When archaeologist Jodi Magness climbed to the sunny hilltop overlooking the Sea of Galilee in the summer of 2010, she was unsure what she might find there. An ancient Jewish village known as Huqoq once stood on the site in northeastern Israel, but all that remained above ground was a jumble of centuries-old building stones, modern debris, and wild mustard plants.
Magness, a professor of early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a National Geographic Explorer, had spent years leading excavations in Israel and suspected that this hilltop was worth exploring. By the following summer, she and her team had discovered a stone wall running north to south some seven feet below ground. Several pieces of evidence—including a main doorway oriented toward Jerusalem—revealed that it was the perimeter of a synagogue that had been constructed some 1,600 years ago, in the early fifth century. Similar buildings of that era had floors paved with flagstones. But as the team kept digging, they unearthed more and more small mosaic stones, called tesserae—a hint that something truly special might lie beneath.
On a hot day in June 2012, Bryan Bozung, a recent graduate of Brigham Young University, was carefully removing dirt from his excavation square when he scraped against something hard at floor level. He alerted Magness, and as she brushed away the remaining dirt, the two were stunned to see the face of a woman delicately traced in tesserae staring up at them. It was the first section of a mosaic to come to light.
(The oldest map of the Holy Land is actually a magnificent mosaic.)
Over the next decade, Magness returned to Huqoq each June with an international team of experts and student volunteers. She had originally planned to spend only five seasons excavating part of the site but quickly realized she was in for a much longer haul. The project goals would now have to include preserving whatever was left of the mosaic floor—and what was left, revealed slowly year after year, turned out to be extraordinary.
The outline of the synagogue, when fully exposed, was about 65 feet long by 50 feet wide. The entire expanse of the floor had been covered in expertly rendered mosaic panels, though only about half of that original floor remained intact.
“Usually in an ordinary church or synagogue you have one, two, or three scenes presented, but here you have many more,” says Gideon Avni, chief archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, which licensed the excavation. “It’s probably the best, most diverse concentration of mosaics in the country.”
Many of the surviving mosaics depict stories from the Hebrew Bible: Pairs of creatures such as camels, donkeys, elephants, and lions heading toward Noah’s ark. The Red Sea engulfing the Egyptian army. Carpenters and masons building the Tower of Babel. Samson carrying the gate of Gaza on his shoulders.
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“There’s a lot of violence in these mosaics, a lot of blood and gore,” says Magness. “But there’s also some humor.” Among the most gruesome scenes: a depiction from the Book of Judges in which a Kenite woman named Jael hammers a tent stake through the head of the Canaanite general Sisera. By contrast, a whimsical twist on the story of Jonah portrays the hapless prophet being swallowed by three successively larger fish.
The mosaics also borrowed motifs from classical art, including cupids, theater masks, and the Greek god of the sun, Helios, who rides in his chariot surrounded by the symbols of the zodiac.
Huqoq may have been a village in the countryside, but it wasn’t isolated, says dig assistant director Dennis Mizzi, senior lecturer in Hebrew and ancient Judaism at the University of Malta. “It was connected with the wider Mediterranean world. That means the community was aware of a wide range of traditions and comfortable enough with ideas from outside its own area.”
While there are still questions about how exactly the synagogue originated, the discovery of its remains is now rewriting history, particularly our understanding of how Jews lived under foreign rule. Romans conquered the land east of the Mediterranean, including Galilee, in the first century B.C. Initially, they recognized Judaism as an ancestral religion. Jewish people were allowed to live according to their own laws and were granted exemptions such as not having to worship the emperor.
“That really doesn’t change significantly until Christianity becomes a legal religion in the Roman Empire and then the empire’s official religion,” says Magness. “Once that happens, in the fourth century, legislation becomes increasingly restrictive of Judaism.”
(Find mosaics and mystery in an outpost of the Roman Empire.)
New laws sometimes banned the construction of synagogues. “If you were going on the basis of that alone, you would think that Jews were persecuted, that they were oppressed,” says Magness of the people in this region. But at Huqoq, the existence of a grand synagogue adorned with bold artistic expressions offers clear evidence that despite tensions, daily life in Galilee may not have been so dismal.
Among all the mosaics, one panel is especially dazzling—and puzzling. More finely crafted than the rest of the floor, with large sections still intact, it’s divided into three horizontal registers. At the bottom, defeated soldiers, a battle elephant, and a bull are dying from bloody spear wounds. In the middle, stone arches shelter men wearing tunics. And at the top, two male leaders are meeting, one in a tunic and the other in armor, each accompanied by his followers.
(Biblical ‘spies’ were revealed in this 1,500-year-old mosaic.)
Magness thinks the one in armor is Alexander the Great. His followers are soldiers with battle elephants. He wears the diadem and purple cloak of a king but is not identified by an inscription.
“There was only one Greek king in antiquity who was so great that he didn’t need a label,” Magness says. That being the case, this mosaic may represent an encounter between the high priest of Jerusalem and Alexander during the famed conqueror’s battles against the Persians in the fourth century B.C. The story—likely a cherished legend rather than truth—circulated in Jewish communities for centuries.
