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Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: seattle, wa
Posts: 9,337
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Jewish Skull Found With Prutah in Mouth Dated to First Century
This isn't exactly news but someone has asked me to do some research on this. Here is the story from Wikipedia:
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Charon’s obol is usually regarded as Hellenic, and a single coin in burials is often taken as a mark of Hellenization,[47] but the practice may be independent of Greek influence in some regions. The placing of a coin in the mouth of the deceased is found also during Parthian and Sasanian times in what is now Iran. Curiously, the coin was not the danake of Persian origin, as it was sometimes among the Greeks, but usually a Greek drachma.[48] In the Yazdi region, objects consecrated in graves may include a coin or piece of silver; the custom is thought to be perhaps as old as the Seleucid era and may be a form of Charon’s obol.[49]
Discoveries of a single coin near the skull in tombs of the Levant suggest a similar practice among Phoenicians in the Persian period.[50] Jewish ossuaries sometimes contain a single coin; for example, in an ossuary bearing the inscriptional name “Miriam, daughter of Simeon,” a coin minted during the reign of Herod Agrippa I, dated 42/43 AD, was found in the skull’s mouth.[51] Although the placement of a coin within the skull is uncommon in Jewish antiquity and was potentially an act of idolatry, rabbinic literature preserves an allusion to Charon in a lament for the dead “tumbling aboard the ferry and having to borrow his fare.” Boats are sometimes depicted on ossuaries or the walls of Jewish crypts, and one of the coins found within a skull may have been chosen because it depicted a ship.
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I saw the coin. It is actually dated to 41/42 CE Meshorer 11, Hendin 553:
That Agrippa I was associated with Charon's obol is attested by Josephus who writes on Agrippa's death:
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“ ...the inhabitants of Caesarea and of Sebaste forgot the kindnesses he had bestowed on them, and acted the part of the bitterest enemies; for they cast such reproaches upon the deceased as are not fit to be spoken of; and so many of them as were then soldiers, which were a great number, went to his house, and hastily carried off the statues of [Agrippa I]'s daughters, and all at once carried them into the brothels, and when they had set them on the brothel roofs, they abused them to the utmost of their power, and did such things to them as are too indecent to be related. They also laid themselves down in public places, and celebrated general feastings, with garlands on their heads, and with ointments and libations to Charon, and drinking to one another for joy that the king was expired, not only unmindful of Agrippa, who had extended his liberality to them in abundance, but also of his grandfather Herod the Great, who had himself rebuilt their cities, and had raised them havens and temples at vast expense.
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The connection with the Christian sacrament was made in antiquity. Wikipedia again notes:
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In Latin, Charon’s obol is sometimes called a viaticum,[12] which in everyday usage means “provision for a journey” (from via, “way, road, journey”), encompassing food, money and other supplies. The same word can refer to the living allowance granted to those stripped of their property and condemned to exile,[13] and by metaphorical extension to preparing for death at the end of life’s journey.[14] Cicero, in his philosophical dialogue On Old Age (44 BC), has the interlocutor Cato the Elder combine two metaphors — nearing the end of a journey, and ripening fruit — in speaking of the approach to death:
“ I don’t understand what greed should want for itself in old age; for can anything be sillier than to acquire more provisions (viaticum) as less of the journey remains?[15] … Fruits, if they are green, can scarcely be wrenched off the trees; if they are ripe and softened, they fall. In the same way, violence carries off the life of young men; old men, the fullness of time. To me this is so richly pleasing that, the nearer I draw to death, I seem within sight of landfall, as if, at an unscheduled time, I will come into the harbor after a long voyage.[16] ”
Drawing on this metaphorical sense of “provision for the journey into death,” ecclesiastical Latin borrowed the term viaticum for the form of Eucharist that is placed in the mouth of a person who is dying as provision for the soul’s passage to eternal life.[17] The earliest literary evidence of this Christian usage for viaticum appears in Paulinus’s account of the death of Saint Ambrose in 397 AD.[18] The 7th-century Synodus Hibernensis offers an etymological explanation: “This word ‘viaticum’ is the name of communion, that is to say, ‘the guardianship of the way,’ for it guards the soul until it shall stand before the judgment-seat of Christ.”[19] Thomas Aquinas explained the term as “a prefiguration of the fruit of God, which will be in the promised land. And because of this it is called the viaticum, since it provides us with the way of getting there”; the idea of Christians as “travelers in search of salvation” finds early expression in the Confessions of St. Augustine.[20]
An equivalent word in Greek is ephodion (ἐφόδιον); like viaticum, the word is used in antiquity to mean “provision for a journey” (literally, “something for the road,” from the prefix ἐπ-, “on” + ὁδός, “road, way”)[21] and later in Greek patristic literature for the Eucharist administered on the point of death
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Now getting back to the coin found in the mouth of the Jewish woman. Craig Evans has written about this extensively in his Jesus and Archaeology p. 239 and the Talpiyot tombs. It is there - in an ossuary associated with Caiaphas we find the following:
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One final point may be mentioned briefly. Another box in this crypt contains the bones of a woman, bearing the name ("Miriam, daughter of Simeon"). In it a coin minted during the reign of Herod Agrippa I (42/43 c.e.) was found in the mouth of the skull, probably reflecting the pagan custom of payment to the Greek god Charon for safe passage across the River Styx (Hachlili and Killebrew 1983a, 148–49) a custom documented as early as the fifth century bce and perhaps implying belief in an afterlife. Knowledge among Jewish priestly aristocrats of Greek afterlife mythology is attested by Josephus (War 2.8.11 §155-156), by at least one epitaph (IG no. 1648; NewDocs 4:221-29, no. 114; W. Horbury and D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco- Roman Egypt [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], pp. 234-35, no. 141: "O pitiless Charon") and by later rabbinic tradition (b. Mo'ed Qatan 28b, in a comical lament for the departed: “tumbling aboard the ferry and having to borrow his fare”). Depictions of boats on Jewish ossuaries or crypt walls may also allude to the belief of the deceased ferried across the water to the land of the dead
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My question beyond the issue of paganism among the Jewish priesthood is whether the prutah took on the functional value of the shekel in the period. I know that Josephus denies this speaking instead of Tyrian shekels used for the half shekel tax. Also the rebels apparently minted their own coins at the start of the revolt which were silver shekels:
But I am just trying in my head to reconcile the pagan practice of the coin for Charon with something Jewish. I just can't believe that the priesthood would have adopted a pagan practice without reconciling it in some way with the customs of Moses.
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04-08-2013, 12:29 PM
