The ossuary of Ζαχαρίας (=Zacharias) (the inscription on the ossuary is in Greek) is unique in its character and decoration.

The ossuary is decorated on its narrow side with two tall independent segmented columns which are not attached to the building and are not connected by an upper cornice. Each column has a base and a capital in the Greek style. Their shape is typical of the columns of the monumental buildings built by King Herod in Jerusalem, Herodium, Masada, Caesarea, and elsewhere (see photos). The two segmented columns are not typical of the columns on the facades of tombs and decorated tombstones from the period such as the facades of the “Yad Avshalom” monument, “Zechariah’s Tomb” in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem or the approximately 12-meter high column which was discovered in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. In those, the columns were fashioned as one solid piece.

A six-leaved rosette can be found on the narrow facade of the ossuary between the two columns. This decoration is characteristic of Jewish ossuaries and testifies to the Jewish identity of the man whose bones were preserved in the ossuary, whose name was recorded only in Greek.

The two tall “independent” (not connected by a cornice) columns decorating the ossuary are of a sort known from the description of the Jerusalem Temple, where two free-standing pillars were erected in the front of the sanctuary. In the First Temple, these two pillars were given the names Jachin and Boaz.

On its broad side, the ossuary is decorated with the walls of a structure made of schematic bricks with 4 entrances, one on each side. The person who decorated the ossuary attempted to incorporate an element of perspective into the structure by adding diagonal lines at its corners.

At the center of the structure, one can discern a crescent-shaped figure within the “rectangle” with the four openings. This figure probably represents the wing/wings of God (“the wings of the Shekhina” or “the Holy Spirit”) or the wings of an angel or a bird (a dove). The entrances in the structure enable the wings of the Shekhina or the Holy Spirit (represented by a wing or bird/dove) to freely enter and leave the structure, without being trapped inside it. The hovering figure (in the shape of a wing or wings or bird/dove) presumably expresses divine protection over the deceased, in the manner of Ruth’s words to Boaz: “May the Lord reward your deeds. May you have a full recompense from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have sought refuge!”(Ruth 2:12). It is worth noting that in all four of the New Testament Gospels, descriptions that relate to Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan, represent the Holy Spirit as a dove.

In the upper part of the other broad section of the ossuary, there is a geometric decoration known as a meander (a series of repeating meandering curves). This motif and similar ones appear on fragments of the ceilings of the monumental buildings built by King Herod in the complex of the Second Temple, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (see photo showing fragments of ceilings and cornices from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, decorated with a meander similar to that depicted on the ossuary. The fragments are found today in the Terra Sancta Museum and the Franciscan Museum in Jerusalem and the ceiling section is currently on display in the Hecht Museum in Haifa). As far as is known, this meander motif has been found to this day only in the Temple complex built by King Herod on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

All of the features noted above (the tall columns, the schematic sketch of the building with the openings containing the “wings of the Shekinah” and the meander decoration typical of the Temple in Jerusalem) point to a connection between the deceased Ζαχαρίας (=Zechariah) and the Temple in Jerusalem; that is, they suggest that the deceased had been a priest in the Temple, that divine protection was given to the deceased, and that there had been a divine revelation to the deceased that was known in the community.

The name Ζαχαρίας is meticulously engraved on the ossuary and appears with this exact spelling in Greek in the New Testament as the name of Zechariah the priest ("Cohen"), the father of John the Baptist, a relative of Jesus, the herald of the coming of Jesus and the baptizer of Jesus. Zechariah the Priest is said to have been a relative of Jesus and the husband of Elizabeth (Elisheva), who was also a member of a family of priests and a relative of Mary (Miriam), the mother of Jesus. According to the Gospel of Luke, Zacharias was a priest from Avia family, one of the most respected priestly “watches” in the Second Temple during the reign of King Herod, and while Zacharias the priest was burning the sacred incense in the Temple, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and announced to him that a son would be born to him and he would name him “Yohanan” (John). This child will announce the coming of the Messiah (Luke 1:12-17). "And all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judaea" (Luke 1:65).

The account of the revelation of the angel (Gabriel) to St. Zechariah the priest, father of John the Baptist, is one of the central stories in the Gospel stories of the New Testament and it also adorns an early Christian ossuary (see the last photo). According to tradition, Zechariah the priest was murdered in the Temple courtyard.

The decoration of the ossuary with a “floating” object, assuming that it symbolizes the wing(s) of God/ the Holy Spirit or the wing(s) of an angel, together with the description of the two columns placed in front of the Temple in Jerusalem by King Herod, and the rectangular structure with openings that encloses the body-like wing/dove, along with the meander (which characterized the ceilings and eaves of the Jerusalem Temple) are all consistent with the possibility that the bones of Zacharias the Priest, the father of John the Baptist, were interred in this ossuary. According to Christian tradition, Zacharias was given divine protection and received revelation from God’s angel - the angel Gabriel (“And the Angel replied and he said to him, “I am Gabriel who stands before God” (Luke chapter A). It is worth noting that according to Jewish and Christian belief, the angel Gabriel is described as a disembodied being made of light.

