Ancient synagogue zodiac mosaics

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Jewish Worship, Pagan Symbols. Zodiac mosaics in ancient synagogues (Walter Zanger). This is a long, comprehensive, and well-illustrated article. The credit gives its publication in BHD as August 2012. But I linked to it in January of 2011 here. Apparently it was published as a Biblical Archaeology Review article then.

As I noted there, it is not correct to say that the "mystical Hellenistic-Byzantine Jewish tradition" represented by these synagogue mosaics left no literature. Read my post for details. And for some additional astrology-related ancient Jewish literature (among the Dead Sea Scrolls), see here and links.

Subsequent PaleoJudaica posts on the ancient zodiac synagogue mosaics are here, here, and here and links. The Helios mosaic at Huqoq was discovered after the BAR/BHD article was published.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.