Jewish-Greek Literature Before Philo

From the Cambridge History of Judaism

 

The origin of Jewish-Greek literature can be traced back to the translation of the Hebrew Torah (the Pentateuch) into Greek, the so-called Septuagint. This is the source which nourished the greater part of the literary production of the Hellenistic Jews. Originally the legend of the 70 (or 72) translators who were said to have rendered the Hebrew Bible into Greek in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285 - 246 b.c.e.) - whence too the name ‘Septuagint’ - referred only to the Torah, the first and properly speaking the canonical part of the Hebrew Bible, or rather its Greek version. This traditional story contains at least a core of truth: shortly after 300 b.c.e. the Jews of the Diaspora, especially in Egypt, felt the need for a Greek translation of their Holy Scripture, because obviously only a minority of Jews in that Greek-speaking environment were still capable of reading and understanding Hebrew. However, some scholars are inclined to follow the legendary narrative of the Pseudo-Aristeas letter. The Ptolemaic kings may be supposed to have had a certain interest in the literature of the peoples incorporated into their kingdom (the Jews of Palestine being subjected to the Ptolemaic reign in the third century b.c.e.), so that the initiative for the translation of the Pentateuch might have come from the Ptolemaic court itself.

The literary critic may well conclude that the Greek of the Septua­gint, and to some extent the language of subsequent Jewish - Greek literature as well, was rather ‘uncouth’ and in places ‘quite unintellig­ible’, so that it must have at times appeared somewhat ‘ridiculous5 to a cultured Greek reader. To be sure, this sort of judgement appears in a different light once we become more familiar with the colloquial language of the Hellenistic period, especially beyond the shores of the Greek mother country - a language which was made more accessible to us through the papyrus discoveries, particularly those unearthed in Egypt. At all events, one should acknowledge the epoch-making achievement which the translation of such an extensive work from a Semitic into the Greek language represented. It is a noble testimony to the intellectual and linguistic capacities of the Hellenistic Jews of Egypt (or, as the Septuagint legend would have it, of Jerusalem). The grandson of Jesus ben Sira, who translated the ‘sayings’ of his grandfather into Greek after 130 b.c.e., reveals in his prologue that he is fully aware of the difficulty of producing an accurate translation. You are asked to read with goodwill and close attention and to exercise tolerance wherever - despite all the pains taken over the translation - we appear to have rendered certain expressions rather infelicitously. For if something is first said in Hebrew and is then translated into a foreign tongue, the meaning undergoes a slight change. And not only this book but also the Law itself, the Prophetic books and the other scriptures reveal not inconsider­able discrepancies if one compares them with the original.

For the rest we should bear in mind that the need for a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was felt not only in Egypt and in other areas of the Diaspora but also in the Palestinian homeland itself. The few surviving examples of Jewish-Greek literature from Palestine, above all the historian Eupolemus, are based on the Septuagint; so too the scroll of the Dodekapropheton discovered in 1957 in the Nahal Hever near Qumran and a few other fragments from the Qumran caves 4 and 7 attest the use of Greek biblical texts among the Jews of Palestine.

Biblical Exegesis and Religious or Philosophical Literature

Normally the Jewish-Greek writers whose books survive only in fragments are grouped together under the heading ‘historians’. But this designation is appropriate only to a small minority of the authors concerned - indeed, to be precise, only to the Palestinian Eupolemus mentioned above. The other fragmentary writings are in part in the nature of narrative fiction, in part they are poetic compositions in metric form, and in part they represent other, quite different genres. In each case they furnish an insight into the diverse forms in which the Hellenistic Jews strove to get to grips with the biblical heritage and to make it their own under the alien conditions of Hellenistic culture.

Thus the oldest of the writers known to us by name, Demetrius, is in point of fact an exegete. In a fragment preserved in Clement of Alexandria, the text of which is somewhat unreliable in its detail, Demetrius indicates that he lived in the reign of the fourth Ptolemy, that is, Ptolemy IV Philopator (221-204 b.c.e.). For he gives the interval between the Babylonian Exile of the Jews - which was obviously the point his own account had reached-and his own day and age as 338 or presumably, to be more correct, 438 years. At the same time the fact that Demetrius invokes the age of Ptolemy at all points to Alexandria as the locale of his activity.

According to Clement’s evidence, it seems as if the book was entitled ‘Concerning the Kings in Judea’. However, this does not accord with the principal group of fragments which have come down to us from Alexander Polyhistor (and after him Eusebius). These fragments suggest something very different from a history of the Judean monarchy. As far as we can see, Demetrius deals primarily with exegetical problems, such as obviously exercised the minds of attentive Bible readers among the Alexandrian Jews when they perused the books of Genesis and Exodus. In the most extensive fragment (F2) he considers at considerable length the question of how according to the information given in the Bible in Genesis 29:31 to 30:24 Jacob could have had eleven sons and a daughter within the space of his second period of service under Laban, a span of seven years (Gen. 29:30). Thus he works out a precisely calculated explanation, according to which the children are born at the shortest practicable intervals of ten months, first to Leah, then to the two maidservants, finally to Rachel and again to Leah, some of the half-brothers or the baby girl thereby being born at the same time. Similarly in other parts of the text, Demetrius repeatedly displays his interest in testing the correlation between the chronological and the genealogical information given in the biblical narrative. In this way he erects on the basis of the Septuagint text the framework of a chronological scheme which ranged from Adam up to the Exodus from Egypt and which clearly continued to exert its influence well into early Christian chronography.

Nevertheless Demetrius is not really a chronographer but an inter­preter of the Bible. This can be seen in other questions that he tackles: why did Joseph, after he had attained high office and standing in Egypt, wait nine years before summoning his father?” Why does Joseph, when his brothers come to him with Benjamin, place a fivefold portion of food before his youngest brother (Gen. 43:34)? How can Moses and Zipporah be alive at the same time when one belongs to the seventh generation after Abraham, the other to the sixth? And why should Zipporah be called a ‘Cushite’ by Aaron and Miriam (Num. 12:1)?’ Finally, how did the Israelites suddenly come to be armed after the journey through the Red Sea (Exod. 17:8ff)?

