Capital with Hebrew carving lends weight to Galilee village’s Jewish past

A pair of 1,800-year-old Hebrew inscriptions carved into a capital found last week in Pekiin may lend support to a tradition linking the Galilean village to an ancient center of Jewish scholarship.

The inscriptions were found etched into a limestone block buried beneath a courtyard of a building adjacent to the village’s 19th century synagogue during restoration work, the Israel Antiquities Authority announces.

The antiquities authority is tight-lipped about the find and refuses to disclose the text of the inscriptions, saying they are still being studied and won’t be published until they appear in a scholarly journal.

The IAA won’t say how archaeologists who inspected the inscriptions determined they were 1,800 years old. The IAA does disclose that the inscriptions appeared to be dedications by donors to the synagogue, lending support to the tradition of a Jewish presence during the Roman period.

The village Pekiin, in the northern Galilee, is believed to have been the site of a Jewish community since the Roman era, and Jewish tradition associates the modern village with a town mentioned in Josephus’s “Jewish War” and the Talmud as Beka. According to the Talmud, the town was a center of Jewish scholarship during the Roman period and Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai hid in a cave there for 13 years.