Yonatan and I visited Horvat Amudim ("The ruins of the columns"), or Sde Amudim ("The Field of columns"), known in Arabic Khirbet Umm el 'Amed (“Mother of the column”), one Friday, accessible near the main road from Hadera to the Galilee (Route 65) as it reaches the Netofa valley. At the foot of Mount Nimra, it is named from the columns that once supported the roof of the synagogue and one in particular that has remained standing through the centuries until today. The site is overgrown in winter and only truly visible and accessible in the summer. Though designated a national park, there are no facilities, signs, paths etc, and it is basically in a field full of cow manure!
The site―clearly a Jewish town of some standing, since it contains the remains of one of the largest synagogues in the Galilee (25 x 14 meters)―was surveyed by Victor Guérin in the 1870s, who noted the synagogue and an ashlar-built structure to its south, which may have been constructed with architectural elements taken from the synagogue. Referring to Guérin’s survey, Conder and Kitchener produced a full report on the site in the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Survey of Western Palestine (In the volume on the Galilee, 1881), which also illustrated the major elements of the synagogue. You can see some of these illustrations appended to the photos of the same objects which we took.
The site―a large settlement of some 55 dunams (5.5 hectares)―includes remains of a dense residential neighbourhood in the southern part and remains of buildings and a synagogue in the northern part. An ancient west-east road passed south of the village. Gustaf Dalman, the German Lutheran theologian and orientalist, suggested it may be the site of Kfar Uziel, mentioned in rabbinical sources and home to one of the 24 priestly families that settled in the Galilee from the 2nd century CE onward, owing to the similar sounding name of the nearby Arab-village, Uzeir (believed to be a corruption of "Uziel").
According to the archaeologist Dr. Dror Ben-Yosef, Horvat Amudim is the village of Kfar Nimra, a settlement mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud by Rav Huna, whose residents were engaged in the manufacture and sale of parchments, based on the preservation of the name in the Arab village of Nimrin, which was situated 2 km southeast. Ben-Yosef believed that Uziel would be found near the settlement of Uzayr in the Beit Netofa Valley. However Nimrin itself is believed by most scholars to have been built on Kfar Nimra.
The first real excavation of the synagogue site was by Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger, in 1905, during their survey of the Galilee; their report described the plan and layout of the building. In 1971, Z Yeivin drew up a plan of the entire settlement as part of a wider survey of the Galilee and Golan. The synagogue was again excavated by Israel Levine in 1979. On the basis of the ceramic artefacts and numismatics he found, Levine dated construction of the synagogue to the late third – early fourth centuries CE, and determined that it was abandoned in the fourth century, after a brief period of use of no more than a hundred years.
The synagogue featured two rows of columns. In the centre is the distinctive northwest corner double column of the synagogue, which remained standing throughout history, lending the site its name. On the right a fallen section from the capital of the column, clearly showing its heart-shaped cross section, and inset is a drawing of the same in Survey of Western Palestine: Galilee, Conder & Kitchener, 1881 [Public Domain]
An Aramaic inscription in the synagogue's floor mosaic reads: "Remembered well... bar Tanhum, who made this pavement of mosaic and the roof. May he be blessed. Amen. Selah." ZU Ma‘oz (1996) contended that the mosaic―on which the artefacts had been found by Levine, influencing his dating―belonged to a later phase, after the renovation of the building. He thus proposed, based on its style, that the original building was constructed in the late second or early third century CE.
Mosaic Floor with inscription [Credit: Levine, Israel Exploration Fund]
A second inscription, in stone, reads, "Yo'ezer the Chazan and Simeon his brother made this gate of the Lord of Heaven."
Aramaic inscription [Credit: Amiad] (left) and drawing of the same
There were three doorways in the southern wall (which is oriented toward Jerusalem in the Galilean synagogues), with a side entrance in the eastern wall of the building, but we'll come back to the doorway shortly, for its elements still exist, though no longer in situ.
Remains found at the site of the village as a whole attest to its continuous settlement from the Roman period until the Arab conquest. It is believed that the village was damaged during the battles of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, but was restored and flourished in the 3rd century, when the synagogue was built.
The base layers of a wall of a large public building, about 12 metres square, with a doorway, whose posts are clearly visible, and a fallen lintel in front
In the southern part of the site can be fund a large public building about 12 metres square. A doorway in the surviving base wall has before it a fallen, decorated lintel, broken into two parts, with a relief of two lions marching towards an amphora, with their front paws on the heads of oxen. A coffered stone lintel with floral relief is found nearby, half buried today. All these carved items―which are hard grey limestone―were noted and drawn by Conder and Kitchener, who assumed (almost certainly correctly) that they were re-used from the synagogue in the structure next to which they now lie. You can see these lintels pictured below, matched with their relevant drawings by Conder and Kitchener.
The decorated lintel, broken into two parts, with a relief of two lions marching towards an amphora, with their front paws on the heads of oxen. Inset: Drawing of the same in Survey of Western Palestine: Galilee, Conder & Kitchener, 1881 [Public Domain]
Coffered stone lintel with floral relief. Insets: Drawings of two similar pieces in Survey of Western Palestine: Galilee, Conder & Kitchener, 1881 [Public Domain]
Left: The lion on the right-hand part of the lintel was far less weathered when this photo was taken in 1980 [Credit: Levine, Israel Exploration Fund]
Right: Reconstruction of the main door with lion lintel [Credit: Kohl & Watzinger]
U. Leibner performed an extensive survey of the whole settlement site between 2001 and 2004 and was able to draw some conclusions from previous observations. Noting the division between the northern hill of the site and the southern one, and identifying further features including burials to the east, he was convinced that the settlement was founded during the Roman period on top of an ancient settlement that sprawled over both hills, and was probably destroyed during the fourth century CE. It was after this that the settlement was renewed and expanded on the southern hill, and ascribes the major structure in the southern part of the site to this phase. Even though the synagogue was abandoned in the 4th century, the settlement continued to exist for another hundred years, and Leibner and others believe that this major structure in the southern part of the site was a new synagogue, built after the first was abandoned, and re-using some of the masonry.
In the 2000s, several more surveys and excavations were carried out, discovering installations, burials and quarrying on the southern fringes, and to the west (across the main road 65). Between 2011 and 2012, a number of trial excavations were carried out in advance of the widening of road 65, on the road’s eastern fringes, on the southern fringes of the settlement, and to its southwest across the road, including at the site of a planned new road junction. These excavations produced pottery dating from the first century BCE to the tenth century CE, wine pressing installations, ovens, cisterns, quarries, graves, burial caves with arcosolia (niches in which individual burials are made), rock-hewn tombs, a hewn enclosure, walls belonging to animal pens, and agricultural terraces. In the 1930s, the site to the southwest was settled by members of the ‘Arab al-ujeidat Bedouin tribe who made extensive use of the quarries, caves and cisterns.