Problems of this kind were thus being discussed by the Jews of Alexandria; and the manner in which Demetrius attempts to solve them testifies to the sober, realistic attitude of mind of these particular readers of the Scriptures. At the same time we can perceive echoes of the Hellenistic concern with Homer, the ‘classical’ text of Greek literature. The literary form of the aporiai (zetemata) kai lyseis (problems and solutions) which had emerged by this period is reflected in Demetrius even down to matters of style.

The whole task of interpretation is orientated towards the Greek text of the Septuagint; it is thus our earliest direct evidence for the use of the latter. Nowhere is there any suggestion that Demetrius was conscious of interpreting a translated text. To him and his contemporaries the Torah is self-evidently a Greek book. And the way in which they read it similarly displays a Greek spirit, though of course they do not on that account renounce their faith in the God of Israel.

In this context the small fragment of an exegete called Aristeas deserves mention because in its own way it is similar to what we know of Demetrius’ book. We cannot deduce anything as to its dating and place of origin from the brief text available. But the very fact that this fragment too was handed down by Alexander Polyhistor is proof that it originated about 100 b.c.e. or shortly after.

The fragment deals with the identity of Job. Aristeas identifies him with the Jobab who is named in Genesis 36:33, thus making him an Edomite, indeed a direct son of Esau. This identification, together with further details, makes it certain that Aristeas too was working from the Septuagint; the very form of the names in Hebrew would have prevented an association of one with the other. For the rest the fragment consists mostly of a terse summary of the narrative framework of the book of Job, in the course of which the four friends of Job are mentioned by name. What is interesting is that the addendum to the Septuagint translation of the book of Job contains the same information as our fragment; moreover verbal echoes make it clear that one is a literary borrowing from the other. The apocryphal ‘Testament of Job’, incidentally, is likewise based on the identification of Job with Jobab.

The most important of the Alexandrian Jewish exegetes before Philo was undoubtedly Aristobulus. Admittedly the text of the Torah inter­ested him in a different way from Demetrius: he devoted his attention, not to the pragmatic historical questions raised by the stories concern­ing the patriarchs, but to the theological or philosophical aspects of Moses’ ‘law-giving’ (for Aristobulus they amount to the same thing). No title for this work has come down to us; a few fragments are preserved by Clement of Alexandria and more extensive sections by Eusebius. Several times in his book Aristobulus addresses ‘King Ptolemy’ and specifically refers to him as the successor of Ptolemy Philadelphus. According to the ancient and, to my mind, correct version in Clement, the ruler in question is Ptolemy VI Philometor. This would take us back to the period around 175 - 150 b.c.e. and indicate a writer who, perhaps as one of the scholars of the Mouseion at Alexandria, had gained for himself at least literary access to the court of the Ptolemies. The letter of 2 Macc.. 1:10 to 2:18, forged about 60 b.c.e., even describes him as the king’s ‘tutor’ (1:10).

Clement and Eusebius call Aristobulus a ‘peripatetic’. This is correct in so far as he certainly thought of himself as a philosopher, not of course as a representative of Aristotelian teaching but as a disciple of Moses. The latter, as the ‘giver of the Law’, was for him the founder of true philosophy. Any ‘correct’ insights that occur in Greek thinkers like Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, or in the peripatetic school alluded to by Aristobulus himself or in the great poets (he mentions Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, Linus and Aratus) are joyfully noted by Aristobulus as parallels to the utterances of Moses. He even surmises that Plato or Pythagoras was dependent on an ancient translation of the Torah into Greek.J But such theses do not encompass the main burden of Aristobulus’ thought as is sometimes claimed: rather, they were first pushed into the foreground by Eusebius.

If one views Aristobulus in terms of the history of philosphy, one cannot but demur at Clement’s judgement and conclude that he was influenced above all by the Stoa. He shares, as does Philo later, the same kind of physical-cum-theological thinking. Unlike the Stoa, he does believe the cosmos to be indubitably the creation of God; there is no question of the universe being ultimately identical with the divine. Human reason is capable of perceiving the uniform law (logos) underly­ing the whole of nature and therein the workings of God in His creation. Thus too man is able to hear the voice of divine wisdom which proclaims itself in the cosmic logos and to obey it in his own life. In accordance with the importance of the Sabbath for Judaism, the number seven plays a special role in all this as a symbol of the cosmic order; in this respect Aristobulus may be linking up with Pythagorean speculation about the significance of numbers.

The longest of the surviving fragments is concerned with the proper understanding of the Torah, above all those utterances which were not readily comprehensible to a philosophically schooled Hellenist, whether he was a Jew or not. There is particular concern with the correct interpretation of the anthropomorphic statements about God, such as the references to God’s ‘hands’, His ‘arm’, His ‘standing’ and His ‘descending’. Here Aristobulus strives for explanations which can be vindicated both vis-a-vis the biblical text and before the spirit of Greek philosophy. He resorts to the allegorical interpretation of Homeric mythology that was practised by the Stoa, and explicitly justifies its application to the Bible. Ostensibly this justification is directed at the king, but implicitly it is also addressed to the forum of his co-religionists, whose comprehension of the text he sought to facilitate by means which were obviously not common in his day and must have been regarded with some degree of suspicion:

I would therefore beg you to consider the true meaning of the commentary and to retain the proper conception of God and not to lapse into a mythical and anthropomorphic (conception of the) existence (of God). For frequently when our law-giver Moses, in order to express what he (really) wants to say, uses words which refer to other things - that is, things that have a visible substance - he thus gives utterance to essential truths and to the nature of important things...I desire now to examine the individual designations (and to elucidate them) to the best of my ability. But if I should be wide of the mark and fail to convince (you), then do not impute absurd statements to the law-giver but rather blame me for being unable to elucidate his meaning properly.

