Ancient Oil Lamp with a Menorah Design Discovered Near the Mount of Olives

 As we light our own Hanukkah menorahs, this ancient oil lamp provides a link to our past.

A few weeks ago, a team of Israeli archeologists conducting an excavation near the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem discovered a ceramic oil lamp decorated with the images of a menorah, an incense shovel used in Temple service, and a lulav – palm branch used during the holiday of Sukkot. The lamp was dated to the Late Roman period, around 3rd-4th century CE. It bears soot marks from 1,700 years ago, testifying to its use in everyday life.

Though the oil lamp itself is rare, it is not unique. What is unusual about this discovery is its location, right across from the Temple Mount, just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Until now, there has been very little evidence of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and its vicinity in the Late Roman period.

The excavation, funded by Ateret Kohanim, is directed by Michael Chernin on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “"The exquisite artistic workmanship of the lamp, which was found complete, makes it outstanding and extremely rare,” said Chernin in a press release.

The excavators transferred their exciting find to another archeologist, Benjamin Storchan, an expert in ancient clay oil lamps. “This find is very significant in a number of ways,” said Storchan in an exclusive interview.

Storchan determined that the lamp was produced in one of the Beit Natiff pottery workshops, located in today’s Beit Shemesh. In the 1930s, under the British Mandate, an archeological excavation was conducted by the British around the Arab village of Beit Natiff, headed by the archeologist Dimitri Baramki. During the excavation, Baramki found “a dump from an oil lamp workshop,” says Storchan. Eighty years later, Storchan himself uncovered another lamp workshop in the same area.

Hundreds of oil lamps from the Beit Natiff workshops have been found in Beit Guvrin, today a national park south of Beit Shemesh. A very similar lamp to the latest find was found in a necropolis in Beit Guvrin.

Oil lamps at the Beit Natiff workshops were mass produced using stone molds. “The molds would be made out of limestone chunks,” says Storchan. “They would be carved into separate upper and lower halves. Clay, like playdough, would be pressed into upper and lower portions and squeezed together.” Hundreds, if not thousands, of identical lamps would have been made using the same molds. To date, archeologists have only found a few.

The Mount of Olives lamp testifies to expert craftsmanship: high relief, clear lines. “It’s not somebody scratching something in haphazardly,” says Storchan. “It’s probably one of the best-looking examples that we have on a lamp.”

The fact that stone molds were used in production is also significant, as Jews of the time were known to use stone vessels for reasons of ritual purity. “The use of stone molds is a very limited local tradition,” Storchan explains. “Across the whole Roman world there are no parallel examples. Most of the lamp molds are made out of clay or plaster. I had suggested that maybe these workshops were born out of the stone industry as a Jewish product, and hence this imagery continues.”

Though thousands of Beit Natiff oil lamps have been found by archeologists, very few of them are decorated with a menorah design. Perhaps they were not in high demand. Other designs, such as images of gladiators found on some on the lamps, would have been more popular among the Romans.

Jews in Judea in the Late Roman period

“Late Roman period is a very interesting period,” says Storchan. “The Temple was destroyed in 70 CE. The Bar Kochba Revolt was in the beginning third of the second century. Jews were banned from Jerusalem, but Jewish populations, ransacked throughout Judea, survived in very small pockets throughout the third and fourth century – in Ein Gedi, in the Hebron Hills region, and in Beit Guvrin. Synagogues were found there, so we know that in southern Judea there was a Jewish population.”

Likely, there was also a Jewish population in the Beit Shemesh area, given the finds in Beit Natiff, although no synagogue or other evidence of communal Jewish life in the area has been found.

However, Judea was no longer the center of Jewish life, as it had been in Temple times. Jewish leadership and scholarship were now located in the Galilee, in the north of the Land of Israel. Much evidence of Jewish presence has been found in the Galilee, including large ornate synagogues.

Jerusalem and the memories of the Temple remained in the hearts and minds of the Jews even several generations after the Temple’s destruction. But did any Jews actually live in Jerusalem or its vicinity? That is the question raised by this latest find.

“Jerusalem has not yet produced strong concrete evidence for any significant Jewish population,” says Storchan. “There are a few menorahs that have been found etched into things from this period, and this [oil lamp] is one of the few now.”

And yet, “somebody in Jerusalem had chosen to buy this lamp,” Storchan points out. Back in those days, oil lamps were as common as light bulbs today, an object used daily. Storchan says, “It ended up right across from the Temple Mount, an illumination device depicting an illumination device. We are seeing a personal interaction between one person or family and one lamp with a historical icon to connect to a much bigger story.”

Storchan is reasonably sure that the people who had used this oil lamp were Jewish. There was no shortage of oil lamps in those days that had plain or Roman imagery. Buying a lamp with Jewish imagery must have been a conscious choice.

Thus, it is possible that the second century decree forbidding Jews from living in Jerusalem was not as strictly enforced in the third or fourth century. The Romans had been encamped in Jerusalem from the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. By the Late Roman period, explains Storchan, “the Roman army moved down to southern Jordan.” The Romans no longer perceived Jews as a threat.

From then on, Jerusalem became increasingly Christian. Roman Emperor Constantine began building churches in the area. Jerusalem again became known as the holy city.

Storchan hypothesizes that perhaps this window of opportunity between Roman military presence and Christian dominance allowed some Jews to move back to Jerusalem.

The Jews of the time were “going through trauma,” says Storchan. They didn’t have the means to build magnificent synagogues with mosaic floors and sculpted menorahs, as found in other locations. “These are communities who are at war, so the material evidence they leave behind is rather small,” explains Storchan.

Menorah as a Jewish symbol

“Iconographically, the menorah becomes a Jewish symbol already during the Second Temple period,” says Storchan. The image of the menorah appears on the Magdala stone, on the Jerusalem sundial, and on coins from that time period.

After the Temple’s destruction, the menorah took center stage in Jewish self-identification. “Jews start to draw the menorah,” says Storchan. “Commonly, the menorah appears alongside two or three other things, such as the incense shovel, the shofar, and the lulav. Many researchers find that the menorah after the Bar Kochba Revolt becomes super important as an identifier among the Jewish community.”

Jews needed to identify themselves to each other, as well as differentiate themselves from the pagan and emerging Christian communities. The menorah served as such an identifying and unifying symbol, often depicted on floor mosaics of synagogues built in that time period.

There was another group, the Samaritans, that identified with the menorah, but they lived in Samaria and the coastal area, much farther north than Jerusalem. Thus, archeologists can be reasonably certain that the lamp found near the Mount of Olives was used by Jews.

For Jews, as synagogues replaced Temple service, the image of the menorah remained in Jewish collective memory, a connector to their collective past, explains Storchan.

Rabbi Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s Minister of Heritage, said in a press release, “This unique oil lamp, which in an exciting manner bears the symbols of the Temple, connects the lights of the past with the Hanukkah holiday of today, and expresses the deep and long-standing connection of the nation of Israel to its heritage and to the Temple’s memory.”

The Mount of Olives oil lamp is on display during Hanukkah at the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel. A tour can be booked through the Israel Antiquities Authority website.

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