“The point of the legend is to show that even Alexander the Great, the greatest of the Greek kings, acknowledged the greatness of the God of Israel,” Magness suggests. This masterpiece, along with the rest of the mosaic panels, was probably laid by specialists from a local, family-owned workshop. An inscription by the main door lists several names of people identified as artisans, perhaps the very ones who created the floor.
“There appear to be brothers within a single family, as well as perhaps a couple of other figures,” says Ra’anan Boustan, a historian of Judaism at Princeton University. A senior artist would have designed the floor and traced out the figures in every panel. Experienced mosaicists fashioned details like faces, hands, and feet, while junior workers filled in backgrounds and the larger fields of color. They worked with stones from the region, cut into long rods on-site and then snipped into tiny cubes.
The quality of a mosaic depends on the size of the tesserae. The smaller they’re cut, the more details they create. Mosaic specialists measure the number of tesserae per square decimeter, about 15 square inches. In some places at Huqoq, the count is as low as 175; in others it’s around 230. But the mysterious three-tiered mosaic comes in at about 500. “The density readings in that area approximate what you would find in Constantinople, in imperial mosaics,” says Karen Britt, a mosaic specialist at Northwest Missouri State University.
(See one of the finest collections of Roman mosaics in the world.)
But that’s not the only ostentatious part of the building. Judging from recovered flecks of colorful plaster, portions of the interior may have been brightly painted, inspiring dig members to dub it the “disco synagogue.” Magness herself calls it the kitschiest synagogue ever. Parts of the building’s interior were probably painted red, white, pink, and yellow—a theme that may have extended to the exterior.
Throughout the excavation, Magness and her team revealed the mosaics in sections, exposing different areas to be cataloged and photographed before covering them back up to protect them in place. After taking into account other finds in the region, Magness now believes that Huqoq’s over-the-top design may be evidence of inter-Jewish competition. “All the villages in the area are building synagogues, and they’re all pretty spectacular,” she says. “But here people decided they were going to build the mother of all synagogues.” Likely two stories tall and situated at a high point in the village, it must have been visible for a great distance.
Such a lavish structure did not come cheap. Perhaps wealthy patrons underwrote the cost, but more likely, villagers of lesser means may have been making enough money to donate to a construction fund. At least in the fifth century, Jews in this remote part of the empire seem to have been prospering. But they may have had concerns about how long their religious freedom might last. And they appear to have expressed those concerns on the floor of their synagogue.
“I think they are grappling with the reality that they are in a rapidly Christianizing world,” says mosaic specialist Britt. “One way of doing that is to say, look, this is not all that different from periods in the past when Israelites had to deal with other foreign powers, whether it’s the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, and now Christian Romans.”
(Meet the biblical heroine who beheaded a Babylonian to save her people.)
Boustan, the historian of Judaism, agrees, adding that “the theme of God’s deliverance through human warriors in the face of foreign domination is something that comes across very strongly.”
And yet, some generations after it was built, the synagogue was mysteriously abandoned. Given the region’s long history of catastrophic seismic activity, it’s not hard to imagine an earthquake leaving the synagogue so damaged that it was thought to be unsafe even though it continued to stand. Eventually parts of the building collapsed, destroying sections of the mosaics. Another tremor may have delivered the final blow.
“It wasn’t burned. It wasn’t taken apart,” says Martin Wells, the project’s architecture specialist from Austin College in Texas. “My guess is an earthquake.”
In any case, some 800 years after the synagogue was constructed, the region came to be ruled by the Mamluks, a Muslim dynasty based in Egypt. A Mamluk road, part of a network connecting Cairo and Damascus, ran right by the village and brought a flow of merchants and pilgrims. As the area became prosperous once again, the Jewish people who remained repaired the fifth-century synagogue while also expanding it and adding a thick, concrete-like base—which, fortunately, protected the mosaics.
In a scene from the biblical Book of Judges, Samson has used his mighty strength to kill this shield-bearing Philistine soldier, who has collapsed on the ground. Two other scenes also celebrate the legendary leader.
Beginning in the 15th century, commercial traffic in the area slowed. The synagogue appears to have been abandoned again, and it gradually tumbled to the ground. So it remained until the archaeologists arrived.
(Read our original coverage, from 2015, of the mosaic’s discovery.)
Twelve years after they first started digging, Magness and her team completed their fieldwork in the summer of 2023. The site remains backfilled to protect the mosaics and has been turned over to the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Jewish National Fund to develop plans for tourism. IAA archaeologist Avni predicts this “jewel in the crown” of Israel’s cultural heritage will become one of its greatest attractions.
The digging may be done, but there is much excavated material—now in storage in Jerusalem—to be analyzed, and many mysteries remain to be solved, Magness says. “My team and I will be coming back for years.”
Ann R. Williams specializes in writing about the ancient world and cultural heritage preservation.
Photographer and National Geographic Explorer Paolo Verzone lives in Italy and Spain. His images of the new Grand Egyptian Museum in the November 2022 issue were awarded first prize for science and natural history by Pictures of the Year International.
This story appears in the April 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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