Aristobulus then explains: when the Bible speaks of God’s ‘arm’, it means His power; God’s ‘standing’ is an expression for His constancy, that is, the permanence of the world and its laws. It is more difficult for Aristobulus to explain how God ‘descends’ on Sinai (Exod. 19:18 etc.). Clearly he refuses to abandon the idea of God’s direct self-revelation in connection with the giving of the Torah to Moses. Philo’s concept of a mediating hypostasis between God and man, for example, the logos, is obviously still alien to him. Yet this very problem of God’s self-revelation on Sinai must have called particularly strongly for a solution along the lines of a hypostasis.

Thus Aristobulus is a pioneer of the allegorical interpretation of the Bible which later, especially with Philo, established itself as the prime method of understanding the text at a deeper level. We should note, however, that for Aristobulus the allegorical approach is merely a device to facilitate the comprehension of biblical passages whose literal meaning creates ideological difficulties for the philosophically schooled reader. As a hermeneutic technique, the allegorical method performs for him a still completely subordinate function, whereas in Philo it emerges as a totally independent method of exegesis. In a tentative way, but conscious of the difficulties, Aristobulus initiates the process of reflection on biblical hermeneutics which proves to be necessary whenever an established tradition enters a new intellectual ambience.

Around 120 or 100 b.c.e. we find this process being continued in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates. The author, in the guise of a Greek official at the Ptolemaic court, offers his readers not only the legendary account of the origins of the Greek translation of the Torah, the Septuagint legend (incidentally, not yet in as miraculous a version as will occur later in Philo and in early Christian literature); above all he provides for the Gentile reader guidance for the proper understanding of this holy book. For Pseudo-Aristeas any sentence of the Torah which does not possess a specific religious or ethical meaning must be interpreted allegorically. If for instance the ironically detached reader should ask why the Torah declares certain animals to be unclean and forbids eating them, the author explains that there is no question here of mice or weasels and similar fauna being singled out for special attention (§144); the issue is rather the proper form of divine worship, in contrast to the animal worship cultivated by the Egyptians, and. likewise the proper mode of human existence. The permitted beasts and fowl are symbols of gentleness and purity, while the animals called ‘unclean’ by Moses are wild and vicious and represent corresponding modes of human conduct. What matters, therefore, is not whether one abstains from or consumes certain kinds of meat, but whether one adopts the appropriate principles of ethical behaviour (§§128-71). The allegorical method is here being applied above all as a means of providing an ethical interpretation of biblical statements.

The pseudonymous author lays altogether great store by an ethos of kindness, reason and piety. Almost half his ‘letter’ (§§184-300) is devoted to the depiction of (invented) table talk between the Ptolemaic king and his guests, the self-same 72 Jewish scholars from Jerusalem, before they are allowed to set about the Torah translation. In the course of seven evenings all the Jewish dinner guests in succession have to answer philosophical or moral questions put to them by the king. Thus with tedious discursiveness (which finally the author himself becomes aware of: §295), and in the manner of a textbook on good government, there unfolds the panorama of a humane ethic that is as enlightened as it is devout. We shall quote only the seventy-second and final section:

(The King) then asked the very last one: what is the most important (factor) in kingship? And he answered: that the subjects should live in perpetual peace and be granted swift judgements in legal disputes. But this the ruler achieves if he hates evil, loves good and considers it a great deed to save a human life; just as you too regard injustice as the worst evil of all and have won immortal fame through your just conduct of affairs, since God vouchsafes you a pure mind untainted by any evil.

The ‘long drawn-out, joyful applause’ of all those present, which then ensues (§293), as on previous occasions, shows the author’s underlying principal aim. He wants to demonstrate that the Jews have attained the highest level of development, philosophically and ethically, and that, without having to give up their distinctiveness, they deserve to be acknowledged as an equal member of the Hellenistic family of nations. Whereas in the case of Aristobulus we see above all a reflection of internal debate among the Jews about the proper understanding of the Bible in terms of Greek thinking, the author of the Pseudo-Aristeas letter is exercised by the question of the intellectual recognition of the Jews on the part of their Greek environment.

As is likewise clear from other writings which we now intend to mention briefly, a humane ethic rooted in religious principles provided the most appropriate meeting point between Jews and those of their Greek fellow-citizens who were schooled in popular philosophy.

The anthology of aphorisms on matters of practical piety which Jesus ben Sira composed in Hebrew about 180 b.c.e. is discussed in chapter 12. His grandson, who moved from Palestine to Alexandria around 132 b.c.e., considered his grandfather’s book sufficiently important - even in his new milieu-to translate it into Greek (see above, p. 386). He himself, or a later Jewish-Greek copyist, there added further maxims which are lacking in the Syriac translation and in those portions of the Hebrew text that have come to light since the beginning of this century, especially at Masada in 1964. These additions revolve above all around the idea that the whole of man’s capacity for good springs from God. The fear of God as the foundation of practical wisdom, and both awe and wisdom as gifts of God2 - such is the core of Israelite-Jewish teaching even in the Hellenistic period. This is what is meant by conduct according to the Law which the grandson of ben Sira (at the end of his prologue), together with Pseudo-Aristeas (§127 etc.), extol as the supreme fulfilment of human life.

The pseudonymous Wisdom of Solomon also rests on this foundation. But this book, unlike the proverbs and sayings of ben Sira, does not present a collection of individual maxims in a fairly loose sequence but rather a composition divided into three logically connected parts with a clearly recognizable and developing theme.

The first section (chs. 1 to 5) depicts the ultimate victory of the righteous over the evil-doers who now appear to have the upper hand. In the second part (chs. 6 to 9) ‘Solomon’ urges all rulers to strive for wisdom and relates how he himself was vouchsafed it as a gift from God. Then he praises its great value and its all-pervading power; his prayer for wisdom concludes this section. The third and final part (chs. 10 to 19) depicts the rule of Wisdom in the history of Israel from Adam to the Exodus from Egypt; an interpolation (chs. 13 to 15) speaks of the folly of idolatrous practices, especially the animal cult favoured by the Eigyptians.

