3 CHAPTER 2 Ships and Seafaring in the Bible 12 CHAPTER 3 Construction and Parts 22 CHAPTER 4 Types of Ships 39 CHAPTER 5 The Crew 47 CHAPTER 6 Maritime Trade 53 CHAPTER 7 In the Harbor 60 CHAPTER 8 On the High Seas 64 CHAPTER 9 Naval Warfare 73 CHAPTER 10 Laws of the Sea and the River 85 CHAPTER 11 Similes and Parables 101 CHAPTER 12 Sea Legends and Sailors' Tales 109 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER 13 Ports and Port Cities 132 CHAPTER 14 Lake Kinneret 160 APPENDIX Biblical Seafaring and the Book of Mormon, by John M. Lundquist 171 Abbreviations Used in the Notes 177 Notes 185 Index 209 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES 1. Two-level Roman galley, second half of the first century BCE.Relief found at Palestrina, now in the Vatican Museum. Reprinted by per- mission from Lionel Casson, The Ancient Mariners, 2nd ed. (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1991), Plate 10 17 2. Sailing ship on a Hebrew seal, eighth to seventh centuriesBCE. Photo courtesy of Nahman Avigad, from Lionel Casson, TheAn- cient Mariners, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), Fig. 26 20 3. Sketch of aship on the walls of the Beth Sh'arim catacombs (second to fourth centuries CE) 24 4. Clay model of aboat from the Island of Cyprus 29 5. Sketch ofaship from Mareshah (third century BCE) 31 6. Roman merchantman, as shown on a mosaic found in Rome 33 7. Picture of aship on the Dead Sea, mosaic map of Palestine,found in Madeba, Jordan 34 8. Another picture ofa ship on the Dead Sea, from the same Madeba map 34 9. The ship of the Argonauts, on a Greek vase 36 10. The construction of apapyrus boat on an Egyptian wall painting 41 11. Picture of apontoon bridge on the Jordan from the Madeba map 45 12. A ship in the fleet of Egyptian queen Hatshepsut (sixteenth century BCE) 49 13. Assyrian warship, depicted in the palace of Sennacherib (ruled 704- 681 BCE) 74 14. A coin of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (ruled 103- 76 BCE) 76 15. A coin of Herod, king of Judea (ruled 37-4 BCE), showing an anchor 76 16. A coin of Archelaus (ruled 4 BCE-6 CE), showing a warship with oars and a cabin 76 17. Another coin ofArchelaus,showing a warship with oars 77 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 18. A coin of Titus commemorating his victory over Judea (70 CE) 81 19. The Lake Kinneret boat. From the collection of Israel Antiquities Authority. Photo credit: Duby Tal, Albatross. 168 MAPS 1. Ports and Port Cities along the Mediterranean Shore of Palestine in Ancient Times 138 2. Settlements around Lake Kinneret in Ancient Times 163 FOREWORD ON JULY20, 1996, Raphael Patai died, a mercifully short time after being diagnosed with cancer. Thereby ended one of the most extraordinary ca- reers in twentieth-century scholarship. Periodically, if rarely, there appear on the cultural horizon those monumental figures whose intellectual achievements serve as benchmarks for entire generations of colleagues and students. Such a man, surely, was Raphael Patai. For over half a century his career was a standing inspiration to those who toiled in the vineyards of anthropology, sociology, and history, and a tacit reproach to those, lacking his genius, who were unprepared to accept his own heroic standards of disciplined, self-sacrificing research. One need only measure the stunning prodigality of the man. The hun- dreds of articles and the thirty-odd books that flowed from his pen would have challenged the absorptive powers of all but a handful of scholars— essentially those willing to devote their most vigorous years simply to a critical evaluation of Raphael Patai's own life and work. Consider, as well, the erudition, the plain and simple cultural and linguistic virtuosity reso- nating in this accumulated Pataiana. The embarras de richesses extends from studies of Shabbatai Zvi (in Hungarian), of the history of the Jews in Hungary (in German and English), of Josephus (in French), of Moroc- can Jewry (in Hebrew), to an explosion of books and articles in Hebrew and English covering every facet of ancient and modern folk mores, from Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual and The Jewish Al- chemists, to Patai's more popular but equally acclaimed volumes on The Arab Mind and The Jewish Mind. Indeed, for academic "purists," fixated by disciplinary categorization, there is a lesson to be learned in the awesome breadth of Raphael Patai's terrain. Not for him artificial margins between the social sciences and the humanities, between Middle Eastern and Western cultures. He erased, devoured those barriers by force of will, stamina, and sheer