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). 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), 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.