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The Estate on the Great Plain
 Josephus the Jewish historian (AD 30-100) refers to the
ownership of villages in the Great Plain (also called Plain of
Esdraelon or Valley of Jezreel; [
Map]). He quotes a decree
of the Roman senate in 44 BC in which the senate confirmed the
right of the Hasmonean rulers to continue to possess the entire
plain just as their forefathers had possessed it before them
(Josephus, Antiquities 14.207). The historian A. Alt reasoned
from this reference that since the Hasmoneans in the year 44 BC
and their forefathers possessed the villages of the Plain,
evidently the ownership extends back beyond the first century
BC. The best way to account for the fact that the Hasmonean rulers had taken over so large an area of farmland as
the Great Plain is that it was formerly a Seleucid private
domain and probably prior to that Ptolemaic. Thus it appears
reasonable to conclude with Alt that the entire Great Plain was
a private estate of Ptolemy which was taken over by the
Seleucids and later by the Hasmoneans.
Alt’s conclusion is now supported by the
so-called Hefzibah inscription found in the Scythopolis Plain
(just east of the Great Plain). The inscription (a stele 77 x
46 cm) contains eight letters from Antiochus III (a Seleucid
king). The letters date from 201-195 BC. The letters are to
one of the king’s high officials who has been given the lands
of the Scythoplis Plain as a grant. The letters refer to the
official’s owning the villages in the plain and indicate that
the same official’s heirs can inherit them from him. This
inscription shows us that owners of large estate, especially
royal estates, owned not only the land but also in some sense
the people on the land.
 That Herod the Great inherited the lands in
the Great Plain is clear from the way he settled his veterans
on a portion of it in 25 BC, giving each of them a plot of
ground near a village called Gaba on the western side of the
Plain (Josephus, Antiquities 15.294; War 3.36). Thus Herod
owned substantial tracks of land in the Plain. Later Josephus
refers to Bernice, the great granddaughter of Herod the Great
(sister of Agrippa II) [
Chart] , as the owner of a large
granary in Besara, a village 2.4 miles east of Gaba (Josephus,
Life 119). Evidently, Bernice inherited the granary and the
land that went with it from the Herodian family. We
can, therefore, document that the Great Plain was royal land
under the Hasmoneans and under the Herodians. Since the
Scythopolis Plain was royal land under the Seleucid king
Antiochus III, it is probably that the Great Plain to the west
was as well. We have then the same pattern as with the other
two large estates: The Ptolemies or Seleucids develop crown
lands into a huge estate. The estate is passed on to the
succeeding ruling dynasty eventually becoming an Herodian
estate. |
