‘How many languages are there? Seventy-two.’ Thus ran the pithy treatment of the diversity of human tongues present in several eighth- and ninth-century collections of Ioca monachorum, ‘Monkish jokes’. Like early medieval wisdom dialogues, the Ioca were written to entertain and to educate, playfully testing biblical knowledge through riddling questions. On one level they serve as a reminder that a close relationship between levity and the classroom continued to exist long after schoolboys were amused, to Jerome's annoyance, by the testament of the piglet ‘Grunnius Corocotta’, and long before Peter Abelard's joking syllogisms elicited the laughter of his Paris students and the comparably cool comment of Otto of Freising. More specifically, this particular question, ‘how many languages are there?’, encapsulates the themes I wish to discuss here, for the answer, ‘seventy-two’, originates in patristic exegesis on Genesis 10–11. This is, of course, the well-known account of the building and subsequent destruction of the Tower of Babel, the ‘scattering of peoples’ that followed in its wake and, with this, the creation of the ‘confusion of tongues’ that offered early medieval intellectuals an explanation for the multiplicity of earthly languages.

As Arno Borst has shown in exhaustive detail, Babel stood at the centre of scripturally based explanations of the diversity of human culture and language. Differences in speech, and the incomprehensibility of the language of one people to another, occupied the very core of the antique notions of ‘the barbarian’, which continued into the early Middle Ages.

INCONGRUITY: THE HUMOUR OF THE INAPPROPRIATE

In the 1980s and 1990s, the cartoons of Gary Larson became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic; indeed Larson's work, ‘The Far Side’, has a special relevance to early medievalists, as Vikings were a favourite topic. One thing that makes Larson's cartoons amusing is his knack of setting familiar things in inappropriate settings or circumstances. The people (or animals, or amoebas) are rarely saying or doing anything – in itself – especially amusing. What makes us laugh is, simply enough, the idea of serious, intellectually brilliant nuclear physicists playing school-yard pranks on each other, cows playing ‘knock on the door and run’ with the farmer, and so on. Similarly, in the earlier 1990s in Britain, whilst Larson's archaeological cartoons were being employed in the journal Antiquity, a startling, runaway success was scored by Rob Newman and David Baddiel's ‘History Today’ sketches. Here, two old Oxbridge historians in suits, ostensibly debating the origins of the Crimean War, rapidly ended up trading the sorts of insult that we associate with primary-school days. The humour was especially enhanced when this was sprinkled with phrases of academic language: ‘I am familiar with her work.’ The dialogue itself was, mostly, no funnier than if it had indeed been spoken by two eight-year-olds in a playground. What made it funny was who was speaking it.

Incongruity has always been central to humour theory.

The early medieval period saw a flowering of riddles and riddle collections, both religious and secular, both earnest and light-hearted. To date the greater part of scholarly attention has been focussed on the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book, on the grounds both of literary merit and of mystery – the text does not include the answers, an omission that has provided happy occupation for decades of scholars. These two features – literary merit and mystery – also appear in what is perhaps a yet more remarkable riddle collection, the Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi iuvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico of Alcuin. The Disputatio is unusual in that it intermingles prose riddles with wisdom literature; that, unlike all other examples of the form, it puts the dialogue in the mouths of contemporary interlocutors (one Alcuin, the other Pippin, the son of Charlemagne), and represents itself as conversation between them; and that, to a degree rarely seen in dialogues, it is playful, teasing and genuinely witty. For the most part, however, scholarship has ignored the Disputatio, and the text has yet to claim its rightful place as a remarkable reflection of the strength a dialogue could obtain in the hands of a master craftsman such as Alcuin.

The early medieval tradition of literary riddling was inspired by Symphosius (or Symposius), a Late Latin poet whose exact identity is uncertain.

