But the nature of the project shifted dramatically the moment Bozung’s hoe scraped against something hard just below the surface. Through the clods “I could see the flat surface, some variation in color, and faint lines,” he remembers. He alerted the team lead, University of North Carolina archaeologist Jodi Magness, who used a paintbrush to reveal a woman looking back at them—exposed to the air for the first time in more than a millennium. “I was truly speechless,” says Bozung.

Recent BYU grad Bryan Bozung (left), working under BYU ancient-scripture professor Matthew Grey, was the first to discover mosaic tiles in the ancient synagogue at Huqoq.

“We were not expecting . . . anything that sensational,” says BYU ancient scripture professor Matthew J. Grey (BA ’03), who had done doctoral work under Magness and was tasked with supervising the synagogue excavation. “All of a sudden we had this precious ancient art that needed to be excavated fully.” And to be shared with the world. Images of the fifth-century CE mosaics began popping up in news articles, archaeologists and antiquities officials journeyed to Huqoq to examine the site, and National Geographic provided additional funding.

Finding mosaics was rare enough on its own—but during the following six years at Huqoq, the team uncovered a selection of scenes never found in an ancient synagogue in Israel: biblical depictions of Samson, Jonah, Noah’s ark, Pharaoh’s army swallowed up in the Red Sea; snapshots of daily life in antiquity; even an enigmatic non-biblical story.

And BYU students have been witness to it. With financial support from BYU’s Inspiring Learning Initiative and under the auspices of the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, Grey began bringing groups of undergraduates in 2016 to get ancient dirt under their nails and watch the rewriting of history. Mark D. Ellison (BA ’90, MEd ’98), a BYU ancient-scripture professor and early-Christian-art expert who joined the BYU group in 2018, says, “It’s life changing for these students who get to go and do this. These are some of the most exciting discoveries of late-antique religious art in our lifetimes.”

These are some of the most exciting discoveries of late-antique religious art in our lifetimes. —Mark Ellison

Though heavily damaged, the Huqoq mosaics join with those found at select other sites in reframing our conception of ancient Jewish worship, say the researchers. From the surviving written record of this period, made up mainly of rabbinical literature based in the Torah and oral traditions, “most scholars had assumed that Judaism at this time was uniformly conservative in its religious beliefs and practices,” says Grey—meaning no figural art and certainly an avoidance of non-Hebrew influences. So “it was a little shocking,” he says, when synagogue mosaics were first discovered early in the 1930s replete with images of human, animal, and mythical figures; zodiac cycles; and Greco-Roman iconography blended into biblical stories.

Magness calls such elements an important corrective to the historical record, revealing a Judaism that was both “diverse and dynamic” during the Late Roman period.

“While they were still fully integrated within Jewish society,” adds Grey, “we now have evidence that some communities were more open than others to the Greco-Roman world around them.”

Far from depicting a Jewish community in decline during the rise of the Christian Byzantine Empire, the mosaics and other discoveries at Huqoq reveal a thriving community with vibrant religious and artistic traditions. And, says Grey, they provide evidence that “Jewish thinking and the Jewish community and Jewish worship were much more diverse than we once thought.”