intellectual muscularity. Whether applying his talents to subjectsas diverse as "Hebrew Installation Rites," "The Jewish Indians in Mexico," On Culture Contact and Its Working in ModernPalestine, to Women in the Modern World, The Republic of Syria,The Republic ofLebanon, or The Kingdom of Jor- dan, he infused his works with an identical thoroughness and exactitude of documentation, with a magisterial command of historical and regional setting, and with an intuitive balance, perspective, and tolerance that, one suspects, reflected Raphael Patai's character no less than his learning. It is instructive, moreover, to recall that this overpowering mono- graphic superstructure was erected on a career enjoying few of the luxu- X FOREWORD ries normally provided by Western academe. To be sure, Raphael Patai's own academic training and teaching experience were as densely uphol- stered as those of anyof his professional colleagues. Born in Hungary, the son of the distinguished Zionist author and activist Joseph Patai, he earned doctorates at both the University of Budapest and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (indeed, Patai's was the first Ph.D. to be awarded by the latter institution), as well as ordination at the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. Thereafter, he taught and acquired devoted proteges at the Hebrew University, at Columbia, Princeton, New York University, the New School for Social Research, the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. Yet, by contrast with those legions of academicians who ceaselessly bemoan the lack of fellowships and paid leaves of absence without which, they insist, there can be no "free time" for research and publication, Raphael Patai managed simultaneously to pursue his scholarship and to shoulder numerous challenging administrative responsibilities. Over the course of six decades, he served variously as research director of the Pal- estine Institute of Folklore and Ethnology; as director of the Syrian-Jor- dan-Lebanon Research Project; as administrative secretary of the Pal- estine and later Israel Institute of Technology (the Technion); and, most significantly, as research director of the Herzl Institute, in this latter ca- pacity building the largest Zionist research center in the United States. It was perhaps the confluence of these executive achievements, no less than a vivid, unifying strand in his publications, that revealed the elan behind Raphael Patai's intellect. There is, after all, a certain particularity within the ambit of every cultural galaxy, and Raphael Patai was no ex- ception to this rule. Notwithstanding his devotion to scholarship in its broadest, most universalist dimensions, his transcending love affair un- questionably remained with Jewish civilization. At once intricate and aus- tere, tradition-freighted and dynamically adaptive, intellectually cosmo- politan and ethnically defiant, that civilization is the coruscating penumbra of one of history's most vibrant and protean peoples. Those who venture to interpret this complex and multifaceted phenome- non ideally should embody at least some of its characteristics. As it hap- pened, Raphael Patai incarnated virtually all of them. In the most authentic sense of the word, he was a protean human being. His death, like his life, matters. "The wind blows through the stubble," wrote Theodor Herzl in 1901, aware that his time was running out. It is the wind that now has cut down Raphael Patai, ideological heir of the great Zionist father, whose majestic intellectual legacy signifies a comparable devotion to the fate and fortune of hispeople.For two generations of his students and admirers, the void left by his departure will not soon or easily be made good. Howard M. Sachar PREFACE HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN THE WRITING of this book spans a period of more than sixty years, many times longer than it took me to write any other of the thirty or so books I have authored in my lifetime. The next longest after thiswasmy The Jewish Alchemists, on which I worked, on and off, for about ten years, and which was published in 1994 by Princeton University Press. None of my other books took longer than a period of one to two years to produce. The history of the present book goes back to 1933, when I arrived in Jerusalem from Budapest, became a graduate student at the Hebrew University, and started to work on my doctoral dissertation, which dealt with water in ancient Palestinian folklore. While gathering source mate- rial for that book—I spent about two years doing little else beside read- ing the Bible and the Rabbinic