The Caesarea Inscription of the 24 Priestly Courses

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Note: In the excavations of the Department of Archaeology of the Hebrew University, at Caesarea in July—August 1962, two fragments of a marble tablet were found, incribed in Hebrew. One of the texts reads:...mlyḥ... /...ṣrt... /...'khlh... /...gdl...; the other (beginning of lines): m.. / msh... /msh... (Pl. ב). These can be completed as a list of the twenty-four priestly courses (1 Chron. xxiv, 7—18), together with the appellation of some, and an enumeration of the seats of the priestly families after the destruction of the Second Temple. The one fragment gives the beginnings of three lines, each commencing with the word mishmeret (course). The other fragment can be completed to give the names and sieges of the seventeenth to twentieth course: Hezir MaMLIAḤ, Hapizzez NaZARETH / Petahiah AKHLAH 'Arab / Ezekiel MiGDAL Nunaiya. The inscription furnishes the first mention of Nazareth in Hebrew epigraphy and the earliest in inscriptions in general. The text of the list of priestly courses is known from liturgical poems, of the seventh—eighth century; in particular two elegies of Eleazar ha-Kalir for the fast of the ninth of Ab. The inscription proves that it was the custom (as suggested by S. Klein) to affix such lists on the walls of synagogues, to keep alive the memory of the priestly courses and their sieges. Moreover, as it was the custom to commemorate each Sabbath of the year the priestly course which was on duty at the Temple on that particular week, the list served also in the synagogues as a kind of auxiliary calendar. This was a task it had assumed already in the Dead Sea sect (as we know from a fragment found in Qumran 4). The fact that the liturgical poems of ha-Kalir mentioned above, link the name of the twelve first courses with a sign of the Zodiac, seems to suggest an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable use of the Zodiac on many mosaic pavements of synagogues of the fourth to sixth century in Israel. Both the list of priestly courses and the Zodiacs represent the important calendar element in religious worship.