ABSTRACT
Introduction The narrative that forms the backbone of this study is told by Eleazar, a Jewish boy nearing 13 who lives in Galilean Tiberias (Tveria), through whom we share a child’s experience of the weekly Sabbath. By endowing the boy with a name, a family and a city, his story brings together important yet also disparate strands, namely the cityscape of a predominantly Jewish city in late ancient Palestine; rabbinic Sabbath rules and their impact on the environment; and an investigation of the Sabbath schedule of children within the religious, social and economic boundaries delineated by law, urbanism and Jewishness. Through the alert eyes of a child it is possible to project domestic and public spaces where children were expected to conform to specific models of behaviour during the Sabbath. In what follows I reconstruct the city’s material culture as gleaned from the archaeological remains of late Roman Tiberias and its rural hinterland. In conjunction I aim at projecting a sense of the weekly celebration of the Sabbath, as described, discussed and debated in rabbinic sources. Above all, I aspire to capture a childhood-Sabbath routine by delving into these literary, visual and material cultures through the eyes of the children themselves.