The relationship between humour, history and gender is still neglected by historians despite a recent fashion for books about humour as an historical phenomenon. This chapter illustrates the degree to which these three issues were linked together by Liutprand of Cremona (c.920/5–72) in his various writings. Liutprand's Antapodosis (or ‘Book of Revenge’, written 958–62), Liber de Ottone rege (965) and Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana (969–70), each contain humorous passages, which are a fundamental feature of his unique literary style. The most developed of all Liutprand's jokes (or ludibrium, as he has it) is a tale that appears in Antapodosis 4.10, inserted into an otherwise anodyne report of a battle, which took place in the late 920s, between Tedbald, a relative of King Hugh of Italy, Liutprand's sometime patron, and some Greeks. I quote this in full in Frederic Wright's translation:

In its simplest form, humour can be defined as a stimulus that generally produces what psychologists and physiologists call ‘the laughter reflex’, although the picture is actually more complex than this. However, there are as many different cultural forms of this stimulus as there are human societies. Furthermore, there are several paradoxes to be confronted when considering the nature of humour and laughter. One is quite simply that the so-called laughter reflex has no apparent biological purpose: its only generally agreed function is to provide relief from tension (although one could count this as a biological function, too) – and the point about humour, of course, is that it consists precisely in the deliberate or accidental creation of a context in which tension of one sort or another can be built up and then dissipated. This can be done quickly, through the format of the standard joke; or at length, in the form of satire or parody; or a combination. Another paradox about laughter is that it is a very complex physiological response – it actually involves the co-ordinated contraction of some fifteen facial muscles as well as altered respiratory patterns – but has no obvious physiological origin: telling an amusing story, and generating humour, is a cultural phenomenon.

The belief that pagans made up a large part, perhaps even the majority, of Galilee's population in the first century CE – a view that has influenced generations of New Testament scholars – exists despite the evidence, not because of it. The image of Galilee that results from an integration of information provided by Josephus and the Gospels with the discoveries of modern excavations is entirely different. The vast majority of first-century CE Galileans were Jews. Pagans were a small minority. The various arguments scholars have proposed for a diverse population simply do not hold up to critical examination. In fact, when checked against the evidence, they fall apart.

Scholars have often claimed that Galilee's history of successive invasions by foreign powers resulted in an eclectic mixture of inhabitants. Galilee was ruled again and again by non-Jewish peoples, first by the Assyrians and later by the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, and eventually the Romans. It did not undergo successive repopulation efforts, however. After the Assyrian conquest, it seems to have lain largely uninhabited until the Persian period. When resettlement began, it was slow, apparently consisting mostly of Phoenicians from the coast. Galilee's population under Greek rule probably also included Phoenicians, as well as a few Itureans (particularly in the northern regions), and some Jews. The repopulation of the region was gradual, occurring over centuries, and seemingly not the result of any intentional efforts by the various ruling powers, none of whom introduced a substantial number of colonists.

For much of antiquity, possession of Galilee shifted hands from power to power. It was conquered successively by the Israelites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, and the Hasmoneans. With the demise of the Hasmonean dynasty came the Herodians, and after them direct Roman rule. Some scholars have concluded that each of these waves of conquest left a dramatic imprint on the composition of Galilee's population, so that in the time of Jesus, elements of all of these external, non-indigenous groups dwelled closely together in the small region. Others have focused on key moments in Galilean history, especially the Assyrian conquest and the Hasmoneans' “Judaization” of the region. The question of the extent of the Roman presence in first-century Galilee has also loomed large in recent discussion.

In fact, the accuracy of the image of successive waves of immigrants into Galilee is doubtful. In this chapter, I will provide an overview of Galilee's history. Detailed treatments of Palestine's political history are readily available elsewhere, so I will focus specifically on the development of Galilee's population, starting with the Assyrian conquest and tracing events until the early second century. Because I am here concerned with Galilee's broader historical development, detailed discussions of individual communities will be reserved for chapter 3.