sources and taking notes—I also jotted down what I found in those historical records on seafaring. I completed my dissertation by the end of 1935 (it turned out to be close to a three- hundred-page book, which was published in 1936 by the Dvir Publishing House of TelAviv), and earned the Ph.D. degree from the Hebrew Uni- versity in June of that year—incidentally, the first Ph.D. to be awarded by that school. Right away I returned to my notes on seafaring, basing on them my Hebrew book Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times, published in Jerusalem in 1938 by the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society. A brief English summary of it was published in 1941 in the Jewish Quarterly Review. This done, my interest turned from the sea to the land, and more and more from historical to contemporary issues, resulting in a number of Hebrew books, published in small editions. In 1944 I became a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and as such began to receive its journal, Man. In its March/April 1945 issue I found an article written by James Hornell on "Palm Leaves on Boats' Prows of Gerzian Age," the illustrations in which reminded me of a sketch in the Jewish burial caves at Beth Sh'arim near Haifa, which had been excavated shortly before. I sent in to Man a note on the subject, which was published in its March/April 1946 issue under the title "Palm Leaves on Boats' Prows in Palestine." In my note I pointed out the sur- prising similarity between the palm leaves on the Gerzian boats discussed by Hornell and those on the Beth Sh'arim ship, dating from the second or third century CE. Xll PREFACE A few weeks later, to my great surprise, I got a letter from Mr. Hornell (it was forwarded by the editorial office of Man), in which he expressed his interest in the Beth Sh'arim find, and inquired whether I had more material pertaining to Jewish seafaring in ancient times. Delighted in the interest shown by a man who I knew was a foremost authority on ancient seafaring and the author of many important studies on the subject, I sent him a copy of my Hebrew book, and asked him whether he thought the book could be published in an English translation or adaptation. His answer was so positive that I felt encouraged to ask him whether he would be willing to read the English version I would prepare, and con- sider adding his own comments to it, or possibly even augment it with data from other ancient cultures that would throw light on what the Jewish sources have to say about seafaring. His answer again was positive, and I went to work on translating my book into English, a language in which by that time I was sufficiently at home, and in which I had even published several scholarly papers. In the fall of 1947 a fellowship from the Viking Fund (subsequently renamed Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research) brought me to America, but before I left Jerusalem I sent off the completed manuscript of my English translation to Mr. Hornell. Several months later I received the manuscript back from him in New York, in a revised, retyped, and occasionally expanded form. However, at the time I was totally involved in writing my book Israel between East and West: A Study in Human Relations(which was to be published in 1953 by the Jewish Publication Society), and was unable to tear myself away from problems of the present and to return to issues of the remote past. Hence, al- though I duly acknowledged to Mr. Hornell the receipt of the typescript, I also informed him that it would take some time before I could go over it and give him my reaction to the changes and additions he introduced. Here things stood when, in 1949, the news reached me that Mr. Hornell had passed away. He was eighty-four years old. With Mr. HornelPs death the incentive to work on the seafaring book disappeared, and I put the typescript at the back of my filing cabinet, thinking that I would return to it once my current research engagements eased up and I would be left with some time on my hands. However, I got more and more involved in studies relating to the modern Middle East, other contemporary Jewish communities, the Arab mind, and the Jewish mind, so that the seafaring typescript remained untouched year after year—in fact, decade after decade. Then, in the late 1980s, I was asked by my friend Dr. John M. Lund- quist, head of the Oriental Division of the New York Public Library, to contribute a paper to the Festschrift he, together with Dr. Stephen D. Ricks of Brigham Young University, planned to publish in honor of the

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