Content and style alike indicate that the author was a Hellenistic Jew from Alexandria, probably writing in the first century b.c.e. (at all events in the first century c.e.). His choice of vocabulary puts us in mind not only of the Septuagint but also of the language of Hellenistic popular philosophy. Only the first section with its small number of Hebraisms and its consistently applied parallelismus membrorurn suggests the possibility of a Hebrew original, a question on which even today scholarly opinion is still divided. But even this part is completely permeated with the Hellenistic spirit; it teaches a peculiar hybrid doctrine, combining apocalyptic hope of resurrection and the Platonic conception of the eternity of the soul. The contemporary targets of this section appear to have been those Jews who had turned their backs on the faith of their fathers and joined the ranks of those who were making life difficult in some respects for the Alexandrian Jews. To them and to the faithful the author wants to show the sublimity of a Hellenistically interpreted Judaism; he encourages the readers on his own side to persevere steadfastly in the hope of being compensated in the life to come. Hence in the second section he urges them to entrust themselves to the leadership of wisdom which will conduct them to every virtue (as defined by the Stoics). The third part then shows how such trust has frequently been vindicated in the course of Jewish history, especially during the tribulations of the Israelites in Egypt; by contrast the Egyptian religion is subjected to corrosive prophetic scorn. In this way, for all his claim to supra-historical validity, the author pursues quite immediate and concrete aims in his exhortation and encourage­ment to his contemporaries and fellow Jews.

A didactic poem composed in quite a different form is that known by the pseudonym of the Greek aphorist Phocylides of Miletus. This poem remains closer to the biblical tradition of aphoristic literature with a universal appeal. It was probably written by a Hellenistic ]ew in Egypt during the first century c.e. In 230 lines of often not very elegant hexameters, which try to imitate the Homeric style, the author offers a compendium of Jewish- Greek ethical teaching. Although no overall structure is apparent, the maxims dwell on the issues of piety, righteousness, the proper kind of neighbourly love, moderation, frugality and the family. What strikes us is that all the doctrinal observances strictly characteristic of Judaism are avoided. Indeed at the end (line 228) the author adopts an explicitly ‘enlightened’ attitude towards ritualistic detail, with the aphorism: ‘Purification rites signify a purification of the soul, not of the body’. Obviously only those ethical rules are incorporated into the poem which could command assent from cultured Gentiles and which would not give the lie to the chosen pseudonym.

In the light of all this, of course, the question has repeatedly been raised whether it is justifiable to attribute the poem to a Jewish author at all, as Jakob Bernays set out to do in 1856. Yet that is beyond dispute - not only because the aphorisms in general are strongly reminiscent of the language of the Septuagint and stand in close proximity to certain sections of the maxims of ben Sira, Pseudo-Aristeas and the Hypothetica of Philo; but also above all because two chapters which furnish the core of the ethical teaching of the Torah (Lev. 19 and Deut. 27:15 - 26) also inform the whole of this particular poem. Thus in the opening section (1.8) we find a principle reminiscent of Lev. 19:2-3: ‘Honour first God, then after Him your parents’. However, Jewish authorship is also indicated by links with the traditions articulated in early Christian texts (the Didascalia  Apostolorum and book 2 of the Oracula Sybillina., the latter of which took over a large section of these aphorisms).

If one asks what is the aim of this didactic poem, one ought not to assume that it was written for a missionary or propagandistic purpose. After all it lacks any commendation of Judaism or of specifically Jewish ideas and ethical values. Nor, for this same reason, can it have been intended as an apologia for Judaism vis-a-vis a gentile readership. Rather, the author seems to be addressing himself to his fellow Jews. He wants to show them, through the mouth of the Greek aphorist, that the ethical values of their fathers, as laid down in the Torah, bear comparison with the highest Greek standards. He thus tries to restore the self-respect of those Jews of the Diaspora who were susceptible to alien cultural influences, some of whom like Tiberius Julius Alexander, the nephew of Philo,’ were flirting with the possibility of renouncing Judaism: the heritage of your fathers, he argues, is on a par with the Greek ethical tradition; thus you will gain nothing by turning to paganism; on the contrary you would only surrender the advantages of belonging to your own nation. In addition one might also consider the possibility that the poem was intended for the classroom as an exercise in style and as an elementary lesson in ethics. In fact it was used for such purposes in the Middle Ages and even into the modern period.

A particularly characteristic example of the religious and philosophi­cal literature of the Hellenistic Jews is the treatise ‘On pious Reason as the Tamer of Passions’, the so-called Fourth Book of the Maccabees, that has come down to us in a few Bible manuscripts and in part too among the works of Josephus.

The anonymous author, presumably writing in the last half century b.c.e. or in the first century c.E. in Alexandria or in some other centre of Hellenistic culture, strives for a comprehensive discussion of this theme. First we get a somewhat dry philosophical or academic contemplation of it (chs. 1 to 3); then he cites examples of Jewish martyrs of the Maccabean period and narrates their history with a sometimes agonizing vividness and with a highly-charged religious commentary (chs. 4 to 17). Through their steadfastness and loyalty to the Torah, which they maintained to the point of death despite grievous suffering, the priest Eleazar, the seven Maccabean brothers and their mother are said to have demonstrated the power of reason over natural desire (a Stoic thesis, it should be noted). What their story shows far more clearly, however, is the superiority of the spirit of self-sacrifice, sustained by an unswerving faith, over tyrannical secular power (17:2 and 8 to 16). A book which begins as a philosophical treatise (1:1-12) ends as an open exhortation to the ‘descendants of Abraham’, the ‘Israelites’ (ch. 1 8) to demonstrate similar fidelity to the Law.