The Assyrian conquest of Galilee

Before the invasion

The nature of the earliest Israelite settlement in Galilee, as in the rest of Palestine, is unclear.

No single thread unites the frequent claims that numerous pagans lived in Galilee and that the region was rightly known as “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Eminent scholars simply present the description as accepted wisdom. Günther Bornkamm's widely read Jesus of Nazareth and Martin Dibelius's Jesus, for example, both casually refer to the “mixed race” of Galileans. One can identify recurring arguments, usually based on the purported changes produced by one event or another in Galilee's history, but one is hard-pressed to identify any clear lines of development for this view, at least in the scholarship pre-dating recent excavations.

What differentiates many of the more recent scholarly statements about Galilee is not detailed argumentation but the claim that recent archaeological discoveries irrefutably prove the population's diversity. Indeed, the extensive archaeological activity that began in the early 1970s and has continued to this day is the only true milestone in the scholarly discussion. One can trace archaeology's impact on the debate, from early calls for greater attention to the “Hellenistic” or “cosmopolitan” aspects of Lower Galilee to recent claims of paganism's representation in Galilee's material culture. A review of the spectrum of scholarly positions on Galilee's population will identify the key moments in the region's demographic development as well as the most significant issues raised by archaeological finds.

Before the digs

Galilee has often been depicted as rural, bucolic hinterland, characterized by natural beauty and simplicity of life. Of these portraits, the romanticism of Ernest Renan is unparalleled.

Josephus described Galilee as a region “encircled by foreign nations.” Many scholars have regarded this encirclement as a defining factor in Galilee's cultural milieu. Not only was Galilee itself full of gentiles, it has often been argued, but gentiles from the adjacent regions often made their way into Galilee. In addition, traders and travelers from more distant lands passed through on the major highways of the day. Galileans frequently took advantage of these same highways to venture frequently into the adjacent regions.

Are such claims accurate? In this chapter, I will summarize the evidence for Galilean interaction with “foreigners.” Understanding this issue requires, first, knowledge of the surrounding territories – their histories, cultural atmospheres, and inhabitants (see Map 2). (As will be seen, determining the cultural identity of a given site's occupants – e.g., Roman, Greek, Syrian, Nabatean, Phoenician, Iturean, or other – is sometimes less complicated outside of Galilee than within Galilee.) It requires, secondly, a summary of the archaeological and literary evidence for contact between Galileans and non-Galileans, with particular attention to trade and the road networks. While some interaction between Galileans and non-Galileans indisputably occurred, its extent, like so many of the stereotypical characteristics of Galilee, has been overstated in much recent scholarship.

The “foreign nations”

The Golan Heights

To the east and northeast of Galilee are the Golan Heights. Altars, statues, inscriptions, and synagogues allow considerable discussion of the presence of gentiles and Jews at specific sites in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods.

Little did I know when I departed the first time to participate in excavations at Sepphoris the impact that experience would have on me. I was instantly captivated by fieldwork – the physical challenges, the tangibility of archaeological evidence, the camaraderie that develops while digging. By season's end, I had developed a new interest in Galilean Judaism and its significance for Historical Jesus research. In my subsequent reading, I quickly became aware of a gap between the archaeological evidence I observed in Galilee and the descriptions of Galilee I encountered in much New Testament scholarship. I also soon realized the need for scholars to support generalized descriptions of archaeological finds with references to specific finds and specific publications.

This study is the result of my ensuing investigation of Galilee's population. The consistency of my findings surprised me. In examining the Gospels, Josephus, and published archaeological data, I discovered impressive amounts of evidence for Judaism and very meager evidence for paganism. I found little support for oft-repeated claims that large numbers of gentiles lived in first-century CE Galilee. The implications of these findings are clear: in our attempts to situate Jesus and the Jesus movement in Galilee, we must always keep in mind the region's predominantly Jewish milieu. Because the persuasiveness of my argument depends upon the thoroughness of my research, I have not been sparing in bibliographical detail.