Tiberias

Tiberias was established around AD 20 by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, it became the capital of his realm in Galilee. It was named in honor of Antipas' patron, the Roman Emperor Tiberius. There is a myth that the site was of the destroyed village of Rakkat.[3] Josephus describes the building of Tiberias by Herod Antipas near a village called Emmaus in The Antiquities of the Jews.[2] Also in The Wars of the Jews Flavius Josephus refers to it as Emmaus.[4] Tiberias' name in the Roman Empire, (and consequently the form most used in English), was its Greek form, Τιβεριάς (Tiberiás, Modern Greek Τιβεριάδα Tiveriáda), an adaptation of the taw-suffixed Semitic form that preserved its feminine grammatical gender. During Antipas's time, the Jews refused to settle there; the presence of a cemetery rendered the site ritually unclean. Antipas settled predominantly non-Jews there from rural Galilee and other parts of his domains in order to populate his new capital, and Antipas furthermore built a palace on the acropolis.[5] The prestige of Tiberias was so great that the sea of Galilee soon came to be called the sea of Tiberias.[5] The city was governed by a city council of 600 with a committee of 10 until 44 CE when a Roman Procurator was set over the city after the death of Agrippa I.[5] In 61 CE Agrippa II annexed the city to his kingdom whose capital was Caesarea Phillippi.[6] During the First Jewish–Roman War Josephus Flavius took control of the city and destroyed Herod's palace but was able to stop the city being pillaged by his Jewish army.[5][7] Where most other cities in Palestine were razed, Tiberias was spared because its inhabitants remained loyal to Rome after Josephus Flavius had surrendered the city to the Roman emperor Vespasian.[5][8] It became a mixed city after the fall of Jerusalem; with Judea subdued, the southern Jewish population migrated to Galilee.[9][10] In 145 CE the Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai "cleansed the city of ritual impurity allowing Jews to settle in the city in numbers."[6] The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, also fled from Jerusalem during the Great Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, and after several moves eventually settled in Tiberias in about 150 CE.[5][10] It was to be its final meeting place before disbanding in the early Byzantine period. Following the expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem after 135, Tiberias and its neighbor Sepphoris became the major centers of Jewish culture. The Mishnah, which Rabbi Judah Hakkodesh is said to have collated as the Jerusalem Talmud, may have begun to have been written here.[10] The 13 synagogues served the spiritual needs of a growing Jewish population.[5] In 614 it was the site where during the final Jewish revolt against the Byzantine Empire, the Jewish population supported the Persian invaders; the Christians were massacred and the churches destroyed. In 628 the Byzantium army retook Tiberias and the slaughter of the Christians was reciprocated with a slaughter of the Jews.[citation needed] [edit] Archaeological site The ancient Severus synagogue is the city's most dramatic archaeological site.