J. Freudenthal described the treatise as a homily specifically meant to be preached in the synagogue; others think of it as a more literary conception and point to the stylistic influence of the later diatribes with their pronouncedly didactic treatises. At all events the book is an eloquent testimony to the way in which Jewish piety and Hellenistic, especially Stoic, thinking, could be intimately fused in certain circles of the Diaspora, though in such a manner that ultimately the Jewish, substance still breaks through the Hellenistic form.

Historiography

One writer who was concerned to depict a period of Israelite Jewish history was, to judge by the surviving fragments, Eupolemus. This author must be identical with the Eupolemus whom 1 Maccabees (8:17f; see also 2 Macc. 4:11) names as one of the envoys sent by Judas Maccabeus to Rome in 160 b.c.e. in order to negotiate a Jewish-Roman friendship treaty. This identification is consistent with the information supplied in fragment 5, according to which Eupolemus carried his chronological calculations down as far as 15 8 b.c.e., in other words down to the fifth year of the reign of Demetrius (I Soter). Eupolemus thus lived and worked in Palestine and was at least a sympathizer with the Maccabean movement. This is also interesting from the point of view of literary history, for it emerges in passing that the Septuagint translation, on which Eupolemus’ account undoubtedly rests, was by this time being used as a matter of course even in Palestine and that therefore even there a fervent devotion to the Torah did not yet necessarily entail a renunciation of Hellenism (2 Macc. 4:13). On the other hand certain details of the fragments reveal that Eupolemus was, of course, also familiar with Hebrew.

Eupolemus’ book clearly bore the title On the Kings of Judea, which from a retrospective point of view meant also the rulers of the whole of Israel, David and Solomon. For the surviving text deals above all with these two kings. An introduction appears to have made only brief mention of Moses and Joshua and the ‘Judges’ - or at least Samuel; not even Saul is discussed in any detail. The account does not grow more discursive until it gets to David. But even here his political and military deeds are quickly dismissed. The narrative does not become detailed until Eupolemus begins to describe the plan of the Temple building.t His special interest in the Temple is very plain in the main part: of the surviving text, the story of Solomon. Here, unless Alexander Polyhis-tor, the author responsible for making the excerpts, has given us the wrong impression, Eupolemus speaks almost exclusively of Solomon’s efforts to erect and complete the Temple, in which connection he includes a detailed description of the building. Eupolemus also interpolated into his account the texts of fictitious correspondence between Solomon and a (legendary) Pharaoh Vaphres, and between Solomon and King Suron (Hiram) of Tyre’ on the subject of the despatch and payment of foreign workers for the building of the Temple. A further fragment2 refers briefly to the dispute between King ‘Jonachim’5 of Judah and the prophet Jeremiah, to the capture and pillage of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and to Jeremiah’s taking the Ark of the Covenant and the Tablets of the Law to a place of safety.

The main part of the surviving text reveals Eupolemus’ enthusiasm for the greatness and splendour of the Temple of Solomon. This doubtless reflects the joy of the Jews who had remained faithful to the Temple at the reconsecration in 164 b.c.e. of the (post-exilic) Temple after its desecration by Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

All in all, Eupolemus stands before us as the oldest of the Jewish historians known to us by name who provides in Greek an outline of the history of his people. It must remain an open question whether he was here addressing himself to educated Greek-speaking members of his own nation, or whether he had Gentile readers in mind. We do not detect any apologetic note in his fragments, nor is there any hint of a missionary tendency, unless one is inclined to term his effusive glorification of the Temple an apologia. At all events such tendencies are far more pronounced in the works of his great successor and fellow-Palestinian Josephus, who in his account of Jewish history was clearly concerned to win the sympathy and understanding of a Greco-Roman audience.

As is well known, the Maccabean period also inspired historians to write about the immediate past and even their own day. I make only a passing reference to this point since the books in question are discussed in other parts of the present work. Yet the supposition should be noted that Eupolemus also wrote a history of the Maccabean uprising and that the First Book of the Maccabees, which was written in Hebrew towards the end of the second century b.c.e., drew on this account by Eupolemus for its information about Judas Maccabeus. But this is of course no more than a hypothesis.

The Second Book of the Maccabees, on the other hand, is presented to us as the epitome of a five-volume work on the Maccabean struggle by a certain Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc. 2:19-32). The very epithet, together with the marked influence of Greek culture that he betrays, tells us that Jason was a Jew of the Diaspora from Cyrene. Nowadays there is an increasing tendency to regard him as a contemporary, even - in the view of some - an eyewitness of the events which he describes and which take us down to 160 b.c.e.; certain historical improbabili­ties can doubtless be laid at the door of the later epitomator. If this assumption is correct, Jason would also be a direct contemporary of Eupolemus (which might explain the allusion in 2 Macc. 4:11). . His writing is influenced by the spirit of the highly-charged historio­graphy of the Hellenistic tradition; this influence can be seen in his strongly didactic presentation and in his predilection for legendary embellishment. Jason unhesitatingly narrates miraculous events and shows supernatural beings taking a direct hand in affairs. On the other hand, the work bears the stamp of Hasidean piety: the events surround­ing the Temple, which God protects again and again in a wondrous manner, and at the outset the figure of the sole legitimate High Priest Onias III, stand at the centre of attention, while interest in the patriotic aspect of the Maccabean struggle recedes completely. Thus Jason is at once a witness to the effective Hellenization of Jewish literature and to the fundamental distrust of that same ‘Hellenism’: he coined this term with a pejorative sense (2 Macc. 4:13).

Among historiographical literature as it was understood in the Hellenistic period one should also include the fragments of an anony­mous Samaritan (‘Pseudo-Eupolemus’) and of Cleodemus Malchus, in which biblical accounts of primeval or ancient history are mingled in a singular manner with pagan mythology. But the Samaritan and the Jewish author align themselves with a recognizable literary genre to be found among other nations which had recently come into close contact with Greek culture, such as the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and so on; we have examples in the works of the Babylonian Berossus or of the Egyptian Manetho. Their aim is to trace their national history as far back as possible and to expound its connection with the history of other peoples. So here myth and history blend indiscriminately with one another, a process which was faci­litated by the widespread euhemeristic notion that the gods of mythology were in fact originally human beings of outstanding excel­lence.

