Early Evidence for the Synagogue
Primary sources and archaeological remains, such as inscriptions, document the earliest Jewish communal worship spaces.
Archaeological and Literary Evidence for Ancient Jewish Prayer Halls
The earliest archaeological evidence for the synagogue comes from Greek dedicatory inscriptions from Egypt. The inscriptions attest to the existence of Jewish public buildings called proseuchai (sg. proseuchē), “houses of prayer” or “prayer halls.” The earliest of these inscriptions date to the third century BCE, but the term proseuchē is also encountered in epigraphic, documentary, and literary sources from the second and first centuries BCE and, much less frequently, the first and second centuries CE. Many scholars see proseuchai as forerunners to later synagogues, although a direct correlation to or identification between the two institutions should be resisted, not least because the synagogue was not a monolithic institution in antiquity and because Jews are known to have met in a wide variety of buildings that they called by different names.