Just as the appearance of the divine “wing of the Shekinah” on the front of the ossuary symbolizes the connection between the deceased and God, so it may also be assumed that the two crescents on the broad back part of the ossuary have a mystical meaning (which is not sufficiently clear). The presence of two crescents (moons) rather than a single moon and the absence of images of the sun and the stars rule out the possibility that the moons represent some sort of idolatry involving the sun, the moon, or the stars (pagan motives). Despite the unique decorations found on this ossuary, there is no doubt that the person whose bones were interred in it was Jewish (the use of ossuaries in the first century was in any case unique to the Jews). The moon had great symbolic meaning in the Jewish world – mainly due to the cyclical nature of its waxing and waning. In the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Hullin, the renewal of the moon (“levana”, from the root for “white”) every month symbolizes the Jewish people. Just as the moon waxes and wanes every month, so the Jewish people go through periods of ebb and flow. This cycle will continue until the future redemption. It is therefore reasonable to presume that the moons ornamentation represents the expected future renewal, the expected resurrection of the dead, and the anticipated future redemption. It should also be noted that the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar based on the cycle of the moon’s monthly reappearance and that the Blessing of the Moon ritual was common among the Jews in the Roman period. It was recited in the first half of the Hebrew month, facing the waxing moon during the first half of the month and blessing God, “Who told the moon to renew itself.”

On its narrow back side, the ossuary is decorated with an open amphora (Kantharos), a sort of large goblet with two handles. The vase motif is recognized as a major Jewish motif from a number of ossuaries and Jewish coins (it is one of the few objects that adorn a number of Jewish ossuaries. See, for example, ossuaries 213, 325, 378, 399, 815 in Corpus Rahmani). The amphora was adopted as a distinctive Jewish symbol at the end of the Second Temple period (in the first century CE) and it appears afterward also on Jewish coins both from the Great Revolt against the Romans (c. 70 CE) and during the Bar Kokhva Revolt (c. 135 CE) - (see the photo of the Jewish peruta coin with an amphora from the Great Revolt and the coin from the Bar Kokhva Revolt stamped with a magnificent amphora decoration). In later times, the vase/amphora was also a Christian symbol and it decorates several mosaic floors of churches from the fifth and sixth centuries CE found around Israel, with branches and vines and bunches of grapes hanging from it. It is possible that in the early days of Christianity, the motif of the vase also reminded the Christian believers of the cup that Jesus held in his hand at the Last Supper, known later as the Holy Grail.

NOTES:

1. In the Ancient Near East, winged animals (especially birds and particularly doves), symbolized divine A wing/wings and/or a bird/dove symbolized in ancient times the Spirit of God (“Holy Spirit” in the New Testament), and sometimes the possibility of communicating with God. At the end of the Second Temple period, the dove was considered a symbol of the Holy Spirit and also symbolized the souls of saints.
2. One of the most important references to the appearance of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament appears in the account of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River by John the Baptist - and there the “Holy Spirit” is described as a dove. The connection between John the Baptist and the spirit/wings of the dove appears explicitly in all four books of the Gospel in the New Testament: in the book of John, it is said about John the Baptist: “Then John gave this testimony: ‘I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, “The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” (John 1:32-33). The Gospel of Matthew states “And it came to pass when Jesus was baptized and he hastened to come up from the water, and behold the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and resting on him.” (Matt 3:16). The Gospel of Mark 1:10 states: “And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.” The Gospel of Luke, chapter 3, says: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:22). Due to these passages, the most popular depiction of the Holy Spirit in Christian art from the fifth century onwards was the form of a winged/winged (dove).
3. The rectangular frame on the broad side of the ossuary (within which floats the wing = the Holy Spirit) is not closed and has, as indicated, openings on each side. The openings above and below the “wings” are particularly wide and allow the wings of the Shekinah (or the angel) to flap, and not be trapped inside it. A number of Jewish ossuaries feature rectangular frames, but they are distinctly different from the decoration on Zechariah’s ossuary: the frames are always complete and closed, and usually even double lined, and they always contain an architectural element of a door/entrance gates, or several (schematic) columns, or a magnificent facade of a tomb (see photo of two such examples). None of these elements appear in this ossuary.
4. It is very unlikely that the object in the shape of a crescent (wings) represents an adornment that marked the status of the wearer, such as the biblical wreath, tiara, or crown, as no such object is known or has been found in Israel or throughout the ancient world.
5. This is one of the few ossuaries with high-quality decorations on all sides. Unlike most ossuaries (which were created in workshops for the production of ossuaries), it was decorated specifically for the person whose bones were interned in it. This suggests that he was well-known and respected in his community, and it was ordered for him individually; it was probably intended to stand in the center of the burial chamber, rather than adjacent to the wall or inside a burial-niche, so that all its sides could be viewed. It would have served, in a certain sense, as the person’s tombstone, and may have been commissioned by the Jewish-Christian sect/community that lived in and around Jerusalem in the first centuries CE.