A fragment of the book by the anonymous Samaritan has been handed down to us - presumably in error - under the name of Eupolemus (hence the frequently used designation Pseudo-Eupolemus). He shows himself to be a Samaritan by the way in which he transfers the story of Abraham and Melchizedek (Gen. 14) to Gerizim and reveals a strong affinity towards Phoenicia. His book may have been composed in an earlier, pre-Maccabean period - at all events, it must have been before the destruction of the Temple on Gerizim by John Hyrcanus (129 b.c.e.) The surviving fragment1 reveals the author’s attempt to bring together Greek and especially Babylonian mythology, inter­preted euhemeristically, and biblical pre-history by dint of identifying biblical with pagan names. He thus has Bel (Kronos) in place of Noah in the genealogy; he identifies the Greek Atlas •-• because of his connection with astrology - with Enoch. For the rest the surviving text glorifies above all the figure of Abraham, who is said to have brought the wisdom of Babylon first to Phoenicia and only then from there to Egypt, and to have introduced the true religion. In the case of several of the points mentioned the author reveals his familiarity with Palesti­nian traditions about Abraham and Enoch (compare the Book of Jubilees and the Apocalypse of Abraham, together with the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch); on the other hand it is equally clear that the anonymous writer was conversant with Greek (Herodotus) and Babylonian - Greek literature (Berossus).

The other author mentioned above, Cleodetnus Malchus, of whose book only a short fragment survives, combines biblical traditions and pagan mythology in a similar manner. However, the mythological traditions that he adduces point to Hellenistic North Africa (Libya or Mauritania). Cleodemus establishes a kinship between two grandsons of Abraham and Keturah (Gen. 25:4; for Epher Cleodemus writes Apheras and Iaphras, whence he derives the name Africa) and Her­cules. The two descendants of Abraham aid Hercules during his campaign against the Libyan giant Anteus; Hercules marries the daughter of Apheras, and from this union issues the Libyan tribe known as the Sophakes, who are thus counted among the direct descendants of Abraham. By showing the alleged blood relationship between his own people and their host nation, Cleodemus, who was obviously a Jew belonging to the Libyan or Carthaginian Diaspora about 100 b.c.e., attempts to include the Jews as equal members of the Mediterranean community, that is, the oikumene - let us remember the similar claim in 1 Macc. 12:5-23 that a bond of kinship exists between Jews and Spartans.

Narrative Fiction

The book of an author called Artapanus, of which three fragments survive,’ one of them in a quite extensive form, is quite different in character from the works discussed hitherto. Here we probably have to do with a Jewish author from Egypt, again writing about 100 b.c.e.

The book titles, which Alexander Polyhistor mentions in his excerpts, namely ‘Concerning the Jews’ or again ‘ fudaica’, could hardly represent the original titles. At all events, to judge by the fragments, the book seems to have been less a depiction of Jewish history than a fictionalized biography of Moses. Abraham and Joseph were probably given only a brief mention at the beginning, with reference to their relations with Egypt; from this point of view the other patriarchs could be overlooked.

In the main part of the text Artapanus tells of Moses’ career in Egypt, depicting him in the characteristically Hellenistic fashion as a hero, indeed even as a theios aner. We hear of the adoption of the boy Moses by Princess Merris and of his royal upbringing, his important inventions and institutions in the fields of technology, government, culture and religion; we hear of various perils to which he was exposed in consequence of Pharaoh’s envy but from which he always emerged triumphant. Likewise in the ensuing, freely adapted, version of the events surrounding the deliverance of the Israelites out of Egypt, the glorious character of Moses occupies the foreground. On one occasion he shows himself superior to Pharaoh: when asked which God sends him, Moses whispers God’s name in Pharaoh’s ear, whereupon Phar­aoh collapses unconscious but is revived again by Moses. The story breaks off after the crossing of the Red Sea; there follows only a kind of personal description of Moses. The events on Sinai or the contents of the Torah as revealed through Moses are of no interest to the author.

What is strange in a Jewish writer is the manner in which Artapanus deals with Egyptian religion. On several occasions Moses takes an active part in the establishment of animal cults. Yet Artapanus does not thereby seek to legitimize Egyptian religion and place it on a par with the Jewish faith. Rather he views it quite contemptuously as a simple means of manipulating more easily the ignorant Egyptian masses. The background to Artapanus’ work, as in the case of other writers, is the euhemeristic interpretation of religions, according to which the (pagan) cults are human institutions and the divinities originally human beings of great excellence. Naturally Artapanus sees the Jewish religion and the God who sends Moses in quite a different light. It is therefore all the more surprising to observe how far he has in effect become assimilated to his Egyptian-Hellenistic milieu in his interpretation of the religious element; hence rationalistic enlightenment and notions of magical powers (as in the episode about the effect of pronouncing God’s name) stand naively side by side.

Artapanus’ interest in things Egyptian doubtless gives us a clue as to his origins. But it seems questionable whether he really knew the Egyptian cults from first-hand experience. All the details he mentions could easily have been drawn from Hellenistic literature about Egypt, such as the Aigyptiaka of Hecateus of Abdera. We should not attribute a missionary purpose to him. Rather, Artapanus wishes to show the importance and superiority of Moses - and thus indirectly of Judaism as such - and in this way perhaps to counteract a deprecatory attitude towards the Jews, possibly even to refute particular calumnies. But in the first instance he doubtless has in mind the need of a Jewish-Greek readership to be diverted and entertained.

