55 RURAL GALILEE AND RAPID CHANGES To conclude this “survey of surveys”, the following may be noted: In all the surveys presented here, there is an unambiguous trend of growth in the settlement density in Galilee and other Jewish regions from the Hellenistic period and onwards until at least the late Roman period. There is no sign of decline in the first century. It is important, however, to realize that the results of surveys should be treated with caution due to their broad time spans. They need to be complemented by proper stratified excavations, to which we will turn shortly. 3. Land Ownership Connected to the issue of settlement patterns is the issue of land ownership, a highly contested topic in Galilean research. Some claim that from the time of Alexander the Great and onwards, more and more land was aggregated under the crown. Large estates, latifundiae, were on the rise, farmed by a mix of day laborers, small-plot owners and even slaves, but owned by the tiny segment of rich elite living remotely in an urban setting as “absentee landlords” 38. Recently, John Kloppenborg has forcefully argued for this picture in his study, The Tenants in the Vineyard 39. Others emphasize that the tension between the rich urban elite and the rural peasantry was a fact of life long before Alexander, as indicated by several pre-Hellenistic traditions 40, and that the sources do not paint a dramatically different picture of this balance during the Herodian period. In particular, it has been a trend in recent research on Herod the Great to depict his rule in a more positive light, stepping back from grand psychological descriptions based on Josephus’ at times colorful descriptions. 38 Cf. eg. APPLEBAUM, “Economic Life”; APPLEBAUM, “Roman Province”; D.E. OAKMAN, Jesus and the Economic Questions of His Day (Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 8; Lewiston, NY 1986) and D.E. OAKMAN, Jesus and the Peasants (Eugene, OR 2008). 39 J.S. KLOPPENBORG, The Tenants in the Vineyard. Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine (WUNT 195; Tübingen 2006). 40 Cf. eg. M. GOODMAN, State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132-212 (Totowa, NJ 1983) and Z. SAFRAI, The Economy of Roman Palestine (Lon- don 1994).