Yesterday’s newsletter mentioned Josephus, who both participated in and wrote the definitive account of the first Jewish revolt against Rome, which lasted from 66 to 74 CE. But this was not the only attempt to liberate Judea. The recent discovery of a cache of ancient silver and bronze coins buried in the ruins of a large building in the city of Lod sheds light on one of them. Gavriel Fiske writes:

The 94 coins were probably buried for safekeeping during the events of the Gallus revolt (351–354 CE), a lesser-known Jewish uprising against Roman rule in the land of Israel, but the building was destroyed and the coins were never recovered. . . . The Gallus Revolt was named by historians after the Roman emperor Constantius Gallus (326–354), who at the time was presiding over a fractured, weakened empire.

The Roman empire at the time was experiencing the turmoil of a civil war, as Gallus strove against the usurper general Magnus Magnentius. . . .  There could have been other factors in the short-lived Jewish rebellion, as the Jewish community was suffering under steep taxes, and it was also a time when Christianity was growing in the Roman empire and taking a more belligerent tone vis-à-vis the Jewish communities.

Although the building was destroyed, archaeologists found “impressive stone and marble artifacts” along with “Greek, Hebrew, and Latin inscriptions” including one “bearing the name of a Jewish man from a priestly family, which is still being studied,” the Israel Antiquities Authority said. The building could have been used as “a synagogue, study hall, meeting hall of the elders, or all three of these functions as one.”

A short video can be found at the link below.

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.