Among the works of narrative fiction we must also include a book of Jewish origin ascribed to an author mentioned in the last para­graph: Hecateus of Abdera (Pseudo-Hecateus I). This too probably originated towards the end of the second century b.c.e. in the Egyptian Diaspora. In accordance with the author’s fictitious identity, ‘Hecateus’ relates his experiences among the Jews, for example, on the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy I, and imparts his knowledge of them which he claims to have derived from a certain Ezekias, a high priest. In this guise he voices several tributes to the size and beauty of Judea and Jerusalem, and to the faithfulness of the Jews to their Law for which they are ready to endure suffering. An anecdote at the end of the surviving text tells how during one campaign it was decided to elucidate which route to take next by having recourse to augury, and how the Jewish soldier Mosollamus fearlessly demonstrated the absur­dity of such divination by shooting down the bird.

The aim of this little book is clear: the unprejudiced voice of a well-known Greek author was to sing the praises of the Jews and at the same time recall the good relationship which once existed between Alex­ander the Great and the early Ptolemies on the one hand, and the Jews in their service on the other; as a result the writer presumably hoped to combat a deterioration of this relationship in his own day. The purpose is thus in several respects similar to that of the roughly contemporary Pseudo-Aristeas letter discussed already.

In this context we must at least mention in passing the so-called Third Book of the Maccabees. As is already widely known, this has nothing to do with the history of the Maccabees but tells of the persecution of the Jews of Alexandria under Ptolemy VII Euergetes (known as Physcon) and of the divine retribution visited upon the persecutors. Written in Alexandria perhaps towards the end of the first century b.c.e., this book too tries in its own way to make clear the need for harmony and understanding between the Greek and Jewish communities in Alexandria.

Finally, a small book which has survived in its entirety deserves our attention: in literary terms it can properly be described as a romance or a ‘spiritual novella’1 and its purpose was doubtless a missionary one. We refer to the anonymous work called Joseph and Asenath, which was probably composed around the turn of the millennium in the Egyptian Diaspora and is written in a Greek saturated with the language of the Septuagint.

The story develops the biblical statement (Gen. 41:45) that Joseph took to wife in Egypt the woman Asenath, daughter of an Egyptian high priest, into a charming novella of love and conversion which combines motifs from Hellenistic erotic fiction with those of Jewish novellas of spiritual import (Esther, Judith, Tobit). The beautiful but proud daughter of the priest is deaf to all suitors. However, her pride dissolves when she catches sight of Joseph visiting her father. Full of inward restlessness she renounces her idols and in utter solitude does penance in sackcloth and ashes for seven days. On the eighth day, in answer to her humble prayer, one of the archangels appears in her chamber, raises her up, strengthens her with a heavenly honeycomb - one might say a combination of manna with nectar and ambrosia - and prepares Asenath for the arrival of Joseph her bridegroom. The latter too had been told by the angel that Asenath was the bride destined for him by God, and so there are no further obstacles to the wedding. Later the marriage is once again imperilled because of a plot contrived by Pharaoh’s son out of jealousy. But divine intervention and Asenath’s magnanimity bring everything to a happy conclusion.

On the one hand the story disposes of the problem of how Joseph could marry a pagan - a woman, moreover, who was to become the mother of two Israelite tribes. It is shown that the marriage was preceded by a genuine conversion on her part. In this way, on the other hand, the story also commends and glorifies conversion to Judaism as the proper fulfilment of human life: Asenath becomes the mother of all future proselytes. Yet this praise of Judaism is not directed at any particular wing of the faith such as the Essenes of Therapeutae, as some scholars have maintained; the peculiarities of, for instance, the ritual practices of these groups play no part here. Rather, the readers of this little tale are presented with a devout, open-minded Judaism characterized by loving-kindness, forgiveness and a profound spiritua­lity.

Poetic Literature

Jewish - Greek writers also tried to establish links with the great poetic tradition of Greece. A few samples from epic and dramatic works have come down to us, again mediated exclusively by Alexander Polyhistor; they too thus belong to the period around (or before) 100 b.c.e., though it is impossible to be more precise about the dating.

The epic poet Philo composed his poem ‘On Jerusalem’ in the tradition of city epics, a favourite genre in Hellenistic times. The three short fragments that have survived1 cannot indeed give us a proper impression of the overall plan of the work which is said, perhaps erroneously, to have had at least fourteen volumes. The fragments relate that it was Abraham who introduced circumcision, they tell of his sacrifice of Isaac, and of Joseph’s reign in Egypt, and finally refer to two swimming baths in Jerusalem. The contents of the first fragment may be connected with Jerusalem in so far as Philo presumably equates the mountain in the land of Moriah (Gen. 22) with the Temple mount (2 Chron. 3.1); but the relevance of the Joseph fragment to Jerusalem is not at all clear. The poet uses a deliberately obscure, barely comprehen­sible language and spices his hexameters with obsolete or unusual vocabulary. Whether he wrote his epic in Jerusalem or in somewhere like Alexandria must remain open. The highly wrought artificial form may well suggest Alexandria; after all Pseudo-Aristeas too extolled the glory of Jerusalem from an Alexandrian point of view (Pseudo-Aristeas §§83-90-

The other epic poet, Theodotus, wrote his verse in plainer hexameters: a fragment of 47 lines has survived under the title ‘Concerning the Jews’. However, we must surely regard the poem as an epic about Shechem. For it seems to have opened with a description of the location of Shechem; only then does there appear to have been, by way of an introduction, a brief mention of Jacob’s sojourn with Laban, his marriage and the birth of his children; thereafter the poem concentrated mainly on telling the story of Hamor and Dinah and the vengeance of the brothers Simeon and Levi on the inhabitants of Shechem (Gen. 34). Since the poem concentrates on Shechem, scholars formerly supposed the author Theodotus to be a Samaritan who through his epic aimed to glorify the centre of the sacrificial cult of his people. But the tendency of his writing is not in favour of the inhabitants of Shechem but of the sons of Jacob, who overcame Hamor and his people; their killing of the Shechemites is justified by reference to a divine oracle. There­fore recently some scholars have seen Theodotus as a Jewish author who by his poetry sought to justify the Hasmonean conquest of Samaria and the destruction of the temple on Mount Gerizim in 129-109 b.c.e.

The poet Ezekiel tried to work up the Exodus from Egypt into a drama in the style of classical tragedy. Two hundred and sixty nine iambic trimeters have come down to us. After a historical retrospect placed in the mouth of Moses, the action begins in Midian (which Ezekiel calls ‘Libya’); it tells of the marriage to Zipporah, then of the confrontation with God in the episode of the burning bush, and of the mission entrusted to Moses to deliver Israel. In the prologue the voice of God speaks of the ten plagues. One fragment gives more detailed instructions about the Passover; the last two extant passages tell (in the form of a herald’s report) of the crossing of the Red Sea and of the destruction of the Egyptian pursuers, and of the discovery of the oasis of Elim.

Thus as far as we can see Ezekiel does not always select episodes according to their dramatic force, presumably because the most exciting scenes would have been difficult to depict in the theatre; he prefers to use monologues for retrospective or anticipatory statements, together with the reports of messengers. We must ask ourselves, however, whether the author ever thought seriously in terms of a theatrical presentation of his work or whether, with due regard for dramaturgical laws, this is not primarily a literary composition. We do know that Philo occasionally visited the theatre; but it is difficult to imagine a theatre run exclusively for the Jews.

But even if we view his work as a purely literary composition, Ezekiel obviously had a hard struggle to reconcile his given material with his chosen form. Doubtless this is also connected with the fact that as a devout Jew Ezekiel could not bring the real mover of the action, the God of Israel, on to the stage in person; consequently his dramatic scenes necessarily lack dynamism.

Ezekiel follows the text of the Septuagint closely and consistently. But he combines with this a remarkable familiarity with the Greek tragedians, especially Euripides, which enables him repeatedly to weave original tragic phrases into his text without creating an impres­sion of being out for artificial effects. The formal skill here displayed by Ezekiel is at the same time a mirror of his intentions. By choosing a Greek literary form that had to be taken seriously, he seeks to pre­serve the religious tradition of his forefathers for his co-religionists who were imbued with a Hellenistic culture, and at the same.time to make it attractive in literary terms to sympathetic non-Jewish readers.

The instances of metric verse which we must now discuss ought to be seen not so much as tokens of the poetic spirit of the Hellenistic Jews but rather as attempts at an apologia, attempts to vindicate certain basic assumptions of Judaism through the ostensible testimony of famous Greek poets.

First of all there is a group of hexameters under the venerable names of Homer, Hesiod and Linus; lines which Aristobulus cited as evidence for the cosmic significance of the number seven1 and which must therefore have been extant as early as the first half of the second century b.c.e. Some of them are genuine, more or less unchanged Homeric lines; for the rest, it is not absolutely clear whether they are of Jewish origin or whether they stem from a Pythagorean collection which had been put together in order to aid speculation about the theory of numbers. A Jew like Aristobulus would have selected from an anthology of this kind those lines which seemed to him to underline the importance of the Sabbath.

There is no connection between these ‘Sabbath verses’ and a gnomologion of dramatic lines under the names of great Greek tragedians and comedy writers such as Aeschylus, JJophocles and Euripides, Menander, Diphilus and Philemon. This ostensible anthology of quotations which probably originated in the first century b.c.e. or c.e. was obviously designed as an organic whole and attributes to the Greek poets what are essentially Jewish ideas, in particular the doctrine of the one God and the impossibility of creating an image in His likeness - the latter notion in conjunction with a polemic against graven images; furthermore, the doctrine of the end of the world and of retribution in the life to come for good and evil deeds on earth. A quotation from this gnomologion appears to have been cited in a flimsily attested (second) pseudo-Hecatean work ‘On Abraham and the Egyptians’. However, it is unjustifiable to ascribe the whole gnomologion to this Pseudo-Hecateus II on such slender grounds.

There are thematic and probably also chronological affinities between this gnomologion and the pseudo-Orphic poem which purports to be the last testament of the singer Orpheus, addressed to his son and disciple Museus. The original version proclaims the unity of God as the creator and ruler of the world and commends the reader to trust devoutly in him. The first revised version speaks in addition of Abraham as the first man to perceive the true nature of the invisible God; a second revision seems to have taught how God could be recognized in his creation, while a still later version introduced the Torah, which was mediated by Moses, as the means of coming to know God. Finally an anonymous Christian writer of the fifth century c.e. strove to concoct a composite version out of all the versions of the poern known to him. Thus in its complicated history the poem reflects the constant struggle of Hellenistic Jewish writers to solve the problem of how one could attain authentic knowledge of God. Precisely because of the immutable principle that God was essentially unknowable and impossible to depict in images, fresh statements were constantly demanded as to how one could say anything significant about this God as the creator and disposer of human destinies.

Finally in this section on pseudepigraphic poetic writings, we must not forget the Jewish sections of the Sibylline Oracles, that remarkable Hellenization of Jewish apocalyptic thinking, whose oldest parts (in the third book of Sib.Or.) were composed in Egypt under the reign of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II Physcon (170 - 164 and 145-117 b.c.e.). The reader will find further details of these in chapter 12.

At the end of this brief survey of Jewish Greek literature before Philo and Josephus, we must remember that we would know nothing about a substantial proportion of the relatively colourful palette of Jewish writing in Greek, were it not for the collector’s zeal of the Greco-Roman author Alexander Polyhistor (about the middle of the last century b.c.e.) and later the great learning of men like Clement of Alexandria and especially Eusebius of Caesarea, who preserved for us, at least in fragmentary form, many of the works discussed here. How many more literary monuments may have simply disappeared without trace! But enough has survived to give us a vivid impression of the manifold ways in which Jewish authors of the second and first centuries b.c.e. engaged with the rich Hellenistic culture of their age. The literature that we have examined shows that the Greek-speaking Jews of these two centuries were able to derive from their intensive exposure to the Greek spirit and Greek culture the impulse to create their own cultural achievements in ways that were originally alien to them but which they succeeded in assimilating to their own faith and philosophy.